Category Archives: Racial Equality

Leave It To Beaver Wasn’t A Documentary

In the run-up to the “Save our Heritage” rally in Fishers, Indianapolis Star columnist James Briggs deconstructed the argument that immigrants are responsible for destroying that heritage. Briggs (unlike the Star’s other opinion columnist, who shares a range of less-informed perspectives) is a thoughtful and generally perceptive observer of the contemporary scene.

Briggs notes the irony of Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith’s participation in a rally to save Indiana’s heritage, given that it is Beckwith and his ilk who are engaged in gleefully destroying that heritage. Save Heritage Indiana, the sponsor of the rally, claims that “Indiana’s identity is eroding under mass migration and weak enforcement.” Both Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita recorded videos for the event. (Rokita’s participation was announced after the publication of Brigg’s essay, but the points he makes about Beckwith also apply to Indiana’s embarrassing AG.)

Groups like Save Our Heritage are nostalgic for a “Leave it to Beaver” past, a past that Briggs says was “perhaps the quintessential mid-century American life.”  That life no longer exists, but it wasn’t eroded by immigrants; Briggs attributes the decline to a retreat from public service and the dismantling of various institutions. He quotes economist Noah Smith, who wrote that

The United States used to have a bunch of institutions that bound us together and forged us into a unified society. Many American communities were centered around churches; these facilitated networking, helped people find spouses, provided community services like day care and mutual aid, and homogenized values and culture at the local level. During the World Wars (and to a lesser extent, the Vietnam War), the military was very large and threw together Americans from various social classes. In the early postwar decades, corporations were also a unifying institution. Mass media provided us with shared cultural context. Even public transit put people of various backgrounds in close social contact on a daily basis.

In the half-century from around 1970 to 2020, those unifying institutions became much weaker. Church attendance slowly declined and then fell off a cliff in the 2010s. The military shrank into a small, professionalized volunteer force. Corporations ended their brief flirtation with lifetime employment, and outsourced many of their roles. Mass media fragmented in the age of the internet. Public transit dwindled in importance as Americans moved to the suburbs and drove.

Immigrants didn’t destroy that “Leave it to Beaver”  lifestyle. Instead, it has been eclipsed by  technological and social change. Briggs noted the effects of technology– “Advanced weaponry reduced the need for soldiers, automation reduced the need for workers and the internet splintered our shared reality.”  I would add the effect of movements for positive social change–the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement were all efforts to give people who had  previously been marginalized a seat at the American table.

MAGA folks like Beckwith and Rokita believe that these and other technological and social changes have cost them their rightful status in American society. The “Heritage” they want to save is the belief that American society should be dominated by straight White Christian males. They need a scapegoat to blame for the loss of that superior status, and they’ve chosen immigrants (and in Beckwith’s case, non-Christians).

In one respect, the quote from Noah Smith is misleading: his description of a “unified” America requires us to overlook the multiple ways in which American society was unfair and definitely un-unified. I strongly recommend Stephanie Coontz’ 1993 book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, in which she provides overwhelming evidence that “Leave it to Beaver” was not a documentary.

I grew up in small-town America in the 1950s, and have subsequently been astonished by efforts to portray those years as somehow “golden.” Granted, if you were a straight Protestant White Male, things were pretty good–if you were female, or Black, or Catholic, or (as I was)  one of very few Jews in a very small town, not so much.

Today, nostalgia for the way we never were has become a primary dividing line between people who live in the real world (and who are, these days, disproportionately Democrats) and angry defenders of a society that never existed (these days, disproportionately MAGA Republicans.)

Nostalgia for a mythological American past–for the “way we never were”–is pernicious; it’s a refusal to learn from experience, and a way for people like Beckwith and Rokita to defend bigotries that are otherwise indefensible.

It’s an indulgence we can’t afford.

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And While We Are On The Subject…

Yesterday, I focused on the fact that Americans can no longer rely upon the Supreme court for defense of basic human and constitutional rights. I had already written and scheduled that post when I read Kristoffer Ealy’s truly outstanding diatribe on the subject at Lincoln Square.

Ealy teaches American Government, political behavior and political psychology in southern California, and as the saying goes, he has a way with words. His essay is long, but I really encourage you to read it in its entirety–it’s worth it. He begins with context:

Before we get into what this Supreme Court is doing now, it is worth remembering what it has always been capable of. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It took Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to begin correcting the most catastrophic of those failures — and even then, states had to be dragged toward compliance like toddlers toward a bath. The Court has always had the capacity for moral failure at scale. What is different now is the combination of ambition and costume.

Ealy unmasks the judicial rhetoric, recounting what actually happened in Callais, because–as he says– “the legal theater is designed to make your eyes glaze over and that is entirely intentional.”

Louisiana is approximately 33% Black. For years, it had one majority-black district. After the 2020 census, a lawsuit forced the state to draw a second majority-Black district, to give Black voters “a meaningful shot at electing someone who actually represents them.” Voters describing themselves as “non-African American” sued, claiming the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the six-justice majority, agreed with them. His central argument was that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race” and that the question before the Court was whether “compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”

He concluded it couldn’t.

Ealy says Alito was “carefully arranging words into something that looks like principle from a distance and collapses into nonsense the moment you apply pressure.” He repackaged the protection of Black voters’ right to meaningful representation as racial discrimination. “Not misinterpreted. Repackaged.” (Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised by Alito’s dishonesty. It was front and center in Dobbs and Hobby Lobby.)

As Ealy points out, six justices signed on to a word salad designed to make dismantling of voting rights sound like the protection of them.

These are six people with law degrees from the most prestigious institutions in the country. Harvard. Yale. Notre Dame. Combined they have more legal training than most courtrooms have ever seen assembled in one room. And not one of them — not one — bothered to engage with decades of peer-reviewed scholarship on what race actually is and what racism actually does…

The audacity of Alito’s framing is not accidental. It is the entire con. He didn’t just reach a bad conclusion. He inverted the premise so completely that the remedy became the crime. That is not legal reasoning. That is a magic trick for people who find racism more comfortable when it comes with footnotes.

Ealy admits that he comes to his analysis as a political scientist, not a lawyer, and that he’s asking different questions: “does this decision move the country toward democracy or away from it? Does it expand the circle of political participation or contract it? Does it reflect the actual needs of the society it governs?” By those measures, he finds Callais a catastrophic failure, because–as decades of scholarship have demonstrated– “racism is not simply prejudice.” it is prejudice plus power— “the deployment of institutional authority in the service of racial hierarchy. Individual bigotry is prejudice. Racism is what happens when that bigotry gets a robe, a gavel, and the full weight of the federal government behind it.”

You really need to read the whole essay.

If there was any doubt that this administration and this Court are intent upon reviving Jim Crow, the haste with which Southern states are rushing to obliterate majority-black districts–and the Court’s decisions allowing them to do so, in stark contrast to prior precedents forbidding such changes so close to elections– should dispel it.

The South really is rising again–thanks in large part to this Court.

But so is a new civil rights movement.

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Restoring Voting Rights

The Supreme Court decision in Callais, eviscerating what was left of the Voting Rights Act, was not unexpected. As numerous legal observers have noted, destroying the VRA had rather obviously been a central aim of John Roberts for many years. Thanks to his fellow ideologues on the court, and a case that presented an opportunity, the result was pretty much fore-ordained.

Its predictability doesn’t make it better, of course.

Perhaps the best analysis in the wake of the decision was Robert Hubbell’s. As he wrote,

For more than six decades, the VRA stood as a towering achievement in the fight to secure equal voting rights for Black Americans, who continue to suffer the effects of nearly two-and-a-half centuries of slavery in North America and 161 years of voter suppression in the United States.

The decision is an abomination. It seeks to repeal the voting protections of the 14th and 15th Amendments, which specifically prohibit denial of the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Those amendments empower Congress to enact enabling legislation, long-recognized as authorizing race-based remedies to address race-based discrimination. See South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (1966) (“[T]he portions of the Voting Rights Act properly before us are a valid means for carrying out the commands of the Fifteenth Amendment.”)

Hubbell traced the evidence of Robert’s preoccupation with the Act, noting that when Roberts was a young lawyer working for Ronald Reagan, he had written 25 memos crafting legal arguments opposing the Act’s reauthorization, and had specifically focused on preventing Congress from strengthening Section 2’s protections for minority voters.

So here we are. The Supreme Court Justice who famously insisted that he would be a dispassionate jurist calling “balls and strikes” turned out to be just as retrograde as the profoundly dishonest and corrupt Samuel Alito, who wrote the decision.

But the most important part of Hubbell’s analysis came at its conclusion, where he reminded Americans that we have a remedy for this effort to reinstate Jim Crow. That remedy would actually do far more good than a simple reversal of the results in this case or even Citizens United. That remedy is the eradication of all gerrymandering.

The Court has persistently, inexplicably failed to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. It has only ruled against gerrymandering that is obviously racial, and thus in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Preventing  all gerrymandering would eliminate racial gerrymandering, not only achieving the objectives of the Voting Rights Act, but putting an end to the state game-playing that depresses the vote and disenfranchises voters in whatever party is in the minority in a given state.

I have inveighed against gerrymandering on this platform too many times to count, because I am absolutely convinced that it is one of the most powerfully anti-democratic aspects of our current political structure.

And as Hubbell reminds us, there are remedies–legislative measures that, if passed, will end all gerrymandering–racial or partisan.

Democrats have proposed two pieces of legislation that would do just that:

The Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 (Would require every state to adopt nonpartisan, independent redistricting commissions and prohibit mid-census redistricting); and

The Freedom to Vote Act (Would establish enforceable anti-gerrymandering criteria for use in redistricting, and authorize national mail voting, automatic voter registration, online registration, etc.)

We would need to control both chambers in Congress, abolish the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president. We can accomplish each of those tasks by January 2029, when the new Congress and president are sworn in.

Given the corruption and ineptitude of the Trump administration, and the fecklessness of GOP congresscritters and Senators, that result looks increasingly do-able. But as Hubbell also reminds us, we must also prevent the Roberts Court from striking down pro-voter legislation by expanding the Supreme Court in 2029.

Hubbell’s post has much more detail, as well as citations to legal scholars whose opinions are also well worth reading. I encourage you to click through for that expanded analysis. In the meantime, I want to emphasize the final paragraph of his discussion.

It was a bad day in the Supreme Court. But we are on the cusp of regaining the political power that will allow us to undo most of John Roberts’ damage. The sting of Callais will linger for several years, but if we are bold and courageous, John Roberts’s worst will be a distant memory in six years.

In order to make that prediction a reality, we need to begin with a Blue tsunami in November.

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The New Authoritarianism

As you all undoubtedly know, the most recent “No Kings” protest was the largest protest in American history, even larger than the huge protests that preceded it. While there are many lessons to be learned from that event, it’s worth considering why it was dubbed “No Kings.” MAGA’s effort to remake our (admittedly imperfect and aspirational) democratic republic into an autocratic version of the Third Reich has triggered national and international discussions of authoritarianism and fascism, and among academics, deep dives into history in an effort to “connect the dots” and figure out just how we arrived at this very uncomfortable place.

A former university colleague recently alerted me to one such effort at understanding, In an email, he wrote

On May 27 in Barcelona there will be a review and discussion of the new authoritarianism of the 21st century. The presenters will consist of researchers and practitioners who are contributing to a new book series, published by Springer press, devoted to the study and response to anti-democratic regimes globally.

The presenters include Milton Bennett, Ida Castioloni, Edward Dunbar, and Shahar Gindi. They will present on the emerging trends of authoritarianism and its impact upon political liberties, citizen well-being, and the challenges this regression away from a civil society poses for peace, the climate, and social stability.

According to that colleague, Edward Dunbar, those unable to get to Barcelona to attend in person will be able to access a video broadcast via a zoom link. (The wonders of technology…)  More information on the program is available at: https://www.idrinstitute.org/activities/the-new-authoritarian-project/ (If you are interested in attending in person–I’ve been to Barcelona, and it is one of my very favorite cities–you can contact Edward Dunbar via [email protected].)

The growing presence of authoritarianism around the globe–a phenomenon that will be unpacked at this conference– is undoubtedly tied to the reality of rapid and disruptive social changes–many of which are the result of increasingly sophisticated technology.  

Those of us of a “certain age” are staring at a world that is very different from the one into which we were born and raised. The rise of what is politely called “populism” and an evident desire for an autocrat who will relieve citizens of the need to take responsibility for our decisions is a response to life in a world many of us no longer recognize.

Last week, as my husband and I watched coverage of the astronauts of Artemis II splashing down safely, I couldn’t help thinking about the widening gap between humanity’s impressive and growing technological know-how and our diminishing ability to govern ourselves. There was the crew of the successful moon mission, displaying the hated DEI–a four person crew headed by a Black man and including both a female astronaut and a Canadian–highly skilled humans managing and clearly understanding the implements of an impressive science.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration continues to ignore reality and reject scientific evidence and expertise in order to appeal to the fears and base tribalism of far too many Americans.

Artemis II was an exhibit of mankind’s potential, a demonstration of the human ability to understand and investigate the world and universe we inhabit. The composition of the crew underlined the essential sameness of all humans, of whatever color or gender or nationality.

The success of the mission should have been a harbinger of global accord and pride–especially American pride.

Pride, however, is vanishingly rare in today’s America, where a demented and ignorant would-be autocrat is laying waste to both domestic government and America’s international stature. The huge discrepancy between the humans of Artemis II and the terrified throwbacks of MAGA is the story of our time–and those throwbacks are the reason we need to understand the appeal of autocracy.

The Barcelona conference being presented by my former colleague will shed some much-needed light on that dark subject. 

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Rewriting History

I went through grade school, high school, college and law school without ever hearing about the Tulsa riots or the Trail of Tears, among other negative episodes. My experience was not unique. It is only in the last couple of decades that a number of previously suppressed episodes showing the underside of our nation’s history have finally emerged into the public consciousness.

It isn’t a coincidence that Americans are only recently hearing about historical events involving women and people of color. The full history of women and Black and Brown Americans is finally emerging thanks to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement–movements that fostered the equal rights and recognition that MAGA despises as “woke.”

As the culture has changed, the backlash has become more ferocious. The Trump administration is trying to root out DEI–characterizing efforts to combat historic exclusion as “anti-White,” and mounting assaults on historic displays at museums and national parks. Meanwhile, Red states like Florida are re-writing curricula to ensure that their students will graduate with the same ignorance of history that I experienced.

The Washington Post recently reported on one aspect of the administration’s efforts.  An internal government database disclosed “the vast scope of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to revise or remove information on African American history, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.” Park employees are under orders to eliminate displays that might “disparage” America, and a growing number of those displays are being “evaluated” to ensure that they are properly positive.

At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, the Trump administration is “reviewing” the exhibit on the teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men— though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.”

At the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, the staff has asked federal officials “to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.'”

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.

The submissions are a troubling indication of the  scope of Trump’s effort to recast the history of the country–and to revise how–if at all– our national parks address such subjects as America’s history of racism and sexism, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and pollution.

The database became public when a group that described itself as “civil servants on the front lines” posted it to two public websites, explaining that it did so to show Americans how the administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”

You will not be surprised to learn that the Department failed to respond to reporters’ questions about the status of the reviews, the process for evaluation, or about the specific examples in the database.

One obvious effect of the administration’s new rules has been confusion.

Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??”

Others wanted to know whether books or displays about slavery and the black experience, or about Lincoln’s assassination–events that may or may not “disparage” historical figures, but that do cover “dark periods in American history”– are acceptable. What about displays that acknowledge Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings?

As the report notes, many–if not most– National Park Service employees gravitated toward their work because they were passionate about telling true stories about history and science. A former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park was quoted as saying “It’s a real affront to the values that rangers have.”

Among the MAGA revisionists who have applauded Trump’s effort to redact inconvenient history is Indiana’s embarrassing White Christian nationalist Senator Jim Banks, who has written to officials at Interior and the Park Service over his concerns about “woke” projects that “cast America’s founding and history in a negative light.”

Actually, it’s people like Trump and Banks–people who want to rewrite history– who cast America in a negative light.

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