This one moved me too. At least from high school on, I’ve known this is a deeply personal issue for black Americans. Damn personal. Obviously, I can’t possibly know all the whys and wherefores from their perspective, but I’ve always known it matters.

Am proud of Virginia for doing this.

Marwa Eltaib stands in front of the Robert E Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia. The Crown Act was passed unanimously and was signed into law in 2019. Photograph: Dee Dwyer/The Guardian

‘Wear your crown, because change is coming’: Virginia joins states banning hair discrimination

(Lotsa cool pics online via the article)

Excerpt:

Virginia’s Crown Act goes into effect on Wednesday – and other southern states could follow

Kenya Evelyn in Richmond and photographs by Dee Dwyer Jonts
@LiveFromKenya

Wed 1 Jul 2020 07.46 EDT
Last modified on Thu 2 Jul 2020 03.05 EDT

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Carmen Davis went natural in 2004, motivated by her mother to do the “big chop”, a phrase commonly used to describe cutting off chemically straightened Black hair in favor of naturally textured kinks, coils or curls.
Cut and run: the underground hairdressers of lockdown
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Standing in front of the recently defaced statue of the Confederate leader Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, she recalled the backlash against her decision.

“My roommate in college stopped talking me,” she said, noting how even in college at the time, being natural was rare. “She told me it was embarrassing to be seen with me and that I’d regret it.”

Today, Davis is a natural hairstylist, helping women in the Richmond area transition from chemical processing. Her former roommate eventually became one of her many clients.

Business is growing for Davis, but she admits change is slow in the “conservative, southern” state where, in many places, wearing natural hair could mean being denied a job or socially ostracized.

“Society overall frowns upon Black hair, but here it can still be uncommon for people to embrace it because of judgment or just the every day exhaustion of having to explain your Blackness,” she said.

Now they won’t have to. Virginia became the fourth US state, and the first in the south, to pass legislation banning hair discrimination based on racial identifiers including hair texture and hair type, as well as “protective hairstyles such as braids, [locs] and twists”. The law, known as the Crown Act, goes into effect on Wednesday.

For those who can’t get to the NYT:

By Caroline Randall Williams

Ms. Williams is a poet.

June 26, 2020

NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
Instagram Live
Caroline Randall Williams will be doing a reading of this essay and answering questions on Instagram (@nytopinion) on Tuesday, June 30 at 7 p.m. Eastern.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

I change my mind about this, all the time. I changed it several times today, in fact. The differences between the two major parties. Are they significant? Are they meaningful, meaningless, relevant, irrelevant?

It depends. For me, it’s all relative and context is everything.

Struggling for useful metaphors, it’s kinda like comparisons seen up close versus those seen from distances . . . and those distances, between valleys, mountains, and further skyward. Up close, on most issues, if we just compare the two parties to each other, just them, to each other, as opposed to a certain set of standards for what should be the case . . . . as opposed to comparing them to higher ideals, the representation of all citizens and our best interests . . . adhering to those higher standards for helping us achieve the best quality of life (and society) possible, protecting the environment, embracing, extending, enhancing democracy and inclusion, etc. etc. . . . if we compare the two major parties not to each other but to “higher things,” they fail utterly, year after year.

But there’s a difference in the failure and the failings, and the differences can matter, on the ground. It can even be a life and death sort of difference, as in the case of Covid-19 responses, Climate Change, Civil/Workers/Women’s/LGBT rights, etc. etc. Following or fighting the science. Fighting or following authoritarianism to its logical ends. If we allow for the fact that they both fall so incredibly short of meeting the Higher Things . . . Yeah, there are differences between them that matter.

Have had a rough day so I’ll leave it there. Will try to elaborate on the above tomorrow, give examples and so on. It got “personal” today and yesterday as well. Not sure how it will all shake out over time, but it got personal for me.

Hope all is well, everyone.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.

zn wrote:

I am going to ask a personal request, if I can. I typed up an answer to Waterfield’s question about what is left/progressive and the ways the 2 mainstream parties are the same. I wonder if I could get people interested in adding to that discussion. I am always wondering about how to put that and what it includes. Other perspectives would help, it’s always enlightening to hear well-informed people muse about this. It’s here: http://theramshuddle.com/topic/are-dems-and-reps-really-the-same/

Will respond there later today. Good idea for a thread.

WV,

I think your “agnostic” stance is a good one. It’s smart to avoid instant judgments. Hesitation, skepticism, being circumspect, waiting for more evidence, etc. That’s just being smart.

Probably why you’ve been so effective at helping your clients for so long.

Thing is, unless I read them wrong, when it comes to Russia and Trump, especially, the Mate, Greenwald, Blumenthal folks aren’t agnostic at all. They just start out assuming it’s all nonsense and try to build their case from there. And they never admit to their errors afterward.

Time and time again the Trump administration, his cronies, and subsequent investigations all end up proving he/they actually did the things our MSM reported. Boiled down, it ends up being the case that 95-99% of what the MSM reported about Trump and company was true. If anything, they tend to undercount the atrocities.

How do we end up knowing this, in most cases? Trump himself, or his cronies, finally end up admitting this or that happened . . . of course, after going through various defensive/offensive stages, from angry denials, to bullying, to lashing out at the media and his political opponents (which tend to never stop); to saying, Yeah, some of that happened, but not the other stuff; to, Yeah, it all happened, but it wasn’t illegal; to, Yeah, it happened but it doesn’t mean anything cuz everyone does it!!

In the case of the Russian Bounties, Trump’s own spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany said this week that Trump was briefed on the subject, but that there wasn’t a consensus among the Intel community. That’s supposedly why they haven’t acted yet.

That already makes Mate and Blumenthal wrong on this issue.

If Russia is in the news, especially if the news is about Russia and Trump, it can’t be true, apparently — if we’re to believe Mate and company. It must be yet another (unsubstantiated) plot of the Dems, the Intel community — which Trump controls — and media all over the globe. It can never, evah be factual, and the only motives we should ever question are Democrats, their donors and the non-Trump-besotted media. We shouldn’t ever question the motives of far-right Putin or the far-right Russian state. They’re angels!! They’re always perfectly innocent!! They would never think of doing anything like this!!

;>)

Me? I think it makes far more sense to keep the skepticism meter on high for everyone, including Mate, Blumenthal and company. I don’t trust them automatically, either. I’m skeptical of mainstream and Internet niche sources . . . etc. etc.

Gotta corroborate, verify, use our own common sense, see the patterns, etc. etc. IMO, the (decade’s long) pattern of Trump’s connections with, and exploitation by, Putin, are too numerous and consistent to dismiss.

Related:

AMERICA’S RACIAL RECKONING Trump promotes video of a supporter saying ‘white power’ The video of a pro-Trump golf cart parade in the Villages, a retirement community in central Florida, includes counterprotesters calling the president a bigot.

And this, from America’s most dangerous AG in generations:

Home Share 2.7k National Security Barr forms task force to counter ‘anti-government extremists’ Attorney General William P. Barr speaks during a meeting at the White House on June 15. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) By Matt Zapotosky

June 26, 2020 at 5:15 p.m. EDT Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday directed the formation of a task force that will be dedicated to countering “anti-government extremists,” escalating federal law enforcement’s response to the violence that has sometimes marked nationwide protests against police brutality and racism, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post. In the memo, Barr wrote that amid peaceful demonstrations, anti-government extremists had “engaged in indefensible acts of violence designed to undermine public order.”

Obviously, when Barr talks about “extremists,” he’s referring to we leftists, not right-wingers who actually commit nearly 99% of the violence. Egged on by Trump and right-wing media, he’s referring primarily to “antifa,” which Trump and company could decide is pretty much any dissenters they don’t like.

We’re in political hell, folks, along with pandemical hell.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by zn.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.

Wasn’t really sure the best place to post this to not start a new thread.

This makes me ask, for the billionth time, what will it take for people to finally, absolutely condemn, reject and rid themselves of this evil, sadistic, little sociopath?

Workers removed thousands of social distancing stickers before Trump’s Tulsa rally, according to video and a person familiar with the set-up

Excerpt:

By
Joshua Partlow and
Josh Dawsey
June 27, 2020 at 3:05 p.m. EDT

In the hours before his rally in Tulsa, President Trump’s campaign directed the removal of thousands of “Do Not Sit Here, Please!” stickers from seats in the arena that were intended to establish social distance between rallygoers, according to video and photos obtained by The Washington Post and a person familiar with the event.

The removal contradicted instructions from the management of the BOK Center, the 19,000-seat arena in downtown Tulsa where Trump held his rally on June 20. At the time, coronavirus cases were rising sharply in Tulsa County, and Trump faced intense criticism for convening a large crowd for an indoor political rally, his first such event since the start of the pandemic.

As part of its safety plan, arena management had purchased 12,000 do-not-sit stickers for Trump’s rally, intended to keep people apart by leaving open seats between attendees. On the day of the rally, event staff had already affixed them on nearly every other seat in the arena when Trump’s campaign told event management to stop and then began removing the stickers, hours before the president’s arrival, according to a person familiar with the event who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

zn wrote:

There have been non-capitalist nations which also had racism.

I see them as intertwining issues in this historical moment, not as logically inevitably determined a certain way.

It’s complicated, but we differ a bit on this. Not absolutely, but mostly. Capitalism actually required racism to enable its original “primitive accumulation” stage . . . when it ransacked, enslaved, committed genocide against, black and brown peoples all over the globe during the so-called Age of Discovery — and then throughout the Colonial Period. Of course, primitive accumulation never ended, but it was necessary to kick-start the system and extend capital accumulation beyond the realm of the aristocracy.

The invention of racism gave it (capitalism) cover to steal, enslave, wipe out those who failed to “improve” their lands . . . which to people like Locke, meant eschewing “profit.” The initial (European) philosophical/legal concept of “private property” made implicit the requirement of “improvement,” or it was deemed legit to hand that property over to those who would. It gave cover to endless “enclosures” all around the world. Though different historians have different first dates and locales for this, it’s safe to say the main nexus was Britain . . . though the Dutch and all the colonial powers were key as well.

I’d also argue that there are no non-capitalist nations anymore, so it’s next to impossible to find a control group now. It’s a capitalist world. We don’t really have any examples of racist, non-capitalist nations . . . and the vast majority of non-capitalist nations were non-white prior to being assimilated into the Borg. I’d also argue that the only “white” nations that remained non-capitalist for a time, once capitalism started its ascent, were colonies. Ironically, the US, prior to the Civil War, and Ireland for a time.

Capitalism requires inequality. Definitely true. And on a scale no previous economic system ever came close to. There can be no effective, sufficient “capital accumulation” by capitalists without it. By definition. If that capital is shared in such a way that it dilutes concentration, it won’t work. It’s just math. And the higher the degree of concentration, the bigger the gap must be. And when just three humans — right now, Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg — hold as much wealth as the bottom half of America combined . . . . that gap is beyond Twilight Zone levels.

So racism kicks in in conscious and unconscious ways. Unconsciously, it helps “white people” ignore the massive gaps, because they don’t always see them, at least not directly, or what they see becomes a “norm” that they’ve become numb to. Black and brown people making far, far less, or working temp jobs, or waiting for buses and trucks to take them to dangerous, back-breaking precariot jobs, or in far away nations, etc. Or, simply unemployed. An army of surplus and radically low paid workers is absolutely necessary, or capitalism can not function. They enable “decent, middle class wages” for white people, as well as massive riches for the financial elites.

Overt racism helps “white people” manage via “they don’t deserve to make a decent living” or some variation. Or, worse. “Screw them! I got mine!” even for the white folks who really don’t. Their sense of “I got mine” is really “I’m superior to them cuz I’m not as bad off,” etc. etc. And then throw in the police, “law and order” issues, and the wild divergence of how people are “managed” by the authorities, and this sense of superiority deepens.

Capitalism needs enemies as well as inequality . . . so furiners and POCs and we leftists take on that role for it. It also needs, ironically, a decent percentage of “successful” POCs (and women) to prevent a mass rebellion. It’s still too early in the morning for me to express how leftists fit into the mix, exactly, as far as the racist safety valve goes . . . . but it’s there, somewhere.

Hope others jump in and discuss this further too.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.

There’s another pandemic we need to worry about, besides Covid-19:

The pandemic of abject stupidity, ignorance, paranoia and selfishness.

Wearing masks, apparently, is the devil’s work, and goes against god’s plan, etc. etc.

Business Insider Residents of Palm Beach, Florida, erupted at a town meeting after masks were made mandatory. Twitter users were quick to compare the intense backlash to an episode of Parks and Recreation. rperper@businessinsider.com (Rosie Perper) 14 hrs ago

This would be “funny” if it didn’t literally cause death and horrible sickness. And it’s not the kind of thing that some could just give out a Darwin Award and move on, like, “Hold my beer while I wrestle that alligator, Bubba!!”

Being dead set against wearing masks endangers everyone, including those of us who can’t be gaslit by right-wing demagogues. And I fear this has spread too far for the head demagogue to stop it, even if he wanted to, and he doesn’t.