Nation

Bob Moses’ Legacy (Call for Donations)

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Dear Family & Friends,

I need your help.  As you know, Bob Moses, Civil Rights legend and Math Literacy Scholar, passed July 25, 2021.  Since then, I and a team at FIU, have established a Bob Moses Research Center at FIU. From 2004, when Bob first joined FIU as an eminent scholar, he envisioned a space at FIU to inspire those who want to transform K-12 public schools, through research, to produce quality education not just for the few, but also for students who historically have been denied equitable learning structures & opportunities. Bob believed that all students deserve the opportunity to learn the mathematics skills necessary for a full livelihood and citizenship in a 21st century society.

And he believed that FIU, as one of the largest Research 1 Public Universities–which had long supported his research, philosophy and practice concerning math literacy for K-12 public school students–was an ideal institution for this work.

To memorialize and project into the future Bob’s vision & practice, FIU has generously donated a wing of its Biscayne Bay Campus (BBC), as the home of the Bob Moses Research Center —a valued contribution and strong commitment to further Bob’s work. The Center will serve as a space for people, from all over the country, to gather together to explore how to make this demand for excellence in education a reality for all the nation’s children.

Now that we have the bricks and mortar and the offices are open, our next step is to underwrite human resources. This is where I need your support. Please join us as a partner in building Bob’s dream and furthering his legacy.

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Unsentimental Internationalism

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One faction of neoconservatives were wittily defined as people for whom it is always 1938. Whoever so defined them may not have considered the possibility that there are also people for whom it is never 1938, and that for some of that latter group even 1938 is no longer 1938 (a very partial version of that last view can be seen in a recently released film in which Chamberlain is credited with having bought the time for Britain to rearm).

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Defund, Abolish, What?

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The people who call for defunding the police, and the smaller number who want to abolish the police, have a particular focus: they are interested in the cops who patrol the streets on foot or in cars, the cops who direct traffic, the cops who answer calls about domestic violence and robberies or assaults in progress, and the cops who deal with threatening or erratic behavior in public places. And they are also interested in the special forces, the SWAT teams, that invade homes, often without warrants, looking for illegal drugs or other contraband. Focusing this way makes perfect sense; these are the cops who too often escalate the violence they are supposed to control; these are the cops who kill innocent people. But there is a great deal of police activity that is missing here.

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Nightmare Scenarios and Beamish Projections

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Linguistics Professor and author John McWhorter (McW hereafter) is many things.  He is an elegant and effective writer and perhaps an even better talker.  Moreover, he knows his way around an argument and is often on the right side of one.  And not least of all, he can be wickedly funny as anyone who has seen him on cable TV harpooning Donald Trump and others surely knows.

These days though, he is increasingly a man on a mission.  In Woke Racism (2021), his recent crusade (sadly, it is hard to term it anything else) against those who would sound the alarm about the continuing impacts of racism in America, even at his best, he fails to put his points about the excesses of “Anti-Racism”—many of which are spot on—into the broader context of all that ails us today.  At worst, e.g., when branding what he calls “Third Wave Anti-Racists”—like prominent authors Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehesi Coates—as “high ‘priests’ in an ‘ideological reign of terror’” and “gruesomely close to Hitler’s racial notions in their conception of an alien, blood-deep malevolent ‘whiteness’”—he has, I fear, gone off the rails.

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McWhorter’s Rare Dare

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The second and third volumes of Stoppard’s trilogy on 19th C. Russian revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, is mostly set in exile, but Voyage, the first volume, is set in Russia.  A brilliant speech opens its second act:  Alexander Herzen, appearing for the first time, addresses the audience, explaining both a children’s game and picture book titled ”What is wrong with this picture?” and the situation of Russia under Nicholas I.  Herzen gives some examples of what is horrifically wrong under Nicholas’s autocracy, and concludes “Something is wrong with this picture.  Are you listening?  You are in the picture.”  It is the most theatrically brilliant moment in the trilogy.  Herzen suggests that we do not seem to take in the grotesquerie of what is happening, or are perhaps merely afraid to speak of it.  I think he is also implying that whichever is the case, in not noticing what is supremely visible and in not speaking about what is clearly outrageous we are to a degree complicit in such things, also more vulnerable to them happening to us.

This is pretty much John McWhorter’s strategy in Woke Racism:  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

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Way Down Yonder

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On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine of skittish enough character to have defected both to and from the Soviet Union, was arrested for assassinating John F. Kennedy by firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, as the president rode in a motorcade below. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, killed Oswald. A commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded Oswald a solo act. This conclusion launched a thousand books, several films, and not a few careers selling counter-theories as to who the actual perps – CIA, FBI, Mossad, Mafia, a military-industrial consort, pro-and anti-Castro Cubans – had been and what role, if any, Oswald and Ruby played.

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Character of the Assassin

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The author wrote this right after JFK’s assassination, finishing it on the day Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby. It was published in The New York Review of Books and in the essay collection, You Don’t Say (1966).

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Shadows: John Thompson’s Reckoning with Race

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“BIG JOHN… BIG BAD JOHN” – Song lyric from my adolescence (that has escaped Google’s dragnet).

Former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson’s autobiographical account of his life and times I Came As A Shadow, written along with Jesse Washington, and completed just before Thompson’s death in 2020 at the age of 78 (2020), is a passionate, but sober paean to his parents’ teachings and love.

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Time and Skyline in Scorsese’s Stoic Epic

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Framing the battle
The long narrative core of Martin Scorsese’s 166-minute epic Gangs of New York (2002) is bracketed by two highly stylized sequences — the first, a dystopian “once upon a time” inside a huge ill-lighted building, and the second, a cinematic dissolution of time in a Brooklyn cemetery.

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The Myth of Joan Didion

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Joan Didion’s death last week was followed by an outpouring of praise stretching over a week in The New York Times. This raises a critical question. Was Didion really a great writer, or merely the vector of attitudes held by the commenting class? The answer lies not just in her most famous books and essays, but in a piece  she wrote that has been overlooked by those who present her as a seer into the enduring meaning of the past.

Didion has been cast as a prophet of the present who “told the truth about America,” as one Times writer gushed. Well, she did tell a kind of truth, one that many sophisticated readers wanted to hear after the traumas of the 60s. Apparently, they still want to hear it. Her images of crazed violence resonate, for her admirers, with the current threat posed by the violent right. But this selective view of Didion’s work ignores the evidence that her dystopian gaze was usually a reactionary one.

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“Succession’s” Essence

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There is no unhappiness quite like that of a Legacy Media Family.  Such is the premise of HBO’s Succession.  At the heart of the show is Logan Roy (a very leonine Brian Cox) and his four children, the most viable candidates to take over leadership of the publicly-owned but family-run company called Waystar Royco, a conglomerate of business ranging from cruise lines to motion picture production to cable news.  The Roys are miserable, especially when they are all together, and they are always together—insulting, undermining, and threatening each other with little reserve or discretion.  They find the savage fun in dysfunctional, and many of us could not wait for the show to return after a long Covid-19 hiatus.

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Do the Wrong Thing

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As though, for the first time I saw my country
And, with a pang of recognition, knew
It is all mine and nothing can divide us
It is my soul, it is my body, too

Iris Dement, “From An Airplane”

Everyone’s lost their damn minds. Americans stalk their local chain stores or Arby’s—once thought neutral ground—with an insatiable need to talk politics. Usually in the most asinine and conspiratorial ways.

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Goodwyn’s Two Gilded Ages

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People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Wesley C. Hogan and Paul Ortiz (University Press of Florida, 2021).

The history business is a curious gig. In my lifetime at least, it always seems that there’s more at stake in it than ever. It’s increasingly politicized because it is relevant; it’s increasingly relevant because it’s politicized. Fewer practitioners or pundits, these days, idealize a scientific pursuit that is separate from politics: it’s just too obvious how much good and lasting (as well as bad and cringy and forgettable) historical writing comes out of political commitments as well as from sheer curiosity. One of the first lessons they teach undergraduate history majors – in advanced classes – is that even though it’s all about evidence and original sources, history is always shaped by the battles of the present, whether it speaks to those battles explicitly or not. What that means for the ethics and politics of historians, as a guild, is the stuff of grad school – the smoky bar-retreats more than the seminars. What historical knowledge means for progressive politics, too, has remained up for debate.

When I entered graduate school, there were a few books and a few historians who seemed to have, and even to be, the answer. It had been ten years since Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment (1978), the slimmed down version of Democratic Promise, and the word we heard was that he had arrived at graduate school with a copy of the manuscript and was told by some august professor, okay… but you have to take some courses before we give you the Ph.D.

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Nell’s Kitchen, Larry’s War Room

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“Do you need a cup of coffee, comrade?”  The offer was generous, the home welcoming.  “Open up that thermos,” Larry would say to the visitor, tapping his pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table, with its littered ashtray and open books.  “Nell just made a fresh pot,” he’d announce, gesturing with a Styrofoam cup.  “Clear off that chair.  Have a seat.”

Years later, the cigarettes would disappear, a personal victory over the cancerous southern-based tobacco industry, a win that added decades to his life, before his lungs gave out.  It was not his only battle with the insanity of his beloved South—far from it.  “We have lots of snakes to kill,” he’d say, ever the Texan, even on Tobacco Road.

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Surprise is Your Best Teacher

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“Larry Goodwyn has a book out there that nobody talks about.” I was struck by Donnel Baird’s nod in People Power to Goodwyn’s Texas Oil, American Dreams: A Study of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. Keep in mind Baird is a young black organizer-turned-entrepreneur who runs a venture capital backed startup focused on bringing clean energy and economic development to places like Harlem, where his business is based. (“We are building solar-powered microgrids in New York City’s poorest neighborhoods.”)  Now take a look at the first few pages in the portrait gallery of presidents of the organization, TIPRO, that Goodwyn lauded in Texas Oil, American Dreams.

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The Ground We Stand On (Redux)

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David Waldstreicher’s invocation of Larry Goodwyn’s — and Faulkner Fox’s — role in Durham for Obama reminded your editor to re-up on Goodwyn’s essential First piece on the 2008 campaign…

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A Texas Experiment

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The harsh restriction on abortion rights just adopted by the Texas state legislature has a curious feature: the ban on abortions after six weeks cannot be enforced by state officials; the police are barred from acting. Enforcement is put into the hands of ordinary citizens—the Texas equivalent of you and me. If any citizen learns of someone involved in or complicit in an illegal abortion, he or she can sue that person. Or, more likely, they can report the offender to one of the civil society organizations that oppose abortion, and its officers will collect the reports and file the suits. The state isn’t involved, and that supposedly means that the law does not violate Roe v. Wade—which, Texans claim, only prohibits state action against abortion, not private action. I doubt that the subterfuge will stand, despite the Supreme Court’s initial refusal to call it out. But there is more to say.

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