Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Declan Walsh @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 20, updated 9:36 pm ET
Rare protests against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi erupted in central Cairo and several smaller Egyptian cities on Friday night as hundreds of young people, responding to online calls for demonstrations against government corruption, chanted “Down with Sisi” and “Leave now.”
The protests, although small, occurred as Mr. el-Sisi flew to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly next week — and they were unusual for taking place at all [....]
My father was raised under Jim Crow. My children could pass for white. Where does that leave me?
By Thomas Chatterton Williams for New York Times Sunday Magazine, Sept. 17; excerpt from the long-form piece:
[....] To speak about a thing clearly you must first be able to name it. To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we’ve endured. The black experience in the South is tantamount to the biblical flood; we’ve stumbled off the ark without an inkling of what things were like before it. As I write this, a tab on my laptop displays a pastel pie chart of my ancestral-geographical makeup. I scrutinize the color-coded slices for meaning. That fuchsia “sub-Saharan” segment is markedly less than half — 40.1 percent of the pie — though that is where my received social identity comes from. The marine-blue “European” section, on the other hand, which I always understood existed but nonetheless thought of as existing somehow outside me, makes up 59.2 percent of the circle. This lopsided ratio surprised me, though it should not have. Millions of “white” Americans have sufficient African ancestry — often a result of some wily predecessor’s successfully having slipped the yoke — to theoretically have been enslaved in the Southern states that enforced racial-purity laws most fanatically. But that is not the case in my mother’s family. My aunt came back 99.9 percent European. Presuming she and my mother share all ancestors, that would put my father around 80 percent sub-Saharan African — right on average, according to some estimates, for the (often forcibly) mixed, Afro-European population of Americans we refer to as “black.”
I am well aware that my situation is not yet, and may not ever be, a terribly common one, and that I have experienced a specific set of breaks and good fortune outside my own control that have contributed powerfully to my own sense of autonomy in the world. Growing up, I understood myself to be black, and yet I was also exposed to whiteness through my mother and most (though certainly not all) members of her family in nonantagonistic, positively nurturing ways. Today, my children, who are roughly a fifth West African descended, are so blond-haired and fair-skinned that they can blend in with the locals when we travel in Sweden. All this and more has forced me to wrestle with the particulars of my family’s story — its painful past as well as its unwritten future — and reflect on what these specific contradictions might imply about the broader color categories we are all forced into. My family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called “black” toward what is assumed to be “white” has led me to yearn for ways of seeing and relating to one another that operate somewhere between the poles of tribal identitarianism and Panglossian utopianism. People will always look different from one another in ways we can’t control. What we can control is what we make of those differences.
It has become commonplace to acknowledge the following point, but it bears repeating anyway: The idea of racial classification, as we understand it now, stretches back only to Enlightenment Europe [....]
note on author: This article is adapted from “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race,” to be published next month by W.W. Norton & Company. Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer for the magazine and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. His last feature was about the director Jacques Audiard.
By Eugene Daniels @ Politico.com, Sept. 20, with video
Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is sticking by his calls for forgiveness for Shane Gillis, the 31-year-old comedian who was hired and quickly fired by “Saturday Night Live” over past racist statements.
“I actually sat there and watched some of Shane's comedy to figure out whether I thought that he was truly malignant or evil or just a comedian who'd made some terrible and distasteful jokes,” Yang, who is Taiwenese-American, said in an interview this week.
Gillis has called it a “hassle” to have to speak with a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, mocked Asian accents, and used a racial slur to describe Asians, including calling out Yang as a “Jew c***k.” But Yang, who jumped to Gillis’ defense when the comments came to light, said he concluded Gillis “was not an evil person and did not intend to somehow advocate for racist ideas or ideologies.” [....]
Risky? For sure. Triggering? Possibly. A must-see? Audiences are about to decide.
By Michael Paulson @ NYTimes.com/theater, Fall Preview, Sept. 11
[...] Set on the grounds of a Virginia plantation, its racially charged sex talk and simulated dominance and submission are potentially so triggering that a pre-Broadway production supplied post-show lobby counselors. An internet-based backlash, seemingly fueled by people who had not seen the play, was threatening enough to require stepped-up security, and online vitriol directed at the Broadway production prompted the show’s social media team to disable Facebook and Instagram comments [....]
By Chris Graham @ Telegraph.co.uk, Sept. 19
Justin Trudeau has apologised over a photograph showing him wearing brownface make-up at a private school party.
The Canadian prime minister, who began his re-election campaign a week ago, is seen in the 2001 photo attending an “Arabian Nights” themed costume gala at the West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver. Mr Trudeau, who was a 29-year-old teacher at the time, is shown wearing a turban and robes with his face, neck and hands darkened. The photograph appeared in the school’s 2000-2001 yearbook, The View, said Time magazine, which first published the image. "I dressed up in an Aladdin costume and put make-up on," Mr Trudeau said after the picture emerged.
"I can say I made a mistake when I was younger and I wish I hadn't. I wish I had known better then, but I didn't and I'm deeply sorry for it." "Now I recognise it was something racist to do," he said. "It was a dumb thing to do. I'm disappointed in myself." [....]
Mr Trudeau also admitted to wearing dark makeup singing Harry Belafonte's 1959 hit Day O (Banana Boat Song) at a separate high school talent contest [....]
The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call [....]
“If I were just 80 years old, if I was 15 years younger, I don’t believe I could undertake the duties I experienced when I was president,” Carter, the longest-lived U.S. leader, said during his annual report at the Carter Center in Atlanta. “You had to be very flexible with your mind. You have to be able to go from one subject to another and concentrate on each one adequately and then put them together in a comprehensive way.”
Trump leads among small donors. Democrats now get plenty of support from the wealthy, with predictable consequences.
Op-ed by Thomas B. Edsall @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 18
Money is the mother’s milk of politics, as the old saying goes, and the slow motion realignment of our two major political parties has changed who raises more money from the rich and who raises more from small donors.
A pair of major developments give us a hint about how future trends will develop on the partisan battleground.
First: Heading into the 2020 election, President Trump is on track to far surpass President Barack Obama’s record in collecting small donor contributions — those under $200 — lending weight to his claim of populist legitimacy.
Second: Democratic candidates and their party committees are making inroads in gathering contributions from the wealthiest of the wealthy, the Forbes 400, a once solid Republican constituency. Democrats are also pulling ahead in contributions from highly educated professionals — doctors, lawyers, tech executives, software engineers, architects, scientists, teachers and so on [....]
In close elections, Republicans are favored to win even when they lose the popular vote.
By Ian Millhiser @ Vox.com, Sept. 17
Clearer than ever that the "if we would just GOTV" mantra is hogwash as far as the presidency (and the Senate, for that matter) is concerned. To win, it's a necessity to convince some crucial swings to vote for you. It's built-in:
[....] To reach their conclusions, the research team ran hundreds of thousands of simulated elections under various election models. The paper as a whole studies three periods in American history: the Antebellum period from 1836 to 1852, the Reconstruction period from 1872 to 1888, and the modern period from 1964 to 2016 (although many of their modern samples only look at the period from 1988 to 2016). These periods were selected to exclude eras when one party typically won in a landslide.
Overall, they conclude that “the high probability of inversion at narrow vote margins is an across-history property of the Electoral College system.” The Electoral College has, at various times, given an advantage to Democrats, Republicans, and the now-defunct Whig Party. Now it gives a clear advantage to Republicans.
The Electoral College skews elections by giving a structural advantage to small states. Each state receives a number of electoral votes equal to the number of United States House of Representatives members from that state, plus two. These two additional votes effectively triple the voting power of the smallest states, while having only a negligible impact on the voting power of large states.
Additionally, modern-day Democrats are disadvantaged because they “have tended to win large states by large margins and lose them by small margins.” [....]
By Alberto Luperon @ LawandCrime.com, Sept. 17
There are toxic work environments, and then there are work environments where your boss is literally trying to get you murdered. Granville County Sheriff Brindell Wilkins was indicted Monday after he allegedly tried to get a former deputy killed, according to The News & Observer. He faces two counts of felony obstruction of justice.
The alleged motive? The target possessed a tape of the sheriff using “racially offensive language.” [....]