I browse through at least four news sources a day and after quite a few years I’m still surprised how many things come up that are related to America’s thing with race. I’m also still surprised - or maybe the right word is I’m struck by the race division and dysfunction that is portrayed every day in the news.
In January I wrote about the huge monument to the Confederacy that stood prominently near the center of Arlington National Monument for 109 years. Arlington National Cemetery is of course where some of America’s war dead - men and women who gave the “last full measure of devotion”[1] - are honored and buried. The monument to the Confederacy honors men and women who gave the last full measure not in service to the United Sates, but who waged war on the United States. The monument stood until December 22nd, 2023 on a 32-foot-high pedestal majestically overlooking hundreds of headstones. Then on December 22nd, after years of wrangling – and the ever present, “It just represents history” jargon - the monument finally came down and was permanently removed, never again to stand on the sacred soil of Arlington. Or so one would have thought. This week the U.S. House of representatives, after years of waffling on where the GOP stood on issues of race, voted overwhelmingly (89%) to restore the monument to the Arlington.
A racist massacre at Charleston South Carolina’s predominantly Black Emanuel AME (African Methodist Episcopalian) church in 2015 by Dylan Roof and then George Floyd’s murder in 2020 by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin intensified a reckoning over the role of Confederate symbols in government and American public life. It’s been a reckoning that has proven difficult for many on the far right to grapple with. Ultimately the measure to return the monument to Arlington National Cemetery failed. But not before 89 Republican Congressmen and women showed their true colors. Red, white, and blue.
Along those same lines and also in the news is the restoration of the name of Stonewall Jackson High School in Shenandoah County VA. Jackson, as you may recall, was a graduate of West Point and a general in the United States army when he switched sides and joined the Confederate Army to fight against his former countrymen in support of slavery.
Last week I visited several Civil War battlegrounds, including Manassas VA where Jackson received the moniker that stayed with him the rest of his life. Jackson’s nickname was applied to him at the First Battle of Manassas (there were two) on July 21, 1861, by Confederate General Bernard Bee. Inspired by Jackson’s resolve in the face of the enemy, Bee called out to his men to inspire them: “Look, men! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer!” Bee did in fact “die here” at Manassas.
Jackson has long been one of the most admired and revered Confederate generals of the Civil War and has many statues, monuments, and place names honoring his contribution to the effort to retain slavery. One such place was the high school in Shenandoah Valley. In 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd murder and a new awakening to the widespread harm racism does to the country, the Shenandoah County School Board voted to retire the Confederate name and change the high school’s name from Stonewall Jackson to Mountain View. The backlash, of course, started immediately.
In 2021, a movement spread around the country including in VA. Republicans demanded the banning of teaching “critical race theory” - whatever that has come to mean. Glen Youngkin ran successfully for governor on a message of “parents’ rights”, mining a national vein of parental grievance over what and how schools teach about race, racism and American history. The board revisited the name change in 2022 but deadlocked. The issue came up again last month and passed with the addition of three new school board members who, riding those anti-CRT issues, had run and won last fall with the explicit goal of overturning the name change.
Also in the news - Black people’s hair: Back in the 70’s when Black Americans adopted the phrase, “Black is beautiful” it was a statement. But it was also a positive affirmation…an attempt by and for Black Americans to start seeing and measuring themselves by Black rather then White standards of beauty. Back then as you waited in the check-out line at the grocery store amidst the many magazines who’s covers portrayed female beauty, if memory serves me right, I think it’s fair to say that none of those magazines ever featured a Black woman. Beauty, especially female beauty, was White. Chief amongst that White beauty standard was hair. Long, soft, lightly curled, fluffy, bouncy, pony-tailed, White hair. Kind of a crown of honor. In the 70’s Black women and men began to say ‘no’ to that standard, hence the ‘Afro’. One of the people that Thomas Jefferson kept enslaved was Isaac. So entrenched is this standard of beauty that when Isaac, a Black man, was asked to describe Sally Hemmings - Jefferson’s Black, enslaved lover - Isaac described her this way: “She’s a handsome woman, nearly white in looks, long flowing hair.” Hair.
Five decades later, it’s still about the hair. Many Black women, influenced by the hair beauty standard, seek to achieve beauty by ‘relaxing’ or ‘straightening’ their hair. Even Michelle Obama. In 2022 that she felt she had to straighten her hair while serving as first lady rather than wear a natural style. “Nope,” she said. “They’re not ready for it.” She was right. A recent study has found that African American women face the highest instances of hair discrimination and are more likely to be sent home from the workplace because of their hair. The study also uncovered that 80 percent of African American women felt they needed to switch their hairstyle to align with more conservative standards in order to fit in at work.[2]
But here’s the thing: The problem with chemical relaxers - other than what it says about beauty standards 50 years after “Black is beautiful” - is that it’s dangerous and even deadly. “A robust body of scientific evidence has now shown that straighteners and other hair products marketed to Black girls and women have been linked to endocrine-disrupting substances associated with the early onset of menstruation and many of the reproductive-health issues that follow, from uterine fibroids, preterm birth and infertility to breast, ovarian and uterine cancer. Many of these hormone-health-related problems are more common in Black women than in other women, including an aggressive form of breast cancer that contributes to a death rate from the disease that is 28 percent higher than the rate for white women.”[3]
A couple years ago I was walking through Walmart when I noticed an aisle devoted to Hair products. Then right next to it a totally separate section for Ethnic hair products. Weird. I’m glad I’m bald. I just kept going to the liquor section.
Read more about hair here and here.
And finally, this important piece of news was actually from a several days ago. Remember the high court’s decision on Affirmative Action a year or so ago? I wrote about it here. The court killed it based on a law suit bought by Students For Fair Elections, an organization created by Ed Blum, a White, 71-year-old financial advisor. I wrote about Ed here. Rising each day at 4:30 a.m., Blum, who’s day job is a part-time financial planner, spends about four hours reading news stories from around the country. He says he is looking for cases in which the law is leveraged to favor one racial or ethnic group over another. But so far, in 30 years of rising early, searching his heart out, and with 8 cases under his belt that he has driven all the way to the Supreme Court, he has only found cases that seemingly favor Black and Brown people and discriminate against White people. Search as he might, he has not been able to find even one case that seems to favor White people and discriminate against Black people. Go figure.
Anyway, Ed kept searching and sure enough, he found another unfair, discriminatory case.
A federal appeals court has ruled that the Fearless Fund grant program for Black women business owners is discriminatory. “The judges ruled that the Fearless Fund’s Fearless Strivers Grant Contest is ‘substantially likely to violate’ the provisions of Title 42 of the US Code, which ensures equal rights under the law and prohibits the use of race when awarding and enforcing contracts,” CNN reports.
The case against the Atlanta-based venture capital fund began last year with a lawsuit by the American Alliance for Equal Rights. The lawsuit, led by Edward Blum, who is known for challenging affirmative action in college admissions, alleged that the fund, which specifically caters to Black women, is racially discriminatory.
The country owes Ed a vote of thanks for ferreting out so many instances of institutional racism.
https://www.vmi.edu/museums-and-archives/jackson-house-museum/history/frequently-asked-questions/#q2
https://www.essence.com/news/fearless-fund-appeals-court-ruling-discriminatory/
[1] Abraham Lincoln’s ‘The Gettysburg Address’ November 19th, 1863 at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery.
[2] https://www.workplacefairness.org/hair-discrimination/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/magazine/hair-relaxers-cancer-risk.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Yeah, amen to that, Mr. Smith.. President Andrew Jackson, the man that Trump so admires, was responsible for removing all of the indigenous people from the southeast and marching them to Oklahoma, known at that time as the Indian Territories. Perhaps as many as 100,000 people were removed so that their ancestral homelands could be converted to plantations. As many as 15,000 people died along the way.
When a slave "belonging" to Jackson ran away he did what all slave owners did. He placed ads in various newspapers describing the slave and offering a reward of $50.00 for the slaves capture and return. Benjamin Franklin made a small fortune carrying these ads in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Jackson, being an unusually cruel man, went further. In addition to the standard reward, he offered an additional reward if the slave had been whipped up to 300 lashings at an extra $10.00 per 100 lashings.
I don't know much about being whipped. But I assume Jackson paid extra to have a corpse returned to him. That's the person that America chose to honor on the $20 bill. There was a plan to replace him with a likeness of Harriet Tubman. That effort was killed by Donald Trump.
The biggest symbol of the confederacy is the US $20 bill. When the face of Jackson embellishing it is changed to someone else, I'll feel a tiny little glimmer of hope for the possibility of change.