Tag: cynthia tucker
We Seem To Need A Blackface History Month

We Seem To Need A Blackface History Month

February is the time for the ritual observance of Black History Month — a brief period when schools, government institutions and even commercial enterprises feel compelled to commemorate a handful of famous black folk who made substantial contributions to American history. It’s a gimmick, an awkward and superficial observance aimed at ameliorating the centuries spent dismissing black Americans as marginal or worse, and I don’t care for it.

But this February has been overwhelmed by some perplexing news events that give me reason to think that some black history lessons are in order. If white men in power are as cavalier about smearing black shoe polish on their faces to mock their fellow black citizens as news reports suggest, then we ought to have a serious discussion about history. Not black history, but American history. The sojourn of black people in this country is, after all, part and parcel of American history — not some footnote or sidebar that is separate and distinct from the story of this nation. And much of that story, if told accurately, must dwell on the brutality, oppression, and rank discrimination that black Americans have endured.

The popularity of minstrelsy and blackface in the 19th century came out of that era’s ugly insistence on white supremacy and black inferiority. In minstrel shows, white performers smeared their faces with burnt cork to lampoon black folk as lazy, stupid, libidinous and criminally inclined. As whites portrayed them, blacks were happily enslaved, desperately in need of the “civilizing” hand of their white masters.

Nor was this “entertainment” limited to the Deep South. A group of singing, dancing, strutting white men in blackface, calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, first appeared at a New York City theater in 1843. The stereotypes endured long after the war ended.

And their success spawned many imitators. Frederick Douglass once called blackface minstrels “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”

Perhaps the particulars of that history have largely been lost to many of the whites of our era who have found donning blackface funny. That group includes not only Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam but also Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who admitted, days after controversy engulfed Northam, that he, too, had donned blackface as a college student. It also includes former Florida Secretary of State Michael Ertel, who resigned last month after photos emerged showing him in blackface at a Halloween Party in 2005.

But you need not know the particulars of history to know that this is a cruel form of mockery, a throwback to a time and place when black people were deemed inferior by law and custom. Ertel was certainly mocking the traumatized black victims of Katrina when he presented himself for a party wearing blackface and a shirt that read, “Katrina victim,” with fake boobs underneath. The party was held just two months after the massive storm that killed more than 1,800 people and devastated countless more. That’s funny?

Northam has, so far, refused to resign, insisting on presiding over a statehouse struggling in a tsunami of scandal. (Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who would presumably take the office if Northam resigned, has been accused of sexual assault.) Indeed, after first apologizing for appearing in blackface in a photo in his medical school yearbook, he later said he wasn’t in the photo. (Northam did, however, admit to smearing black shoe polish on his face to imitate Michael Jackson during a college dance contest.) He plans to hire a private investigator, according to published reports, to solve the mystery of a how such a photo could have appeared on his yearbook page. In the picture, by the way, the person in blackface is standing next to someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood, another costume meant to be … amusing?

It is hard to imagine that anything uplifting or inspiring can come out of these tawdry episodes, but perhaps a bit of commonsense instruction is enough: Blackface is offensive and suggestive, at the very least, of racism. That bit of history should be consigned to the dustbin.

Religious Right Shuts Out Spirit Of Christmas

Religious Right Shuts Out Spirit Of Christmas

As Christmas approaches, the conservative media axis is aflame with anger and resentment over President Donald J. Trump’s failure so far to procure funding for his wall across the southern border. It seems an odd preoccupation in a moment of a teetering economy, a chaotic White House, numerous foreign conflagrations and multiple investigations into a corrupt administration, but the border wall is the major talking point for Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge, and their compatriots.

The pre-eminence of the wall in the imaginations of Trump and his allies is curious. It has always been more symbol than bulwark, more representation than fortification. As the nation grows inexorably browner, as white Americans lose their cultural dominance, the wall is an emblem of their resistance to demographic change. Trump’s voters want to shut out “those people,” the ones that the president has denounced as terrorists, rapists, drug dealers and violent gang-bangers.

There are countless elements of irony in this resistance, but one that sticks out in this season is this: Aren’t “those people” the very ones that the president’s constituency of conservative Christians ought to be reaching out to assist at Christmas? Isn’t the New Testament full of entreaties to help the less fortunate, to support those in trouble, to aid the stranger? Isn’t this season supposed to represent the opportunity for renewal of a generous spirit, a compassionate disposition, a merciful outlook?

Even non-Christians know the story at the heart of the Christmas celebration: A young pregnant woman and her husband report to authorities in a place where they are not welcome, and she is forced to give birth in a stable. After warnings, they flee with their newborn because a powerful man wants to harm their son. Ahem. Any parallels here?

Yet there has been precious little outcry from Trump’s sycophants over the death of a young girl in the custody of U.S. border agents. Earlier this month, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal died after reporting to a remote New Mexico border outpost with her father, Nery, who intended to apply for asylum.

To reach the United States, Jakelin and her father had crossed the desert with a group of other Central American migrants. The Washington Post has reported that she died of complications from dehydration, though an autopsy has not been completed. To cross the southern border without papers, migrants undertake a treacherous journey, often on foot, often in searing heat and without adequate food or water. Thousands have died trying to complete the journey. An investigation into her death is underway, and it may well be that she would have died even if she had received swift medical attention once she reached New Mexico.

But she did not receive that swift attention, according to the Post’s Nick Miroff, who reported that she and her father waited hours for a bus to take them to a larger border facility. A few minutes into the 90-minute trip, the girl started to vomit, but Border Patrol agents continued the drive, summoning an ambulance when they arrived. By the time she reached an El Paso, Texas, children’s hospital, Miroff wrote, Jakelin’s temperature had soared to nearly 106 degrees. She was dead within hours.

Even if U.S. immigration authorities are blameless in Jakelin’s death, you’d think there would be more outrage, more anger, more finger-pointing — even from Trump’s base. What about their concern for children, especially during this season? Shouldn’t they demand more appropriate care for families who will inevitably show up at tiny border facilities?

A federal judge recently shot down President Trump’s narrow new rules for asylum seekers, ordering him to follow the old regulations: Migrants may still seek asylum based on credible fears of domestic violence or gang violence. That’s good news for asylum seekers, but it also means that women and children, especially, will continue to seek sanctuary at tiny outposts after long and grueling trips.

The Trump administration, however, has decided that its practiced cruelty is the best way to deter them. It continues policies and procedures that will result in more heartbreak, more family separations and, likely, more deaths. Why aren’t those who celebrate the religious traditions of Christmas more outraged? Isn’t compassion what those religious traditions represent?

In America, Just Another Normal Mass Shooting — And The Usual Political Indifference

In America, Just Another Normal Mass Shooting — And The Usual Political Indifference

This, apparently, is “normal” in the United States: Earlier this week, in the small town of Benton, Kentucky, a high school sophomore walked onto his campus and started shooting, wounding several schoolmates and killing two — Bailey Nicole Holt, who died at the scene, and Preston Ryan Cope, who died after he was transported to a hospital. Americans barely noticed.

It was the 11th school shooting of this year (and this month), according to the New York Times. (Some were suicides; some resulted in no injuries.) As Katherine W. Schweit, a former FBI official and an expert on school shootings, put it: “We have absolutely become numb to these kinds of shootings.”

There is no other country on the planet that tolerates gun violence as we do. We have about 5 percent of the world’s population, but we account for 31 percent of the world’s mass shootings. Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States, according to University of Alabama professor Adam Lankford, who has published a study about shootings that kill four or more victims. We also rank No. 1 in gun ownership; in a nation of 317 million people, there are about 357 million guns. As Lankford notes, there is a connection between that staggering number of guns and the number of people who die as a result of gun violence.

“For decades, people have wondered if the dark side of American exceptionalism is a cultural propensity for violence,” he wrote, “and in recent years, perhaps no form of violence is seen as more uniquely American than public mass shootings.”

His study did not include the October 2017 horror in Las Vegas, where gunman Stephen Paddock fired into a crowd of unsuspecting concertgoers, killing 58 and injuring countless others. These atrocities, if they are awful enough, capture our attention for a week or so. The Benton shooting hardly induced a raised eyebrow. Such is our capacity for denial, for resignation, for apathy.

Polls show that most Americans favor stricter gun laws, but Congress has failed to pass any. The gun lobby holds Congress hostage, refusing to sanction even the mildest restrictions. The National Rifle Association believes that any man, woman or child should be able to buy his or her own shoulder-fired grenade launcher, and the American public doesn’t care enough to fight against that nonsense. If the 2012 massacre of babies at Sandy Hook Elementary School didn’t change us, what will?

Some blame our renowned founding document, the U.S. Constitution, which includes a Second Amendment that explicitly states, “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” But you cannot read that sentence and ignore its opening clause, which sets its context.

The amendment was meant to protect a citizens’ militia, such as the National Guard, not individuals. In recent years, federal courts have grossly distorted its meaning. In prior generations, jurists agreed that it did not protect the right of individuals to own any weapon they wanted.

Indeed, much about gun culture has changed since my childhood. I grew up in the Deep South — rural Alabama — with a father who loved hunting and who owned firearms. He was typical of his time and place; he hunted with brothers, brothers-in-law, and friends. But my father was strict about gun safety, and he would not have recognized a culture that allows worshippers strapped with holsters to take their guns into church. An educator, he would have been aghast at a gun lobby that insists that teachers should be able to carry their guns into the classroom.

Some blame our frontier heritage for our fondness for firearms. Yet, Australia has a similar frontier heritage — cowboys, ranches, endless prairies — and that nation got a grip on gun violence. After a mass shooting in 1996 that left 35 people dead, Australia’s then-prime minister, John Howard, pushed through a set of strict gun laws and instituted a gun buyback program. In the years that followed, gun deaths plummeted.

We seem incapable of that sort of rational thinking. We are caught up in a uniquely American form of madness, suffering a sort of paralysis that has normalized the unthinkable.

Creators Of Iran Situation Should Stay Out Of It Now

Creators Of Iran Situation Should Stay Out Of It Now

Last Wednesday, in a thoughtful and persuasive speech on the merits of the Iranian nuclear agreement, President Barack Obama chastised Dick Cheney and his ilk. He didn’t mention the former vice president by name, but few in the audience would have missed the reference.

Noting that many critics of the Iranian deal also supported the invasion of Iraq, President Obama said they “seem to have no compunction with being repeatedly wrong.” Tellingly, the former vice president, who still insists that deposing Saddam Hussein was a good idea, has been among the most vociferous critics of diplomacy with Iran. “(The agreement) will in fact, I think, put us closer to the actual use of nuclear weapons than we’ve been at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II,” Cheney recently told Fox News.

He’s not the only one. Those curiously unselfconscious denunciations of the Iranian agreement continued in last Thursday’s GOP presidential primary debates. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said the deal would make the world “an incredibly dangerous place.” (That was at least less hysterical than his assertion a few days earlier that Obama was “marching Israel to the door of the oven.”)

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker pledged to rip up the deal on “Day One” of his hoped-for administration. In the earlier debate for second-tier candidates, former business executive Carly Fiorina said she would telephone “my good friend, Bibi Netanyahu, to reassure him we will stand with the State of Israel.”

Given our history with Iran, it’s no surprise that this deal has attracted many skeptics — including some from the president’s own party. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, prominent among Senate Democrats, has announced his opposition.

But it is the Republican Party that remains a refuge of historical revisionism, full of prominent politicians who refuse to admit that the Iraq war left the Middle East worse off. Indeed, the toppling of Saddam Hussein significantly bolstered Iran, giving it more power in the region.

After all, Saddam was an enemy of Iran’s ayatollahs, a counterweight that kept them in check. That’s why the United States was a tacit ally of his for many years, supporting Baghdad in its eight-year war against Tehran. (Remember that 1983 photo of Donald Rumsfeld, then President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, shaking Saddam’s hand?)

Even if the GOP wants to pretend that its military adventurism hasn’t had a downside, many voters remember anyway. A college student had the gumption to confront Jeb Bush at a campaign stop last May as he blamed President Obama for the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. “Your brother created ISIS” when he disbanded the Iraqi Army, said 19-year-old Ivy Ziedrich.

So it is simply mindboggling to watch the politicians who’ve done the most to empower Iran denounce Obama’s diplomatic efforts to limit its nuclear power. They were wrong when they rattled their sabers to gin up public support for the invasion of Iraq, a strategic misfire with consequences that will ripple for decades. And they’re just as wrong now. Why would anyone listen to them?

Prominent Republicans are quite aware that the American public is weary of war, wary of any armchair hawks who would insist that U.S. military strength would carry the day in any conflict. Even core Republican voters are reluctant to use force; only 21 percent of GOP voters — and 14 percent of voters across the board — support military action against Iran rather than a diplomatic solution, according to an April Washington Post poll. So Republican leaders insist that they’re not pushing for military strikes against Iran.

“That’s never been the alternative,” Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Post. “It’s either this deal or a better deal, or more sanctions.”

But that’s a far more naive proposition than depending on the inspections regime to limit Iran’s nuclear program. President Obama persuaded China and Russia to join sanctions against Iran, but they’re ready to ink this deal. They won’t be pressed into tightening the financial noose around Tehran. And without their cooperation, sanctions won’t work.

Because America’s military might has limits, diplomacy ought to always be the first and second options. History makes that clear; the war in Iraq was merely a reminder.

Photo: A staff member removes the Iranian flag from the stage after a group picture with foreign ministers and representatives of United States, Iran, China, Russia, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union during the Iran nuclear talks at the Vienna International Center in Vienna, Austria, July 14, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria