Racial Equality – Sheila Kennedy

Bigotry And Business

Every day, I become more convinced that racism is the foundation of MAGA Republicanism. I do give grudging kudos to MAGA’s activism on behalf of its expansive hatreds–all evidence points to the minority status of these angry White Nationalists, but they are unrelenting–and frequently successful– in their efforts to combat any movement toward civility and inclusion.

Most of us are aware of MAGA’s successful efforts last year during Pride month to cow Target for having the temerity to carry Pride merchandise and thus mortally offending the “Christian” warriors. Those pious folks also rose up to attack Bud Light for working with a transgender person. (Somewhere, there must be an office of “watchers” ready to unleash the troops whenever some business has the nerve to market to “undesirable” folks….)

The most recent example of which I’m aware is a business called Tractor Supply.

Tractor Supply (with which I am wholly unfamiliar) sells animal feed, tractor parts and power tools. It has more than 2,230 stores nationwide, and has been recognized for its inclusiveness; Bloomberg praised it for promoting gender equality, while Newsweek called it one of the best U.S. companies for diversity.

Inclusion was evidently the company’s big sin. The haters came out in force.

The company came under scrutiny this month when conservative podcast host Robby Starbuck denounced Tractor Supply’s diversity and climate policies. An employee recently had messaged him to complain that the company was supporting LGBTQ+ groups, Starbuck told The Washington Post.

Starbuck visited Tractor Supply weekly to buy provisions for his farm in Franklin, Tenn., he said, but wasn’t comfortable with the company putting money toward inclusion programs.
“Start buying what you can from other places until Tractor Supply makes REAL changes,” he wrote on X on June 6.

Other customers responded to say they would join the boycott, and the company’s share price fell by 5 percent in the past month, according to the Financial Times.

Tractor Supply backed off, announcing that it will end all “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” programs and will no longer support LGBTQ and global warming causes.

That, of course, enraged a different part of the customer base. A number of customers have indicated an intent to stop doing business with Tractor Supply, and several have issued statements indicating disappointment with the company’s willingness to buckle under. As one wrote, “Tractor Supply’s embarrassing capitulation to the petty whims of anti-LGBTQ extremists puts the company out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who support their LGBTQ friends, family, and neighbors.”

Tractor Supply is a predominantly rural enterprise, which means it faces a more formidable challenge than businesses that cater to a largely urban customer base. As a recent study has found, a growing aspect of rural identity has added to America’s political and cultural divide.

Jacobs and Shea pinpoint the 1980s as when this identity began to crystallize. In different regions, cost pressures on family farms and ranches, suburban sprawl, or water inaccessibility squeezed rural communities economically, which coincided with terrible depictions of country life in popular culture. Just as national news outlets emerged through cable and the internet, regional papers closed, and divisive national narratives enveloped local political context. Separate localized identities merged into a national common rural identity

Simultaneously, globalization shuttered small manufacturers central to communities’ economies, so younger generations moved to bigger cities, and social issues and addiction grew. For Cramer, a key component of this rural identity is a resentment from the perception of being overlooked by government. It has furthered party polarization as rural Americans increasingly vote Republican and see the world opposite from group identities associated with Democrats and vice versa.

Rural America is whiter, older, and more religious than urban America, but the researchers found that–even after controlling for those factors– living in rural America independently added to support for the Republican party.

One of the most conspicuous aspects of MAGA Republicanism has been the willingness of its adherents to “act out.” In addition to the more-or-less organized bands of truly dangerous crazies like the Proud Boys and other neo-fascist groups, members of groups like Moms for Liberty and the American Family Association have become increasingly belligerent, increasingly apt to insist that the schools, libraries and businesses they patronize privilege their particular bigotries. They are primarily active in the rural precincts where Republicanism is high and the fact that they don’t represent majority opinion even there is less obvious.

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the businesses caught in the middle–damned by MAGA if they stick to their purported principles, and shunned by tolerant Americans if they abandon them.

And we wonder why success in retail is so elusive…..

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Occam’s Razor Again

A few days ago, I mentioned “Occam’s Razor,” the principle that the explanation of an event or condition that requires the fewest assumptions is usually the one that’s correct. (Wikipedia tells us that “Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation. Occam’s razor applies especially in the philosophy of science, but also appears in everyday life.”)

In the years since the election of 2016, I have come ever-more-firmly to the conclusion that the explanation of MAGA–as predicted by the principle of Occam’s Razor, not to mention common sense– is racism.

There are reasons so many well-meaning Americans fail to understand this. As Rick Perlstein recently wrote, much of that failure can be attributed to coverage by the traditional media.

This failure, as I have been imploring, represents a deeply ingrained pattern, betokening a broader civic problem. In the weeks following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, America suffered an epidemic of racially motivated hate crimes: 200, all told, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You may not have heard about that, because it was woefully undercovered by the gatekeeping organs of American political journalism. It was crowded out by their chosen narrative: that with the election of an African American president, we had overcome.

In the nation’s vaunted Newspaper of Record, a record of that portentous violence was particularly scant—even when it occurred in New York City, on the night of Obama’s victory, when a roving mob on Staten Island committed three separate assaults on minorities. The last victim they thumped onto the hood of an automobile; he spent the next month in a coma. The New York Times only ever mentioned the crime two months later, tucked away in the “New York Region” section, when the alleged perpetrators were arraigned.

I am actually somewhat sympathetic to the “we have overcome” narrative; it was certainly my initial reaction to that election. Unfortunately for its accuracy, subsequent research has painted a very different story. While many Americans (I hope and believe a majority) rejoiced at what we thought was evidence of progress, it turned out that Obama’s election operated to surface a significant and virulent racism that had been (thinly) veiled by what was then called “political correctness” and is now vilified as “wokeness.”

I recently came across an article about yet another academic study underlining the role of “racial resentment” in our current, ugly, polarized political time.

“Stop the Steal: Racial Resentment, Affective Partisanship, and Investigating the January 6th Insurrection,” relied on a national survey of adults in the US conducted in 2021. As the Guardian has reported,

Political observers are quick to blame hyperpartisanship and political polarization for leading more than 2,000 supporters of Donald Trump to riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

But according to a recently published study, “racial resentment” – not just partisanship – explains the violence that broke out after the 2020 election.

Angered over the claim, promoted by Trump and his closest allies, that heavily Black cities had rigged the 2020 election in favor of Democrats, white voters – some affiliated with white-nationalist groups and militias, and others acting alone – stormed the US capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election.

“What Trump and Republicans did was they tried to make the point that something nefarious was going on in areas that were primarily African American,” said David Wilson, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who published the study with Darren Davis, a professor of political science at Notre Dame.

The entire appeal of the MAGA movement has been a play on racist resentments: affirmative action and other remedial measures are really efforts to “rob” Whites, taxation of the wealthy is a ruse to enable “redistribution” to unworthy Black folks, immigration is an effort to “replace” White Christians, elections of the “wrong” people have obviously been rigged…Whatever “polite” justifications voters offer for supporting Trump, the real reason, when you peel the onion, is that he hates the people they hate: Jews, Gays, Muslims…and especially, always, Black and Brown people.

The research cited by the Guardian confirmed numerous other studies that have found a major, positive correlation between racialized resentment and support for Trump and MAGA. The potential effects of that resentment for democracy were suggested by a hair-raising quotation in the final paragraph:

“If you can get people to believe that democracy is about your freedom, and that the government is taking that away through taxes, through policies, through regulatory efforts, and [even] by fixing and rigging elections, you can stoke their resentment and they can even come to resent democracy.”

If democracy helps “them,” then democracy must go….

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Are Remedies Discriminatory?

If I started a nonprofit that provided wheelchairs only to crippled people, would I be discriminating against people who aren’t “mobility-challenged”?

If I established a mentoring organization to assist kids who were failing math, would I be discriminating against kids who were doing well in math?

What if I started a foundation focused on–and limited to– helping Black women entrepreneurs? Would that amount to discrimination against Whites and men?

The courts are about to answer that last question.

Each of the efforts I’ve described center on helping a population that demonstrably needs a helping hand: people who cannot walk unaided, kids who struggle with math, Black businesswomen disadvantaged by years of discrimination.

It turns out that the White Wing–aka the Right Wing–strongly objects to efforts to ameliorate that latter disadvantage, seeing such remedial efforts as discrimination against White folks. And our reactionary Supreme Court may well agree with them.

They might be courtroom adversaries, but Arian Simone swears she and the man suing her venture capital firm want the same thing: an America where race does not matter.

The difference is that Simone believes race-specific initiatives like the Fearless Fund are essential to achieving that ideal. Given that Black-owned start-ups secured less than 1 percent of the nation’s VC spending last year, she said, “I can’t stop.”

But the conservative activist driving the lawsuit, Edward Blum, says racial equity is not one-sided. That’s why he insists that the fund’s grant program for Black women is discriminatory, in one of the most-watched civil rights cases since he was on the winning side of the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned race-conscious college admissions.

In the coming months, a panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Florida will decide whether to block the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund from awarding $20,000 grants to Black female-owned businesses while the case is litigated in trial court. The stakes could not be higher, as evidenced by the legal firepower lining up on both sides and the swarm of amicus briefs, illustrating the vastly different interpretations of the nature of discrimination, the role of history in shaping public policy and how civil rights should work in America.

Four years of Donald Trump’s Court appointments have distorted more than just the Supreme Court; two of the three judges on the 11th Circuit panel are Trump appointees, and according to the linked report, have appeared skeptical of the Fund’s argument that its targeted giving is “charitable giving” protected by the First Amendment.

Should Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights prevail, the case could have sweeping implications for any race-based initiative in the private sector, particularly grant programs, scholarships and other efforts with monetary benefits, according to observers on both sides of the issue. In less than a year, Blum’s legal nonprofit organization has reached settlements in about a half-dozen cases involving scholarships and fellowships at large law firms, as well as a Texas-based grant program for minority and women entrepreneurs. All agreed to drop racial criteria to resolve the discrimination claims.

The attorney who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has accused the plaintiffs of “taking the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and trying to turn it on its head, so that it becomes weaponized and undermines efforts to do exactly what the Civil Rights Act was intended to do, which was be remedial and race-conscious.”

The lawsuit is an attack on efforts at remediation. Fearless Fund was established to address what it called “the chasm in venture capital for start-ups run by women of color.” In 2018, the year the Fund was established, businesses headed by Black women received exactly 1 percent of the $131 billion invested that year. Conservatives argue that targeting investments in an effort to level the playing field is anti-business and–horrors!– meant to promote a “liberal agenda.” The lawsuit is part and parcel of the broader backlash against DEI efforts in higher education and the business world. Civil Rights organizations respond that the Fund’s grant program is a form of charitable giving — much like organizations that support people of a certain heritage, such as the Sons and Daughters of Italy in America.

As one commentator has written, the case should trouble people who value the independence of American philanthropic institutions– even opponents of affirmative action and DEI. Fearless Fund grants are awarded by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation that should have the right to target its grant program as it chooses.

Conservatives used to advocate for limits on government intrusion into private behaviors. I guess that was only so long as those private behaviors benefitted White men.

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And The Evidence Mounts….

Yesterday, I posted about the 2018 book How Democracies Die. My “take-aways” were twofold: first, the authors located the source of today’s efforts to install an autocracy in the racism that has long been identified as America’s “original sin,” and second, they identified warning signs of institutional and normative breakdown.

Several things have changed since 2018, of course, and some of those changes have been positive. Biden’s victory in 2020–a resounding popular victory despite the desperate efforts of Trump and MAGA voters to de-legitimize it–and the failure of the much-anticipated “Red wave” in 2022 come immediately to mind. But other signs are more ominous–especially the pathetic acquiescence of elected Republicans to Trump’s and the far-Right’s increasingly public racism, and the unprecedented and blatantly-partisan behavior of members of the judiciary.

Two examples from just the past week.

The Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murder for fatally shooting a demonstrator during a Black Lives Matter protest. Perry had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing Garrett Foster in downtown Austin in July 2020. Abbott’s hand-picked Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously in favor of the pardon.

Witnesses at the trial had testified that the man Perry shot had never raised his weapon, and according to court records, in the weeks leading up to the protests, Perry had sent multiple racist messages about protesters, shared white supremacist memes and talked about how he “might have to kill a few people” who were demonstrating. In one, he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to “a zoo full of monkeys that are freaking out flinging their shit.”

Abbot’s pardon sends a strong–and horrifying–message: in Texas, elected officials will protect racists. Even murderous ones.

Then there’s the even more horrifying disclosure that–in the wake of the January 6th insurrection– a “Stop the Steal” symbol flew on Justice Samuel Alito’s lawn.

You need not be a lawyer to share Robert Hubbell’s reaction:

As a Supreme Court justice, Alito has been unapologetic in his efforts to defend Trump’s lawlessness. He has risen to Trump’s defense with gleeful spite and unveiled resentment against those seeking to hold Trump accountable under the Constitution.

On Thursday, the New York Times revealed that Alito’s home displayed an upside-down US flag during the fraught days after the January 6 insurrection. At the time, flying the US flag upside down was a symbol calling to “Stop the Steal” of the 2020 election from Trump. It was a call to insurrection—proudly displayed by a US Supreme Court justice sworn to defend and protect the Constitution. See New York Times, At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.

In response to an inquiry from the Times, Alito said, I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.
Notably, Alito did not deny the veracity of the photograph of the flag flying upside down on his lawn. He did not deny the symbolism of the upside-down flag. He did not deny that he was aware of its continued presence in front of his house. Instead, he blamed his wife, whom he claimed flew the “Stop the Steal” banner in response to anti-Trump signs in the neighborhood.

Alito’s response to the Times is a lie. He owns the flag. He owns the flagpole. He owns the property on which the flag was displayed. He permitted it to remain on display on his property. He, therefore, did have “involvement” in “flying the flag.” It does not matter that it was his wife who physically raised the “Stop the Steal” banner on the flagpole. Alito’s hair-splitting denial is misleading and incomplete—and therefore false.

As Hubbell notes, this leaves us with a second Supreme Court Justice whose spouse actively supported an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Those justices—Alito and Thomas—are currently considering Trump’s presidential immunity defense to the indictment alleging that Trump attempted to subvert the election. Under any reasonable reading of Code of Conduct that applies to Supreme Court justices, Alito and Thomas should have recused themselves long ago (under Canons 2 and 3).

In a very real sense, Americans are still fighting the Civil War. Today’s Confederates are more geographically scattered, and the incidents of bloodshed and violence are being perpetrated by individual MAGA racists rather than by an organized Rebel army, but the White Supremacy beliefs motivating the combatants haven’t changed. More worrisome still, years of partisan efforts to subvert racial and religious equality and the rule of law have led to utterly scandalous, unethical, and judicially-unforgivable behaviors by two Justices of the highest court in the land–a profoundly dangerous institutional breakdown.

This is how democracies die.

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It’s All About Race

I’ve been working my way through the numerous books–both the physical ones and the ones on my Kindle–that have been piling up on my nightstand, and I’ve just finished How Democracies Die. It’s a book that has generated a lot of discussion, for obvious reasons. The two scholars who wrote it in 2018, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zimblatt, have spent their academic careers focusing on the ups and downs of democratic governments around the globe. That focus has allowed them to draw conclusions about the normative elements that serve as guardrails protecting democratic institutions, and about the signs warning of democratic collapse.

There’s a lot to absorb from the book’s copious descriptions of democratic failures in a wide variety of countries–and the authors make no bones about the reality of the threat to American institutions posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It’s all pretty grim–and entirely persuasive.

That said, I was particularly struck by one of the book’s central observations–probably because it confirms my strong belief that support for Trump/MAGA is almost entirely rooted in racism.

About halfway through the book, the authors identified two democratic norms that are essential to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance. In other words, acknowledging the legitimacy of one’s political opponents, and “forbearing” to abuse or over-use institutional weapons like the filibuster or Mitch McConnell’s legal but shockingly undemocratic theft of a Supreme Court seat. Extreme polarization erodes those norms; as they write, when societies sort themselves into political camps whose world-views aren’t just different but mutually exclusive, toleration becomes harder to sustain.

When the authors analyzed what had allowed America’s politicians to sustain basic democratic norms for a period running roughly from the collapse of Reconstruction through the 1980s, they came to a very troubling conclusion–that during that time period, “The norms sustaining our political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion.” To the extent that America operated with bipartisanship and experienced reduced polarization during that extended time period, those outcomes “came at the cost of keeping civil rights off the political agenda.”

In the final paragraph of Chapter Six, they write

America’s democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the United States. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.

That paragraph confirms what a growing body of research has verified–and what any semi-sentient observer can see. The election of Barack Obama unleashed the overt expression of formerly-suppressed hatreds. It seeded the growth of White Christian nationalism, the huge reaction against anything seen as “woke,” the efforts to de-legitimatize efforts at inclusion–and explains the utter inability of most reasonable, non-racist Americans to understand the animus and fury of the MAGA movement.

That paragraph explains so much–as does a sentence in the final chapter, in which the authors concede that it is “difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities give up their dominant status without a fight.”

Even a cursory look at the current crop of GOP nominees up and down the various state ballots shows them publicly expressing opinions that would have been met with horror not all that long ago. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, homophobic…meanwhile, the numerous Republican campaigns expressing hostility to immigration from the south hardly bother to veil their racism.

It’s been a long time since the Civil War. It’s been a long time since the South was able to dismantle Reconstruction. These days, the country’s accelerating social and demographic changes are making it increasingly difficult to maintain the dominance of White Christians. It’s the recognition of–and hysterical reaction to– that reality that explains Trump and MAGA. How Democracies Die warns us of the way that movement threatens not just social peace/tolerance, but the continued operation of America’s democratic institutions.

I keep thinking about that slogan “The South will rise again.”

It did. It’s now called the Republican Party, and How Democracies Die documents a lesson we have yet to learn: the persistence of this country’s deep-seated racism poses an existential threat to human decency, civic equality and the continuation of American democracy.

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