The Return of White Impunity for Black Death

Posted on by Scott

Merriam-Webster defines impunity as exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss. With their acquittal of Daniel Penny on the charge of criminally-negligent homicide in his killing of Jordan Neely, impunity is what the jury granted him. Jordan Neely was lynched for having a mental health crisis while black, poor, and homeless. A jury of Daniel Penny’s peers showed him the mercy that he didn’t show Jordan Neely. It didn’t matter that that Penny’s Marine instructor testified that he executed the hold incorrectly. It didn’t matter that at least one passenger is on video warning Penny that his chokehold was going to kill Neely. It didn’t matter that Neely had no weapon and didn’t harm anyone on the train before Penny literally choked the life out of him. The video of Neely being asphyxiated is a modern-day lynching postcard now.

I’m old enough to remember watching video footage of Rodney King being beaten within an inch of his life on video. I remember watching broadcasts of the destruction that resulted from people enraged by the verdict (and some opportunists too). Fast-forward almost 30 years and one of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynchers leaked the video of his crime thinking it would help him. He and his co-conspirators will likely spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. Video of George Floyd’s excruciating death under the knee of Derek Chauvin will keep the man in prison for nearly 2 decades from now. But just 4 year later, a vigilante can strangle a man to death with impunity.

My cynical mind wonders how the jurors who acquitted Daniel Penny responded to the broad daylight murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Perhaps the response to his murder (which has included very dark jokes and applause on social media) and the response to Neely’s lynching are two sides of the same coin.

Either way, we are (and have been for far too long) a nation too comfortable with violence, too numb to the suffering of those who are most often its victims. This puts everyone in a marginalized community at greater risk—not just from police (who will operate with even greater impunity than they already had once the second Trump administration begins), but now apparently from white vigilantes also.

A Nation Without Mercy, Revisited

Posted on by Scott

Yesterday, a mutual on Bluesky shared this news:

How can you be deadlocked when HIS HAIR PROBABLY SPEAKS AFRIKAANS BY ITSELF?!!

[image or embed]

— Ash Higgins (@ashhiggins.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 3:48 PM

It reminded me a post I wrote last year about just how broken this allegedly Christian nation’s understanding of the parable of the good Samaritan is. “He had to die, just in case” may yet spare Daniel Penny up to 15 years in prison that a manslaughter conviction could yield as a sentence. Like the trial of those who lynched Ahmaud Arbery, the only reason there was a trial at all was some public outcry that Penny was initially released without charges after he was first questioned by police. While Penny is also charged with criminally negligent homicide, the maximum sentence for a conviction on that charge is just 4 years. It’s also possible (if not probably) that the jury will will show Penny the mercy he lacked for Jordan Neely and find him not guilty–despite video evidence of him slowly but surely squeezing that man’s life out of him.

In the time since I first wrote A Nation Without Mercy, the “active and ongoing dehumanization and criminalization of the poor and mentally-ill” has continued. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public–even if the cities offer no alternative shelter. In a country where homelessness is rising, a housing shortage persists, and Trump is returning to the White House with a government unified under GOP control, the likelihood of homeless people ending up with fines, criminal records, and even prison terms seems uncomfortably high.

We Are Going Back

Posted on by Scott

I hated the “zombie Palpatine” storyline for awhile on social media, but the United States of America willingly chose to reenact this in real-life by reelecting Donald Trump. But in a result even worse than 2016, he won the popular vote–a feat he failed to achieve in two previous runs for the White House. Votes are still being counted as I write this, so we don’t have a full picture of the final outcome, but it seems likely that the GOP will control all three branches of the federal government again. Trump appears to not have grown his vote totals from 2020 much at all–but some 11 million fewer people voted for Kamala Harris this cycle than voted for Joe Biden four years ago. To the extent there is any silver lining in this election wipeout, my home state is sending its first black senator to Washington, along with keeping my House representative Jamie Raskin in his seat.

Every post-mortem of Kamala Harris’ loss that I’ve read sucks–except Michael Harriot’s. It seems that black people in this country are nearly alone in believing in the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr for racial equality in this country–and that is why we are going back. The only question which remains to be answered is “how far back?” The Trump rally in Madison Square Garden before the the election suggests a return to the 1930s, when the pro-Nazi German-American Bund met openly and freely in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere before World War II began. Trump (and JD Vance’s) blood libel of law-abiding Haitian migrants in Ohio and elsewhere and their campaigning on mass deportation and border camps sets this country’s return destination to the 1950s, and Operation Wetback–the largest mass deportation in this country’s history. We can be certain that the same administration which birthed the child separation policy at our southern border–a policy that years later has left hundreds of children growing up with strangers, separated from their real parents–will devise a sequel to Operation Wetback which makes the original look humane by comparison. The end of birthright citizenship–another part of Trump’s xenophobic plans–along with the return of the Muslim ban of his first term intimates a return to an 1860s United States after the Civil War but before the ratification of the 14th Amendment. This is just a small sample of the threats which await in the future. We don’t know if the Affordable Care Act will survive. We don’t know if the Department of Education will survive–along with the oversight and mandates it provides which ensure that my son gets support in public school for his special needs. We don’t know what will become of the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or any other federal agency responsible for protecting Americans from threats to their physical or financial health.

From January 20, 2025 onward, things will change. The coming days, weeks, and months will bring negative impacts that Trump’s non-wealthy supporters did not anticipate. Tariffs are certainly returning, along with the inflation that comes from companies increasing their prices to maintain their profit margins. I’m good on the appliances front myself, but I might be upgrading more of my personal technology earlier than I planned to avoid the price increases that tariffs will bring. The mass deportation plans, possible Affordable Care Act repeal, and other aspects of Project 2025 may create infighting, backlash, and enough pain nationwide to create a small window to mitigate some of the damage in 2026–if elections remain a thing we still have in this country. That hope may be a dangerous thing, but I will nurture it nonetheless.

Despite these future threats, I have decided to focus more on the present. What can I do today to make sure I’m ok, that my wife and kids are ok, and that the people who matter to me are ok? Answering those questions and doing as many of those things as possible, and repeating that cycle the day after that is what I can do. In addition, I can figure out what I can do beyond voting to make the spaces I inhabit and have influence in a little better. It may not be much, but it feels like a more productive and sustainable alternative than despair.

My First YouTube Video

Posted on by Scott
A hastily-made tutorial for sharing your screen and sound in Zoom by yours truly

I made the tutorial you see above entirely with the following tools:

  • QuickTime Player
  • iMovie
  • Zoom

The reason I made it was a recent struggle one of the presenters of our weekly Zoom Bible study had to get their sound shared along with their screen for the music and videos that were part of the presentation.

As long as I’ve owned Macs, it wasn’t until trying to figure out how to capture what I was doing in Zoom that I learned the QuickTime Player also has a screen recording feature. So with that new (to me) information, I wrote myself a little script and followed it to record my demo.

Once I captured the demo (and the Zoom recording of the brief solo meeting I used to demonstrate screen and sound sharing), then it was time to combine them into a single video. This is where iMovie comes in.

First I pulled in the two clips and trimmed them to the desired places. Next I threw in a cross-dissolve between them. I also tried adding a voiceover to clarify that the video after the cross-dissolve was the Zoom recording created during the first part of the video but I didn’t get that voiceover audio to come through.

Still, not bad for a first effort—and it helped the very small audience for which it was intended.

Past Tense

Posted on by Scott

We are reaching and surpassing dates in real-life that were formerly part of our science fiction. The screenshot which leads off this post is from part 1 of Past Tense, a time travel episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Given what the episode is about, it is even sadder that barely two months before the date in the screenshot the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bans against sleeping outside do not violate the Eighth Amendment.

Gatekeeping Blackness is the New Birtherism

Posted on by Scott

“Kamala isn’t black” is the latest lie dividing black folks (and uniting those seeking to discredit her). I take personal offense at this particular insult as the American-born descendant of black Jamaican parents. While efforts to gatekeep black immigrants (and their descendants) out of blackness are not new, the speed with which the normally fractious and divided Democratic Party united behind Kamala Harris as their new presidential nominee after Biden dropped out has given them new fuel.

Whether they brand themselves American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) or Foundational Black Americans (FBA), the most militant among them have decided to make common cause with Donald Trump (and his allies) and years of trafficking in xenophobic rhetoric directed against black and brown immigrants. Even the internet-infamous Curtis Scoon, who has made a career of pathologizing black folks for social media clicks had something to say that I agree with to those folks:

Curtis Scoon being right for once

A friend of mine told me that Scoon has Grenadian heritage, which probably explains the pointed nature of his rhetoric against ADOS & FBA. Speaking of Grenada, one interesting thing I learned from the limited series podcast The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop was about Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s speech to a predominantly black audience at Hunter College in New York City mere months before he and key members of his government were murdered and overthrown by a coup d’etat. Below is a short clip from the speech:

3 minutes, 38 seconds of Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, speaking to an audience at Hunter College, in New York City in 1983

Political views aside, one thing that is clear from this brief clip is that Bishop’s concept of blackness was an inclusive not an exclusive one. If the raucous response of his black American audience is any indication, they were very much onboard with what he was saying. Bishop gave another speech in D.C. the same year to the Sixth Annual Dinner of TransAfrica. The full text of his remarks are quite enlightening to read this many years later. He notes the Caribbean heritage of a number distinguished black Americans–but puts their black Americanness in the forefront. A few of the names I will touch on later in this piece are all people whom ADOS/FBA would gatekeep out of blackness. To continue briefly with Grenada and its American connections, it is very important to talk about Louise Little. She is known as the mother of Malcolm X (so by the logic of ADOS/FBA he’s not black), but only when researching this piece did I learn that she was first introduced to Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Montreal by her uncle.

Garveyism is a flavor of black nationalism named for Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the U.S. UNIA was the black nationalist organization he founded. His separatist views were at odds with the pro-integration aims of the NAACP (and Colin Grant’s biography of Garvey suggests that he and W.E.B. DuBois hated each other), but UNIA’s presence grew enough to span 25 U.S. states (and attract the unwanted attention of J. Edgar Hoover). Garvey was inspired by Booker T. Washington, and was among the people Washington corresponded with via letters. Garvey wanted to found a school in Jamaica like Tuskegee but Washington died months before Garvey would come to the U.S. to discuss his plans. During and after his 52 years of life, his ideas would influence black nationalism, the black power movement, and Pan-Africanism, the ideas which ultimately inspired Malcolm X in similar ways to his parents. Garvey’s concept of blackness too was inclusive rather than exclusive. After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Kwame Ture (previously known as Stokely Carmichael) would raise the mantle of black power. Ture hailed from Trinidad, so by ADOS/FBA logic, John Lewis’ successor as chair of SNCC was not black.

Garvey was far from the only West Indian to contribute to blackness in America in the early 20th century. Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology The New Negro, a key work heralding the Harlem Renaissance, contained numerous works by black authors from Jamaica (Claude McKay and Wilfrid A. Domingo), British Guiana (Eric Waldron), and Puerto Rico (Arturo Schomburg). Nearly one in four members of Harlem’s black residents were foreign-born in the 1920s. Looking back into the 19th century and the Civil War, we find that the black volunteers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment hailed not only from states in the Union and slave states, but from the Caribbean and Canada as well.

Contrary to the narrow and exclusive concept of blackness that ADOS/FBA advocates, black student groups protested apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, many years before the likes of Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jeff Flake were fighting movements to boycott, divest, and sanction it (and after William F. Buckley, the intellectual father of the modern right, turned from advocating for apartheid domestically to advocating for it overseas). ADOS/FBA’s narrow and exclusive concept of blackness continues to be ignored by law enforcement in this country. Amadou Diallo (killed by plainclothes NYPD officers) was a student from Guinea. Botham Jean (murdered by his neighbor, police officer Amber Guyger) was from St. Lucia. I suspect more research would confirm that black immigrants are at just as much from police violence as black folks with solely American heritage.

Many first-generation immigrants (like my parents) have long since become citizens–and lived in the United States far longer than they ever did in their country of origin. Harry Belafonte was born in New York City, but his parents came from Jamaica. Colin Powell had both Jamaican parents and a New York City birthplace in common Belafonte. Many children of first-generation immigrants (like me) have black American wives and children. The late General Powell’s wife Alma (who passed away late last month) was originally from Alabama. My wife and in-laws hail from Columbus, Ohio, with a lineage that stretches back to Tennessee and Mississippi. Among their relatives is a now-deceased Tuskegee Airman who lived in Kansas.

Regardless of the desires and efforts of those in this country who wish to define blackness as something small and exclusive to those whose heritage is solely the United States, the history and the present of this country makes blackness a little larger. Having a heritage that includes a Caribbean island or a birthplace on the African continent does not make us any less black. Donald J. Trump and his father wouldn’t rent his apartments to us either. The anti-black racism to which too many in the United States still cling, negatively impacts every black person in this country–regardless of their heritage. Xenophobia against immigrants who look like you doesn’t improve anyone’s life.

For the better and professional version of this argument, read Adam Serwer’s piece titled What Trump’s Kamala Harris Smear Reveals.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Posted on by Scott

For they sow the wind and they reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; It yields no grain. Should it yield, strangers would swallow it up.

Hosea 8:7

The first part of this verse came to my mind rather quickly as it became clear that what happened at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania yesterday was a failed assassination attempt. It needs to be said that Trump and his allies have flooded our politics with both rhetorical and real violence for many years. Because memories and attention spans among regular citizens (and unfortunately journalists too) are quite short, it is important to push back against the continuing attempts of those on the political right to cast themselves as victims.

This ABC News piece from May 2020 catalogued no less than 54 criminal cases where those who threatened and/or perpetrated violence against people used Trump as their rationale for it, or used his name in their threats. A post I wrote 2 1/2 years ago drew connections between the January 6th insurrection and our response to the 9/11 attacks, but Trump’s speech on the Ellipse that day certainly incited the violence and deaths that would happen later. On June 16, 2015, Trump said the now-infamous, xenophobic words about who Mexico was sending. While looking for the source material for this, I came across the abstract of an undergraduate honors thesis exploring the impact of Trump’s presidency on Latinx teens which cited those same words. These examples barely even scratch the surface of how far Trump’s particularly malign influence has spread. As Trump’s legal troubles have grown (along with those of January 6th insurrectionists), threats against judges and their families have spiked to exceedingly high levels.

North Carolina lieutenant governor and gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is one of the better and most recent examples of a politician Trump has endorsed who traffics in the same rhetorical violence he does. Robinson reportedly said the following from the pulpit of The Lake Church on June 30:

“Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”

NC Newsline story by Rob Schofield, published July 5, 2024

An even more grim example of the endorsement of violence far too common among candidates and elected officials in the GOP comes from Texas governor Greg Abbott. Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry for the murder of Garrett Foster, a U.S. Air Force veteran participating in a Black Lives Matter protest against police brutality. Despite evidence that Perry planned to murder a protestor, despite a jury finding Perry guilty on the basis of that and other evidence, and despite being sentenced to 25 years for his crime, he served barely a year in prison before receiving a full pardon from the governor. The pardon will restore Perry’s right to own and use firearms. Perry is a US Army veteran who the Army removed from its ranks via a dishonorable discharge after his murder conviction.

In the years after Black Lives Matters protests spread worldwide in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, Republican legislators have sponsored and even successfully enacted into law, measures protecting drivers who injure or kill protestors with their vehicles. Jack Galle is a Louisiana Republican who recently sponsored legislation to limit the liability of drivers if they harm people illegally blocking a road or highway. Kevin Stitt, the GOP governor of Oklahoma, signed legislation in 2021 granting immunity to drivers who unintentionally injure or kill protestors. The same legislation makes penalties against demonstrators who block public roads more severe. Below is a reminder of what these GOP lawmakers are endorsing:

James Fields drivingg through a crowd of counterprotestors of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017.

The picture above was taken by Ryan Kelly, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it. In 2017, a man deliberately drove his Dodge Charger into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA. He murdered Heather Heyer and injured 35 others. These are the protests of which then-President Trump said “But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.” What precipitated the rally and the counterprotests was the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on horseback from a park that formerly bore his name. It was the latest in the series of removals of Confederate monuments and memorials that began in the wake of the 2015 mass shooting at the Charleston, SC church affectionately known as Mother Emanuel by yet another white supremacist.

Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric against Mexicans could certainly have been taken as encouragement by the mass shooter who murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Beyond the recent state-endorsed anti-migrant measures of questionable legality, such as buoys on the Rio Grande with razors and razor wire strung across private property without the permission of landowners, Texas and Arizona have decades-long histories of vigilantes operating at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Vigilantes have taken it upon themselves to impersonate government agents, to hunt, detain, and even kill migrants. Trump’s xenophobia (and that of the political far right more broadly) should also be considered in connection with his championing of birtherism conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. Trump predictably turned to the birtherism playbook again to undermine Nikki Haley’s candidacy.

The ABC News piece I linked earlier makes plain the common threads between the perpetrators of Trump-inspired violence and the victims of it this way:

The perpetrators and suspects identified in the 54 cases are mostly white men–as young as teenagers and as old as 75–while the victims largely represent an array of minority groups–African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and gay men.

ABC News story written by Mike Levine, May 30, 2020

Both in this country’s history and in its present, the venom of violent rhetoric far more often than not infects those who go on to enact real violence against others. Black folks in particular, as well as their allies, have often been at the receiving end of political violence and terrorism. Often that violence has been aided and abetted by law enforcement, from the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, to the Orangeburg Massacre, and many lynchings, bombings, and other acts of terrorism in between. Trump has joined Alabama Governor George C. Wallace in a rare example of a political figure reaping a small measure of the violent rhetoric he has sown for many years.

In the wake of violence turning on someone who stoked such rhetoric for years, we are predictably hearing calls to turn down heated rhetoric from anti-woke publications like The Free Press, from House speaker Mike Johnson (who could be found earlier this spring spreading disinformation re: students protesting the war in Gaza and arguably inciting violence against protestors), and others in the GOP. When it comes to the political right however, we are talking about the same group of people responsible for what you see below:

Democratic elected officials condemning the violence and wishing Trump a full recovery were easy to find, including President Biden, former president Obama, and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Former speaker Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked by a man with a hammer by a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory (which Trump has embraced and amplified for years). It is very easy to find video of Trump telling jokes about Paul Pelosi being assaulted, and his audience laughing along with him.

Others can and will draw false equivalences between political violence from the ideological left and right. I won’t waste time doing that. The political registration of the would-be assassin (Republican) and his $15 financial donation (Democrat) are far less relevant than his easy access to a dangerous weapon (courtesy of his father) and reports that he was bullied as a child. We have seen incels with guns engage in mass shootings before, with women as their primary victims. It should be noted that both the increasingly broad availability guns, and in the places they can be carried, and in laws that reduce or eliminate the liability of those who shoot and kill others if they claim self-defense are largely championed by the GOP.

Not only is the predominant source of the threat of political violence and terrorism abundantly clear, that has been the case for years. The GOP has actively opposed efforts to give the federal government tools to combat domestic terrorism going back to the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. The GOP destroyed the careers of those in the DHS who warned of an increase in right-wing extremism in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. The GOP’s deliberate destruction of the federal government’s ability to provide intelligence and act as a resource for local law enforcement led directly to Charlottesville PD having no federal support with which to counter the white supremacist and neo-Nazi elements that descended on their city in 2017, and to the Oath Keepers being able to grow unchecked into a group whose members would man a stack formation which would ultimately breach the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection.

It should go without saying that political violence is bad for the United States. Even a small country like Jamaica has been beset by political violence for decades. Political violence ought to be condemned, and I add my small voice to the chorus who condemn it today in good faith. But we ought not accept unchallenged such calls to turn down heated rhetoric from the very same people who turned the rhetorical temperature up in the first place. We can and should condemn political violence at the same time we call out hypocrisy.

The Real Problem with Biden’s Bad Debate

Posted on by Scott

The response to President Biden’s subpar debate performance against Donald Trump creates an opportunity to talk about the poor choices black voters in particular face in seemingly every election in the United States. I’m talking about the reaction to the debate rather than the debate itself because I didn’t watch it. Debates are not the same as governing, and what the Biden administration has accomplished legislatively (rather than just through executive orders) is more than enough to merit a second term. The immediate aftermath of the debate was filled with panic, both in my social media feeds and among friends I talk to regularly. The chattering class at the New York Times ran to fill their opinion columns with calls for Biden to resign (calls they very notably did not make when Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records). What I most noticed about every single panicked replacement plan I saw posed in social media is that they all involved stepping over Kamala Harris, the current Vice President of the United States who also happens to be a black woman (as well as southern Asian, on her mother’s side).

When you call out liberals on this, you tend to get responses that look like this one:

This is utter horseshit because if Michelle Obama was running you wouldn’t hear any of this. And you know it, but for some reason the people making your argument want to ignore it.

— Underachiever (@whiskeyblackout.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 12:31 PM

Aside from the obvious virtue signaling, they tell you who has no clue, memory, or care of the way the actual Michelle Obama was treated while she was First Lady. I called it out as wishful thinking at the time, and while the original poster had very little to say in response, another person on Bluesky provided this helpful reminder of how both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were once regarded:

The history of the Democratic Party taking black voters, our issues, and candidates from our communities for granted is not exactly a short one. As such, the idea among many hair-on-fire panickers about Biden’s poor debate performance that they should simply replace Biden (and his vice president) with someone else that can beat Trump is not surprising. One proposed replacement, Pete Buttigieg (currently secretary of transportation), ran for president before and had his candidacy fail in large part because of a lack of connection to and interest in black voters and our issues. I haven’t looked deeply at other prospective replacements regarding their connections to and interest in engaging black voters (in addition to other demographics), but the small percentage of black voters they represent suggests that they haven’t had to care about black voters to win elections. The speed with which the powers-that-be in the party suggested that Biden be cast aside after the bad debate suggests to me a desire to no longer be beholden to black voters (and our interests) in the way Biden quite clearly is because his primary campaign was on life support before South Carolina and Jim Clyburn’s intervention and now he is president.

Seth Moulton might be the best current representatives of the middle of a Democratic Party for whom the existence of black voters is an hindrance to his goal of having the party change its focus by “talk about [Biden’s] bipartisan wins, like the infrastructure bill”. Particularly when the GOP marches in lockstep behind the convicted felon who currently leads them, the insistence of Moulton’s fellow “centrists” on bipartisanship dooms good policy to defeat. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented the child tax credit from being expanded, erasing the gains made in the reduction of child poverty–which helped everyone while it was in place, including black folks.

According to Moulton, his party colleagues have “lost the middle” due to Biden’s push for student-loan debt relief and “identity politics”. When I looked up the demographics of the congressional district Seth Moulton represents, it turns out to be not only one of the whitest congressional districts in the country, but also rather well-off financially on average. It’s quite revealing of a so-called centrist to point to “identity politics” as why the Democrats have supposedly lost the middle in an environment where the Supreme Court has made affirmative action in higher-education illegal and conservative school boards in so-called red states are busily banning books by and about black people. Despite not treating black people as a constituency to be respected, the Seth Moultons of the Democratic Party will be the first ones to turn around and blame us when his party loses elections they think they should win.

This isn’t to suggest that the Biden administration has been an unambiguous plus for the black community either. While he did choose Kamala Harris as his vice president and nominated Ketanji Brown-Jackson to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court, along with passing economic recovery legislation that helped reduce unemployment among black people to the lowest level on record, he hasn’t succeeded in reviving the Voting Rights Act from its nearly-dead state (thanks to judicial overreach from the conservative activists who sit on the Supreme Court). Biden has also been relentless pro-police, despite decreasing rates of violent crime, and despite the disproportionate impact of police violence on black communities. And that’s before you get to the prior years of his political career which included mishandling the hearings which would ultimately result in Clarence Thomas being elevated to the Supreme Court, co-sponsoring a crime bill that paved the way for decades of mass incarceration of black folks, and legislation that stripped student borrowers of bankruptcy protections–which would ultimately be shown to disproportionately impact black borrowers.

The “indifference, unless it’s an election year” approach of national Democrats is obvious enough that the GOP has made it part of their pitch to black voters. But a GOP approach that veers between the cartoonish (such as Trump’s continuing insistence on the appeal of his mugshot to black voters), the insulting (literally anything Vivek Ramaswamy says), the dishonest (Tim Scott pretending that systemic racism doesn’t exist), and voter suppression manages to be even worse. Any messages they might try to put forward about values, or fiscal responsibility, or entrepreneurship are largely undermined by Trump’s corrupt business dealings, nepotism on behalf of his incompetent children, and his unconvincing attempts to even pay lip service to the idea of Christianity mattering even a little bit to him personally. But in the debate where Biden performed poorly, Trump may have managed to hit a new low even for him by warning both during the debate and a recent campaign rally that migrants are taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” from Americans.

Predictably, we took “black jobs” and ran with it for fun on Black Twitter #BlackJobs, to flip Trump’s nasty xenophobia into a way to highlight the variety of different work we do in this country. Sadly, given the disrespect I’ve observed and personally experienced online directed at black immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens or who have parents from abroad, there is definitely a small segment of black Americans Trump will succeed in attracting to his camp with xenophobia. Nor will I rule out the possibility of xenophobia succeeding in attracting a small number of Hispanic Americans. But the press is so focused on Biden’s poor debate performance that they’ve almost entirely missed and failed to even comment on why this particular remark by Trump is revealing and important. Quinta Jurecic touches on why political media’s handling of this might be inadequate:

it feels like the whiteness of big political media spaces right now is having a big effect on how people are thinking about the debate. eg I have seen relatively little discussion of trump's "black jobs" comment, which immediately exploded on black twitter

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 9:45 AM

Adam Serwer’s reply provides necessary context as well:

Both the “black jobs” remark and using palestinian as a slur are hopefully clarifying as to actual Trump’s ideology and worldview, in contrast with the imaginary trump some people have built up in their heads as the memory of his administration has receded

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 12:10 PM

Beyond nobody in the GOP even thinking to push back on the xenophobia of these remarks by Trump, having developed a very strong muscle memory for surrender during his reign of the party, it is necessary to take certain “never Trump” Republicans to task as well. Whether they recognize it or acknowledge it or not, the GOP we see today is one that to a man (and virtually all of them are men) that they helped create. On their watch, the GOP changed into a party that embraced the vision of Pat Buchanan and rejected the “kinder, gentler” conservatism of George W. Bush which despite the many flaws of his presidency (both foreign and domestic) managed to appeal to enough voters to win the popular vote in 2004, including between 40 and 44% of Hispanics. So while they have predictably joined the chorus of panic that would push Biden out in favor of some mythical moderate candidate who would appeal to enough of the electorate to beat Donald Trump, they are operating from the same Seth Moulton perspective that sees black voters and our issues as a inconvenience. They may oppose Donald Trump, but their views of black voters don’t appear to be much more sophisticated than his.

So these are the choices of black voters–a Democratic Party that takes our votes and interests for granted, or a GOP who would rather suppress our votes and divide them than compete for them. Black voters ceased to be the largest minority group in the United States years ago, and both parties appear far more interested in pursuing Hispanic-American and Asian-American votes than black votes.

How to Protest a War Machine: Thoughts on Campus Protests

Posted on by Scott

In recent days, we have seen many university leaders of various titles (president, chancellor, etc) resort to calling the police on their own students and faculty to break up encampments set up by students to protest their schools financial ties to Israel in the wake of the continuing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Various social media sites are filled with video of police in riot gear breaking up these encampments and engaging in violent takedowns of unarmed students and faculty. We’ve even seen still photos of police snipers on the roof of student unions at Indiana University and The Ohio State University. Each and every university leader who has taken this step has failed in their role:

  • By not actually addressing the antisemitism problem, and the real concerns Jewish students have for their physical safety
  • By inviting government interference in the exercise of free speech, and penalizing the exercise of it
  • By adding police willing and able to use deadly force to an already-volatile situation, they increased the danger to everyone on campus

Using government power to quell dissent is not a new mistake. It was used during protests against the war in Vietnam, which ultimately resulted in dead students on the campus of Kent State University.

Responses to the shooting deaths of students by National Guardsmen

This particular clip is notable because of how casually people not just accept, but even approve of what happened to 19 and 20-year-old students. Finding similar sentiments is not difficult, as the same man who called for military force against people protesting George Floyd’s murder by the police in 2020 was joined by Josh Hawley (the cowardly Jan 6th insurrection inciter) in his call to send National Guard troops to Columbia University. These two senators in particular very much want a re-enactment of what happened at Kent State.

Four years after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and 2 years before National Guardsmen would kill those Kent State students), police would open fire on unarmed students of South Carolina State University (an HBCU) protesting the whites-only policy of a bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Three students were killed, 28 wounded in the Orangeburg Massacre. To add insult to injury, the few policemen actually brought to trial for their actions were all acquitted. Cleveland Sellers–one of the shooting victims–was falsely convicted of rioting at the bowling alley and served jail time. Inaccurate press coverage and the shift of attention to the Tet Offensive resulted in this massacre nearly being lost to memory.

In the midst of the pandemic, we saw protests of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police spread around the country and overseas. The police responded with arrests and violence, not just against protestors but against journalists covering the protests. Ali Velshi was shot with a rubber bullet by police on live television during his coverage of the protests.

It is no coincidence that government power is employed once again against people dissenting on behalf of an oppressed or marginalized group. It is easy to notice when actual antisemitic & white supremacist groups like Patriot Front–itself an offshoot of another white supremacist group called Vanguard America–march under police protection in Charleston, West Virginia, or when a neo-Nazi group like Blood Tribe marches in Nashville. The stark differences in when (and against whom) government power is used undermines the idea that concern about antisemitism is the main reason. Accusations of antisemitism leveled against university presidents by congressional Republicans are just a convenient tool in the arsenal of those who want to bend higher education to their viewpoint.

As indicated in the April 25th edition of The Daily podcast, Minouche Shafik (president of Columbia University) only dodged the Elise Stefanik-led hit job that would push Claudine Gay (Harvard) and Liz Magill (University of Pennsylvania) out of leadership because of a previous conflict. Having seen her peers fail in front of Congress, Shafik did not hesitate to offer congressional Republicans everything they demanded–only to be exposed as not having the degree of control she claimed when Columbia students set up their protest encampment. The calls for her resignation she thought she would escape by selling out her faculty and the student body have come nonetheless.

That such calls would be led by a man so unequal to his current role as Speaker of the House (and whose grip on that office perhaps even more tenuous than that of Dr. Shafik’s on hers) speaks volumes about the power of culture war in this country to empower the incompetent to such a degree.

Dr. Shafik’s actions in particular make a few things clear:

  1. Calling the police on her students and faculty is not intended to solve an actual antisemitism problem–but to demonstrate control.
  2. The primary audience for this demonstration of control is congressional Republicans.
  3. The goal of demonstrating control is to preserve her job.

The University of Southern California ended up in a similar place via a different route that might be an even more blatant betrayal of the ideas of free speech and academic freedom. They cancelled the valedictorian’s commencement speech due to alleged security concerns. It seems far more likely that the university bowed to internal and external pressure from groups advocating on behalf of Israel expressing concerns about Asna Tabassum’s social media activity. The USC Shoah Foundation, with whom Tabassum worked with as part of her minor in “resistance to genocide”, has distanced itself from her, via the words of a spokesperson. But her academic advisor, Wolf Gruner, backed her to the hilt in this open letter to university president Carol Folt. The cancellation of Tabassum’s speech has since snowballed into the cancellation of its main stage commencement ceremony. As of today, even the smaller ceremonies individual colleges were set to have may be at risk with two scheduled speakers, C Pam Zhang and Safiya Noble pulling out in protest of the cancellation of the valedictorian’s speech and calling LAPD on campus.

One unexpected bright spot in this season of failing to live up to ideals is the DC Police Department, who rejected the request of George Washington University leaders to clear an on-campus encampment of a small number of protestors. HBCUs have not shown up in any news I’ve seen regarding protests of the war, and beyond calls for peace there are numerous reasons for relative silence from leaders of those institutions. While my wife and I are nearly a decade away from higher education decisions for our twins, how a university’s leadership chose to treat students and faculty in this moment will factor significantly into my decisions regarding where to send them. If the recent past teaches us anything, it is that those who stood up for the marginalized and oppressed in the face of government power stood on the right side of history.

Migrating My WordPress Database from a Lightsail Instance to a Standalone Database

Posted on by Scott

Last year, I moved this blog off of a EC2 instance running a too-old version of PHP to a Lightsail instance. I had to restart that instance in order to retrieve the images associated with all the prior posts so they looked exactly as they did before, but the end result was the same blog at a lower monthly cost. Since then, I installed and configured the WP Offload Media Lite plug-in to push all those images to an S3 bucket. Today I decided to move the WordPress database off the Lightsail instance to a standalone database.

Accomplishing this move required cobbling together instructions from Bitnami and AWS (and filling in any gaps with educated guesses). Here are the steps I took to get everything moved over, in the order I took them.

  1. Export the application database from the Lightsail instance. As of this writing, the Bitnami WordPress image still keeps database credentials in a bitnami_credentials file, so using that with the mysqldump command generated the file I would need to import to the new database (backup.sql).
  2. Download backup.sql to my local machine. Connecting to my Lightsail instance with sftp and my SSH key followed by “get backup.sql” pulled the file down.
  3. Download MySQL Workbench. Looking at these import instructions, I realized I didn’t have it installed.
  4. Create a Lightsail database. On the advice of co-workers who also do this with their side projects, I used us-east-2 as the region to setup in. I specified the database name to match the one in the backup.sql file to make things easier later when it was time to update wp_config.php.
  5. Enable data import mode. By default, data import mode is disabled and public mode is disabled. So I turned on data import mode and was puzzled for a second when I couldn’t connect to the database in order to import from backup.sql.
  6. Enable public mode. With public mode disabled, and my backup.sql file (and tools to import it) not already available in a us-east-2 hosted instance or other resource, I couldn’t load the backup data. Once I enabled public mode, I was able to use MySQL Workbench to connect and upload the data.
  7. Disable public mode.
  8. Update wp_config.php to use new database credentials.

To confirm that the post you’re reading now was written to the new database, I turned on the general query log functionality on the database instance to ensure that the server was writing to it. Having confirmed that, I turned off the general query log.

The additional cost of a standalone Lightsail database is worth it for the week’s worth of database backups you get with zero additional effort. Migrating to a newer WordPress instance in the future should be easier as well, now that both the database and media for the site are off-instance. The next step I need to take is upgrading from the lite version of WP Offload Media to the full one. This should offload all the media so I can safely remove it locally.