A Real Memorial to Jim Crow

In tiny Russellville, Kentucky, where 110 years ago four African-American men were lynched by a cheering mob.  Today, a gut-wrenching exhibit ensures they are not forgotten.

From Wes Swietek at the Bowling Green Daily News:

"It was as easy to raise a (lynch) mob in Logan County in those days as to drop a hat ... ."

That was the observation of Bowling Green lawyer John Rhodes in 1944. Rhodes was looking back three decades on the power of mob violence he saw firsthand as one of the lawyers in a 1908 shooting case in Russellville involving an African-American named Rufus Browder.

Extraordinary steps were taken to protect Browder from lynch mobs — including having a jailer hide him overnight in a cemetery — but four other African-American men were not so fortunate.

 They were hanged one by one from a cedar tree on a small rise in Russellville on the morning of Aug. 1, 1908, in a lynching case that would go on to have national repercussions, but remain largely forgotten for a century. An effort is now underway, however, to erect a historic marker for the quadruple murder and other racial killings in the county.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article217361810.html#storylink=cpy

 SNIP

Logan County is also unusual in that it houses a powerful memorial to the legacy of lynchings.
. . .
The West Kentucky African American Heritage Center in Russellville stretches across several buildings that chronicle the experiences of African-Americans in the region.

Perhaps the most powerful exhibit fills a small room. At the center is the work of folk artist Willie Rascoe — a small tree with nooses dangling from the branches. The surrounding exhibits tell the story of numerous Logan County lynchings, with an emphasis on the quadruple 1908 lynching.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article217361810.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article217361810.html#storylink=cpy

Because One Day is Not Enough to Celebrate Crushing Treason in Defense of Slavery

Today is Emancipation Day, which celebrates Lincoln emancipating the slaves of the District of Columbia in 1862.

But it's also my excuse to post - a week late - this wonderful thing from Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Today (April 9) is the greatest day in American history. Robert E. Lee surrendered, effectively ending Treason in Defense of Slavery. The best way to celebrate is to read, or re-read, the single greatest document in American history: Jourdon Anderson’s infamous kiss-off letter to his ex-master.

Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.

President Obama Defeats ISIS; Orange Loser Takes Credit

Yes, of course we know he's lying.  The problem is that we're not his audience.  His mouth-breathing voters are.  And all they hear is what he says and how his Faux News cheerleaders repeat it.

This is how bad history gets written in stone.

Kevin Drum:

ISIS is hardly Barack Obama’s finest moment. He was late to understand what was happening and slow to do anything about it. But in the end he did do something about it, and he did the right thing: he kept the US footprint light; he avoided rules of engagement that would inflame the very people we were trying to liberate; and he understood that the only route to victory lay in a slow but steady campaign. It wasn’t sexy, but it worked.

In a few weeks or months, Donald Trump will announce that we’ve won the war against ISIS. Will he give Obama any recognition for this? Of course not. So that means the rest of us will have to do it for him.

Next Day:

Trump did nothing. The plan to take both Mosul and Raqqa was initiated under Obama, and Trump famously refused to approve a new plan for months because the military kept telling him that Obama’s approach was working. So he put them off and put them off until he finally approved a plan in August that was mostly the same as the plan we already had. And now he’s claiming that this new plan turned things around in eight weeks.

I know we don’t expect anything else from Trump. But he can always be even worse than you think, can’t he? Hell, he didn’t even give the military any credit, let alone Obama. What a jackass.

Stop Talking Respectfully About Traitors

Steve M. writes that confederates are winning the public opinion war.

Racists want the monuments to stay up, of course, but for others, the "tearing down history" argument seems to settle the question, and opponents can't seem to refute it effectively. We can say that we don't put up monuments to the 9/11 hijackers, or to Hitler and Hirohito's soldiers, or even to British troops in the Revolutionary War, and no one says that we're "denying history." But that argument doesn't resonate.

SNIP

The backlash is strong. It's not going away. And Americans in the middle simply don't understand the reasons for opposition. 

But at the Smithsonian, Christopher Wilson writes that we're letting the traitors win by talking about them with respect:

Those artifacts are not the only way we legitimize and honor the deadly and racist 19th-century rebellion against the United States. Much of the language used in reference to the Civil War glorifies the rebel cause.

The language we turn to in describing the war, from speaking of compromise and plantations, to characterizing the struggle as the North versus the South, or referring to Robert E. Lee as a General, can lend legitimacy to the violent, hateful and treasonous southern rebellion that tore the nation apart from 1861 to 1865; and from which we still have not recovered. Why do we often describe the struggle as between two equal entities? Why have we shown acceptance of the military rank given by an illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity? In recent years, historians in academia and in the public sphere have been considering these issues.

SNIP

Landis goes on to suggest that we call plantations what they really were—slave labor camps; and drop the use of the term, “the Union.” A common usage in the 19th century to be sure, but now one we only use “the Union” in reference to the Civil War and on the day of the State of the Union address. A better way to speak of the nation during the war, he argues, is to use its name, the United States.

In the same way, we could change the way we refer to secessionist states. When we talk of the Union versus the Confederacy, or especially when we present the strife as the North versus the South, we set up a parallel dichotomy in which the United States is cast as equal to the Confederate States of America. But was the Confederacy really a nation and should we refer to it as such?

When historian Steven Hahn participated in the 2015 History Film Forum at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, he noted that using these customary terms to tell the story of the Civil War —Hahn suggests we use “War of the Rebellion”—lends legitimacy to the Confederacy.

 

“If you think about it,” Hahn said, “nobody in the world recognized the Confederacy. The question is can you be a state if no one says you are a state?”

SNIP

In his writings, Lincoln referred to the group he was fighting as the “so-called Confederacy” and Jefferson Davis never as president, only as the “insurgent leader.”

 

And if the so-called Confederacy wasn’t a country, but rather what political scientists would call a proto-state, because not a single foreign government in the entire world recognized it as a nation-state, then could Jefferson Davis legitimately be a president? Could Robert E. Lee be a General?

The highest rank Lee achieved in the United States Army was colonel, so given his role as general in service to a failed revolution by a group of rebels, how should we now refer to him?

It would be just as accurate to refer to Lee, who led an armed group against national sovereignty, as an insurgent or a warlord, if not a terrorist. Imagine how different it would be for a school-age child to learn about the War of the Rebellion if we altered the language we use.

When news reports about the debate over monuments say “Today the City Council met to consider whether to remove a statue commemorating General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army,” what if they instead were written in this way: “Today the City Council debated removing a statue of slaveholder and former American army colonel Robert E. Lee, who took up arms in the rebellion against the United States by the so-called Confederacy?”

Douglass knew, day-by-day, after the shooting stopped, a history war was playing out. It is clearly not over yet. Words, though they do not stand as marble and bronze memorials in parks and in front of buildings or fly on flagpoles, are perhaps even more powerful and pernicious. The monuments we've built with language may, in fact, be even more difficult to tear down.

They are Traitors in Defense of Slavery (thank you, Erik Loomis), and so are their apologists and defenders today. 

Call them out and name them accurately: Traitors in Defense of Slavery.

Bevin Lies About Treason Statues; Gets Schooled by Girl

If you lived your life by one maxim, you could do worse than: Do I want Robyn Pennacchia of Wonkette to rip me a new one on this?

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said he “absolutely” disagrees with removing Confederate symbols and monuments from government property, calling it the “sanitization of history.”

 

The actual sanitization, of course, is the statues themselves.  They were erected to erase the real history of Treason in Defense of Slavery, turn Slavery Promoters into heroes and reverse Emancipation with Jim Crow.

Bevin - and the Nazi-living apologists who pretend the Civil War Participation Tropies are historic landmarks - has it exactly backwards, as Wonkette explains.

There is a very big difference between the way people see Auschwitz and the way many White Southerners, at least, see Confederate Generals posed triumphantly on horses. Auschwitz serves as a reminder of those who suffered, while the Confederate statues glorify those who fought for continued suffering. You will notice that there are no triumphant looking statues of Hitler in Germany.

There is, however, a far more accurate analogy to be made here. Imagine if, in Germany, 50 years after WWII, groups of Holocaust deniers did put up statues of Adolph Hitler looking triumphant? And then got mad that people wanted to tear them down, because how dare they not remember history?

Well, that is exactly what happened in the United States after the Civil War. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is revisionist history just like Holocaust Denial is. It is also about as accurate.
 
Germany, as you may know, bans people from promoting Holocaust Denialism. After the Civil War, America did the exact opposite. It allowed the Lost Cause bullshit to proliferate, believing that it would help the nation to heal. Lost Causers were allowed to pretend that not only was the war about more than just slavery (it was not), that t was noble in some way, but also that slavery wasn’t really all that bad anyway. This was taught in schools and even promoted in Hollywood, with movies like Gone With The Wind and The Birth of A Nation. My mother grew up living in Florida for half the year because of her father’s job, and she was taught in school that it was not the Civil War, but The War of Northern Aggression. That the real villains in this story were the carpetbaggers. If slavery was ever mentioned, she says she does not remember it.

To this day, many textbooks in the South teach that slavery was but a “side issue” to the Civil War, rather than the reason it was fought in the first place.
A fake history was created to make the South feel better about losing, to help us heal as a nation. That was a bad idea. It did not help, it hurt. Rather than dealing, as a nation, with the devastating horror of slavery and the evil that produced it, we allowed the South to whitewash the whole thing and still think of themselves and their generals as heroes. Who want to believe they were good, because they don’t want to confront a “heritage” that was wrong. We did the wrong thing.

Because now we have people who have been taught, and who truly believe in, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, freaking out because they can’t understand why anyone thinks they shouldn’t celebrate their glorious heritage. All of this should have been dealt with over 100 years ago, and it wasn’t, because America would rather ignore pain than deal with it. The Germans dealt with their atrocities responsibly, and we simply refused to. Because it was easier this way, because it preserved everyone’s idea that America is and was always basically good. Because if we lost that, then who would ever fight our wars for us?

These statues are not about remembering history, they are about misremembering history. And this war is being fought between those who want to remember history correctly, and those who want to protect their made-up history, because actually confronting the real history feels bad.

Auschwitz is ugly. It’s harrowing. It makes you sick to look at it. It makes you say “NEVER AGAIN.” Keeping it up is necessary for that reason. It is not there to provide comfort to Nazis. These statues, however, are meant to provide comfort to those who wish to celebrate the South and fondly misremember what it stood for. And they don’t deserve that.

Out of Irish Mouths

Via PZ Myers:

In other words, Cic Maith Sa Tóin Atá De Dlíth Air.

American Greatness and Who Tried to Kill It

From Charlie Pierce:

I wonder how that possibly could have happened in this country. How did we abandon our dreams of greatness that we demanded of our self-governing Republic. We didn't dig the Panama Canal. Our government did, after it stole the land from Colombia. We, as individuals, didn't tame the West. Our government did, with railroads and homesteading and the U.S. Cavalry. We didn't ourselves build the Hoover Dam. Our government did. We didn't create our own private space exploration. Our government did. 

How could the country have come to such a sorry pass? Perhaps a clue can be found in a speech given from the U.S. Capitol by a newly elected president on a cold, clear January morning in 1981.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. 

Sad.

Atheism

Via Pharyngula:

A Free Man Responds

If you knew absolutely nothing about the slavery of African Americans, the letter pasted at the end of this column would tell you everything you need to know.

Loomis, of course:

And, not surprisingly, the now-freed slaves joyously rubbed their freedom in their masters’ faces when they could. The brilliant letter from ex-slave Jourdon Anderson to his ex-master Col. P.H. Anderson when the latter wrote to ask him to come back to work on the plantation after the war is the best way to conclude:

Dayton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.

Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

Why Next Year's Young Voters Will Vote Even Stupider

Conservatives and repugs aren't destroying public education for the hell of it.  They're destroying it specifically to create citizens so stupid they will always vote repug.

Welcome back to the days of "War of Northern Aggression," "happy slaves," "redskin savages," "women's place is in the home," "protesters are traitors," "homos are perverts" and the whole Murka Rulz hit parade.

 

Think Progress: 

After backlash from conservatives that AP guidelines released last year by the College Board were unpatriotic, the new AP standards, which are effective immediately, will use the phrase “American exceptionalism,” and includes the founding fathers, according to Newsweek. The College Board said it “previously assumed it wasn’t something it needed to spell out as part of what would be taught in an American history course.”

Some of the main criticisms of the guidelines, conservatives voiced, were less emphasis on the founding fathers and more emphasis on slavery. The guidelines also included earlier American history that included violence against Native Americans and mentioned the growing influence of social conservatives. There were also complaints that World War II was not emphasized enough, but military victories will be given more attention in the new standards. Mentions of slavery will be “roughly the same” as previous standards, according to Newsweek.

SNIP

The AP standards are just one piece of the debate over how to accurately cover American history, especially if you intend to describe the actual experiences of people other than white, landowning men. Texas also recently changed its state academic guidelines, which means its new textbooks won’t mention the Klu Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws. Texas is a very influential textbook market, and publishers tend to look to Texas when deciding content for the textbooks they publish.

Buy copies of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me quick before they are all burned.

Denying Slavery Is the Problem

James W. Loewn has been de-bunking the myths of American History since his terrific book Lies My Teacher Told Me.

In the Washington Post, he turned his talents to explaining how maintaining monuments to traitors in defense of slavery hurts the nation.

The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation that they spread, which has manifested in both our history books and our public monuments.

Take Kentucky. Kentucky’s legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found “no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility … in Kentucky.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.

SNIP

The politics behind the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina(1:37)
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced she supports removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds. Here's what you need to know about the history of the flag in the state and what needs to happen to have it removed. 

In addition to winning the battle for public monuments, neo-Confederates also managed to rename the war, calling it “the War Between the States.” Nevermind that while it was going on, no one called it that. Even “Jeopardy!” accepts it.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded for states’ rights. When each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states’ rights. In its “Declaration Of The Causes Which Impel The State Of Texas To Secede From The Federal Union,” for example, the secession convention of Texas listed the states that had offended them: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa. These states had in fact exercised states’ rights by passing laws that interfered with the federal government’s attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Some also no longer let slaveowners “transit” through their states with their slaves. “States’ rights” were what Texas was seceding against. Texas also made clear what it was seceding for: white supremacy.

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

Despite such statements, during and after the Nadir, neo-Confederates put up monuments that flatly lied about the Confederate cause. For example, South Carolina’s monument at Gettysburg, dedicated in 1965, claims to explain why the state seceded: “Abiding faith in the sacredness of states rights provided their creed here.” This tells us nothing about 1863, when abiding opposition to states’ rights as claimed by free states provided South Carolinians’ creed. In 1965, however, its leaders did support states’ rights. Indeed, they were desperately trying to keep the federal government from enforcing school desegregation and civil rights. The one constant was that the leaders of South Carolina in 1860 and 1965 were acting on behalf of white supremacy.

SNIP

Teaching or implying that the Confederate states seceded for states’ rights is not accurate history. It is white, Confederate-apologist history. It bends — even breaks — the facts of what happened. Like other U.S. history textbooks, “Journey” needs to be de-Confederatized. So does the history test we give to immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens. Item 74 asks, “Name one problem that led to the Civil War.” It then gives three acceptable answers: “slavery, economic reasons, and states’ rights.” If by “economic reasons” it means issues about tariffs and taxes, which most people infer, then two of its three “correct answers” are wrong! No other question on this 100-item test has more than one “right” answer. The reason is not because the history is unclear, but because neo-Confederates still wielded considerable influence in our culture and our Congress until quite recently, when a mass of politicians rushed to declare the Confederate flag unsuitable for display on government grounds.

SNIP

With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about, and our army honoring its generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until last week. We can literally see the impact Confederate symbols and thinking had on Dylann Roof, but other examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a neo-Confederate T-shirt showing Abraham Lincoln and the words, “Sic semper tyrannis!” When white students in Appleton, Wis., a recovering sundown town that for decades had been “all white” on purpose, had issues with Mexican American students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags, which they already had at home, at the ready. Across the country, removing slavery from its central role in prompting the Civil War marginalizes African Americans and makes us all stupid.

De-Confederatizing the United States won’t end white supremacy, but it will be a momentous step in that direction.

AynRandy, White Supremacist

Remember back in 2010, when nobody thought he had a chance against Jack Conway for Senate, and the Tribble-Toupeed One told Rachel Maddow live on the teevee that restaurant owners should be able to refuse to let black people into their restaurants because FREEDUMBS?

He hasn't changed.

Greg Grandin at The Nation:

Senator Paul is a history buff. And as an ophthalmologist, he’s interested in the history of science. Except that anyone who actually knows the history of the smallpox vaccine knows that it was anything but voluntary, at least for the many African and African-American slaves the vaccine was experimented on (including by Thomas Jefferson) and whose blood streams served as the best and cheapest way to transport the vaccine across the Americas. 

I have no idea whether Paul knows this history, despite being its big and great fan. But it’s not just for rhetorical effect that conservatives and libertarians like Paul and Sarah Palin “invoke slavery for all sorts of things that,” as The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart points out, “don’t come anywhere close to matching the evil it represented.”

The “right to health care,” Paul once said, is “basically saying you believe in slavery.” That sounds like a ludicrous statement, except that there’s a reason he, along with other likeminded individualists, can’t stop talking about slavery.

The ideal of freedom they champion was born in chattel slavery, by the need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another’s absolute slavishness. And try as they might, this patrimony is inescapable: individual supremacy is white supremacy.

SNIP

That feedback loop, which has its origins in the history of American slavery, has two basic beats: Individual rights (to property, guns, speech, etc.) are freedom. Social rights (to education, medicine, and a decent, dignified life) are slavery.

Happy Just Another Monday

Because enough with this shit.

Why Conservatives Hate History

The facts destroy their mythology, that's why.

Sean McElwee at Salon:

American’s right wing, you see, is terrified of history because it is always sentimentalizing it. Many of its arguments rely on a feeling of nostalgia for “good old days,” that appeals almost exclusively to aging whites. That means that a more accurate history, one that considers groups that are traditionally marginalized — women, people of color, Native Americans, immigrants and the poor — don’t necessarily sit that well. Their stories, the stories of the downtrodden, crush the false narrative that many conservatives like to imagine — that of a idyllic past marred by the New Deal, women’s liberation and civil rights.

In Denver, a school board recently tried to limit the historical curriculum to only events that would, “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights.” Needless to say, much of American history — the Great Depression, the Trail of Tears and the internment of Japanese-Americans — would, under those parameters, need to obfuscated. The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has issued a statement calling the new Advanced Placement U.S. History standards ”radically revisionist.” But conservatives may want to take the plank out of their own eye before examining the speck in their neighbors. Here are the most important distortions of history the right has promoted recently.

SNIP

There was a time when conservatism was a philosophy concerned primarily with wrestling with and understanding tradition and the limits of human reason and ability. However, these days conservatism is reactionary — it has been imbued with racism, conspiratorial thinking and a hyper-individualistic capitalism. Instead of questioning the limits of reason, it has jettisoned it. In its place remains free market dogma, bad Biblical interpretation and a sentimentalized past. In place of reason and argument, most conservatives rely on fantasy and reminiscence. Allowing conservatives to redefine the past will be incredibly harmful.

Exceptionally Exploitative

As the survivor of a southern public school system whose idea of teaching the Civil War War of Northern Aggression was repeated showings of "Gone With the Wind," a movie I have ever since hated with the heat of a thousand supernovas, let me just say that anyone who thinks this country ended slavery "voluntarily" is not only wrong, not only not fit to sit on a public school board, but should be stripped of her rights to vote, drive, and speak to actual human beings.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

In the recent battles over the new AP U.S. History standards, standards that center nothing more than the standard narrative of most American historians in 2014, one of the right-wing critiques is that they don’t celebrate American exceptionalism, while instead instilling in our young people that they should question authority (the horror!). Among the many problems with these assertions is that the idea of American exceptionalism in service of whatever right-wing agenda is currently popular means forgetting the many ways that exceptionalism has operated in the past. Kevin Levin:

Part of the criticism of the revised AP US History curriculum revolves around the assumption that it undercuts and even contradicts a narrative of America’s Exceptionalism. I don’t believe it does and I base such a conclusion on the fact that I’ve read through it. More accurately, it doesn’t say anything one way or the other. I suspect that the vast majority of critics have yet to read it through.

What I’ve never understood, however, is if some people expect me to teach American history through such a lens, whose understanding of the concept should I teach?

Baptist’s slaveowners fully embraced capitalism. Despite the Panic of 1837 slavery resulted in enormous profits throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and helped to push the nation west on its course of “Manifest Destiny.” Americans celebrated this expansion and the wealth created as a sign of its exceptionalism. I suspect that this is one of the reasons why there is such a need to argue that American slavery was not profitable and that it was on the decline by the eve of the Civil War. Better to see it as positioned in sharp opposition from the kind of post-Civil War capitalist surge than as the engine that pushed it forward. We should ignore the fact that it was John Calhoun’s theory of “Due Process” that was later embraced by pro-big-business legal thinkers during the Industrial Revolution.

No, no, stop with that version of American exceptionalism. We just need to teach that America is awesome. Enough said.

The Proper Response to Freakazoid Extortion

Because that's what it is: extortion.  When they say "do it our way or else," that's extortion.

And if you cave and agree, or even if you try to be reasonable, they will double down and demand human sacrifices, too.

So the only proper response is "Fuck you, we're doing it the OPPOSITE of your way, times a thousand."

Steve Benen:

It came as something of a surprise, though, to learn the RNC has also taken an interest in high-school students’ advanced-placement exams. Caitlin MacNeal reported yesterday:

The Republican National Committee on Friday denounced the College Board’s new framework for the AP U.S. History exam for its “consistently negative view of American history.”

 

The committee adopted a resolution during its summer meeting in Chicago condemning the exam’s new framework, according to Education Week.

 

In the resolution, the RNC slams the College Board’s “radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.”

By way of an example, the RNC believes the AP framework portrays early U.S. colonists as “oppressors and exploiters while ignoring the dreamers and innovators who built our country.”

In other words, the Republican National Committee wants these advanced-placement classes to put a more positive, more deliberately patriotic spin on history.

Repugs and conservatards don't give a flying fuck about the AP History exam.  They care about bashing liberals and making them defy facts and science to kow-tow to jingoistic stupidity.

So instead of having a bunch of history professors trying to rationally explain that the AP history textbook actually does reflect the non-existent Greatness of Murka, this is what the AP should tell the RNC:

"You don't like the current test?  Fine, the new test will be based completely and exclusively on Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."  (Also known as "How to Force Socialism Down Your Children's Throats.") Now kindly fuck off and die in a fire. Slowly. And painfully."

Christian Nation

ummagumma.co:

Fucking Over Veterans is All-American

ICYMI

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Income Inequality is Policy, Not Destiny

I would say, rather, that deliberate policies of income inequality that excluded non-white non-protestant non-men from access to wealth made building this country easy for white men and lethal for everybody else.

Mychal Denzel Smith at The Nation:

The problem is that I always hear the issue of inequality situated around what has happened in the last thirty or forty years, which ignores the fact this is a nation built on inequality. The wealth gap didn’t spring up from policy gone awry—it is the policy. This country was founded on the idea of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few white men. That that persists today isn’t a flaw in the design. Everything is working as the founders intended.

The source of that inequality has changed, as the past thirty/forty years have been dominated by the financial class and rampant executive corruption, but the American economy has always required inequality to function. Even times of great prosperity, where the wealth gap decreased, inequality was necessary. The post-WWII period is notable for the lowest levels of inequality in the modern era, but the drivers of that prosperity (the GI Bill, construction of the highway system, low-interest home loans) deliberately left black people out, and the moments of robust public investment that have benefited racial minorities and women have always been followed by a resurgence of concern over government spending and “state’s rights.”

Our job, then, if we’re serious about forming a society of true equality, is to interrogate and uproot the ideologies that created the original imbalance. In other words, we can’t deal with income/wealth inequality without also reckoning with white supremacy and patriarchy.

SNIP

Perhaps this is an opportunity to revisit A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget for All Americans.” But any conversation about inequality absent one of white supremacy (and patriarchy) isn’t one worth engaging. 

The Curse of the Pioneer Society

Via Divine Irony:

The bias against science is part of being a pioneer society. You somehow feel the city life is decadent. American history is full of fables of the noble virtuous farmer and the vicious city slicker. The city slicker is an automatic villain. Unfortunately, such stereotypes can do damage. A noble ignoramus is not necessarily what the country needs.

Isaac Asimov (via azspot)

Explains a lot.