What Do Musing, Abortion, And American Airlines Have In Common?

Nothing. Just me.

When The Civil Conversations Project was conceived in 2020 on a beautiful, not-yet-hot morning in the parking lot of the Kopeka Coffee shop in Grand Junction - and here I’m going to put in a plug for the best damned cinnamon rolls on this side of the Milky Way - Joe Neuhof, my partner in this crime, said that Substack (which of course I had never heard of) would give me a place to muse. I’ve never looked up the definition of “muse”, but I take it to mean that I can ramble on about whatever damned thing I feel like. So this morning I’m going to muse while drinking my Trader Joe’s shade-grown coffee. And thanks to CCP board member Vanessa Linaris for cluing me in to the huge environmental harm of non-shade grown coffee.

Musing: A few years ago someone told me that the United States Department of Justice was created to fight back against the Klu Klux Klan and their reign of terror and murder over Black Americans. I don’t recall who it was, but whomever it was I believed them and I’ve mentioned that factoid from time to time. Yesterday I Googled the DOJ - actually, I used the more private Duck Duck Go search engine as I always do - and was directed to this Smithsonian site with this lede, “Created 150 Years Ago, the Justice Department’s First Mission Was to Protect Black Rights. In the wake of the Civil War, the government’s new force sought to enshrine equality under the law.”

Equality under the law - our 14^th Amendment. Cool concept. I dunno about you, but I think that’s pretty cool that the DOJ’s first mission was to try to force this country to live up to the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin which are oft quoted and forever enshrined in our Declaration of Independence - by protecting one of this country’s most vulnerable people.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

Yeah, “men”, meant White guys and excluded women. But they were in the right forest if not on the right trail and that DOJ thing does give me a bit of a warm and fuzzy…a feeling that I don’t always have.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the 3^rd. Photo credit to Gage Skidmore

It would have been nice if someone had told all that to Trump’s first attorney general - the person at the top of the Department of Justice, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III - named for two confederate heroes  - a man so vile and racist that his own Alabama state legislature prevented his appointment to the Supreme Court. There are many fine people living in Alabama, including two personal friends of mine. But having said that, it’s hard to imagine being TOO racist in Alabama. Trump’s attorney general succeeded in the near impossible.

In the Smithsonian article - A cartoon by illustrator Thomas Nast shows a member of the White League and a member of the Ku Klux Klan joining hands over a terrorized black family. Library of Congress

From the Smithsonian: Amos T. Akerman was an unlikely figure to head the newly formed Department of Justice. In 1870, the United States was still working to bind up the nation’s wounds torn open by the Civil War. During this period of Reconstruction, the federal government committed itself to guaranteeing full citizenship rights to all Americans, regardless of race. At the forefront of that effort was Akerman, a former Democrat and enslaver from Georgia, and a former officer in the Confederate Army. (Note…back in the day, the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and the Democratic Party was in support of enslavement. It’s confusing. And since teaching that in our schools might be considered teaching the evil boogeyman, Critical Race Theory…well…you know where’d I’d be going if I were there. Every once in a blue moon someone will ‘remind’ me that it was the Republican Party who freed the enslaved and fought for their rights.)

Though the United States had had an Attorney General since the formation of the government in 1789, none had been empowered with the full force of a consolidated legal team quite like Akerman. And none had had the monumental task of enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments and new legislation delivering long overdue rights to four million formerly enslaved black men and women. This department’s work on behalf of the emancipated population was so central to its early mission that Akerman established the department’s headquarters in the Freedman’s Savings Bank Building.

You can read the full text here.  

In The News…Is this 2024 or 1924?!?! Black Americans smell!?!?! “In a lawsuit filed last month in federal court, three passengers said American Airlines employees removed them and five other Black men from their seats on a January flight before it was scheduled to take off from Phoenix. Eventually, an employee told them that someone on the flight had complained about body odor, even though no one had accused the plaintiffs themselves…The allegations placed American back under scrutiny, several years after the NAACP issued a travel advisory in 2017 warning that Black passengers could encounter “disrespectful, discriminatory or unsafe conditions” when flying on the airline.

Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s president and CEO, said that advisory was lifted the following year, after American committed to moves — including creating a diversity, equity and inclusion council — to prevent discrimination. He warned in a statement earlier this month that the NAACP would need to reinstate an advisory if the airline did not deliver a “swift and decisive response” to the situation. The statement said American disbanded the DEI council in 2023 and urged the airline to revive it.”

Sheesh…I have one airline that I collect miles on. Want to guess which one? And who knew that simply forming a DEI committee would prevent discrimination. Firing folks at the first hint of racism…I wonder if that would work even better than a committee.

Of Interest: Ok…so this is about abortion, not race. But here’s the thing…it comes from exactly the same hateful place that lies within the hearts of some people. I have what is probably an unprovable theory that racism taught America how to hate. Pre-WWII the Nazi’s actually came to America to study our Jim Crow laws so that they - no strangers to hatefulness - could learn how to legislate and codify hatefulness. I wrote about the root of our hatefulness a while back here. If you find the Nazi thing stretches credibility, you can read more here, here, and many other places.

Again, not something you were taught in any American school. We have a specific narrative that probably still goes something like it did when I was in school.  American history was taught as a series of triumphs that we have bragging rights to and that remain front and center over wrongs that were relegated to the distant, unimportant, unspeakable past. We portray that we are an honorable country always marching towards good. Slavery was evil, but the Civil War ended that evilness. Then there was segregation, but America-the-good gallantly addressed that with the Civil Rights movement - and with the help of White people ended segregation and all that had been unfair and un-American. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, yet it somehow didn’t invalidate our national narrative of perpetual greatness. Abroad, the U.S. had led the cause of freedom against fascism and communism. At home Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam were mistakes but they didn’t erase the larger picture of our greatness. The Nazi/Jim Crow/Hatefulness/Abortion thing doesn’t fit.

Anyway…“A study published June 24^th in the pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Pediatrics) shows that the idea of returning women to roles as wives and mothers by banning abortion has, in Texas, driven infant death rates 12.9% higher. The rest of the country saw an increase of 1.8%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies increased almost 23% in Texas while they decreased for the rest of the nation, showing that the abortion ban is forcing women to carry to term fetuses that could not survive. 

When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state.”^[1]

Infant deaths up 12.9%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies up 23%. 26,313 pregnancies due to rape. All that seems pretty hateful to me.

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^L Heather Cox Richardson “Letters From An American”. June 24^th, 2024