The past week has certainly seen an interesting set of issues and subjects bubble up into the collective conscience. Looking at them all together provides a fairly clear view of perspectives on race, the direction of our country and society, how we will reconcile issues of our past, and which direction we’ll take in the future.
How many N-words does it take before you’re totally disqualified for Harvard?
How do you accomplish anything substantial if the people you’re working with are too horrible to be tolerated?
At what point do we admit that the inhumane crimes we commit now echo the crimes of our past?
And exactly at what point do we finally begin to atone for and repair the damage caused by those crimes?
Parkland survivor Kyle Kashuv, who supports gun ownership, had his Harvard admission rescinded after it was found that he had repeatedly used the N-word online two years ago, and the right wing lost its mind, arguing this is “political retribution,” even though Harvard has done the exact same thing several times with other students, considering them to have violated the school’s morals rules.
Fox News has argued that Kashuv was bounced by Harvard for “espousing conservatism.” So he did that by using the N-word 11 times? Whose version of “conservatism” is that exactly?
Michael Knowles argued for Fox News this week that Kyle Kashuv was only “espousing conservatism” when he was rejected by Harvard for using the N-word at least 11 times and calling to “kill all the f*cking Jews.”
In an op-ed on the Foxnews.com website, Knowles asserted that Kashuv is being singled out by Harvard because he has conservative views.
“The cruel irony is that, while there is no evidence that Kyle Kashuv harbors any actual racial bigotry, there is plenty of evidence that Harvard does,” Knowles wrote. “Plaintiffs in a major racial discrimination lawsuit against the university introduced evidence last year demonstrating that Harvard systematically disadvantages Asian-American applicants.”
He was talking about “Nigger Jocks" and saying “kill all the fucking Jews,” but allegedly he's not the racist? Harvard is racist? Er, what?
Knowles continued, saying that “The left doesn’t mind double standards. Ralph Northam posed in either blackface or a Ku Klux Klan outfit on his medical school yearbook page, and he remains governor of Virginia. But Northam is a Democrat, and Kyle is the most prominent 18-year-old conservative in the country.”
It's not like plenty of Democrats didn’t call for Ralph Northam to step down, because they did.
The chorus of prominent liberals and progressives demanding the resignation of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is resounding. Last Friday, images circulated from Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page showing two people in racist garb, one in blackface and the other in a Klansman costume.
After initially apologizing for the image, the Democrat has since claimed that neither of the people pictured is him — although Northam added he did wear blackface on another occasion, as part of a Michael Jackson costume.
Northam just refused, and there wasn't enough outrage to have him impeached and removed, but we haven't forgotten, not even a little bit. All of this is just a political game of one-upmanship to people like Knowles. This isn't about the fact that Kashuv is a conservative, or because he’s a gun ownership supporter; it's because he’s a bigot with genocidal dreams.
Kashuv says that in the intervening two years he’s “grown” and that he deserves a chance to prove it. Northam has made a similar argument. Grown into what, I wonder? At what point is someone irredeemable? Are these claims of growth merely a deflection, or are they legitimate?
Northam may have shown some poor judgment, but there are some that have argued that Kashuv’s comments have shown a tendency for something much worse.
“It is not Harvard’s role to reform him,” [former Republican U.S. Congressman David] Jolly said of Kashuv, while speaking on MSNBC Tuesday morning.
Noting that “within our culture we have leaders who are giving greater permission to racist statements and people with racist feelings, they’re giving them greater equity,” Jolly said Harvard is right to say, “not in our community” to Kashuv.
“This story is greater than Harvard,” Jolly continued, noting that what Kashuv wrote, as HuffPost reported, was “kill the effing Jews,” Jolly said.
“He posted the ‘N’ word repeatedly, and he referred to one of these shoot-em-up video games and suggested that they should put a map of that up on his high school,” the former Florida Congressman said.
“This was two years before Parkland, but my immediate reaction when I dug into this, these are the social media postings we see of a shooter, and we ask, ‘where were the signs?'” he charged. “This is exactly what we see.”
Stephanie Ruhle asked, “Is that too far?”
Jolly doubled down.
“It is not.”
“These are the exact posts we find of people, particularly those who advocate for stronger gun rights.”
Is someone like Kashuv beyond the pale? Does he deserve a second chance? Is he a potential shooter himself? All that remains up in the air, but one thing he does seem to be right now is a political football.
People like Knowles seem awfully concerned about the opportunity to attend Harvard that’s been lost by Kashuv, but as I’ve seen noted on Twitter, they didn’t much care when 14 of his classmates lost their chance to live as a result of gun violence, now did they?
Also, it has to be noted that conservatives such as Laura Ingraham taunted activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg when he was rejected by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA.
Mocking Hogg's comments, Fox News Host Laura Ingraham tweeted a story from a conservative news website that described the teen as a "Gun Rights Provocateur" - and said Hogg was whining.
"David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it," Ingraham tweeted. "(Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA . . . totally predictable given acceptance rates.)"
Hogg took to Twitter, where his number of followers has surpassed 900,000. He compiled a list of 12 companies that advertise on Fox News's "The Ingraham Angle."
In a matter of days, Ingraham lost more than a dozen advertisers, including Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, Hulu, Jenny Craig, Ruby Tuesday and Miracle-Ear.
Hogg eventually had the last laugh as he was accepted into Harvard.
In mid-December, Harvard's early-entry candidates began logging onto the application status portal to learn whether they'd been accepted to one of the world's most prestigious universities. But for one particularly famous member of the class of 2023, entry into Harvard brought a bit more than congratulations.
For David Hogg, it was the last laugh.
"Thank you all for the well wishes," Hogg tweeted Saturday morning. "I'll be attending Harvard in the fall with a planned major in Political Science
I find this irony delicious, but at the same time I would hope we could grow beyond ticking off political points. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Kashuv’s comments were very serious, although he was indeed very young. Harvard is a private institution that can set its own standards for admission, and its own requirements for morals and character. If it wanted to prioritize people with leftist views over those with right-wing ideas, it could do that just as much as Liberty University can. I’m not personally invested in the college career of either Kashuv or Hogg. I don’t feel more sympathetic toward one or the other.
Unfortunately, for many conservatives, everything is a political battlefield.
We’ve seen another spat occur this week, between Joe Biden and Cory Booker, over Biden’s statement that he was able to reach across the aisle and get things done with segregationist senators in the ‘70s, saying that they had called him “son” instead of “boy.”
The statement outraged Booker and many others because, of course, “boy” in that context is the genteel N-word. Biden wouldn’t ever be called “boy” in that way because he’s white. It doesn’t make sense even to mention it. Booker demanded that Biden apologize, and Biden responded with his own outrage at the suggestion that his statement had been racist, which it wasn’t. Both were talking past each other: Booker wasn’t attacking Biden for being racist, and Biden wasn’t intending to insult anyone with the N-word Lite.
Sometimes these things happen when the intended meaning of a person’s words is lost in the context of the hearer’s experience. Words mean different things in different contexts. Confusion ensues. I take Biden at his word that what he meant was that sometimes you may have to deal with people you vehemently disagree with, for the greater good. He could have used other examples, but to him, his point was most salient and poignant in the example of the worst possible person: a segregationist.
At the same time, I also sympathize with Booker’s point. Throwing around the word “boy” should be a clearly fraught thing to do. In previous versions of this story, Biden was quoted as saying that “he didn’t call me senator, he called me son,” and I’m not sure why the story changed; but I'm pretty sure Biden is largely oblivious that that simple change means so much more than it would seem on the surface.
It’s going to take a little patience and understanding to move forward on this and on many other fronts.
A little understanding would also be helpful in the situation being stirred up after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated that we have concentration camps on our border. Actually, I would argue those are private prisons located all over the country; on the border we have the Dog Pound and the Freezer, but that’s neither here nor there. Border Patrol Agent Art Del Cuerto was one of the first to slam AOC, saying that the ”kids were outside their cell. They were out on the floor, playing puzzles, watching movies, eating cookies. What have you. She needs to come down here.” Wow, that’s mighty white of you guys.
Ocasio-Cortez, however, did make the crucial distinction that she's not saying these are “death camps." The terms “concentration camp” and “death camp” are not synonymous, either historically or today. I would argue that most of the death actually happens out in the open in the desert when people try to get around barriers on foot. About one person per day has been estimated to have died crossing the desert since 1995, when the main border fences started going up. Trump may claim this is a matter of “national security,” but people really are losing their lives in this process.
The number of migrants who died near the US-Mexico border rose in 2017 even as the number of attempted border crossings fell dramatically, according to the United Nations’ migration agency.
Last year, 412 migrant deaths were recorded on either side of the border, up from 398 a year earlier, the International Organization for Migration said, adding that 16 migrant deaths had already been recorded in the area so far in 2018.
“The increase in deaths is especially concerning, as the available data indicate that far fewer migrants entered the US via its border with Mexico in the last year,” Frank Laczko, head of IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre, said in a statement.
Back-of-the-napkin math shows that that’s been about 9,000 deaths in the desert since 1995. Adding more walls, as Trump intends, will only make that situation worse.
Then Rep. Liz Daughter of War Crimes and Torture Cheney went after AOC, suggesting her “concentration camp" claim was anti-Semitic and “disrespectful” to victims of the Holocaust.
Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.Please @AOC do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.
AOC responded:
Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to “educate me,” I’m curious: What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands children at the border from their parents?
And then Chuck Todd decided to pile on.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd says “you can’t call” the concentration camps at our southern border “concentration camps.”
“Be careful,” Todd warned – comparing the Trump administration’s camps, where we are keeping migrants, including many children, against their will, in horrific conditions – “comparing them to Nazi concentration camps. Because they’re not at all comparable in the slightest.
He is extraordinarily wrong.
Todd, who hosts NBC’s “Meet the Press” and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily,” also serves as the network’s political director. Perhaps he should reach out to a few historians and a few experts on authoritarianism, maybe experts in Nazi concentration camps, before opining in such a degrading and condescending manner (watch the video below.)
Todd is actually criticizing Democratic lawmakers for not condemning Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks.
Keep in mind, she never said “Nazi concentration camps,” nor did she say “Nazi death camps.”She said “concentration camps,” which Hitler did not invent, and which have been used before, even by the U.S. – as many who studied America’s horrific Japanese internment camps know. Some, like George Takei, say the comparison is legitimate. He should know. As a young boy he lived in two.
Chuck Todd is extraordinarily the wrong.
Yes. So is Cheney.
I've written literally thousands of words about the frankly fucking ridiculous inhumane conditions at the border and in the various internment camps that migrants who are legally seeking asylum have been placed in. It is completely legal to cross the border without papers in order to seek asylum. Consequently there is no good legitimate reason to hold 80,000-100,000 people in facilities designed for a maximum capacity of 40,000. But I have to say that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a singular skill for getting directly to the heart of the matter: “concentration camps” says it all.
She knows exactly the right words to kick up a dust storm such as this one, with conservative Steve Cortes demanding that she resign.
Conservatives panicked on Tuesday after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) referred to Trump’s tent city detention centers as concentration camps.
Republican Steve Cortes argued against Ocasio-Cortez was wrong to correctly use the term concentration camps.
“AOC should apologize at least and probably resign,” Cortes argued.
Progressive analyst Angela Rye shut down Cortes, explaining to viewers that Ocasio-Cortez was correctly using the term.
“Whether we call them concentration camps or detention, they are problematic,” she added. “And I’m telling you that we are irresponsible at this point, that whether we call them concentration camps or not, her point remain and is the right is threatened by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because she tells the truth, whether they can digest it or not.”
Cortes attempts to justify these inhumane detentions by repeating Acting DHS Secretary MacAleenan’s bogus claim that “90 percent of asylum seekers don’t appear for their hearings” but the fact is that 70-85 percent of them do appear, and that figures goes to 100 percent when they have legal representation. Which again begs the question since it’s legal to enter the US at any point in order to seek asylum; if about 90 percent o them are not going to run away and skip court — why are we holding any of these people at all?
I'm going to take George Takei’s word on this over that of Liz Cheney, Chuck Todd, or Steve Cortes. Also the dictionary’s.
con·cen·tra·tion camp
/ˌkänsənˈtrāSHən ˈˌkamp/
noun
noun: concentration camp; plural noun: concentration camps
-
a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution.
Isn’t it amazing that conservatives can get so worked up over references to the Holocaust, but not so worked up about a conservative kid talking about “killing all the Jews”? AOC is “anti-Semitic” and should resign, but Kashuv is being unfairly politically persecuted in not being allowed into Harvard.
They also get pretty worked up on suggestions of reparations. Case in point: Mitch McTurtle.
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” the Kentucky Republican opined. “We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African-American president.”
“I think we’re always a work in progress in this country but no one currently alive was responsible for that,” he added. “And I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it.”
McConnell argued that “it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate.”
“We’ve had waves of immigrants as well who have come to the country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another,” he remarked. “So, no, I don’t think reparations are a good idea.”
This is a profound failure to fully understand the breadth and scope of this issue. As I’ve previously written at length, this isn’t just about what happened 150 years ago, particularly because thanks to the “duly convicted” exception in the 13th Amendment, it never really ended. Slavery continues today as part of the criminal (in)justice system. There are also the Black Codes; the 100 years of terrorism by the Klan; Jim Crow; segregation; redlining; job, lending, and housing discrimination; racial gerrymandering; voter suppression; and more.
All of that is current. There are people who are alive today who have implemented and supported these ongoing policies, and one of them is Mitch McConnell. Consequently, it makes some sense that he’s not eager to take a serious look at reparations.
Even if you were to take McConnell’s ridiculously narrow definition and simply focus on the human rights crime of slavery itself, he is still wrong. The slave trade was, at its base, theft. Theft of freedom, theft of labor, theft of property, theft of generational wealth. The illicit profits of the slaveholders can be tracked, their property down through the generations can be followed and documented and, consequently, seized. They paid taxes on their property, including taxes on the slaves they possessed. Some of them even insured their property, including their slave holdings.
New York Life, the nation’s third-largest life insurance company, opened in Manhattan’s financial district in the spring of 1845. The firm possessed a prime address — 58 Wall Street — and a board of trustees populated by some of the city’s wealthiest merchants, bankers and railroad magnates.
Sales were sluggish that year. So the company looked south.
There, in Richmond, Va., an enterprising New York Life agent sold more than 30 policies in a single day in February 1846. Soon, advertisements began appearing in newspapers from Wilmington, N.C., to Louisville as the New York-based company encouraged Southerners to buy insurance to protect their most precious commodity: their slaves.
Some slaveowners received compensation for releasing their slaves.
In the United States, the regulation of slavery was predominantly a state function. Northern states followed a course of gradual emancipation. During the Civil War, in 1861, President Lincoln drafted an act to be introduced before the legislature of Delaware, one of the four non-free states that remained loyal the others being Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri), for compensated emancipation. However this was narrowly defeated. Lincoln also was behind national legislation towards the same end, but the southern states, now in full rebellion, ignored the proposals.[2][3]
Only in the District of Columbia, which fell under direct Federal auspices, was compensated emancipation enacted. On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act. This law prohibited slavery in the District, forcing its 900-odd slaveholders to free their slaves, with the government paying owners an average of about $300 for each. In 1863, state legislation towards compensated emancipation in Maryland failed to pass, as did an attempt to include it in a newly written Missouri constitution.
I’ve heard reports that the $300 paid then for the freedom of a slave would be about $7,000 today. There were approximately 10-12 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage and were forcibly brought to America during the 246 years of the slave trade. As of the 1850 census, there were 3,204,313 slaves in the U.S. If the U.S. were to pay the family of each of those 3 million slaves the same compensation that was offered in Washington in 1862 in current dollars, the total cost would be $22 billion.
This doesn’t include compensation for a lifetime of stolen wages which is worth at least another $7000 per slave, it doesn’t include the pain and suffering of being in captivity, of enduring the intimidation, terrorism, torture, assault, mutilation, rape and murder and families being randomly destroyed that the enforcement of the process of enslavement required which at a minimum is worth yet another $7,000 per slave and then the fact that this went on and on for nearly 10 generations which all together would be raise the total to about $672 billion for approximately $21,000 for each of about 32 Million slaves over the course of 200 years. For comparison, those Japanese-Americans who were held in interment camps during WWII were ultimately granted $20,000 each in reparations.
Just for the sake of argument, that payment could be considered the cash amount that America owes the descendants of former slaves, which would average about $16,000 per person with a current estimated African-American population of about 42 Million. Recipients could be identified by family records, and also by DNA testing, since those who were brought across through the Middle Passage would have had to have been in the U.S. since at least 1808 when, 20 years after the Constitution was ratified, its terms allowed Congress to change the law, and the importation of slaves was made illegal. Certain tribes from certain countries were the sources of these slaves, and that lineage can be identified. People with a mixture of those specific DNA strands, along with likely genetic inheritance from Europeans, Native Americans, and South Americans, can be tracked back to before 1808, and to the Middle Passage.
None of this addresses anyone who had nothing to do with the slave trade, either as a beneficiary or as a victim. White people or others who came long after 1865 have nothing to do with this calculation. A compensation scheme of this type wouldn’t affect them unless their generational wealth is linked to the slave trade. Africans who’ve arrived since the end of slavery would not be eligible. Most arguments that a reparations package would unfairly impact those who had nothing to do with slavery can be handled.
This could be figured out with science and math. The bigger questions, though, are legal and moral. The Constitution’s prohibition against passing ex post facto laws means that criminal or civil penalties cannot be applied to something that was not illegal when it was done. Slavery was legal. Lawsuits by the families of former slaves cannot be filed against the descendants of slave owners, so their funds can't be seized or assessed through the courts. The U.S. Treasury would have to provide the funds, not the families of the slave owners.
Unfortunately, this calculation is not a full accounting. Even at over a half $trillion this fund would still not include the following 100 years of open terrorism by the Klan, the loss of lives and homes and businesses including the 4,700 Americans who were lynched. This fund still doesn’t address the loss of opportunity, the loss of hope, the loss of brighter futures that was the result of Jim Crow, segregation, or the economic job deserts of ghettos created by government approved red-lining. It would frankly take $trillions to balance everything out, and then you still have the criminal justice issues which affected millions from the Scottsboro Boys, to Emmett Till, to James Byrd, the Exonerated Central Park 5, to Tamir Rice and so many many others.
But the real question is, regardless of the price tag, is America anywhere near ready to accept the moral judgment that this would clearly require? Can this nation accept what it did? Can we honestly accept even the concept of owing $trillions in debt to a large number of our citizens? We apparently can’t even accept that we have concentration camps on our border right. fracking. now.
Even though they were paid reparations have we really fully accepted what we did to Japanese Americans in placing them in internment camps? We’re using those same camps to jail migrant kids today. That doesn’t seem like a lesson learned.
We can't accept that we were the ones who repeatedly broke treaties with Native Americans and perpetrated the horrors of the Trail of Tears against the Cherokee Nation. We are the only nation that has ever used nuclear bombs in a war, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And yet we still have nuclear weapons.
In some of these cases we have already paid reparations, but have we fully learned the lesson of “Never Again” from them yet? I would argue that we haven’t, since we continue to repeat the same mistakes.
We have, as a nation, much to atone for. More important than paying anyone a cash settlement is learning the damn lessons. All of these stories that have cropped up this week show that we don’t have the answers; we barely even understand the real questions. We can’t agree that a kid who can openly say “nigger” eleven times and calls for killing “all the Jews” probably isn’t Harvard material. We can’t agree that calling an adult black man “boy” is not acceptable, ever, from anyone. We can’t agree that we still have fracking concentration camps, filled with 40,000 kids, and that that is not acceptable. We can’t agree that the descendants of African slaves were wronged and robbed.
We can’t agree that we’ve made all these mistakes and that we need to do better.
And that’s the real issue. We won't do better until we first admit that we haven't done nearly enough yet. We won’t do better until we realize that we must.