With a dark mark
My intent is known
All my power contracts
smaller than a pupil
Nation
Members, Don’t Get Weary
I’m with the OG Tonight‼️ @DoloresHuerta @amazonlabor✊🏽
Jolene
I once worked in a factory with a girl named Jolene. We were 17 and I had lied to get hired; we couldn’t legally work in the plant for another year.
She was white, from somewhere around “Taylor-tucky”, a name that mocked the southern roots of working class whites of the suburb of Taylor, Michigan. I lived in Detroit (still do). I was black, and I still am, as a matter of fact. Without the factory we’d never have met.
BTC (Better Than Champagne and/or Beat the Clock!)
The moment Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse declared victory in their vote to form the first Amazon union in the United States pic.twitter.com/Fr92Wz1LIN
— Kei Pritsker (@KeiPritsker) April 1, 2022
Bad Actors
Hunter Harris notes there’s something “sexy” about not having a take on the Oscars’ slap heard round the world. (Though she goes into the gory in her gossip column.) FWIW, C. Liegh McInnes, who’s often posted in these pages, had the best analysis of what went down: “Public buffoonery is embarrassing, especially when the buffoon makes a mess at a place where, just a few years ago, folks were begging to be invited.” He was firmly in Camp Rock, pointing out how Smith’s act will make him a “respected person, a real n-word” among the benighted in black communities.
Smith wasn’t the only bad actor on parade that night in L.A. per this report from In These Times:
A Year in Legal Limbo
In Lollipop, Bob Levin has written a totally honest “memoir” of his year as a VISTA lawyer in Chicago from September in 1967 to September in 1968.
It is totally honest because, as he says in his introduction, “I have made up up (almost) all names of individuals and organizations. I have manufactured dialogue. I have composited some characters and omitted significant others. I have altered time sequences and appropriated events which occurred to others as my own. Some of what I believed happened did not. Some of what I thought I’d made up, I learned from my journal, occurred.”
This is all in legitimate service to telling a story that needs to be told of one young lawyer’s experiences in sixties’ Chicago, that city of Sandburg’s broad shoulders and the Daley administration’s narrow and dangerous mind.
Lollipop might seem a flippant title for a book that at its core is a serious consideration of mid-twentieth America in all its shabby glory. It comes from the following statement by the Black civil rights leader and scholar Roger Wilkins: “What we are talking about is changing the way people live. Everything else is band-aids and lollipops.”
Licks from “Lollipop”: An Essential Memoir of the Sixties
The Sixties didn’t spark all that much good writing. Back then, the charm of making it new on the page seemed diminished by other urgencies. And time does its hack work, removing would-be authors from their moment of the Moment. Lucky for us, though, Bob Levin not only felt those Sixties’ urgencies in his nerve ends, he’s managed (fifty years on) to put down in writing what happened as he stretched himself in a year when the country seemed bound for implosion. Check the review above for more context and perspective on Levin’s Lollipop, A Vista Lawyer in Chicago, Sept. 1967 – Sept. 1968. What follows are excerpts from his memoir, starting with the back story of the youth gang he worked with while he was in Chicago.
Talk is Cheap
“The new Faith in America” survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights that the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person’s political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.”
While there’s absolutely nothing surprising about this, I suspect you’d get a very different result if you asked the question this way.
“Do you believe that the life of Jesus Christ should influence a person’s political values?”
Late Prince (Black Lives Matter & A Month of Death)
Prince’s Welcome 2 America, which was recorded in 2010 but only released in 2021, five years after his death, has a rep for being a politically aware CD that anticipated the BLM summer of 2020. Prince limned his country as “land of the free, home of the slave.” Triplets on one lyric disclosed a low line of descent – “son of a son of a son of a…slave-master.” Ten years after, it’s still bracing to hear Prince cutting through the fantasy of a post-racial America.
Brothers in Arms
If y’all have time, watch “The Truth,” which is episode five of season one of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. I will only add this. Black people don’t fight for America because we love it. We fight for America because we built it and because it ain’t shit without us.
Into the Pit
A few days ago, I posted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s video message to the Russian people, an example of thoughtful Republican rhetoric and action. Good to be reminded there are Arnold’s and Liz’s and Adam’s in the world. They are far too few. As we see below.
Today we return to the more typical universe of Republican thought. Something we might call Dispatches from Trumpworld.
The Way We See (and Hear) Now
“Westside Story 2021.” A yes for me. We watched it through, surprised and moved by crazy young love brought vividly to life in this cast’s Tony and Maria. I kept thinking, no, they have a chance, they’ll get out of the Shakespeare play they were born in, like the street where you were raised and the language that formed you. Valentina will give them bus fare and Anita will not betray them after she is almost gang raped. Justin Peck’s balletic remastering of the Robbins dances. The screenplay by Tony Kushner. The Spanish spoken throughout without subtitles. Spielberg’s camera adds wings to the play, turning it into a movie that’s a play set in the way we see things now. Every story is about the time it’s told in, not the period depicted, and this one is about something’s coming. Gustavo Dudamel conducts the rapturous, jazzy Bernstein score that doesn’t get old. And never will.
Moses from Harlem
Reps. Espaillat, Wilson, and Raskin are leading a push to posthumously honor Bob Moses with a Congressional Gold Medal. Rep Espaillat hosted a virtual tribute to Moses during Black History Month. Moses’ daughter Maisha spoke briefly about her father, starting with his boyhood in Harlem…
Bob Moses’ Legacy (Call for Donations)
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.
Unsentimental Internationalism
I
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).
Defund, Abolish, What?
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.
Nightmare Scenarios and Beamish Projections
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.
McWhorter’s Rare Dare
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.
Way Down Yonder
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.
Character of the Assassin
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).