Preaching Beyond The Choir: My Interview On Pachios On The News

I had no idea that the community television talk show Pachios on the News is sponsored by corporate law firm Preti Flaherty. Had I known I probably still would have agreed to be interviewed there because I welcome opportunities to preach beyond the choir. Nor had I done my homework to watch host Harold Pachios interview luminaries like Governor Janet Mills or Senator Angus King; I had only watched part of his most recent interview with Portland City Councilor Anna Trevorrow.

I probably also should have given more consideration to the fact that the interview started at 7pm -- as an early riser, I'm past my usual bedtime when the show concludes at 8pm. So I misnamed the famous Milgram experiments as Millman, and said they were done at Harvard, not Yale.  Also at no point did I name my blog --  nor did the host, but he seemed aggravated by me and my views and probably with himself for inviting me in the first place. 

At one point he said, "I'm not here to argue with you," and I am proud of myself for not LOL at that gross canard.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's the interview. And here's a game: guess how many times Harold interrupted me and then keep a tally. Was your estimate over or under?*

*A friend counted 32 interruptions, but that may be an undercount.

Note: The episode hasn't appeared on the show's YouTube channel yet, but when it does I'll swap it out for this version that I uploaded. (My blog could not handle uploading the MP4 file directly due to its size.)

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On another subject altogether, I always enjoy being published in the Bowdoin Orient. It was one of the early places my writing found a home when I was a student there. Nowadays I write to them about local issues like the foam spill catastrophe at the old Brunswick Naval Air Station:

Nice Manners Uphold White Supremacy & Brutal Class Warfare

A spokeswoman for Police Scotland said: “A 22-year-old woman was arrested..on Sunday 11 September 2022 in connection with a breach of the peace.” This occurred during a public ceremony to recognize Charles as the new King of Scotland. Source: The National

One of the strongest messages a white baby boomer received growing up was the need to behave well. "Pretty is as pretty does," was one such admonition, particularly tailored for girls. "Fools' names and fools' faces are often seen in public places," was another. 

This conditioning must be overcome in order to raise a dissenting voice.

The changing of monarchs in the United Kingdom produced an outburst of fawning over crowned heads as well as an outburst of truth telling and its inevitable companion, tone policing.

Scots were arrested protesting the ascension of the rather unpopular Charles III. Some with signs were put in handcuffs, while others who boo'd appear to have gotten away with it.

The quintessential tone policing remark was predictable. As reported in The National:

Donald Maclaren, 64, of Livingston, said: “It’s very disrespectful, there is a time and a place if you want to protest, but this isn’t it."

 

See, his mother just died, so it's not the time and place to protest a man who just inherited a vast fortune and is exempt from the 40% inheritance tax others must pay. 

No matter how rich you are, you are likely to be totally clueless about how bad tone policing makes you look. Billionaire labor nemesis Jeff Bezos chastised a Black academic on Twitter who wrote: "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating." 

His criticism and the pushback to it greatly elevated her original tweet (which now appears to have been censored by Twitter). More tone policing came from Carnegie Mellon University where she is employed. They said her remarks did not reflect their values despite Dr. Uju Anya's explanation to a journalist:

"I am the child and sibling of survivors of genocide. 

From 1967-1970, more than 3 million civilians were massacred when the Igbo people of Nigeria tried to form the independent nation of Biafra.. 

this genocide was directly supported and facilitated by the British government.. 

weapons, bombs, planes, military vehicles, and supplies were sent to kill us and protect their interests in the oil reserves on our land."

If you're white and live in a racist country like the U.S., you've probably been in lots of situations where you were hearing white supremacist rhetoric while wondering what to say in response.

 That's if you could find the courage to speak up at all.

You might have been at a family holiday dinner.

You might have been in a hair salon where the person you angered could be holding scissors next to your face.

Is it a coincidence that the part of the U.S. where many still revere the Confederacy has the reputation of being especially polite?

No matter where you live in the U.S., you were probably raised to be conflict averse in a society where "conflict" is a euphemism for war. 

So there's likely an element of fear of violence involved in the calculus about what to say or whether to say anything.

Doris Lessing, one of my favorite authors, grew up white in apartheid colonial Africa, the part that is now Zimbabwe. Her penchant for telling the truth about British colonialism among other things did not always make her popular. She died in 2013 but I'll give her the last word:

Divide & Conquer, Part 3: White v. Human

Source: McGill University

The divide and conquer trope at the heart of the U.S. empire's moral rot is race.

Race is the biologically imaginary distinction between humans based on melanin i.e. skin color.

The fact that white supremacy was first enforced against indigenous people in the Caribbean and North American continent gets muddied by the ideology of Christianity's Doctrine of Discovery where not-white = heathen. 

It took 1619 and the enslavement of African people to start cementing in place a permanent underclass based on the skimpy ideology of skin color-hair texture.

White America has been sitting on a powder keg of race relations ever since, with discontent always brewing, and terrified owners desperate to keep their power over workers.

Enter white supremacy and its unearned benefit, white privilege.

When I was a young child my father pointed out that I was white but that fact didn't make me better than anyone else, just luckier. "Many doors will be open to you that would not be if your skin were a different color," he explained.

Some examples of what dad was talking about:

Dad used the GI bill to get a college education after discharge from the Army. Many Black GI's did not receive this earned benefit. They also did not receive GI bill support for home ownership as millions of white veterans did.

This set up Black families in the U.S. for generational disparities in net worth. As reported by the Federal Reserve:

In the 2019 survey, White families have the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $188,200 and $983,400, respectively. Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than White families. Black families' median and mean wealth is less than 15 percent that of White families, at $24,100 and $142,500, respectively. Hispanic families' median and mean wealth is $36,100 and $165,500, respectively. 

The 1619 Project is a collection of research-based essays on how white supremacy warped not only our hearts and souls but the actual structures of government (think electoral college). It also argues that racism hurt labor organizing. What true strength in numbers can there be if white workers don't stand shoulder to shoulder with workers of color? How will labor stand up to capital if solidarity is rotted from within by racism?

The Project's authors also cite the dreadful state of public transportation in this country as an effect of racist public policies based on white flight from cities to suburbs. 

The horrifying state of policing likewise is a logical outgrowth of slave patrols and the notion that any white man with a gun is entitled to rob any person of color of their freedom. How many #sayhisnameDonovanLewis cases will there need to be before white people stop funding more and more violent police forces out of fear? 

Police gunning down unarmed, even sleeping, Black and brown people is part of the very fabric of the U.S. Now, with cell phone cameras and bodycams for police, even white people can see the problem.

And as Chris Hedges argued recently, a low-income white person without health care, living precariously as the U.S. empire declines, clings to gun ownership as the final bulwark against humiliation.

Black majority cities like Jackson, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan go without potable water for years.

Mortality and other indicators of health are significantly different by race, both pre and post Covid.

Source: Ben & Jerry's

Mass incarceration for a myriad of victimless crimes (cannabis possession springs to mind) denies Black families of their parents, and Black communities of their voters. And keeps ex-cons in the prison labor force many compare to slavery, but out of the labor force where they would compete with white workers.

Jennifer Schulte aka "BBQ Becky" became famous for calling police in Oakland on Black men who were grilling with charcoal in an undesignated area of a public park.

White women have played an outsized role in demonizing Black people just for existing. Emmett Till was lynched at age 14 after white adult Carolyn Bryant Donham lied about him sexually harrassing her, but a grand jury in Mississippi still failed to indict Donham for her role in Till's death.

Media has pushed the narrative of an alleged criminal class based on melanin so relentlessly that even Black and brown people are more likely to identify what a young man of color is holding as a gun when it's actually a cell phone or a soda can.

Liberals like 3rd grade teacher Jane Elliott could easily demonstrate the educational impacts of separate, unequal treatment based on eye color, but that did nothing to change systemic racism.

Some believe, and I'm among them, that reparations is the only thing likely to effect real progress.

It would be hard to find a more divisive issue than reparations. Unless it is the first Black president of the U.S. -- a neoliberal who did almost nothing to address economic disparities by race, but allowed a lot of white people to pretend that electing him had ushered in an era of post-racism. Uh huh.

Apology To The Black Woman On The Path At Willard Beach

Photo: Soul Cap

Greetings to the Black woman I met on the path at Willard Beach in South Portland on Friday, July 16. Our brief encounter has stayed with me because I regret my choices and hope that by reflecting on them I can do better. 

This is a story about how intentions don't matter nearly as much as impact matters.

It was late on a warm, muggy day when I arrived at the beach. My husband went ahead with two little grandkids eager to get on the playground after a long car ride. After reorganizing the car a bit I hurried to catch up with them and found my way to the path by the outdoor showers. It was wet and puddly and there were wild roses crowding it on both sides. Meant to be a two-way path, but only if both parties skirted the puddles in the center and scraped the edge of the roses.

I was about halfway up the path when I saw you at the other end. You had almost shoulder length curly dark hair and a blue print dress. I'm not sure how old I thought you were but definitely an adult and definitely younger than me.

I kept to my edge of the path and continued as you began walking toward me. When we were about six feet apart, skirting our respective edges around the puddles, I said, "Excuse me" in what I thought was a polite tone. I thought about stopping to let you pass but I didn't. As you passed me you said distinctly but quietly, "She's everywhere I go." There was no one else nearby that you might have been talking to or about, though I suppose it's possible you were on the phone talking into a bluetooth device I couldn't see. My impression was that you were speaking both to me and about me.

Doing the work to examine my own racism within a system of enforced white supremacy that has benefited me for 64 years, I found these feelings: surprise that you spoke; hurt that my "excuse me" wasn't viewed as the polite expression I intended; annoyed that I was being lumped in with all the white women hogging all the paths; compassion for the weariness in your tone; confusion about what, if anything, I had gotten wrong; fear at the iceberg that your brief sentence is the tip of; exasperation that a Black person in the whitest state in the nation expressed annoyance at being surrounded by whiteness.

Reflecting on my brief utterance, it occurred to me that the words "excuse me" can be weaponized with sarcasm and undoubtedly are by passive-aggressive white women.

Reflecting on how my body took up space that could have been yielded, I realize that my upbringing in a society dominated by white privilege was worse than useless. As the older person and the one who was already on the path, I assumed my right to keep using it.

As a white person, I have never expected a person of color to step off the sidewalk to let me pass. But I look like a whole lot of people that not only expected it but might use violence to enforce it. Even a woman definitely too young to have lived through the Jim Crow segregation practices that traumatized my young parents in Georgia in 1955 probably knows this in her bones.

Even if she was not the descendant of enslaved Africans, but possibly part of the diaspora communities from Somalia, Sudan, and Democratic Republic of Congo that now live in southern Maine. Because Jim Crow doesn't care what country you were born in or what language you learned to speak as a toddler. The fact that you don't look white is the only salient fact for segregationists.

So I want to apologize to you, Black woman on the beach path. 

I wish I had paused on the path and let you pass without comment. I might have said "hello" as you passed by, but I wish I had not said "excuse me."

Thank you for saying what you did. Without it, I would have quickly forgotten our brief encounter.

I would have gone on clicking heart on the Instagram posts of both ___brick and the group blacksand.surf who are claiming the right to surf and otherwise enjoy the beach while Black in California. 

Source: How the memory of a black resort refused to fade "A bather at Bruce’s Beach. The Shades of LA Collection, LA County Library"

I know the history that a Black resort owned by the Bruce family was thriving until 1924 when it was stolen from them by the City of Manhattan Beach.

I know that when I got up this morning both Huntington Beach and Proud Boys were trending on Twitter, because of a white supremacist rally yesterday in another southern California beach town. Some history on that location, as reported by Mark McDermott in easyreadernews.com:

in early 1926, the most ambitious Black resort of all, the Pacific Beach Club, which was near completion in Huntington Beach and intended to be “the grandest escape of all” for Black Californians, complete with Eygptial Revival architecture, was destroyed by arson. The project had been headed by Ceruti and was clearly intended not only as a resort but as an act of economic activism, a statement that Black people would not only have a place at the beach, but build the “Queen of the Pacific.” It had all gone up in flames. Though no arrests were ever made, the Ku Klux Klan’s very active presence in Southern California at the time caused many to believe that they had started the fire. 

I would have gone on shaking my head at the 2020 Olympics committee that banned swim caps that could be worn comfortably by Black women and others with thick, curly hair. Their reasoning: such caps don't follow "the natural form of the head."

Photo: SoulCap.com

Whose head is the natural form? 

I'm going to remember your words -- "She's everywhere I go" -- the next time I have an opportunity to hold space for a person in a Black body. And I'm going to do better at using that opportunity, because I sincerely want to, and to honor the work that you did for me when you spoke up. Because only impact matters.

Insatiable Greed And A $600 Slap In The Face

Fascism got a bad name in the 20th century because of the mass genocide of the Holocaust, plus the rapacious colonialism (redundant, I know) of the Japanese imperial project. For decades since, teenagers have snarled "fascist" at parents enforcing curfew in reference to the violent policing that accompanied the rise of a white supremacist party in Germany.

But it was Mussolini, the dictator of Italy, that actually had it right: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

In other words, the precise system of government we have in the United States today.

Over the last several decades we have watched as corporate power captured, not only our legislative and executive branches of national government, but the judiciary as well. 

The predictable outcome of our descent into fascism is the passage and enforcement of laws designed to benefit our corporate overlords at the expense of the literally starving and homeless people.

During any crisis of the last several decades, the already wealthy have prospered while the already impoverished have perished before our very eyes with little to no government intervention. I think Hurricane Katrina is when I first realized that the federal government would stand idly by, fat with our tax dollars, while the poor drowned and starved. FEMA like so many other federal agencies was designed to enrich corporations while the matriarch of the Bush clan toured refugees being housed in a sports stadium and pronounced on network television, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them."

The fact that so many of the "underprivileged" were Black was undoubtedly a factor in their abandonment by government of, by, and for the wealthy. Kanye West increased his fame when he said live on network television at the time: "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." 

So, failure to attend to the common good is nothing new. But it is accelerating mightily under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other wealthy countries have managed the health crisis by recognizing that staying home is containment, and subsidizing people to stay home -- including staying housed -- is good health policy.

But the US Congress is in session this weekend struggling over whether to pass a relief bill that would provide $600 one time payments after sending a measly $1200 once months ago. (Note: I know at least one Black working mother who never even received that payment.)

Currently 1/3 of people in the U.S. report they are struggling to meet basic expenses such as rent, food, and utilities.

The uptick in memes and slogans advocating violent revolution is significant in my social media feeds.

A sampling includes this one with one of the planet's rapacious billionaires as poster boy:

Also:

But more specifically, Congress is in the crosshairs. Sample tweets:

$600 and whatever you can carry from your local Congressional representative’s second home

— Edward Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin) December 18, 2020

 

The U.S. government gave over 40,000 millionaires an average of 1.7 million each in Covid Aid

This is our tax dollars they gave
to millionaires

AND wanna give middle class
& poor families only $600 in stimulus checks?

This is supposed 2 cover
8 months of back rent & mortgages?

— Kirk Acevedo🇺🇸 (@kirkacevedo) December 17, 2020

I also saw but cannot now find one that said, "The next stimulus is hidden inside in your member of Congress like a piñata."

Meanwhile reformers are insisting on a floor vote in the House on the wildly popular Medicare for All that our elected representatives will not even consider.

Fascists, drunk on power, always think the future is theirs. I think they're wrong about that.

Medical Apartheid Particularly Gruesome Evidence Of Caste System

Source: http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-disparities-in-covid-19

Taking my life in my hands (a common occurence in the time of plague) I stood in line at the pharmacy yesterday to pick up a prescription. Two customers who were in front of me had a long, interesting discussion about covid and the likelihood of a vaccine that can be trusted anytime soon. 

Both Black elders expressed skepticism about the form this might take in their community and the woman identified the source of her distrust as, "medical apartheid." Her remark has been ringing in my ears ever since. 

Higher infection and death rates for Black, indigenous, and people of color during this pandemic mirror the chronically worse health outcomes for BIPOC even before covid and are exhibit A for systemic racism in this country. 

Higher maternal mortality, infant mortality, and mortality from common diseases like high blood pressure and cardiovascular ailments are accepted by many as a fact of life in the US. A lot of victim blaming goes on and the higher castes look away from the nutritional realities of life in a food desert. 

Having recently read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, I've been thinking a lot about her thesis that status in society isn't necessarily tied to skin color or religion or circumstances of one's birth. In the US skin color has been used extensively to establish an underclass that receives poorer nutrition, housing, schooling, and health care. But Wilkerson argues that it wasn't always thus, and looks at two other caste-driven social orders -- India and Nazi Germany -- to examine the underpinnings of America's toxic racism.

Examples of caste in action abound in 2020. 

Germany is bending the EU's rules to rush their covid vaccine to Israel, but not to Palestinians.

Rather than hold Israel accountable for its lethal violations of its basic legal and humanitarian obligations, Germany appears eager to help exacerbate them https://t.co/auJmWAKx7K

— Electronic Intifada (@intifada) December 3, 2020

The University of California, Los Angeles showed that it considers college athletes of higher importance than hospital nurses, an example of caste that ignores race but does seem to exhibit a gender bias.

Registered nurses gathered in Los Angeles to protest the fact that UCLA's athletic department conducted 1,248 tests in a single week while health-care workers at UCLA hospitals were denied testing. https://t.co/wRXxSFg5xH

— The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) November 27, 2020

As someone in the caste associated with white skin and middle class economic status, it wouldn't occur to me to worry that the vaccine offered in my community might be of inferior quality. The fact that I don't have to worry is the quintessential example of white privilege.

The mass incarceration of BIPOC prior to the age of covid has meant that they are disproportionately in danger from the disease because they are forced into a congregate setting with no power to choose where they'll go or who they'll associate with. Prisoners in California just ended the hunger strike portion of their ongoing campaign to call attention to this deadly risk to their health and safety.

🚨Update from hunger strike 🚨

“WE determine that OUR Covid Intervention Statement remains relevant as an organizing tool to those involved in the struggle to force transparency of California prisons.“

Read more: https://t.co/O75E32jolY

— TGI Justice Project (@tgijp) December 2, 2020

Excerpt from Oakland Abolition & Solidarity's blog post:

CDCr [California Department of Corrections]’s negligent and careless response to the COVID-19 outbreak at CSATF [California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility] has now killed at least three people. Active cases at the prison continue to hover near 1000 and now over half of the facility has contracted the disease. Guards and staff members are still failing to follow safety protocols and continue to move people around the facility creating more and more exposure.

Prisoners all over the nation suffer under a system of forced labor that is little different than slavery. Most are not a danger to society at all but are exploited by those who profit from their incarceration and the work they do. 

People with substance use disorder don't belong in prison to begin with, but our lack of universal health care means most in the US view prison as a treatment option rather than the punishment it really is. Many in recovery cite the stigma i.e. low caste assignment they struggle with in a social order built to reward some at the expense of others.

Our public health crisis has moved us even further away from any national greatness we might have aspired to, and it is highly unlikely that the president and VP-elect will dismantle the carceral state that helped build their political careers.

Medical apartheid is ugly and evil, and I know I'll be thinking about how to end it for a long time to come.