“That Conversation about Race” category archive

Leonard Pitts, Jr., explains why he doesn’t support a boycott of Starbucks because, in his opinion, the problem isn’t Starbucks’ problem; it’s America’s problem. A nugget:

. . . it’s all the same story.

The circumstances change, yes, but the story never does. Nor does the moral thereof: America is a nation still infected with the same idiocy that has bedeviled us since before Thomas Jefferson wrote those noble words he didn’t believe about all men being created equal. Now, as then, some of us think you can judge a person’s intentions and worth from the color of his skin.

They may heatedly deny that they believe this. They may not even know that they believe this. But they believe it just the same.

So it’s useless to single out Starbucks for opprobrium.

Donald Trump is the personification of America’s id and America’s original sin of racism.

Those are just a few of yesterday’s headlines.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Elie Mystal notes the malodorous flaw in the arguments of Constitutional “originalists”–you know, the folks who believe that it’s still 1789 or at least can be again. He argues that “originalism” is ipso facto acceptance of segregation as being legal.

A snippet. Follow the link for the complete article:

Originalists try to skirt most of the horrific defects of the original Constitution by referring to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments as curative of all of the Constitution’s racist ills.

But Brown (Brown v. Board of Education, the case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s overturning segregation–ed.) trips them up because the institution of segregation post-dates the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Clearly, the original authors of those Amendments thought segregation was okay. Congress had many, many opportunities to outlaw segregation, yet did not act. And, of course, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld segregation laws as perfectly constitutional. At every time, up to and including the time that Brown was decided, large pluralities of American legislators and legal scholars believed racial segregation was compatible with the Constitution.

(Link fixed.)

In the Raleigh News and Observer, Frank Hyman wonders why U. S. southern history is taught so incompetently. A snippet:

While historians at all levels have fixated on glorious battles and battling generals, they ignore the Articles of Secession; most Confederate states explicitly say they seceded to defend slavery. Are these concise, primary documents not making it into classrooms?

Why aren’t students learning that North Carolina voters (white males over 21 in those days) opposed secession? The slave-owners in the General Assembly overruled them and launched us into a war not wholly supported by most Tarheels.

The answer to his question is quite simple.

The South may have lost the war, but it won the peace. From the end of Reconstruction on, southern racists conducted their own reconstruction, reconstructing history to justify racism, oppression, and theft of labor.

As Tiffany Capers points out, it’s as American as a Confederate monument.

Words sometimes catch up with you.

A Facebook post shared by a Springfield firefighter that the city says led to his firing contained a racial slur, and mocked school dropouts and McDonald’s employees.

Bradley Baugh was fired on March 9 after only a few weeks with the Springfield Fire/Rescue Division, according to city records obtained by the Springfield News-Sun through a public records request.

City representatives refused to reveal the contents of the post; they would say only that it was “awful.”

There was a young Trumpler from Nantucket . . . .

A historic building central to the history of Nantucket’s African-American community was defaced between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning with racist and sexually explicit graffiti, according to local police.

Between 4 p.m. Saturday and 7 a.m. Sunday, someone vandalized the island’s African Meeting House, spray-painting a racial slur and the word “leave” on its door alongside a crudely drawn penis on its shingled facade, according to Nantucket’s police chief William Pittman and photos of the scene.

Pap Discusses a school that’s being sued for not taking action against racist bullies.

Via PoliticalProf.

When I took my first class in Virginia history in third grade (yes, they used to teach history in school) that was the label given to 1619. The label referred to three events in that year:

• The first meeting of the House of Burgesses, the Virginia colony’s legislature.
• The arrival of the first English women to the colony.
• The arrival of the first “shipment* of Negro (as the text book styled it) slaves.

The Hartford Courant’s Frank Harris, III, muses on how to recognize the last event on that list. Here’s a bit of his musings:

For blacks, slavery was our holocaust and our Kristallnacht — it was bodies smashed and shattered over centuries, tossed into the oceans and rivers and creeks, burned into the embers that blackened America’s soil and soul.

It should not be forgotten. But how do we not forget it?

____________________

*Yes, “shipment” was the word in the text.

I paid attention in history class, even in third grade. I paid attention in history class up through graduate work in history, with a focus on “U. S. Southern,” and much subsequent reading, because the past explains the present.

In that text and in the construct it portrayed, persons were “cargo” because they were Not White. And many would take us back to those days.