IN THE NEWS
In the news
Two mornings ago I rolled out of bed intending to do what I do...brew a cup of my favorite coffee - Starbuck’s Cinnamon Dolce - read the news in the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, The Washington Post, and any interesting links those newspapers guide me to - and then continue my dive into the Voting Rights Act and it’s Death-By-Court-Order, the related Death-By-Court-Order of Affirmative Action, and the related 1954 Brown V Board decision. Brown isn’t dead, at least not legally, but it might as well be. School desegregation flourished - sorta - between 1954 and the mid-80’s. But then White folks found ways around it and here we are. Again.
A major UCLA civil rights project reported that before Brown, “Virtually all southern Black s were segregated.” After desegregation enforcement - and that sure took a while - it was three years after Brown before the now famous Little Rock Nine integrated Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and another three years before six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated the White elementary school in New Orleans.
But after Brown was enforced by the federal government, the share of Black students in majority White schools in the south rose to about 43% in the 1980s. Today, more than 75 of American students attend single race schools. Two steps forward...
Speaking of the Wall Street Journal, if you pay attention to race in America, you will frequently hear that “Slaves built America.” And they did. Not just figuratively, but literally, not just the wealth of both north and south, which was considerble. At the start of the Civil War the United States was one of the top three economies in the world, and the south was the fifth largest economy in the world.
This is just a guess, but my guess is that most people think that Wall Street is named Wall Street because it’s lined with very tall buildings much like a wall. At least that’s what I always thought. But Wall Street is named Wall Street because it used to have an actual wall to protect it from the native population who were kinda annoyed at having their land stolen from them by White colonialist. Anyway, the wall, built in 1653 was built by slaves. 100% of it. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
There’s a cool plaque on Wall Street talking about the wall. The plaque kind of neglects to mention who built the wall. Actually, New York was one of the largest of the northern slaveholding states. By the early 1700s about 20% of the population of New York City was enslaved Black people. I’ll bet you didn’t know that either. As it turns out, New York was one of the last northern states to abolish slavery. 1827. One more thing about American history that you didn’t know because it wasn’t taught.
Anyway, a couple days ago that was my intent...to keep digging. But if you’ve been with me for a while, you know that a key intention of The Civil Conversations Project and these newsletters is to help America understand how pervasive racism is in America. So...I brewed my coffee, went out onto my porch, sat down, went to my news, and was kinda’ struck by the many articles where race was the backstory. So instead of doing a deep dive into each of these stories individually, I’m going to do a collective, less-deep dive. Here we go.
The first one to grab my attention was the huge Christian Nationalist celebration on the mall in Washington DC. Thousands of people gathered to engage in an eight-hour taxpayer-funded evangelical worship event to “rededicate” the nation to Christianity.
There’s Christian Nationalism and there’s White Christian Nationalism. They are not the same thing. But under Trump they’ve become mighty damned close.
The “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event is not the event that congress established to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. It’s Trump’s concoction. Congress established the bipartisan “America250 commission” in 2016 with the intent “to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” But Trump didn’t like the idea of congressional oversight, so in December 2025 he created his own new organization so he could make the celebration all about him, and shortly after he took office for the second time Trump and his sycophants (Sycophant. I love that word. It’s one of the few words I know that sounds exactly like what it is describing) began to take over the planning for the nation’s birthday celebration.
Part of Trump’s attempt to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to rewrite America’s history, turning it from a celebration that champions the traditional American values of equality, self-government, and inalienable rights to the Trumpian ideology that requires Americans to accept and even champion that some people are better than others and to defer to those people. People like Trump and his billionaire cronies, for instance.
The same company that staged the January 6, 2021 “Stop The Steal” rally near the White House before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, was given the management of Trump’s Freedom250.
Congress appropriated $150 million for the Department of the Interior to distribute to organizations for celebrations of the 250th. Of that money, congress’s America250 has been allocated $50 million - but to date has only received half of the allotted amount - while Trump’s Freedom 250 has been allocated $100 million. Freedom 250 has also solicited donations in exchange for access to Trump. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s sponsors include ExxonMobil, Mastercard, Deloitte, Palantir, and IndyCar.
Again unsurprisingly, Trump’s Freedom 250 has planned events that showcase Trump rather than important events and themes in the nation’s history.
But how does this play into race? Back to Christian Nationalism and White Christian Nationalism. There simply is not a lot of daylight between the two. Really not much more than the inclusion or absence of the word ‘White’. America has often been described as a Christian nation, which it is not and is specifically what the founders intended for it not to be. But just as often America has been described as a White Christian nation. Christianity, by, for, and about White people and White people only.
Pete Hegseth was one of the rally’s key speaker. Pete talks a lot about God, and America as a Christian nation. He also promptly fired or relieved of command many Black and Brown military big-wigs. Hegseth suggested that General Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, being Black, could only have risen to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a “DEI hire”. Hegseth then spent millions of taxpayer dollars to call together all of the top dogs of America’s military to talk about and emphasize that the days of fat generals and DEI were over. Military leaders have been promoted...” Based on their race, based on gender, quotas, based on historic so-called first”.... The military has become, “the woke department. But not anymore.” Generals and admirals had been forced to repeat, “the insane fallacy that our diversity is our strength” and that leaders have been required issue “dizzying DEI and LGBTQ+ statements.”
And then there’s the tattoo that I wrote about here. Hegseth, a major in the army at the time, was pulled from participating in a security detail for Biden’s inauguration in 2021. It had been discovered that he was sporting a “Deus Vult” tattoo. A quick google search revealed the Latin phrase means “God wills it,” which served as a battle cry for Christians during the Crusades but has become associated with White extremist groups.
Over a 10-year career as a Fox News host, Hegseth scoffed at accusations of racism in the ranks and called for firing generals involved in programs to increase diversity in the military. In 2017, he defended the White nationalists and their supporters who rallied in Charlottesville, Va. On Fox Hegseth said their grievances were a “discussion [that] should be had” and that young White men felt they had become “second-class citizens.”
He also opposed the removal of Confederate statues in the aftermath of the rally, calling it “an attempt to erase our history.” In his book, Hegseth also described “diverse recruits—pumped full of vaccines and even more poisonous ideologies” as signs of the Pentagon’s weak leadership. “Take it to the racist bank: Black troops, at all levels, will be promoted simply based on their race.”
Let’s agree that if you look like a racist, talk like a racist, and carry with you the stench of racism...you’re a racist. Hegseth is one of the people that headlined Trump’s tax-payer funded, Christian Nationalist event on the National Mall.
I searched dozens of pictures of the rally. Hundreds of White folks plus two or three that might have been Black . Or not. But there’s more that indicates that Christian Nationalism is just 5 letters removed from a more racist form of Christianity, as I wrote about here in June two years ago.
The Appeal to Heaven flag. In June of 2024 Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito had an American flag flying upside down at his house in the DC area. Traditionally that has meant a unit or outfit in trouble and looking for assistance. But like so many other so-called American symbols, like the 13 star Betsy Ross flag, the Gadsden “coiled snake” flag, and even the American flag itself, the inverted American flag has been co-opted by the far right and other racist organizations. So it’s disturbing to see this sign of political affiliation flying above the home of a Supreme Court justice who we hope is ideologically neutral. The upside down American flag had been prevalent at the January 6th insurrection. But it gets worse.
A few days later another flag was spotted on another Alito home. This one an ocean front vacation home. This second flag is the pine tree adorned, Appeal To Heaven, flag that had been spotted numerous times at the “Whites Only” insurrection in DC. Like you, I was not familiar with the Appeal to Heaven flag. No idea what it meant. But thanks to judge Alito, all that has changed. Mostly what has changed for me is understanding the almost non-existent difference between Christian Nationalism and White Christian Nationalism. Not much.
Turns out that the Appeal To Heaven flag is from a by-gone American era and that very few of us knew what the Appeal To Heaven flag meant, then or now. What we do know is that it, like the upside down flag, has been co-opted by the MAGA Stop The Steal campaign and that it was plentiful at the insurrection.
Here’s what else we know: “It was originally commissioned by a secretary of George Washington and flew on several military ships dating back to 1775, meant to signify a plea to a higher power for help saving early American colonies from the rule of the King of England. More recently, the flag was adopted as the symbol of the “An Appeal to Heaven” initiative of South Carolina preacher Dutch Sheets.
“Sheets is the leader of a group called the New Apostolic Reformation which is a far-right evangelical group whose goal is to re-Christianize the country and especially the government.
When Sheets discovers this flag in 2013, he sees this as the symbol of what he wants to do. He believes that the Supreme Court is not only too liberal, but that it’s evil, that it’s introducing bad things to the country. And he really admires Justice Alito. He refers to him as their “Great Hope” because Justice Alito cares about religious liberty. So one of the things Dutch Sheets does to popularize this flag and this set of ideas is that he tries to get the flag into the hands of powerful people. He gives it to Sarah Palin. He gives it to all sorts of political leaders. Just a few weeks before the 2020 election he gave it to President Donald Trump.”[1]
Sheets wants to promote Christian Nationalism - White Christian Nationalism - and he sees Alito as a tool. Maybe the tool.
“When people hear the phrase Christian nationalism” in the news, they do not always get the correct meaning. A common misunderstanding would be that it is the same thing as being a patriotic Christian,” according to Philip Gorski, chair of the Department of Sociology at Yale. “Patriotism is an adherence to the ideals of the United States. Nationalism is loyalty to your tribe, not your country.”
In a recent book Gorski traces White Christian Nationalism in the United States to the late 1600s. Adherents believe in the idea that America was founded by Christians who modeled its laws and institutions after Protestant ideals with a mission to spread the religion and those ideals in the face of threats from non-Whites, non-Christians, and immigrants.
Gorski assembled scholars and journalists for a two-day conference to define White Christian nationalism … and explore lingering questions about what role it may play in the November midterm elections and how much of a threat it represents to American democracy.
“We want there to be a deeper and clearer understanding of what White Christian nationalism is,” Gorski said. “It’s a term that even five years ago you wouldn’t hear outside of a seminar room, but since the January 6th attack on the Capitol, it’s started to circulate in national newscasts, sometimes applying to any set of ideas people don’t like. We want to be clear that it’s not all Christians, not all White people.”
Panelist Bart Bonikowski, associate professor of sociology and politics at New York University, spoke of how Christian nationalism in the United States is exclusionary and nostalgic, seeing the nation as going downhill and needing to be recaptured by people who see themselves at its rightful owners — possibly through authoritarian means. White Christian nationalists take advantage of preexisting societal cleavages to mobilize supporters, channeling their fears into resentments.”
Getting Canceled By My Church. The Personal Cost Of Integrity. David French is an attorney and conservative columnist for the NY Times. He’s an Army veteran of the war in Iraq, and a former columnist for the right-of-center National Review. The Review was founded by ultra-conservative William F. Buckley - which kinda’ tells you all you need to know about the publication.
In addition to being an attorney, French is a partisan Republican who chose to make a home for his family in TN, a deeply conservative state; a combat veteran who was awarded the Bronze Star; college professor; and conservative journalist for two leading national publications. He is a deeply religious family man who until two years ago was an active and dedicated member of the conservative Presbyterian Church of America. Then his church kicked him out.
His town, Franklin, is a small conservative city of around 82,000 people. 75% White, 5% Black , and 20% other stuff. French made two mistakes: When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, French, a columnist, says, “There was no way I could support Trump. It wasn’t just his obvious lack of character that troubled me; he was opening the door to a level of extremism and malice in Republican politics that I’d never encountered.”
Mistake number one. But then came mistake number two, his bigger mistake. He adopted Naomi, an Ethiopian girl. A Black Ethiopian girl.
Here’s part of his story in his own words. His full, sad, American story can be read here.
“I was a senior writer for National Review at the time, and when I wrote pieces critical of Trump, members of the alt-right pounced, and they attacked us through our daughter. They pulled pictures of her from social media and photoshopped her into gas chambers and lynchings. Trolls found my wife’s blog on a religious website called Patheos and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead and dying Black victims of crime and war. We also received direct threats.
The experience was shocking. At times, it was terrifying. And so we did what we always did in times of trouble: We turned to our church for support and comfort. Our pastors and close friends came to our aid, but support was hardly universal. The church as a whole did not respond the way it did when I deployed. Instead, we began encountering racism and hatred up close, from people in our church and in our church school.
The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because “my dad said Black people are dangerous.”
There were disturbing political confrontations. A church elder came up to my wife and me after one service to criticize our opposition to Trump and told me to “get your wife under control” after she contrasted his support for Trump with his opposition to Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Another man confronted me at the communion table.
On several occasions, men approached my wife when I was out of town, challenging her to defend my writing and sometimes quoting a far-right pastor named Douglas Wilson. Wilson is a notorious Christian nationalist and slavery apologist who once wrote that abolitionists were “driven by a zealous hatred of the word of God” and that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the war or since.”
We also began to see the denomination itself with new eyes. To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination were invisible to us before our own ordeal. But there is a faction of explicitly authoritarian Christian nationalists in the church, and some of that Christian nationalism has disturbing racial elements underpinning it.
In 2022 a member of the denomination who has since left it published “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” one of the most popular Christian nationalist books of the Trump era. It argues that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnicities” and that “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man.”
Brown versus Topeka KS Board of Education versus the State of Massachusetts. The full story can be read here. Public schools are largely funded by property taxes from the community they are located in. I have no idea if that is an intentional ploy to keep White schools better funded and superior to Black schools. I do know that the number one criteria for ranking schools is zip code. Wealthy zip code, good school. Poor zip code, not so good. Brown v Board in 1954 didn’t solve this. I would imagine that the philosophy of school integration had several components. Diversity was supposed to allow different ethnicities to get to know each other, discover that we had more on common than we had in differences, and start to love one another, develop platonic and romantic relationships and we’d all get along, as Rodney King so eloquently suggested in the midst of the riots that ensued when the officers who beat him very nearly to death were somehow or other found guilty of...nothing.
But America is deeply opposed to racial congeniality. For a while back in the 50’s, towns and cities started constructing swimming pools left and right. Many were grand structures reminiscent of a by-gone era. The pools had everything. Everything except Black people.
So deep was the animosity that rather than allow racially mixed pools, many, many, many, municipalities simply closed the pools. Some went so far as to plow them under and destroy them, closing them forever. Other municipalities dumped large quantities of acid in the pools to burn anybody that tried to swim. Diversity didn’t seem to work all that well.
White America’s hatred of Black Americans can run pretty deep.
I also imagine that behind the Brown decision that with a better education, Negroes would be better equipped to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and improve their lot in American life. But 72 years later, Black Americans are at the bottom of every single metric of success, comfort, health outcomes, finances, and life expectancy.
So school integration hasn’t worked as well as planned. Like swimming pools, White Americans found numerous ways around the court order. But now we have the state of Massachusetts trying again. Bless their hearts.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of nine children argues that boundary lines trap many low-income students of color in low-performing public school districts.
A lawsuit filed Wednesday challenges alleged school segregation in Massachusetts, arguing that boundary lines are trapping many low-income students of color in segregated, low-performing school districts and denying them the right to the adequate education guaranteed by the state constitution.
The suit, filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, challenges policies that bar students from attending public schools outside their home districts in most cases. Plaintiffs include nine children who go to school in districts with high concentrations of poor, Black and Hispanic students. In each instance, their district neighbors one or more wealthier, Whiter school districts with higher test scores and more experienced teachers.
“Massachusetts’ district lines and school assignment policies foster and maintain segregation, with scant opportunities for students to attend schools beyond those boundaries,” the suit alleges. “Even where Black and Latino schoolchildren live just a stone’s throw away from higher-performing, lower-poverty school districts, the Commonwealth’s district lines and school assignment policies deprive these students of the educational opportunities that the State concentrates in predominantly White school districts.”
Without higher property taxes that nicer, more expensive homes would generate towards nicer, more expensive schools, nicer more expensive schools are not going to magically appear. And without nicer, better financed schools, nicer, more expensive homes are also not going to magically appear. Welcome, Black people, to the American Merry-go-round.
Racism that knows no boundaries. This next story from the news a couple days ago comes from two sources: I read it in the Substack Newsletter of my friend Bill McKibben. Bill is a best-selling, prolific author, mostly about the environment and the climate change crisis. I think Bill has cranked out 23 books and has started two organizations to fight climate change. 350.org is one of them and if you’re over 60, then the Third Act is the other. Racism and climate change are the two biggies, so in addition to supporting The Civil Conversations Project, I hope that you will support one of those organizations. Anyway… That’s the end of my plug for Bill. You can read the full story here on Bill’s Third Act site, or here in the NYT.
From Bill’s Newsletter:
Let me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk, in particular, shut down US AID—boasted about “feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal government. That is to say, the richest man in the world did this, under the auspices of our government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and his abject racism—know no bounds.
This is what American racism looks like. Mohamed Abdi Abdullahi, 18 months old and suffering from malnutrition, with his mother, Fartum Abokor Omar, at Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu. Courtesy of the NY Times
For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.
Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water and health care.
Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.
Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people — roughly one third of the population — were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.
Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.
Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.
“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”
In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”
Mark Fuhrman and OJ Simpson. Mark made headlines this week by dying. You can read his NYT obituary here.
A bunch of years ago, probably 2005, when I was ski patrolling at Snowmass, one of the Aspen resorts, it was first thing in the morning, and I was checking the functioning of the AED in the mid mountain restaurant and bar. It was probably 8:30 in the morning and I noticed a guy sitting in the bar drinking by himself and flashing me a big smile. I’m into smiles and people being nice to me, so when I finished checking the AED I stopped to say hello on my way out. He was a really big man, mostly blubber. I didn’t recognize him as O.J. Simpson. But I introduced myself. He introduced himself as OJ. My response was, “Simpson? “He nodded yes, but I was a bit skeptical. I didn’t know he had gotten so blubbery. But after chatting for a while, it was clear he was OJ. He did a lot of name dropping. Anyway, we chatted for a bit and I went on my way.
A few years after that, probably because of my renowned and awesome outdoor credentials, I was asked to join the planning committee for the Pacific Northwest Trail. A new 1200 mile route that ran from Glacier National Park across the northwest United States, and terminating on the western edge of Olympic National Park in Washington.
In that role, I was invited to a meeting in Sandpoint Idaho. Sandpoint is a stunning town. It’s an old and still current railroad town all gussied up and yuppified on the shores of beautiful Lake Pend Oreille - pronounced exactly like it’s spelled...Pond-o-ray. The lake is surrounded by mountains that come right straight down into the lake. Hardly any beaches at all. Just cliffs and mountains. If I’d had a few hundred thousand dollars I might even have driven back home to Colorado the proud new owner of a second home.
I knew that Sand Point and northern Idaho was the exact epicenter at that time of violent White Supremacy and anti-government sentiment. Ruby Ridge is in Sandpoint as was Randy Weaver until the feds killed his wife and son which drove him to move elsewhere. But the town is beautiful with awesome access to outdoor adventure.
So I soon found myself sitting in a local tavern eating the best veggie pot stickers I’ve ever had. Most of the tables were taken but the bar was empty and the waitress was pretty and seemed friendly. So I pulled up a stool and started chatting her up. I knew that Mark Furhman had moved to Sandpoint after the OJ trial. When I asked about him, the waitress told me that I was sitting on his stool. Mark was the primary officer involved in OJ’s arrest and was the key witness for the prosecution. But Fuhrman used the n-word so regularly in his conversation, said so many derogatory things about Black Americans, took so many actions against Black residents of Los Angelos, and was exposed as such a thorough and violent racist that instead of bolstering the prosecution’s case, he sunk it. The phrase “N-word” was coined during the OJ trial entirely because Furman had used the real word so many times, and the decent ladies and gentlemen of the Court did not want to continue to use the word.
“People there don’t want niggers in their town. People there don’t want Mexicans in their town. They don’t want anybody but good people in their town…”
“Go to Wilshire division. Wilshire division is all niggers. All Niggers, Nigger training officers, niggers…”
“When I came on the job all my training officers were big guys and knowledgeable, some nigger’d get in their face, they just spin ’em around, choke ’em out until they dropped.”
“I used to go to work and practice movements. Niggers. They’re easy. I used to practice my kicks.”
“Why don’t you give them the 77th lie detector test? … You choke him out until he tells you the truth. You know it is kind of funny, but a lot of policemen will get a kick out of it.” He continued: “First thing, anything out of a nigger’s mouth for the first five or six sentences is a fucking lie.”
After retiring and moving to Sandpoint, followed by many other former LAPD like-minded cops, Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly called on Mark whenever she needed an “expert” witness to explain away the many killings of Black men by various police officers. Megyn, herself a racist, could always count on Mark to explain to the public why the Black guy got what he deserved by the heroic cop.
Megyn Kelly did not, to my knowledge, make the news this week. But since her name came up, let’s talk about her too. On her Fox show, The Kelly File, just before Christmas in 2013, Kelly felt the need to explain to any kids that might be watching that Santa Claus was White. “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is White.” But she didn’t stop there. “I mean, Jesus was a White man too. He was a historical figure: that is a verifiable fact. Sorry kids, but that’s just the way it is.”
Apparently, Megan didn’t realize that Santa Claus is actually a fictional character and can be envisioned any way at all then any kid wants to envision him. I guess she thought Santa was a real guy flying around amongst the stars with a reindeer with a Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer guiding his way.
And I guess she also didn’t realize that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the region of historic Palestine that today is in the West Bank. He would not be the blonde haired, green eyed man that we commonly see hanging on walls, even church walls. Forensic scientists think he might have looked like this:
Speaking of fictional characters...and also in the news this week, both Elon Musk and Newsmax anchorman Rob Finnerty, both have their bowels in a considerable uproar because film director Christopher Nolan is casting Black actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in his movie The Odyssey.
Musk claims that Nolan is re-writing DEI into history in order that he might win an Oscar. But Rob Finnerty is so incensed that he devoted an entire segment to this travesty. “Helen of Troy, the woman who started the Trojan War...she was beautiful. The woman whose face launched a thousand ships, whose beauty was unparalleled. A woman who was definitely White is going to be played by Lupita Nyong’o.”
But here’s the thing...I guess that neither Musk or Finnerty know that Helen of Troy, like Santa Clause, wasn’t real. She was a fictional character. Therefore, there are no actual paintings or photographs of her. She could have looked like anything and she still can look like however anybody wants to imagine that she looked. And actually, Helen of Troy was half bird. So...yeah...she could have been imagined as looking like any way anybody felt like having her look.
But here’s the thing...how she might have looked and how she might be portrayed in the movie is immaterial. The thing is that these two racist are upset how a fictional character is being racially portrayed. In whatever planet they come from, people who are good and wonderful and heroic are automatically White. They could not possibly be Black . If you don’t believe that, just ask Megyn.
Kinda reminds me of the bruhaha over beautiful and accomplished Black actor Halle Bailey playing the part of Ariel in the 2023 movie Little Mermaid. Ariel...yet ANOTHER fictional character is evidently supposed to forever be White in America’s imagination.
In America, heroes MUST be White. Even make-believe characters. Even in the deepest recesses of our own private imaginations.
Jimmy Kimmel did an amazing and hilarious job skewering Musk and Finnerty last night starting around minute 11:27. It’s WELL worth watching.
And finally, also in the news the last couple of days...in the midst of gathering up every brown skinned immigrant he can find, legal or not… dangerous or not… and of any age from young child to elderly widow, Trump has found time and money and cause to admit 10,000 more White South Africans at a cost to the American taxpayer of $100 million.
So much for rounding up and deporting every immigrant he can find. You can read the whole sad story here.
The LA fires from last year: I wrote about them here with the story line being did Altadena, the Black neighborhood, receive the same effort and response as the tonier White neighborhoods? We are all aware that Black Americans have been herded into clusters, forming Black neighborhood ghettos. But a ghetto is different from a slum. Merriam Webster defines ghetto as, “An underprivileged district of a city or town in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.“ They go one to say the term was originally applied in Europe where Jews were confined to their own neighborhoods.
Their definition of a slum is not that much different. “A densely populated usually urban area marked especially by poverty.“ But here’s the thing. Although laws and customs and banks and the federal government - often accompanied and enforced by violence and police - forced Black Americans into ghettos, it was not Black Americans who turned those ghetto into slums. Turning them into slums was a thing that the government did and they did it intentionally. The White population then looked at these rundown and dirty and unkept areas as what Black Americans did to themselves in their neighborhoods. But it wasn’t Black Americans. As hard as this may be to believe, Black Americans like nice homes and nice stuff and safe streets just as much as White Americans do. It was the government who intentionally didn’t replace burned out bulbs on street lights. Who intentionally didn’t pick up trash and garbage on a consistent basis. Who intentionally didn’t build grassy parks. Who intentionally responded slowly to the call for emergency services. Who intentionally didn’t repair potholes. Who intentionally zoned in businesses such as taverns and liquor stores and motels rooms-by-the-hour for a little quick fornicating, and payday loans, and chemical plants, and munitions dumps that were not allowed in White neighborhoods.
It was so intentional that Richard Nixon and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined a term for it. Benign neglect.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson, concerned about the many Black riots, created the National Advisory Commission On Civil Disorders, aka The Kerner Commission.
Adel Allen, an engineer who came to St. Louis in 1962 to work at the McDonnell Space Center, told his story to the commission in 1970. Allen was ready to quit and return home to Wichita, Kansas after no realtor would sell him a suburban home. He was unwilling to live in a small apartment in the overcrowded St. Louis ghetto that was apparently his only alternative.
Allen finally succeeded in getting a White friend to make a “straw purchase” - hiding the true buyer - of a home in Kirkwood, a nearly all-White St. Louis suburb; a second friend gave him $5,000 toward the $16,000 price. The funds were probably needed because the Federal Housing Administration would not insure mortgages for African Americans in Kirkwood, and no bank would issue them. Allen’s income was higher than those of the 30 White homeowners on his block and he alone had a college degree. Allen described life in Kirkwood in 1962 and then in 1970:
“When I first moved there (and the community was still all White... parentheses are mine)… I don’t know if [the police] were protecting me or protecting someone from me. We had patrols on the hour. Our streets were swept neatly, monthly. Our trash pickups were regular and handled with dignity. The street lighting was always up to par. … We now (now that the community is all Black ... the parentheses are mine) have the most inadequate lighting in the city …People from the other sections of town … now leave their cars parked on our streets when they want to abandon them. … What they are making now is a ghetto in the process. The buildings are maintained by owners better than they were when they were White but the city services are much less.”
Benign neglect.
The commission’s general counsel then asked if Allen had ever been stopped by police.
“Yes, I don’t think there’s a Black man in South St. Louis County that hasn’t been stopped at least once if he’s been here more than two weeks. … There’s an almost automatic suspicion that goes along with being Black . … [T]here is an obvious attempt toward emasculation of the Black man. I’ve been stopped, searched, and I don’t mean searched in the milder sense, I mean laying across the hood of a car. And then told after they found nothing that my tail light bulb was burned out … something like that.”
I didn’t write that story about the Altadena section of the LA fires speculating on the city and the counties response to the Black section that burned down versus the White section based on anything factual. I wrote it based on reflections of historical fact. But then this week a story popped up that circled back to my story of 16 months ago:
A consultant’s report on Los Angeles County’s response to last year’s catastrophic Eaton fire found that officials were hampered by chaos and limited resources, but engaged in no misconduct or discrimination.
“While the report provides an honest account of our operations, we recognize that no investigation can truly capture the horror and tragedy residents endured,” the county’s fire chief, Anthony C. Marrone, said in a statement accompanying the Monday report, which his agency had commissioned. He said its lessons would be turned into “lasting changes that will better protect our residents and neighborhoods.”
So maybe. Maybe not. But here’s the thing, different treatment and response has happened and continues to happen so often, that the Black residents of the burned area had reams of historical fact to be suspicious and to wonder why nearly all the 19 people who died in the Easton Fire lived in Altadena. You can read the full story here.
And finally, and maybe the saddest news of the week, was the shooting at a Mosque in San Diego - a place where people gather to love, worship, and foster community - was targeted and attacked by gunmen - or more accurately, gunboys - who killed 3 people who had never in their lives harmed the boys. I think we can all agree that was all about race.
I didn’t write all this to get you caught up on the news. I wrote all this to get you caught up on how completely surrounded we are by racism. And we’re so surrounded and it’s so common that we don’t even notice.
I’ve mentioned before my long ago friend from my days as a Marine helicopter gunner in Vietnam, who, years later, would get angry with me...”The only reason you think there is so much racism is because you’re constantly looking for it.” If by “Looking for it” you mean, simply opening up a newspaper and reading it, or walking down the street with my eyes open… then I guess you’re right.
Sources, in addition to the links above:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/how-hegseths-tattoo-got-him-barred-from-working-at-bidens-inauguration-0bd0efebT
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/05/23/appeal-to-heaven-flag-meaing-history-pine-tree-flag-supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito-beach-house/?sh=6bb355e23c0a
https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2022/10/understanding-White-christian-nationalism
ttps://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-act-explained
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-act-explained
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/05/court-rules-for-south-carolina-republicans-in-dispute-over-congressional-map/
The whole regime is racist and they have plenty of support from racist Americans. It's there...you don't have to go looking for it.
The question is, what is it going to take for that to change? Without economic power, change is fleeting and white supremacy makes damn sure the economic power stays in their hands. White Americans who have access to power and privilege need to stand up for justice. The rest of us need to demand it at the ballot box and build coalitions which work towards those ends.
It doesn't have to be this way, and racists and those disengaged from democracy are fighting hard to maintain the status quo. The stripping of voting rights should wake white people the hell up!