Happy Friday. I’ll give this a try and see whether anyone is interested. I am going to briefly highlight some older pieces I’ve written that, I think, are still helpful context for the times we live in.
In chronological order:
1) here’s a piece I wrote in 2013 for the Huffington Post. It’s a riposte following the first legislative session in North Carolina after Republicans took control of all three branches of state government - the Senate, House and Governorship. A once “moderate” Republican, Pat McCrory, had just won the governor’s race in 2012. And an already GOP-controlled state legislature went to work.
Opener:
“Can we please stop talking as if the phrase "Republican moderate" has any basis in political reality?
This week, North Carolina's Republican governor Pat McCrory signed into law a voter suppression bill that the election law expert Rick Hasen says has no parallel in the United States, dating to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This brings to a close an extraordinary and well-chronicled legislative session in Raleigh. A state long known as a bastion of relative moderation, particularly relative to the South (I did say "relative"), is now in the thrall of extremists. They've attacked abortion access, thrown an all-purpose roadblock in the path of voting for groups they don't like, shifted dramatically the tax burden in the state to the favored few at the expense of the many, substantially cut education spending when it's already very low by national standards, rejected Medicaid expansion, thus denying perhaps half a million North Carolinians health coverage and much more. And Pat McCrory, who has likened himself to an "Eisenhower Republican," has been a cheerleader for the right wing onslaught every step of the way.”
2) On the Republican war on reality, from the Indy Week in 2019:
Opener:
“Language is structured by countless rules. Mostly, we don’t have to think about them. We just know what makes sense and what doesn’t. If someone asks, “How tall are you?” you respond with a range of heights. But you wouldn’t, for example, say “purple” or “tomorrow.”
Well, you could, but those would be nonsense answers. And if you kept giving nonsense answers like that—Q: What did you do today? A: “57”—pretty quickly, people would stop taking you seriously.
Which brings us to today’s Republican Party. In defending Donald Trump, they’re no longer playing by the ordinary rules of language. One sentence flatly contradicts the next. Exaggeration is replaced by fabrication. Sometimes, there’s no obvious connection between questions and answers. They’re just spewing nonsense.”
3) On redlining and the persistence of racism in wealth accumulation, from the INDY in 2020, summarizing Richard Rothstein’s tour de force, The Color of Law.
Excerpt:
“One critical driver of racist housing policy was the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934 during the Great Depression. The FHA backed loans to banks issuing mortgages and spurred massive new investments in residential building projects. But until the 1960s, the FHA largely refused to guarantee loans for integrated housing projects. When the FHA drew up guidelines for appraisers in preparation for home sales, for example, it indicated that they should favorably view “appropriate deed restrictions” and “proper zoning regulations.”
If the point wasn’t clear enough, the guidelines stipulated that “adverse influences” included “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.” Those guidelines also made clear the necessity of having deed restrictions that prevented the sale or renting of property to Black people. Combined with other policies, government institutions ensured that major public housing projects would be built in segregated neighborhoods and that new middle-class suburbs, like Levittown, would exclude African Americans.”
About this last piece, there is a spirited debate, mostly away from mainstream political discourse, about how we should understand the intersection between race, class, capitalism and progressive politics in the United States. Some people, including the scholar Adolph Reed (whom I am a great admirer of, though he can be frustrating), are very critical of the mainstream liberal focus on race. Reed argues that, among other things, that focus is a distraction from the more fundamental class realities that structure American society and determine who wins and who loses. Reed also believes, insofar as high profile authors many white liberals admire, like Ibram Kendi (author of How to be an Anti-Racist) tend to demonize working class white folks, it’s ultimately a political loser (I should clarify that I don’t think Kendi himself demonizes white people in his writing, but that’s a matter of debate for many).
Reed, by the way, is Black and an avowed socialist. There are other scholars and critics writing in a similar vein, including Reed’s son, the historian Toure Reed, Cedric Johnson, a political scientist and Carleton professor Charisse Burden-Stelly, better known as Dr. CBS.
Anyway, to be continued, and have a nice weekend (unless I get the urge to write something before Monday. :))
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