Internment camps: we've been here before.

The government is now planning to house immigrant families in "temporary and austere" camps on military bases, including San Diego's Camp Pendleton.  The language is chilling.

Last year, BP and I traveled down highway 395, which winds down the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada.  We visited an actual temporary and austere internment camp:  Manzanar, one of the camps used to imprison Japanese-Americans, citizens and non-citizens alike, during the second world war.  They were rounded up from their homes and businesses, which they never recovered.  The US Census provided information to help locate them. With only a few possessions in hand, they were shipped to these remote places throughout the west.

Parts of Manzanar have been rebuilt and restored, as a National Historic Site run by the Park Service, so visitors can see exactly what it was like.  It's a grim, sere place, with the cold majesty of the mountains overlooking a plain that is swept by fierce winds. It is hot and dusty in the summer, and frigid cold in the winter.

The facility was hastily built, and the residents lived in humiliating conditions.  Thrown-together buildings with thin, gapped walls.   Shared toilets in an open-roomed latrine with no privacy panels. Barbed wire and guard towers.

Our Japanese compatriots endured this vile and illegal imprisonment for years, as their sons joined the Army to form a highly-decorated unit that suffered enormous losses, to "prove" their loyalty.

In one of its darker moments, the US Supreme Court in found in Korematsu v US that the exclusion orders were justified. This is now recognized to have been "bad law" but is still relied upon today by certain actors.

An investigation was opened by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, leading to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that was signed by President Ronald Reagan. The act provided reparations for the survivors, acknowledging  that "The Congress recognizes that, as described by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Commission, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership...For these fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights of these individuals of Japanese ancestry, the Congress apologizes on behalf of the Nation... " There was no security justification for the internments, and indeed the government was found to have lied to the Court about evidence of espionage.

The Manzanar Monument, in the cemetery at the camp, is surround by strings of faded paper cranes.  It is formally "Soul Consoling Tower" (that is the meaning of the characters in the front).  The wind whistles past it, sounding like the grieving whispers of history.

It is hard to get there, being quite distant from major centers, but that was the point:  out of sight, out of mind. The drive is worth it, though, because it's a vital part of our history.

I hope that we have not forgotten the lesson of Manzanar, but I fear otherwise.

The end of our democracy: the triumph of racism

There's an important new article from Ezra Klein over at VOX, where he reviews a new book called "How Democracies Die".  And it makes clear that race (and its proxy, evangelical Christianity) remains the fracture of this country.

Our democracy was built atop racism and has been repeatedly shaken in eras of racial progress. The founding compromises that birthed the country included entrenching slavery and counting African Americans as three-fifths of a person. ...Then in the the Civil War’s aftermath, the pursuit of equality fell before the pursuit of stability — in Reconstruction and continuing up through the mid-20th century, the Democratic and Republican parties permitted the South to construct an apartheid state atop a foundation of legal discrimination and racial terrorism, and it was in this environment that American politics saw its so-called golden era, in which the two parties worked together smoothly and routinely..... 

The racial progress of the civil rights era led to a series of political assassinations and, shortly thereafter, to the election of Richard Nixon — who quickly caused a democratic and constitutional crisis of his own. In the aftermath of that period, little was done — and much was undone — on civil rights, and American democracy stabilized. 

That is, it stabilized until the election of President Barack Obama, which led to a hard turn toward confrontation in the Republican Party, and — perhaps predictably, given this history — to the election of Donald Trump, who pairs racial resentment with a deep skepticism of both democratic process and the legitimacy of his opponents.

So Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided by race and religion, to the extent where toleration and compromise aren't possible.

....to survive, political systems need parties who place fundamental values above immediate political or policy gain. America’s democracy is currently operating without that protection. History shows that leaves us vulnerable....Democracies fend off challenges when participants value the preservation of the system — its norms and ideals and values — over short-term political gain....

Quoting from the book,

If the definition of “real Americans” is restricted to those who are native-born, English-speaking, white, and Christian, then it is easy to see how “real Americans” may view themselves as declining. As Ann Coulter chillingly put it, “The American electorate isn’t moving to the left — it’s shrinking.” The perception among many Tea Party Republicans that their America is disappearing helps us understand the appeal of such slogans as “Take Our Country Back” or “Make America Great Again.” The danger of such appeals is that casting Democrats as not real Americans is a frontal assault on mutual toleration.

This is not a new observation. Former Republican (and now Political Orphan) Chris Ladd has made the point before:

We are discovering that no one ever really cared much about abortion. No one cared about fiscal restraint, or tax cuts or nationalized health care. The Republican base we painstakingly assembled across fifty years is only really interested in one thing – preserving the dominant position of their white culture against a rising tide of pluralism. Other issues only mattered to the extent that they helped reinforce and preserve white supremacy.

In an interview, Ladd expands,

I grew up white trash in one of those forgotten hellholes in Trumplandia. Most of these places were hellholes decades ago in their imaginary prime. They were hellholes 80 years ago when writers like James Agee came to ogle their inhabitants and muse on their simple virtues. Now they many of them remain hellholes with fewer people and less going on. 

Nothing about these places has changed apart from the fact that the rest of the world got better, a lot better. And most importantly, the world has gotten better for people like African-Americans, Hispanics, and women; people whose suffering and enforced weakness used to give Trump voters some relative comfort. 

....Mealy sympathy-pieces about backwater towns in thrall to Trump offer a certain comfort to everyone else. We would all be relieved to discover that this national nightmare was just a big misunderstanding, another example of “elites” failing to listen to the common people. We could just hug it out. 

Sorry. I’ve been listening to these people my whole life. We are not facing some new problem born of globalization or capitalism or trade. We are facing America’s oldest problem.

When white people feel their hold on power slipping, they freak out. And it always starts with the folks lower down the economic ladder, because they have the highest relative investment in what it means to be white in this country. There’s not a damned thing we can do about it other than out-vote them and, over time, out-evolve them until this crippling and occasionally lethal national glitch is slowly worked out of our bloodstream. 

Klein concludes his review with a quote from the book:

The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economies that empower all have been achieved.

It is not clear that we will change that.

Alt-Right, Alt-White, and Southern Baptists.

The Atlantic Reports,

Leaders from the Southern Baptist Convention were divided over a resolution affirming the denomination’s opposition to white supremacy and the alt-right during their annual meeting in Phoenix this week. On Tuesday, they initially declined to consider the proposal submitted by a prominent black pastor in Texas, Dwight McKissic, and only changed course after a significant backlash. The drama over the resolution revealed deep tension lines within a denomination that was explicitly founded to support slavery.

With 81% of Evangelical Christians supporting Trump, despite his toxic support from white-supremacists and Islamophobes, I don't think there is any surprise here. Racism is an open wound in this country.

All that's left is white nationalism

As Trump's proposals turn out to be grift for the 1%,  Nancy LeTourneau points out how Trump's economic policy is bound to hurt his rural, poorly educated white supporters.  The ACA repeal will throw tens of millions out of health coverage.  The EPA retreat will leave them drinking dirty water and exposed to chemicals.  The coal jobs aren't coming back, regardless.  And don't even get us started on the effect of climate change.

The truth is that Trump’s economic populism consists of promises based on lies. But there is one arena of his populism that is actually moving forward – albeit in fits and starts. That is his appeal to xenophobia. .... 

In this country, the Trump administration’s deportation force is sending undocumented immigrants farther underground. As was predicted, victims of crime now fear reporting it to law enforcement and children are being pulled out of free lunch programs at school for fear of being deported. AG Sessions is planning to pull federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” and has broadcast that he will no longer pursue police brutality investigations. 

To the extent that these kinds of activities address the concerns of Trump’s base of support among white working class Americans, his populism is solely based on what many of us assumed it would be all along…white nationalism. The only question is when and if any of his supporters who thought his presidency would be about anything else will catch on.

Will they catch on?  Will they care?  I firmly believe that as long as it is THOSE PEOPLE being targeted--the poor, the brown, the Muslims, the gays, the ones NOT LIKE US, that Trump's supporters will still make excuses. As long as THOSE PEOPLE have it worse, they will suck it up.

 The New York Times went to Iowa to see what the reaction there was to the blatantly racist comments of their representative Steve King.

His latest anti-immigrant tirade — “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he said — once again drew wide condemnation and critical attention to Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, whose voters overwhelmingly re-elected him to an eighth term in November.

And yes, the Times easily found people who were uncomfortable with King's comments....but he has't changed his spots, and they keep voting for him.  So frankly they seem more uncomfortable that the unspoken is out in the open:

Mr. King has survived past denunciations: Last year, he drew a rare primary challenger, who accused him of being so toxic that his name on a bill rendered it “dead on arrival.” But Mr. King won easily and went on to crush his Democratic opponent, Kim Weaver, an advocate for the elderly.

So, sure, they can look embarrassed about him. But they keep voting for him.  And then there's this :

[T]here are plenty who don’t seem to quibble much with Mr. King’s way of thinking.

Sitting at the Hardees in Orange City last week, Don Engeltjes, 76, said he agreed with Mr. King on the need to clamp down on immigration. He said he believed new arrivals were a drain on taxpayers’ money, lumping immigrants from Mexico in with those from the Muslim world. 

“It’s just handout, handout, handout,” he said. 

“But Don, your dad is an immigrant too,” another man piped up, noting that Mr. Engeltjes’s father, like many forebears of the district’s voters, had come over from Holland at age 9. 

“You bet he was,” Mr. Engeltjes replied. “But the way it’s going nowadays, man, they’re outproducing us. We’re going to be the minority in a few years.” 

Asked by a reporter who he meant by “we,” Mr. Engeltjes said: “The white people. The American people.”

I'm sure he thinks he's a God-fearing Christian. But let's remember that the Christian Right that so fervently embraces Trump has its roots deep in racism.  And they  have ripped off any pretense that they are driven otherwise.  Sarah Posner describes how Trumpism united with the Christian Right--and how the CR roots are deeply racist.

The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

... evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.

Racism is alive and well in this country. The bubble we've been living in, is to think that we had made progress.  All that they offer is nihilism and destruction, and by God they are going to destroy all that they can, while waving a cross above them.

Deplorable

Yes, I'd say this is deplorable.

The Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll that asked respondents if they supported or disapproved of “the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government”—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The Republicans need to own it that they are the party of white supremacy.  Democrats need to stand firm:  these views have no place in mainstream politics.

And I'd say this is a sad indictment of what had been a noble history.

For a very brief period after the end of the Civil War, Republicans truly fought for the rights of black Americans. Frustrated by reports of abuses of and violence against former slaves in the postwar South, and by the inaction of Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, a faction known as the Radicals gained increasing sway in Congress. 

The Radicals drove Republicans to pass the country’s first civil rights bill in 1866, and to fight for voting rights for black men (though not yet women) at a time when such an idea was still controversial even in the North. 

Furthermore, Republicans twice managed to amend the Constitution, so that it now stated that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, that all citizens should have equal protection of the law, and that the right to vote couldn’t be denied because of race. 

This article concludes:

Now the GOP is at a crossroads. It’s possible that the turn toward Trump and his ideas this year will be remembered as an aberration, and that a new generation of Republican politicians will find a way to be more than just the party of white resentment — rediscovering their roots as the party of Lincoln. 

But it’s also quite possible that Trump is just the beginning, and that the party will increasingly play to white voters by appealing to racial tensions. It’s up to Republican voters and leaders to decide just what they want their party to be.

UPDATE:  Ta-nehisi  Coates argues that the polls back Hillary up.

Was Hillary Clinton being truthful or not? 

Much like Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War, this not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of Trump’s supportershold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claim are not ancillary to Donald Trump’s candidacy, they are a driving force behind it. 

When Hillary Clinton claims that half of Trump’s supporters qualify as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” data is on her side. One could certainly argue that determining the truth of a candidate’s claims is not a political reporter’s role. But this is not a standard that political reporters actually adhere to.

Pause to remember

Let us remember the African American victims of the shooting in Charleston a year ago, and the LGBT victims at Pulse this last weekend, targeted for who they were.

And let us remember all the other victims and come together in one human family to mourn, and to love.

Under the influence

A while back, we were all shocked by the hit and run death of a cyclist in Baltimore, by a (now former) Bishop who was drunk.  The alcohol may have been the reason for her impairment but not an excuse for driving drunk and causing grievous harm.  She's in jail, as she should be, for years.

Apparently, though, if you are a privileged white athlete at Stanford, alcohol absolves you of personal responsibility and it's somehow acceptable that you have "20 minutes of action" (as his father actually put it) performing a violent sexual assault on an unconscious woman.  The judge gave this nice white man a mere 6 months since he's suffered already.  In return the rapist promises to talk about booze and promiscuity on campus.  The media has a winsome picture of this blond haired, blue-eyed, boy-man looking sad.

As his victim wrote in a searing letter, the problem isn't promiscuity.  It's CONSENT.   The whole thing is disgusting, not least of which what it says about any man who physically violates an unconscious woman's body.   (Go read her letter.  It is powerful.)

Interestingly there was a case in Tennessee this spring as well, where a former Vanderbilt football player was convicted of raping an intoxicated, unconscious woman.  He's going to get at least 15 years.   What's different in Tennessee?  Either their judges get it, or, black football players get different rules than white swimmers.  What do you think?

As one internet meme put it, we make laws against trans people using the bathroom to prevent women from being assaulted, but apparently we can't convict a man who actually assaults a woman.

Because, well, it's going to ruin his life.  Poor boy.

Talk about privilege.

Complicity, racism, and the legacy of the Confederacy

In reaction to the massacre in Charleston, SC, people are taking a new look at the Confederate battle flag.

What do you think, when you see it?  I remember visiting San Antonio TX on a professional trip, and seeing a pickup drive by with  a huge Confederate flag flying off a pole in the bed, and I thought, "they don't like my kind here," my kind being liberal, academic, lesbian. I knew I would be scared  to meet the  men driving the truck because I instantly associated the flag with white conservatives and anti-gay, anti-black, anti-women values. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes compellingly in the Atlantic,

That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

and stirringly concludes,

Take down the flag. Take it down now.

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

Well, this demand has been made before,  but now there's support from an unexpected quarter.  Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention agrees with Coates (a pigs-flying kind of event):

The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. White Christians, let’s listen to our African-American brothers and sisters. Let’s care not just about our own history, but also about our shared history with them. In Christ, we were slaves in Egypt—and as part of the body of Christ we were all slaves too in Mississippi. Let’s watch our hearts, pray for wisdom, work for justice, love our neighbors. Let’s take down that flag.

And yesterday, the governor and senators of South Carolina agreed and called for the flag's removal from the grounds of the State Capitol. Meanwhile, Walmart announced it would remove flag-themed merchandise from its stores.

But let us not delude ourselves into thinking that removing this potent symbol will cure what ails us.  Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times

I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.

 He goes on to cite the sobering scholarship that supports this statement, and concludes that while things are better, we aren't there yet:

[A] history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy....Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin.

Slavery is the root of our long battle with racism.

And let's not pretend we aren't all in some ways complicit.  Here in San Diego, our Spring Diocesan newsletter addressed issues of race and reconciliation (before the recent shootings), and the Bishop and the Editor received what they describe as "angry and vitriolic" letters in response.  Now, the newsletter isn't particularly strident, and in fact as I re-read the articles knowing the response they elicited, I was extremely surprised at how mild they are. And yet apparently many people felt enough offended by what was expressed to write angry letters.  Our Bishop shepherded the Diocese through The Gay Issue successfully (so that it's no longer an issue here), so one might think that Episcopalians in Dio San Diego are all in the same place. So it's quite a surprise to realize that our self-satisfied "enlightened values" here aren't so enlightened after all.  I wonder what response the Bishop will get to his latest call,

My sense is that nothing is going to change until we get rid of the guns and we actually pay the price, as a nation, for what we have done to generations of African-Americans from the days of slavery until today. The wasteland we have created calls for a new Marshall Plan to transform the lives of our brothers and sisters. It is time. There are no excuses. The next time we recite our baptismal covenant and say the words, "to respect the dignity of every human being," race relations and reconciliation are what we should be thinking about.

You go, Bishop Mathes!  But you might want to have some asbestos gloves to handle your mail after this one.

Death Belt states

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  From the NCRonline:

The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., finds in its new study, "Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror," that "an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching" remains in the communities where this form of racial terror was most prevalent.

Most astonishingly, this includes our churches. Forgetfulness of lynching and the death penalty in America demonstrate an appalling apostasy on behalf of Christians who tolerate this evil.

This legacy endures in the states of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and my home state of Louisiana.

Scholars call these "Death Belt" states because of the high correlation they find between the history of lynching against African-Americans and today's disproportionate arrests, prosecution, and sentencing to death of African-Americans. We deem these unworthy of life along with the economically poor and people who are mentally or psychologically disabled.

The correlation between the practice of lynching and the death penalty goes down to the parish/county level.

Cry, cry.....

Why people vote the way they do (4) : Last place aversion and race

Following up on our series why people vote in ways that potentially damage them, a discussion of how race yet again percolates to the surface.

Contrary to popular belief, the incomes of the very rich increase more under Democrats than they do under Republicans. While pretax and transfer incomes are rather similar, the main shift occurs posttax and transfer.

Similarly, in absolute terms, whites do better under Democratic than under Republican leadership. But that doesn’t really matter.  People weigh their well-being relative to those around them. There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of “last place aversion,” the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself. Among white voters, racial bias is strongly correlated with lower support of redistributive programs. For example, research shows that opposition to welfare is driven by racial anger. Approximately half of the difference between social spending in the U.S. and Europe can be explained by racial animosity.

I think one thing having an African American President has taught us, is that the toxic brew that is racism is far from being solved in this country.

And what is this "last place aversion"? It comes from this paper, which showed (my emphasis)

 In money-transfer games, those randomly placed in second-to-last place are the least likely to costlessly give money to the player one rank below. Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because it could differentially help the group just beneath them. Using survey data, we show that individuals making just above the minimum wage are the most likely to oppose its increase.

So, rather than viewing it as an advantage to bring someone up to the next level, the person previously at that level resents now being at the bottom. And race, as in everything else, enters into it.

Or as Lyndon Johnson put it, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

And yet, so many of these people who are unwillng to help their fellows call themselves Christians. I think it's no coincidence that, as the saying goes, Sundays at church are  the most segregated day in America.

Dehumanizing is not a Christian value

Observing the dehumanizing rhetoric used to describe the poor and people of color,  Ed Kilgore writes,

This virulent classism/racism is in fact a betrayal of “traditional values” in multiple respects. It destroys the solidarity of Americans with each other as heirs of a society where entrenched castes have supposedly been left behind. And it defies all the cherished myths of color-blindness and equal opportunity that are established elements of the civic code.

But the thing that bothers me most about the dehumanizing of the poor and the dispossessed is its violent conflict with the supposed religious ethic of this country, particularly when it is promoted by people who think of themselves as good Christians. For the life of me I cannot understand Christians who do not grasp that an essential tenet of their faith is the radical equality of human beings as subjects of both divine judgment and redemption. Every human being is made in the image of God, and how one treats those Jesus called “the least of these” is the acid test of Christian ethics, certainly as important as obedience to rules of sexual behavior or social order. I think it’s fair to demand—if not, of course, to expect—that the religious leaders of those who look at poor people of color and see subhumans whose lives are punishment for vice preach against nothing else until this grievous collective sin is stigmatized if not exterminated once and for all.

On the same lines, Russell Moore, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has called out racism in the church.

Moore added that in the wake of Ferguson, he has called for “churches that come together and know one another and are knitted together across these racial lines.” In response, though, he said, “I have gotten responses and seen responses that are right out of the White Citizen’s Council material from 1964. In my home state of Mississippi, seeing people saying there is no gospel issue involved in racial reconciliation.”

And goes on,

We have a group of people—a small group of people, not a lot of people—some unreconstructed racists in American society and we have some who continue to come and to sit in pews of churches and pretend as though they are disciples of Jesus Christ. And we have some other people who are willing to speak to any possible issue, from the framework of Scripture that goes on in the world until it comes to the question of whether or not we maybe do have some legitimate problems being faced by our African-American brothers and sisters in Christ, and then at that point they become completely silent and say the gospel doesn’t speak to this. I think that’s wrong.

Some of these issues are going to be complicated, and some of these particular. . . when it comes to Ferguson we’re going to have different understandings of what the grand jury should have done and how they should have handled it. There are going to be some differing interpretations. But folks, when we’ve got police officers killing a man on video with a chokehold, can we not say there are still some problems in American society when it comes to race?

I'm not sure how small the group is, but it's about time churches call out their own on this.

Sanctuary

You may have seen the news reports this week of a band of tea-partiers in Murietta, CA, who were outraged that the Border Patrol was sending several buses of immigrant children to be processed at a facility there.  The mere presence of the children is an affront to Real Amuricans.

Not just immigrant children.  Refugee children, who had endured an almost incomprehensible journey away from unimaginably violent states.   Terrified while white racists screamed and shouted at them. USA.  USA.  Sure, that's what we stand for--xenophobia and lack of compassion.  Real Christian values.

Oh, I know the arguments.  They are here illegally.  We can't solve the world's problems.  Freeloaders.  Deport them.  Except.... we are the richest country in the world.  We built it on the backs of hard-working immigrants. Every white American is an immigrant.  We could save these children.

This op/ed in the Dallas News lays it out. 

Exactly 75 years and one month ago the St. Louis, a German trans-Atlantic liner carrying 938 Jewish refugees, was turned away from the United States, forced to return to Europe. U.S. law didn’t allow them sanctuary. 

Today we are preparing to send 45,000 children back to Central American countries controlled by drug cartels that routinely torture, rape and kill children who refuse to work for them. So routinely, so often are children menaced that their families sent them away, alone, across thousands of miles on just the slimmest of hopes that they might be safe. U.S. law doesn’t allow them sanctuary. 

The St. Louis is famous now as a failure of compassion that haunts American history. It is so easy to imagine the despair of those passengers, forced to return to countries that would soon be overrun by the Nazis. It is difficult to imagine an America that would be so cruel and insensible to the terror of others. President Franklin Roosevelt is still held accountable for his failure to respond. 

And now we have President Barack Obama promising to send the children back. We have an America demanding that he do so, and in fact, blaming his administration for not securing the borders more tightly so that those desperate Central American families would have had no hope at all that their children might find sanctuary. 

But, in fact, the border is secured. The children are in custody. They will be turned back. . ...

Our hearts are not touched by these children. We want the law enforced. This is our country. Ours. And we don’t have to share it. Not now. Not 75 years ago. 

We haven’t changed at all. 

Why? It’s simple, really. A matter of us and them. Yes, these are children whom we’ll send back to be raped, maimed and killed. But they aren’t our children. Our children are precious. 

These children. They simply aren’t. Not to us.

Shame, for shame, America.

Episcopal Relief and Development is helping here. 

Republicans want to cut food aid to urban children

....but only URBAN children. You know. THOSE people.This is deeply disturbing.

Josh Marshall recently highlighted Republican efforts to limit food aid for the summer to rural children only. Let me say that once again for emphasis: “limit food aid…to rural children only.” Much has been made of how gerrymandering has allowed Republicans to choose their voters and become the party of older, ruralwhite people. This is the apogee of confirmation for that theory.....

Let me be clear. Offering food aid to children in rural areas while denying that same aid to children in urban areas is a poorly disguised attempt to replicate the effects of Jim Crow policies. The impetus for the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t merely a desire to be able to sit in the same classroom as white people (although the continued reality of segregation is undeniable), but to demand rightful access to the resources that black tax dollars paid for. Republican attempts to limit aid to “rural kids only” is a thinly veiled challenge to the laws designed to end Jim Crow policies. Combined with recent efforts of voter suppression and the refusal to amend theVoting Rights Act, the Republican position amounts to open contempt for black Americans’ rights as citizens.

Why are they not getting called out for this bold, obvious policy? 

The pervasive racism in the US

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a powerful, powerful piece in the Atlantic entitled The Case for Reparations.  And it is sobering reading about the deeply ingrained racism of our culture, which as we discussed below, is emboldened to show its face strongly these days.  And we aren't just talking about slavery, but modern times.

The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. ...

The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. ..... The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III [low income loan] benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”

And lest we think it is over

Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to TheNew York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.” 

“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”

Changing views of racial issues, by party

I live in California, which has ample problems to be sure.  But one feature of living here is that it's far from homogeneous.  Of course there's racial segregation, but it's  still a melting pot, where I mangle Mandarin to wish a student Happy (Chinese) New Year, or greet my office neighbor with "Hola!" On my morning train, there's a rainbow of skin color along with multiple languages.  Of course race is noticed;  we aren't post-racial much as we pretend to be. And we have fierce arguments about immigration reform and affirmative action.  But for most of us, racial difference per se is not a threat.  I wept with joy when Obama was elected.

Sobering reading in the Washington Post suggests that Democrats and Republicans increasingly view issues around race very differently.

Then:  we weren't so far apart.  (Goetz shot four black youths, claiming he thought they would mug him.  OJ, well, you know.  And Don Imus made insensitive racial comments. )

Now, it's far more dramatic a difference, and it suggests something very troubling.  Over and over again we see ugly attitudes rear their heads, suggesting that the core of the Republican party is angry white people who are threatened by this spectrum.

How do we lance this boil?

Crawling out from under a rock (updated)

So, a little while ago Cheerios had an adorable on-line video ad, where a little girl wants her dad to be healthy by eating Cheerios. Thing is, it was a biracial couple and the haters came out of the woodwork and from under the rocks to leave the most vile comments  on Youtube. You can read more here. So, here's a spoof version of the ad that....well, you'll see.
(Updated: Corrected video now uploaded)


Humor is always a good response.

But more troubling, this isn't isolated.  An 11 year old San Antonio boy with a terrific voice sang the National Anthem before one of the games in the NBA final.  He's of Mexican descent, and the troglodytes crawled out with the racist comments there, too. (Read more about it here--and listen to his awesome performance!) They were sending him vile tweets.

What these have in common is people revealing a racism that we know exists, but that used to be seen as unacceptable.  But now, they are coming out of the closet, using Twitter accounts with their own names.  And they aren't just Angry White Men.  There are blacks and women too.  Because  everyone needs someone to look down upon. There's a hierarchy of putdowns here.  And, they seem to feel its appropriate to express these feelings about CHILDREN.

It's really disturbing how our country is fracturing.  Of course, this prevents building bridges and coalitions against the corporate oligarchs and millionaires.  And of course, cultural warriors benefit too. Look at how the Catholic church is threatening to pull funding from immigration reform groups that belong to progressive coalitions that support marriage equality.

 What's also deeply troubling is how many of these people probably think of themselves as Christian.

By the numbers: same sex marriage compared to inter-racial marriage

"Activist judges do not have the right to redefine marriage if the majority of voters disagree." That's what the marriage equality opponents tell us all the time, to justify the "right of the people" to let their opinion determine the rights of a minority group.

So let's consider what the People thought in 1968. In that year, Americans told Gallup that they disapproved of inter-racial marriage by a margin of 73%-20%. Overwhelmingly, Americans did not think people should marry across racial lines.

That's a year after the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia, legalized inter-racial marriage. Despite the fact that nearly 3/4 of Americans disapproved. How dare they! Over the voices of the mob majority, how dare they?

It wasn't until 1991, twenty three years after the decision, that a plurality of Americans approved of racially mixed marriages. The number approving has flattened out in recent polls at around 75% now. I suspect it will stay there for some time, until a particular generation dies out.

Now, let's think about marriage equality for GLBT people. When the question was asked in 1996, it was 65% opposed, 27% in favor. Pretty close to where we started with inter-racial marriage, back in the 1960s. So, I wondered: how does the trend compare? The answer is, remarkably well.


These graphs look almost perfectly superimposed. By this prediction, marriage equality will have a plurality of support by about 2019, and an overwhelming majority by 2028. Good news for our kids, eh?

But here's the thing. All these data points for inter-racial marriage come from a time when inter-racial marriage was already legal in all 50 states . We didn't wait for majority approval to remedy the injustice. In contrast, I'm sure I needn't remind you that same sex marriage is not legal yet, except in a few pockets in the country.

Further, by the time public opinion was at the point regarding inter-racial marriage as it is now for same sex marriage, inter-racial marriage had been legal for 14 years.

So please, just what in hell are we waiting for?

And next time you have to deal with the "activist judges" line, remember these data.

Method I took the data from the Gallup polls on inter-racial marriage, and the Pew polls on same-sex marriage. For this analysis, I assigned the starting year to the absolute value "0" (1968 for inter-racial data, 1996 for same-sex marriage data). Each data point was then plotted based on how many years had elapsed since year "0". The density of points for same sex marriage relative to the inter-racial marriage reflects the difference in frequency of polling the questions.

Religious identity and Racism

Here's one for the books. There's a recent meta-analysis published about links between racism and religiosity. (A meta-analysis means that they take data from many studies and combine and compare them to identify broad trends).

The authors find in a series of studies published over many years, that racist views are more prevalent in people with a strong religious identity, and particularly with those who were religious because of social tradition and conformity. Although racist views have declined over time, they are still apparent.

The effect was strongest for religious conservatives and seminarians, although even those with more moderate views came across as more racist than religious agnostics.

Of course there are people of faith who are part of mixed-race communities, and who have been active in the civil rights movement. But they are the minority overall, and for the majority the sense of in-group vs out-group, moral vs. immoral, them vs. us, appears to be tracked by racial identity too.

From their abstract:

Religious racism partly reflects intergroup dynamics. That is, a strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others appear to be in competition for resources....The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.

I'm going to speculate that this sort of correlation is true for any sort of group identity, whether it's a social club or a neighborhood association or a church: us vs them. But, there aren't many group identities remaining in our restless, mobile culture, and even church identity is declining.

Their abstract also says,

In addition, religious racism is tied to basic life values of social conformity and respect for tradition. In support, individuals who were religious for reasons of conformity and tradition expressed racism that declined in recent years with the decreased societal acceptance of overt racial discrimination.

Now, given that kind of observation, it's not surprising that anti-GLBT sentiment is also stronger in church groups--and it's still very socially acceptable to be anti-gay. Again, yes, we know that is not true of all church groups, but as we learned in the Prop 8 trial, numbers count-- and you can't count the UCC as equal to the Roman Catholics because there are many more RCs.

So, how do you break down the "us vs them" while keeping the good part?

Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, 126-139 (2010)

Diversity questions from Irene Monroe

From columnist Irene Monroe, quoted at PamsHouseBlend, some provocative thoughts on diversity and the election of Diane Jardine Bruce and Mary Glasspool:

If both women are approved by a majority of bishops their elections will signal that the U.S. arm of the Episcopal Church is aggressively moving forward on both gender and gay justice.

But for many Episcopalians of color the issue of racial and diversity justice still hangs in the balance as many of their urban ethnic churches struggle to survive. With nearly one-half of L.A.'s population Latino concerns arose with the election of two white women over Latino candidates.....

The election for bishop suffragan of the Diocese of Los Angeles was a fiercely close race between Glasspool and the Rev. Irineo Martir Vasquez of St. George's in Hawthorne, CA....

The issue of diversity in the governance and election of bishops in the Episcopal Church is of great concern to congregants of color in light of shifting racial and ethnic demographics in big urban cities like L.A.

And with the shifting demographics from white to ethnic groups of color the Episcopal Church, perhaps unintentionally, has chosen to build up one ethnic or minority church over another. And, too often, it feels to many ethnic churches of color that they are always pitted not only among themselves, but also against white queers.

For example, the unresponsiveness to dying black urban churches is emblematic of the Episcopal Church's ineptitude to grapple with the ways that racism and classism choke not only the spiritual life out of a church but its monetary life as well. With the Episcopal Church's urban landscape changing, the denomination has opted to pour its support, money, and energy not into these historic black churches but instead into developing urban Latino churches. The gentrification of the urban church by replacing one minority group with another sets up a paradigm of "divide and conquer" that makes neither group feel welcomed, but both expendable.....

I have my own queries for the Episcopal Church, dubbed by many as the "ruling class at prayer," with respect to its urban churches, including:

• Will the Episcopal Church move as aggressively on race issues as it has on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) issues?


• Can Episcopalians only talk about the welcoming inclusion of its church in the context of women and LGBTQ issues in white face, but can't when the issue is race?


• Does the Episcopal Church's catholicity fall short with people of color because its hegemonic model of being Christian is not only racially white, but it is also theologically and liturgically Anglican?

Ouch. Even given that Monroe is a comabative columnist, we have to admit these are hard questions. And of course, I respond to these from the perspective of a liberal white American, with a European background and a place of privilege in the professional class. I can't change that, though as a woman and a lesbian at that, I do have some experience with marginalization.

And the Episcopal Church can't disclaim its background and heritage as an Anglican church with deep roots in England. That's not going to change either. How does the church reach out to other groups? In some places it is having enough trouble with its traditional core group. (There is a tendency in the media, also seen here, to cast the Episcopal Church as representing the wealthy and the powerful; though I think that's largely been usurped by conservative Catholics and C-Street now.) And when language is a barrier, I don't see any way to avoid some inevitable separation. For example our Cathedral has a separate Spanish Eucharist every week. Why is that a bad thing?

At least Monroe acknowledges,

Glasspool is fluent in Spanish, has served in urban cities across the country and is not a single-issue cleric. She told a reporter at the annual convention that the church is ready to go beyond " "superficial characteristics and boxes in which we put people, to really look at individual people and assess the needs of the diocese and pair them with the gifts and skills that Diane and I each bring. In that sense, in all ways, we are moving to a point where we can look beneath the skin color and any single characteristic and really rejoice in the wholeness of every individual person."

That's the goal. We would all like to get to the point where the labels are irrelevant and we can be sensitive to, and celebrate the variations of experience we bring to a common community.

So how do we get there?

(Update) BTW, I also think someone should point out to Monroe that the previous suffragen Bishop of LA, Chester Talton, is African American, and the previous Bishop Assistant, Sergio Carranza, is a Latino. So why exactly is it a problem that the women and the GLBT are also represented?

Religion of whiteness

Religion Dispatches explores racism in a post-Obama election U.S.

When I saw the Confederate flags and angry signs and heard the rhetoric of frustration coming from Dick Armey’s protest rally at the Capitol grounds on Saturday, I thought: So now it’s come to this—white people having to stake their claim to social space in a culture they think is overrun with foreigners and people of color?
I guess it has come to this. As Eric Reitan noted in these pages recently, a significant portion of the population has been seriously and superstitiously unnerved by the disorder represented by a President who (in their eyes) is both racially "other" and a foreigner.

We have long understood that nostalgia is the most dangerous of emotions in respect to political and cultural life. The nostalgia of the Weimar Germans for a strong and aggressive Reich, the current nostalgia of many Russians for the gold old days of Stalin or even Czar Alexander, and now—in our country—the nostalgia of white people and white men especially for a better time when, to be white, male, and Christian stood for something. A time when white men cold take certain things for granted, like the right to be ill-informed and obtuse but still receive deference and some degree of social privilege.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad point to the irony of white folks believing that black people will get all the goodies in Obama Time, when in fact it is African American families—many of them new entrants to the middle class—who have taken and will continue to take the worst hits in the Great Recession that continues to unfold.

But the thing about a mythos—in this case about an entire worldview shaped by resentment and fear of falling—is that it is not susceptible to being corrected by mere facts.

I think it might be helpful to look back at expressions of White Faith from a century ago—Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris—before returning to consider the possible religious significance of Dick Armey and his tea-partying troops.

Read it all here