The unnecessary death of Dijon Kizzee

 NYT report on the death of Dijon Kizzee, who was shot to death by sheriff's deputies in LA:

On Monday, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials said deputies tried to stop a Black man who was riding a bike in South Los Angeles. They said he was stopped for a code violation related to the bike, but wouldn’t elaborate on what the alleged violation was.

The sheriff's office said Kizzee fled and then "made a motion" toward a dropped gun. I think we've learned by now that such accounts should be viewed as provisional, at best, and possibly false. But even if completely true, I'm trying to imagine a "code violation related to the bike" that was so worth enforcing that this outcome was worth it.

We need laws for good order and civilization. But the libertarian side of me has come to believe that maybe we go overboard -- and that the result, sometimes, is a death sentence for selling loose cigarettes, or having a bike code violation. At the very least, it criminalizes people who are just trying to get through the day. And, disproportionately, those people are Black. I'm not saying anything new, here, I realize, but really: If a bike code violation was the reason Dijon Kizzee is dead, then he should be alive today. 

"Asking people to be hyper-conscious of race is likely to aggravate, not fix, racial injustice."

At Persuasion, Matt Lutz argues that "asking people to be hyper-conscious of race is likely to aggravate, not fix, racial injustice." 

Refusing to ascribe importance to something morally neutral is a virtue. And because colorblindness is a refusal to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, it remains the best remedy for old-fashioned racism that we have. 

But: 

The world is a much more peaceful place today than it was as recently as a century ago—largely because of attempts to emphasize our common humanity. If we focus on what unites us, our altruistic instincts take over and we become kinder and more trusting towards each other.

But our tendency to favor the ingroup can never be completely eradicated.

Perhaps the answer, then, isn't to embrace some unachievable notion of colorblindness, but A) to refuse to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, B) recognize that many people are discriminated against on the basis of their skin color, then C) act accordingly. Recognizing that people are and have been discriminated against and that this fundamentally transforms their relationship to ingroups and outgroups and groups of all sorts doesn't have to be "hyper-conscious." It just has to be conscious.

Would you still love America if America didn't love you back?

A good question by Peter Weber. I had a conservative friend who disliked the poet Langston Hughes -- who did some of his growing up in the town where I live -- because he wasn't very patriotic. Her attitude stunned me as a failure of empathy and moral imagination. Black people have been patriotic throughout America's history, even if America hasn't always reciprocated the love. But why on earth would you expect a Black man who was living in Jim Crow America to be patriotic?

Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote in 2003, about Hughes' testimony before Congress during the McCarthy era:

In Lawrence, Hughes said, he attended a “nickelodeon” movie theater every afternoon.

One day, Hughes said, “the woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said something, in effect, ‘Colored not admitted.’

“My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not,” he told the senators. “I could never see a film in Lawrence again, and I lived there until I was 12 years old.”

Not for nothing, one of the chief interrogators of Hughes that day was Roy Cohn -- Donald Trump's future consigliere.  

For so much of our history, Black Americans were treated as property. Then they were treated as second-class citizens, if that. Even now, the way Black people are policed, and the way they suffer disproportionately from society's ills, suggests America hasn't fully embraced them. Expecting people to love when they haven't been loved isn't laudable. It's abusive.

Is the media making us think we're more racist than we are?

In Tablet, Zach Goldberg documents that major media outlets are using terms "racist" more often. Some initial thoughts about his article.

He writes:

One possible way of explaining these statistics, is that America experienced an explosion of racism over the past decade and white liberals are uniquely reflective of that change. But another possibility, perhaps more likely, is that ascendant progressive notions about race reflected in a steady drumbeat of reporting and editorializing on the subject from leading national media outlets, encouraged white liberals to label a larger number of behaviors and people as racist. In other words, while the world may have stayed more or less the same, elite liberal media and its readership—especially its white liberal readership—underwent a profound change.

Let me offer a third possibility: That there is probably not that much more racism in America than there was 10 years ago, but that racists -- who empowered President Trump and were also empowered by him -- are more vocal and prominent in American life than they were a decade ago: The societal consensus that required racists to be careful and closeted has largely, but not entirely, disappeared. That has led to growing pressure from and within mainstream media outlets to call a thing a thing -- euphemisms like "racially charged" are now widely seen as weak tea, and there's a growing sense that the media doesn't have to be mindreaders to name a racist act a racist act.

Goldberg writes:

In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017. ... Did white Democrats simply come to know more racists in these years? It’s possible, but if so that would indicate that the media’s increased reporting on racism actually correlated to a marked increase in racists being detected by white Democrats.

In other words, Goldberg's case is that the perception of racism in American life is pretty much a media-driven phenomenon -- manufactured by "woke" elites -- rather than events- or information-driven. But the  rise in the use of the term racism, you'll see in the chart above, starts around 2011. That's when Donald Trump was going around TV promoting birtherism. In 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed. In 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement got started, with events in Ferguson helping spark a wave of protests -- and coverage. In 2015, Tanehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" came out, giving many readers a sense of what America looks like through African-American eyes. And in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The period of increased "racism" coverage also coincides pretty much with the rise of viral videos depicting police brutality against black people. A lot of actual racism that was invsible to white liberals became more visible during this time. Alongside that, so did efforts to explain and understand the contours of that issue. "Did white Democrats simply come to know more racists in these years?" Goldberg asks. Unlikely, but it seems possible that white Democrats saw how other whites -- including folks they knew -- responded to events and concluded their circle of acquaintances probably contained more racism then they had previously realized. 

It's also worth noting that Goldberg focuses his examination of the issue through the eyes of white liberals. In 2010, though, most Black Americans -- according to Pew Research -- already thought racism was a "big problem." The figure has only grown in recent years, but a lot of people for whom racism would actually be a big problem already thought it was a problem.

There may be more "wokeness" among media elites. But Goldberg barely entertains the possibility that events have helped create the phenomenon he describes. Instead, he suggests that the real problem is that newspapers started using academic jargon surrounding the issues of race a lot more. "Intentionally or not, by introducing and then constantly repeating a set of key words and concepts, publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that “color” is the defining attribute of other human beings," he writes. This is similar to the "if we don't test, we won't have cases" logic that President Trump uses with COVID-19. I won't say that elite media efforts to describe the racial landscape of the United States haven't had an effect on that landscape. But the anger over the deaths of people like Breonna Taylor, Phlando Castille, Tamir Rice, George Floyd and all the rest didn't come about because people were reading the New York Times.

'I am not a racist.' Jimmy Fallon - and me

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it.

Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw:

“I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained.

I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person.

And honestly, who cares?

Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasured. Rightfully and understandably nobody cared if I thought of myself as a good person. They only cared what I had done. 

It's possible that if you search, you might find that younger version of me online somewhere telling people I'm not a racist. I remember making a conscious attempt not to defend myself in such a fashion, but the the temptation not to be a bad person -- and we see racism, rightly, as an indictment of the character of its practitioners -- that it can overwhelm the desire to simply apologize, to take your punishment, and to realize that in some people's minds you are forever tainted. 

Shame is not fun, but it is also much less pain than a lot of black Americans have to live with, dealing with oppressive and even deadly policing in their communities. So the best thing to do, in my mind, is to offer an unqualified apology, then put your head down and do the work of being better, and making it better. And do it quietly, instead of performatively -- because that is simply another way of letting everybody know that, no really, you're a good person.

Other people can't see our hearts. They can only see our deeds. So we white folks need to stop boasting about the content of our character and instead live it in everything we do. "I am not racist," isn't an apology. It's self-affirmation.

Things that trouble me: Loving your enemies

Just saw this posted by a prominent African American attorney in Philadelphia:




And I get it. There's a history in this country of "Christians" using their religion to subdue black people. I'm reminded of this:

On display now at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is a special exhibit centered on a rare Bible from the 1800s that was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves. 

What's notable about this Bible is not just its rarity, but its content, or rather the lack of content. It excludes any portion of text that might inspire rebellion or liberation. 

"About 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing [and] 50 percent of the New Testament is missing," Schmidt says. "Put in another way, there are 1,189 chapters in a standard protestant Bible. This Bible contains only 232."

A religion that contorts itself to maintain the mastery of its adherents is bad religion. It is propaganda parading around in the garments of faith. But I'm going to resist the temptation to say the people who do such things aren't "real Christians," because let's face it: Christianity is whatever its adherents actually do.

On the other hand: Loving your enemies is really fucking hard to do. Almost nobody is inclined to try, and very few make the attempt.

And I'm convinced that the proportion of people claiming to be Christian who really endeavor to love their enemies is exceedingly small.

I'm maybe not the person to lecture on this. My own faith is ... shaky. I can best be described as agnostic-with-one-foot-still-in-the-faith. But I believe Christianity's ideal is a challenge for adherents, not because of its sexual ethic, but because it requires us to love the most unlovable of people, in the most unlovable of situations.

That is an extraordinary demand. That so few of us follow it make the meme above seem pretty reasonable. But I hate that it is so.

This is a pretty lousy argument against reparations

I'm not sure how an effective reparations program would work, but I do know that this is probably about the worst argument against it:

  The room grew raucous at times, with spectators hissing at Republican witnesses and Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the subcommittee’s senior Republican, when he spoke against the measure. In a comment that rippled throughout the hearing, Mr. Johnson suggested that great black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington thought African-Americans should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. 

“Those great leaders encouraged people to take responsibility for their own lives, because that gives every human being a greater sense of meaning and satisfaction,” he said, adding that the bill “risks communicating the opposite message.”

 It's the old "bootstraps for thee" argument, and it presumes that whites have achieved their greater wealth by dint of hard work and grit, so why can't African Americans do the same? The problem is that a lot of wealth that whites hold they hold by dint of A) government action and B) being the "right" race.

Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrated the falsity of the bootstraps argument in his "Case for Reparations" that kicked off the current debate, a few years ago in The Atlantic.

When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” 

 The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” 

 Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.” 

 That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle.

So the bootstraps argument is just so much hooey. African Americans haven't been given access to the same types of programs that allowed whites to get ahead. Generations of white Americans didn't get a better mortgages than their black neighbor across town because they had "taken responsibility for their own life." They had the advantage of policies that reflected this country's longstanding white supremacy. That's one starting point for any honest discussion of reparations.

What ever happened to those racist white folks from those old photos?

See here.

For people of my generation, there was a narrative - not entirely spoken - that racism ended somewhere around 1968. That narrative, in turn, provided a foundation to the idea that attempts to correct for the effects of hundreds of years of racism were themselves racist — and, ironically, was allowed to suggest that problems that had their roots in racism were actually the results of the lesserness of other "cultures." The "end of racism" helped racism survive in dressed-up, yuppified form.

One ironic blessing of the Trump Era: Lots of folks don't feel the need to dress it up anymore. It's as out there as it's been in my lifetime.

But Voter ID Laws Aren't Racist.

Vox:

A study for the Black Youth Project, which analyzed 2012 voting data for people ages 18 to 29, found 72.9 percent of young black voters and 60.8 percent of young Hispanic voters were asked for IDs to vote, compared with 50.8 percent of young white voters.

FYI

Why does Barack Obama think he's black?

An article at Carolina Journal suggests Barack Obama could've offered more racial healing to the U.S. if he'd identified as bi-racial instead of black:

Much of the Left imposes racial conformity — especially on those it considers its own. You need solid attachment to a demographic group, and not consider yourself different, an individual or, perhaps even worse, part of America’s old-fashioned melting pot. To lead that group there are expectations about what you should think, the language you should use, and how you should characterize others. It’s hardly the stuff of national unity.

Oh how I hate this piece. For a very simple reason.

It decries "the left's" tendency to force people to attach themselves to an ethnic group, rather than America,without mentioning or grappling with the historic reality and cultural (nevermind legal) power of the "one-drop rule."

Obama's decision to present himself as anything but a black man probably wasn't, for much and I'd say most of his life, a decision that really was his to make. Many Americans would've seen him as "black" no matter how complicated the reality of his genetics and upbringing.

Is this still salient? Yes:

The centuries-old “one-drop rule” assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry. 

So say Harvard University psychologists, who’ve found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. The research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

People forget how recent the worst of our history was. Obama was born before the Civil Rights Act was passed. He was born before the Voting Rights Act was passed. He was born well before Loving v. Virginia was decided. And as the Harvard piece mentions, it was as recently as 1985 "when a Louisiana court ruled that a woman with a black great-great-great-great-grandmother could not identify herself as “white” on her passport."

And, not to throw anybody under the bus: I was told growing up — by people who encouraged me to see Martin Luther King Jr. as a hero — that marrying a black woman would be wrong. Because to make biracial babies would be a disservice to those children.

The past is never dead. It's not even the past.

Our societal effort to celebrate biracial children — to acknowledge the fullness of their histories instead of stamping them with the "minority" label — is both welcome and a relatively new thing. It still gets pushback. I don't know how widespread it really is.

Given that, and given all the history, it's not really remarkable that Obama thinks of himself as black. It's also true that he's never, ever hidden his white ancestry — in fact, has spoken of it prominently and proudly but also sometimes too honestly for white critics to forgive. 

So Obama thinks of himself as black? Sure. Most Americans would've thought of him that way, too, even if he'd self-conciously tried to identify otherwise. To pin any blame for America's racial problems on a decision that was compelled by America's racial culture is ... silly.
 

Liberals: We're overthinking this. Hillary didn't lose. This is what it should mean.

Interesting:

Nate Cohn of the New York Times estimates that when every vote is tallied, some 63.4 million Americans will have voted for Clinton and 61.2 million for Trump. That means Clinton will have turned out more supporters than any presidential candidate in history except for Obama in 2008 and 2012. And as David Wasserman of Cook Political Report notes, the total vote count—including third party votes—has already crossed 127 million, and will “easily beat” the 129 million total from 2012. The idea that voters stayed home in 2016 because they hated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is a myth.

We already know the Electoral College can produce undemocratic results, but what we don't know is why — aside from how it serves entrenched interests — it benefits the American people to have their preference for national executive overturned because of archaic rules designed, in part, to protect the institution of slavery. 

A form of choosing the national leader that — as has happened in this election — gives greater weight to the preferences of whites over the preferences of the overall body of voters might plausibly be said to be White Supremacy. When that form was created by men trying to ensure slavery wasn't overturned, the argument grows stronger yet. Throw in the number of black votes that might've gone missing due to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the conclusion becomes more difficult yet to avoid.

I know, I know, this is a republic, not a democracy. But this isn't like the Senate, where the structure can be said to "cool" fiery, short-term passions. There's simply no good reason for producing a result most voters said they didn't want. That we've entered an era where the system repeatedly produces that outcome doesn't mean that Democrats have the wrong message for America. It means they have the wrong message for, I guess, Florida. The Florida panhandle, if you want to get specific. And that's not the same thing.

It also means the system is delegitimizing itself.

Perhaps instead of battling each other over whether liberals need to reexamine their principles, what we need to really do is work hard and persistently for fair elections that really represent the preferences of most voters. Such a system won't always produce wins for Democrats. But it would probably produce wins for Democrats when Democrats win. That's not too much to ask.

What we can learn from former racist Derek Black

How to completely destroy Nebraska football in four easy steps.*

1. Be a nearly all-white state.

2. Have a team that relies on African American players to be competitive.

3. Have angry white officials threaten to kick those players off the team for protesting racial injustice. Compound that with "fans" sending lynch threats to those players.

4. Watch the recruiting bonanza come in!

* Yeah, I know. Lots of football today. It's what caught my eye.

The tragedy of George W. Bush

This picture:

George W. Bush was, to my mind, the biggest failure as president in postwar history — more than Jimmy Carter, more than Richard Nixon. His choices were uniformly wrong. Budget surplus? Let's fritter it away. Terror warning? Ignored. Terror attack? Respond with attack on Iraq. Devastating hurricane? Heckuva job, Brownie. And, finally, he left us with the Great Recession.

But now, we see, that list doesn't even encompass the worst of his legacy.

For all his faults, you see, Bush doesn't strike me as a bad man. And more than any major Republican before him — at least in the post-Civil Rights Era — Bush seemed to want to treat African Americans as part of America: No Child Left Behind, despite its problems, as aimed at improving educational outcomes for blacks. His RNC chairman acknowledged and refuted the GOP's long-running "Southern strategy." And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, he helped get funding for the national museum of African-American history past reluctant Republicans. (In this he was aided by Sam Brownback. Yeah, I'm still struggling with that, too.)

And so I wonder:

If Bush's presidency hadn't been so thoroughly discredited by nearly everything else that happened in Bush's presidency — if he hadn't failed so badly that even Republicans turned their back on him — would we have today's Trumpist GOP, with white nationalism and, yes, racism resonating so strongly with the base of a major political party?

I do believe the surge in white nationalism is, in part, a backlash to America's first black president. But even Barack Obama became inevitable only because of Bush's failures — chiefly, Iraq — and the complicity of his opponents (Hillary, John McCain) in those failures.

So I'm left  pondering: If George W. Bush been a success, might other Republicans view his example on race as part of the template to follow?

This Woman Worked Hard to Overcome Her Racism. So Why Are We Ridiculing Her?

I'm a bit disturbed by this post at Vox, about a woman whose daughter married a black man — causing the woman to recognize, then work to overcome her racism. The article she then wrote has become the target of ridicule, enough that she's had it removed from the website where it appeared.

Vox:

You can see why this post, which the author almost certainly thought was a message about tolerance, was read differently by people who were irked by the idea that accepting a person of a different race would be a major feat requiring point-by-point instructions and a mandate from God. 

I shudder to think of how she would have treated this person if she hadn’t found a biblical angle that mandated seeing him as human, or if she embraced a different interpretation of scripture.

I mean: This is just liberal snootiness. And I say this as a snooty liberal!

I don't like racism. I hate it. I'm sorry that this woman's racism was so ingrained that it created issues within and for her family. But you know what? I'm really glad she recognized it and took steps to overcome it. For some people, that will require step-by-step instructions and religious motivation.And if she was motivated by her belief in God that racism was wrong ... well, we should probably tell Martin Luther King Jr. he was doing it all wrong.

Don't get me wrong. If I'm black, I'm probably irritated that it takes so much effort to treat me as human.

But still: What's our plan, liberals, to work against racism? To humiliate racists into surrender? Or to actually, genuinely change hearts? What's better for society? What's better for the individuals involved?

Vox is also careful to ridicule this woman for caring that her other, racist family members be treated with respect.

Calling Uncle Fred a bigot because he doesn’t want your daughter in an interracial marriage dehumanizes him and doesn’t help your daughter either. Lovingly bear with others’ fears, concerns, and objections while firmly supporting your daughter and son-in-law. Don’t cut naysayers off if they aren’t undermining the marriage. Pray for them. 

The writer seems to be quite concerned with the potential dehumanization of Uncle Fred and the experience of her daughter, but the impact of the decision on the “African American with dreads” isn’t given any thought at all. It’s a hint that she may still struggle to see him as fully equal to a white person.

Since the original piece was taken down, I can't say if the woman really appears to be more concerned about her racist family than her new son-in-law, and "lovingly bear" could encompass all sorts of responses. Let me suggest that it's possible to be concerned about both, though. And while I hate racism with all my heart and soul, let me say this: Racists are people too. 

That doesn't mean we don't confront racism. And it doesn't mean there aren't times to get angry about it. But if we really want to reduce racism in the world — I don't believe, unfortunately, that it will ever go away — we might try winning of hearts and minds. And we might stop ridiculing the people who are brave enough to acknowledge their own wrongdoing, people who have worked hard to overcome their own racism. Let's make it easy for people to do the right thing.

Don't Tread on Me (Or: Is the Obama Administration Really Trying to Ban the Gadsden Flag?) (No.)

The latest non-Trump scandal du jour among conservatives is the reported effort by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to consider whether the display of a Gadsden Flag in the workplace amounts to racial harassment. It was first reported by Eugene Volokh here. Here's National Review's take on the topic:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has ruled that displaying the Gadsden Flag in the workplace — the yellow flag with the words Don’t Tread on Me below a coiled rattlesnake — may be punishable racial harassment.  

In case you’re wondering: That’s it. That’s the extent of the offense. There were no racist statements. No slurs. No threatening looks. A dude wore a cap.  

Ah, but: Complainant maintains that the Gadsden Flag is a “historical indicator of white resentment against blacks stemming largely from the Tea Party.” 

As Hillary Clinton would say: Sigh. There is no evidence that the Tea Party as a movement was motivated by racial animus (even some of the “racist” episodes that critics cited never happened). But there is a strong vein of leftwing historical revisionism that says it was so, presumably because that is easier to accept than the possibility that right-leaning voters circa 2009 had legitimate, defensible discontents. And here’s yet another example. So it turns out the complainant’s logic is just the typical, indefensible sort: The Tea Party is racist. The Tea Party uses the Gadsden Flag as a symbol. Therefore, the Gadsden Flag is racist 

And, naturally, the EEOC bought it. 

Naturally, there's both more and less to this story than meets the eye.

Take a look at the prime document, excerpted heavily in Volokh's post, and the story becomes a bit more clear.

• The EEOC acknowledges that the Gadsden Flag isn't necessarily a racist symbol: "After a thorough review of the record, it is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context. Moreover, it is clear that the flag and its slogan have been used to express various non-racial sentiments, such as when it is used in the modern Tea Party political movement, guns rights activism, patriotic displays, and by the military."

• But there have been times when it has been used in the service of racism: "For example, in June 2014, assailants with connections to white supremacist groups draped the bodies of two murdered police officers with the Gadsden flag during their Las Vegas, Nevada shooting spree. ... Additionally, in 2014, African-American New Haven firefighters complained about the presence of the Gadsden flag in the workplace on the basis that the symbol was racially insensitive."

• So what the EEOC wants to do is ... investigate a little bit more to determine whether the Gadsden Flag's use in this case and context was used as racial harassment: "In light of the ambiguity in the current meaning of this symbol, we find that Complainant’s claim must be investigated to determine the specific context in which C1 displayed the symbol in the workplace. Instead, we are precluding a procedural dismissal that would deprive us of evidence that would illuminate the meaning conveyed by C1’s display of the symbol."

Somehow all of this has become, in conservative circles, "the Obama Administration wants to ban the Gadsden Flag." But what's really happening is: The EEOC is trying to determine if there's evidence that racial harassment occurred in a workplace. That's the EEOC's job. And if the EEOC does find that such harassment has occurred, it seems obvious from its statement that it won't be issuing a blanket ban on the Gadsden Flag. Instead, it'll be punishing a specific employer for allowing the flag to be used to harass.

Here's the EEOC's explainer of what happened in this case. One interesting fact that emerges — never mentioned by Volokh or the many conservative websites that spread the fear — is that the employer in this case is the U.S. Post Office. A public employer, not a private one.

Now, many conservatives may think the EEOC has no right to be adjudicating such workplace disputes, and that it is an affront to freedom by doing so. That's a different argument. The claim the "Obama Administration" is banning Gadsden? Doesn't hold up to even the mildest scrutiny.

Are Violent Radicals the "Real" Black Lives Matter Movement?

Bag O' Books: James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"

I came to this book after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me", which a number of reviews suggested followed in Baldwin's footsteps. It's true there are similarities — both relatively short, yet incisive, essays on what it's like to live as a black man in America — but there are differences: Baldwin's book is written when (in 1963) it seems like white supremacy in America might be undone; perhaps as a result, it's a more hopeful book than what Coates delivered. Which is an odd thing to say about a book that remains bracing, angry, and uncompromising after all these years.

A few quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussions. These are all taken from the second part of the book, ""Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind":

Steve Hayward's Wrong About Diversity and "Trump 101"

My friend Steve Hayward is put out with The Chronicle of Higher Education for not including non-white-guy voices in its recent “Trump 101” syllabus:

Where to begin. First, let’s note that Trump has caught on precisely because he speaks to “marginalized groups” that the fashionable, race-obsessed academic left (and much of the GOP establishment—ahem) disdains. So the identity politics set gets a failing grade here for low self-awareness. Second, it is embarrassing but necessary to point out that when inquiring about any subject, any serious list will want to include only the best work that bears on the subject. When Ta Nahesi Coates writes something sensible about Trump, someone will include it on a recommended reading list.

So let’s talk about the “identity politics” involved here.

John Hinderaker Misses White (Electoral) Supremacy, But Thinks It's Dems Who Stir Racial Resentment

This post from John Hinderaker is a doozy, oozing wistfulness for a time when white folks decided how the country was run:

One thing is worth pointing out, however: even in this outlier poll, Trump holds a ten-point lead among white voters, 50%-40% (down from 57%-33% in May!). It is remarkable that even at his low ebb, Trump wins by a near landslide margin among white voters, a majority of the electorate. Not many years ago, that would have assured him of victory.

This is why Democrats stir up racial resentment, he says:

This is why Democrats are so anxious to “fundamentally transform” the United States through mass immigration from Third World countries. Only by building up the minority population do they have a chance to stay competitive. But that still wouldn’t be enough, even if the Democrats got most of the votes cast by minorities, if minorities voted in anything like a normal pattern. In order to win, the Democrats need to roll up ridiculous margins, like the 90%-8% lead that Clinton holds with blacks in the ABC/WaPo poll.

Hinderaker's got a couple of presumptions going here:

• That minority groups are incapable of determining their own best interests and easily suckered by Democrats who are playing them. This is, er, patronizing, let's say. 

• It ignores the role Republicans have played in their own marginalization — they're on the verge of nominating a presidential candidate who regularly demonizes persons of minority races and religions, and who has a personal history of racial nastiness. White people are the only voting group he can appeal to, given that rhetoric. What's more his positions merely echo the nasty stuff that's been said by conservative popularizers like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and the Fox News crew for years. Physician, heal thy own goshdarn self.

Now: Yes, Democrats have their own problems with race. I won't pretend otherwise. But Hinderaker's play-it-both ways game — pining for white (electoral) supremacy and blaming Democrats for exploiting his preferences — doesn't bear scrutiny.