The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: woke cultural debate
The 'Woke' Satire Of Jonathan Swift Stings Ron DeSantis Where It Hurts

The 'Woke' Satire Of Jonathan Swift Stings Ron DeSantis Where It Hurts

Being something of a smart aleck, I’ve sometimes joked that while I may look white, actually I’m Irish. All eight of my great-grand parents were born there. Indeed, there was a time during the Great Potato Famine of 1845-52 when my ancestors were treated rather worse than Black slaves in America. Millions of Irish peasants starved even as the country exported plentiful foodstuffs guarded by British soldiers.

As valuable property, Black slaves never died of hunger.

So, the Irish fled to America in “coffin ships,” so-called because many thousands failed to survive the journey. The best way I know to understand this historical tragedy is to read Joseph O’Connor’s terrific novel Star of the Sea.

(Joseph is the older brother of Sinead O’Connor, the singer whose recent death was mourned all over Ireland. A talented family, the O’Connors of Glenageary.)

Nor were the Irish, being Catholic, particularly welcome in America. But so what? None of that has affected my own life in any practical way. Nor have I noticed that Irish-Americans behave better than anybody else when it comes to race.

(In the old country, of course, they’ve only recently quit murdering each other over what’s basically a 17th century religious quarrel.I once asked a correspondent in Belfast how they could tell each other apart, as on TV they all looked like my uncles and cousins. The shoes, she responded. The shoes!)

My first great literary hero was the immortal Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift. The first time my wife saw tears in my eyes was visiting his tomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He’d died in 1745, author of perhaps the most penetrating anti-racist essay in the English language. An Anglican clergyman marooned for life in his native Ireland, Swift thought of himself as an Englishman.

But the appalling poverty of the native Irish troubled him, so he wrote A Modest Proposal, a pseudonymous essay proposing a useful reform: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.”

The author expressed confidence that his proposal would be well received by absentee English “landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

The 1729 pamphlet was published anonymously, because had its authorship been proven—although pretty much everybody in Ireland could guess who’d written it—Swift could have been imprisoned, or worse.

Anyway, here’s where I’m going with all this: Because I am, in fact, white, and because Irish history threatens no vested American interests, nobody has ever suggested that my studying it is in any way improper. Nor, certainly, tried to ban it. Had Swift been a Black man, I’m sure, his works would be illegal in Florida. Arkansas too.

Consider the scene in Gulliver’s Travels where the gigantic hero extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputian Queen’s chambers by pissing on it. (The author’s response to Queen Anne’s ingratitude for services done the crown.) Not to mention the scene where enormous teenaged Brobdingnagian girls perch tiny Gulliver on their nipples. Whoa, Nelly!

Moms for Liberty, which is what they’re calling the United Daughters of the Confederacy these days, would banish the novel from every library in the land.

I think my favorite moment during the absurd controversy over Florida and Arkansas’ efforts to ban Advanced Placement African-American History classes from being taught in public schools, was when Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Department of Education published a letter claiming that “The content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law" [my emphasis].

Meaning they can’t explain it. Not what they intended to say, I suspect. This is what happens when you enlist semi-literate ideologues to defend us white folks from…

Well, from what?

As near as I can tell, from history itself, and from the idea that Black citizens of a state where chattel slavery was legal until 1865 and Jim Crow segregation laws replaced it right up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and where race riots and lynchings were not uncommon just might have a perspective on its history different from the white majority’s.

DeSantis’ slogan is literally “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Sanders too derides the very idea of an African-American perspective as “critical race theory,” and “indoctrination.” Black people have no legitimate point of view and it’s literally illegal to say otherwise in a public-school classroom. Here in the United States of America.

So where does that leave somebody like me, an aging white man whose education in these matters has been sadly neglected?

Thinking maybe I need to take that African-American history course.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President..

Translating Gov. Sanders' Bizarre Fox News Diatribe Into American English

Translating Gov. Sanders' Bizarre Fox News Diatribe Into American English

LITTLE ROCK -- If history is any guide, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ bizarre “rebuttal” to a presidential speech she hadn’t heard will be the high point of her political career. (Her own address was pre-recorded.) Contrary to many, including Sanders herself, voters in this state have little enthusiasm for living in a fundamentalist theocracy. They know these Bible-beaters all too well.

Unfashionably clad in what looked rather like a white bathrobe — to emphasize her purity, I suppose — Sanders came off as a self-intoxicated fanatic, the second-string preacher at the kind of suburban fundamentalist church with auditorium seating and multiple video screens. Her eyes had that familiar gleam; everybody who disagrees with her is “of the Devil.”

For as long as I’ve lived in Arkansas—that is, since Gov. Dale Bumpers liberated the state from the segregationist Orval Faubus in the early Seventies—right-wing theocrats have made most of the noise in statewide politics but lost most of the elections. That would include Sanders’ father, Mike Huckabee, the kind of affable Baptist preacher who plays bass guitar in a band that performs Rolling Stones covers.

The elder Huckabee campaigned and governed as a relative moderate. His 1997 speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of Little Rock Central High School’s integration through the good offices of the 101st Airborne put even President Bill Clinton in the shade. He became a TV miracle cure peddler and hard-core Trumper later on, after learning where the money is.

Oddly, Sarah Sanders’ rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union, never mentioned her personal benefactor, Donald Trump. Instead, as Trump supporters bitterly observed, it was all Ron DeSantis-style culture war pronouncements.

So what did they expect? As White House press secretary, Sanders told the national press that she’d gotten scores of congratulatory calls from FBI agents celebrating President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. Asked under oath by Independent Counsel Robert Mueller, she admitted those calls were imaginary. “A slip of the tongue,” she called it.

You can’t count on loyalty from a person like that.

Rebutting Biden, who spoke mostly about jobs, economic growth, Social Security and Medicare, Sanders accused him of surrendering his presidency to a “woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

Do what?

“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace," Sanders said, “but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your freedom of speech. That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.”

Which flags and false idols would those be? I wonder. She never did say. Preaching to the converted, she apparently didn’t think she needed to.

Flags with big red Razorback Hogs are popular here on game days, along with bronze statues of rampant swine. How about them Hogs? as we say.

Otherwise, I have no earthly idea. You?

In almost the next breath, our champion of free speech boasted about issuing executive orders forbidding the teaching of “CRT” in the state of Arkansas, and banning the word “Latinx” from public documents. For the initiated—that is, dedicated Fox News fans—the acronym refers to “critical race theory,” a professorial approach to understanding slavery and racial segregation.

Most Americans likely had no idea what she was on about.

Never mind that there’s no evidence of “CRT” being taught in Arkansas schools. How banning it comports with protecting First Amendment freedoms, Sanders didn’t say. As I have commented previously, she’s the kind of ideologue who invokes the word "freedom" to mean people who disagree with her need to shut up, or else.

How, then, to deal with Arkansas’ complicated racial history: slavery, Civil War, Jim Crow, lynchings and massacres? Would it be permissible for a teacher to explain the complex legacy of Sanders’ own alma mater, Little Rock Central High, by playing a video of her father’s excellent speech? President Clinton’s?

Or would those constitute “CRT”?

How about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a masterpiece of American oratory as significant as Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”?

More than a bit smugly, Gov. Sanders added that “the dividing line in America is no longer between right and left—it’s between normal or crazy.”

Within 24 hours of Biden’s State of the Union and Sanders’ pre-fabricated rejoinder, the Arkansas legislature got busy passing legislation to free up $60 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds as a lifeline to struggling rural hospitals in jeopardy of closure. Almost needless to say, it was a Biden White House initiative. The Arkansas statehouse vote was 95-1.

I’m confident of two things: Gov. Sanders will sign the bill, and she won’t thank President Biden. Normal politics, Arkansas style.

The Demeaning Of ‘Woke’ -- And The Decline Of Decency In America

The Demeaning Of ‘Woke’ -- And The Decline Of Decency In America

Endesha Ida Mae Holland smiled as she recounted the events of the Mississippi voter registration movement for the 1994 documentary Freedom on My Mind. That movement, from 1961 to 1964, was marked by the bravery of activists and the violence meted out by those who felt threatened by the very idea of Black citizens exercising their fundamental rights.

Holland's upbringing as a young African American in Mississippi, her work in the struggle and the retaliation that followed had left her unprepared for her first encounter at a Southern lunch counter following the passage of civil rights laws she fought so hard for. She said that when the clerk politely greeted her, it was so overwhelming and appreciated, she ordered everything on the menu, just to experience the balm of kind words covering her again and again.

At the close of Freedom Summer — only a few years after a Black farmer who tried to register to vote was shot and killed by a Mississippi state representative, who got away with it — respect seemed a triumph to someone whose humanity had been denied for so long.

Remember the phrase "political correctness"? It's not so in vogue these days, mostly because it has outlived its usefulness.

I remember when it was all the rage, an effort to reframe any rude and insensitive lout as a bold rule-breaker. My feelings about all the fuss? Despite protests to the contrary, there was never a prohibition against making rude remarks, no law that punished anyone who chucked racist or misogynistic or homophobic comments toward acquaintances or perfect strangers or who viewed the world through a lens of hardened stereotypes.

Not The First Time

During the heyday of outrage over "political correctness," everyone could — and did — say anything, make any joke, pass ridicule off at wit. And they could feel quite pleased with themselves.

What they couldn't do was escape pushback. The targets spoke up, demanded accountability, sometimes at great danger to themselves.

That was the problem for those who had lived a life without consequences, and wanted that status quo to continue.

I always wondered why anyone would have a desire to offend, would insist on it as a right. To me, it wasn't about being politically correct but about being a decent human being, following the Golden Rule, treating others as you would like to be treated, with consideration.I was happy when the phrase began to vanish, though unfortunately it took a while, until politicians and hucksters (sometimes one and the same) had managed to drain every drop of advantage from it.

But alas, it has been replaced with a word that has come to mean, well, whatever its users want it to mean. Unless you've been asleep, you know what word I'm talking about.

When you break down "woke," it literally means "the past tense of wake." But it also means being aware. When blues singer Lead Belly used the phrase "stay woke" in a 1938 protest song about nine African Americans, the falsely accused "Scottsboro Boys," it was advice to Black Americans who wanted to avoid a similar fate.

It has, however, been, as they say, weaponized. To mean, well, excessive sensitivity, I suppose.

How much attention to injustice is too much?

Again, I wonder about motivation, the need to, for example, join a stadium full of Atlanta Braves baseball fans performing a "tomahawk chop" when many Native American organizations have objected to appropriating rituals and using people as mascots.

In Gaston County, North Carolina, protesters at a high school have told school officials they could keep the "Red Raider" nickname if they just get rid of the red-painted "Indian head" symbol. So far, not a step in that modest direction.

A White House proclamation marking November as national Native American History Month read, in part: "Even as they shouldered a disproportionate burden throughout the pandemic, Tribal Nations have been paragons of resilience, determination, and patriotism." It went on to praise Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a presidential Cabinet.

Where were former President Donald Trump and Melania Trump? Standing up to join Atlanta fans in "the chop."

'Own' Your Enemies

The leader of the Republican Party still sets the tone, and the tone is anything goes if it allows you to "own" your perceived enemies, and those enemies are everywhere. They could even be your colleagues.

Take Arizona GOP Rep. Paul Gosar, who faced the consequences this week for tweeting an altered anime video that showed him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and swinging two swords at the president of the United States.

The Democratic-led censure resolution that passed Wednesday read, in part, "Violence against women in politics is a global phenomenon meant to silence women and discourage them from seeking positions of authority and participating in public life, with women of color disproportionately impacted."

That may be the point for those who view Gosar as a right-wing hero and his tweet as clever and edgy. Of course, he's doubled down and most of his fellow Republicans haven't had much to say. Why would they, at a time when transgressions are praised and the Golden Rule is deemed a sucker's game.

Endesha Ida Mae Holland is the true hero. She died in 2006 as a celebrated scholar and author; she eventually had a documentary made about her. But as I sat riveted by Freedom on My Mind in a recent late-night showing on TV, it was that look on her face and her giddy smile — of someone who had been given a gift from a simple act of kindness — that stayed with me.

Sadly, it also struck me that recognizing the power of kindness — for the giver and receiver — is fading as surely as "woke" will, when another word rises to divide us.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.