Joel Mathis

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson There's a question that pops up now and again. About whether, if you lived in the era of slavery, or as a German during the Third Reich, if you would be the kind of person to go against the grain-- to stand for human dignity and freedom. We like to think we'd be the exception. But most of us would be the rule. I think I shared this book's overall viewpoint, but I learned things new to me about the history of racism and slavery in America, some ugly and breath-taking details about the immense evils done to black people in this country. You can know it's bad and still get sucker-punched with a fresh realization of just how bad it is. And it is distressing to know how difficult, how dangerous it was for people of goodwill to step outside that system. I worry there are evils that I am now complicit with that I don't even recognize because I am immersed in them. All I can try to do is evaluate the day-to-day det

 I've been thinking about this, from Roger Marshall, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kansas: "I don't see race" is a line that has become a punch line, but it occurred to me that for Kansans, it is literally true: They think they don't see race because s o often they don't actually see Black people : 13.4 percent of the U.S. population is Black, according to the U.S. Census, but just 6.1 percent of the Kansas population is. In Great Bend, where Marshall lives, the number is less than 2 percent. I went to a central Kansas high school where (reputedly) one Black person had ever graduated in the entire history, and that was before my era. For many rural or rural-ish Kansans who live outside the cities of Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, it is pretty easy to go about your life -- work, education, church, everything -- and only occasionally, if ever, encounter a Black person.* That means your primary source of understanding comes from media sources in

 In his biography of Frederick Douglass, David Blight relays the following story about racist conspiracymongering as the Civil War came to an end. What's the saying? History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

Rod Dreher* has a lot of anonymous correspondents. But I think this is one super-misguided part of his recent blog post. My correspondent — let’s call him Henry — argued with the CRT person over power and identity within corporations. Henry has decades of experience with corporate life. His view is that men and women who have reached the top in most corporations have been thoroughly assimilated into corporate culture — and that defines who they are and what they believe. His interlocutor disagreed, and said blacks in corporations retain their black identity and just engage in lots of “code switching.” They tell white people what the white people want to hear. They tell the truth to their black friends. Henry said that this woman’s view, when understood through communications theory, means that her actual argument is this: that black people lie to white people all the time. Conclusion: the white racists have been right all along. Black people cannot be trusted when they talk to whites.

Here is my column from this morning about how Donald Trump is criticizing Critical Race Theory and "The 1619 Project": It is unlikely Trump has read or personally tried to understand much about CRT or "The 1619 Project," or possesses the capacity to engage with either meaningfully. But he probably understands one important thing. What both those efforts have in common is an effort to understand and address the experience of being Black in America — where slavery and Jim Crow have been the law of the land for all but a few decades — and to do so from a Black perspective. That is what Trump is against. After nearly four years of this guy's presidency, it feels insufficient to say "Trump is a racist" over and over again. I mean: It is one of his defining characteristics. But the people who are going to listen to you say it already agree with you. Also, it's easy. But it also seems worth pointing out how that actually works from time to time. I'm

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 al

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.

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

Three thoughts about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”: • This is a relentlessly political book — how could it not be? — and yet attempts to respond to the book from within the typical left-right Democratic-Republican construct of punditry seem to be insufficient to me — they come to the book, as with other political debates, without curiosity, for the sake of trying to win an argument. Let’s try again. This is an American black man telling us how he perceives living as a black man in America today: It contains no policy prescriptions, no endorsement of party or candidate, no 10-point campaign for better living. We haven’t found the right way to talk about this book yet.

Though the narrative is rarely made this explicit, I believe there's a line of thinking that goes something like this: Racism, as a force in American life, for all intents and purposes ended sometime in 1968. The civil rights bills had been passed, Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, and the work of consolidating the gains of integration was finally consolidated with President Obama's election in 2008. People who want to make a big deal of white-on-black racism are generally "race hustlers" who want to prey on our divisions for their own gain. So while it's easy to write off Rick Perry's "Niggerhead" moment as a faint echo of a long-ago era—and echo that probably would only be heard in the South, really—I suspect there's a lesson in there for the rest of us. And it comes from this New York Times' article: One woman said local residents had called the area by that name since long before Mr. Perry and his father had leased the property.

There's been a lot of talk about the apparent racism and historical ignorance of Virgina Gov. Bob McDonnell's proclamation of "Confederate History Month." But racism aside, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a good point that we don't think about very often. Speaking of Republicans who approve of McDonnell's actions, he says : If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. Well, yeah. Defenders of the Confederate flag and other efforts to honor the Old South always say they're not interested in slavery or racism but heritage . Let's leave aside how the racism and slavery are inextricably bound up in that heritage; we'll ignore them entirely. (Although Republicans who chafe under the burden of racism accusations might stop and consider, for a moment, how actions like McDonnell's look to African Americans.) Even putting its best foot forward, the reason the Confederacy existed was to tear asun