For those of us old enough to remember the protests against racism and police brutality in the late 1960s, the outrage of African Americans has a sad and sickening familiarity. It’s sad because yet another black man was killed by police officers although he was not resisting arrest (and even had he been resisting arrest, the officers were wrong to apply lethal force to an unarmed person). It is sickening because so little has changed in 50+ years.
We don’t have to think back to the 1960s for examples of racism and racial profiling. We see it now, with disgusting, appalling frequency.
Some important things have changed: our nation twice elected a black man as president. Yet so much remains unchanged: segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools, persistent inequality and disparate treatment.
And now a federal administration that exploits and encourages racism, as it did in Charlottesville when neo-Nazis marched and brazenly displayed their bigotry and hatred. And a president who appoints federal judges who can’t say whether the Brown decision was correctly decided in 1954.
Black Lives Matter. Colin Kaepernick was right. Symbolic statements and gestures matter but they don’t change injustice. We need change in enforcement.
We need a Justice Department committed to protecting the rights of all Americans and to defending the most vulnerable and to enforcing civil rights laws. We need a president who sets a moral example and stands forcefully against racism in word and deed.
Whoever is president creates a tone and climate that others take as a signal of what is appropriate.
Vote. Vote. Vote as if your life depends on it. It does. Vote for justice. Vote for decency. Vote to defend civil rights.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not only lethal force to an unarmed person but he was handcuffed and lying on the ground. There was no reason whatsoever for that police officer to have his knee on that man’s neck.
Derek Chauvin was taken into custody Friday afternoon after violent protests rocked cities around the country.
Related-
“The exemption charter schools have from racial integration laws might be unconstitutional, Minnesota judge rules.” The planned trial for the issue is July 2020.
The Democrats need to realize that there are about 1 million unregistered, potential first nation voters that live on tribal lands in many battleground states including Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. Many of them have been unable to vote because they do not have a legal address. However, GPS coordinates can be a substitute for an address. Many of these people would vote by mail if it is available in their state. Representatives of the Navajo Nation have been actively knocking on doors to register people that live on their lands.https://www.navajoelections.navajo-nsn.gov/
Now THIS is a reason I really value Diane’s blog. Whenever I get down or pessimistic, you always have a way of snapping me out of it. Diane is the “E.F. Hutton” of society of our times. When she speaks, everyone should listen and pass her wisdom on to others.
I am old enough to remember back then and when schools were first integrated in Florida.
Your last remarks are exactly right. Vote as if your life depends on it. It does.
You conjured up a memory I had long forgotten. I learned later in the year that the Birmingham, AL suburban middle school where I attended 7th grade was all white and segregated up until that school year. We had two black students, one with whom I shared a class. I remember being in my first day of classes when a teacher said to him, “you look just like J.J. on Good Times!” All the teachers were condescending to him. I wonder how things turned out for him. I have a dark complexion, more so after a southern summer. I remember getting a lot of suspect looks early that year.
Well said. My day started off very early watching the arrest of that CNN news crew. It’s a relief to read these comments as I start to think about winding things down.
George Floyd allegedly used a fake $20. Meanwhile, our fake president and his flunkies pilfer and pillage our nation.
I’d crawl over broken glass to vote this November.
The current state of affairs is making radicals of us liberals.
Great piece, Diane!👏👍👏👍
Sent from my iPad
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Magnificent, Diane!!!! So very, very well said!!!
“Humans are not intrinsically good. Each of us is conflicted; sometimes selfish, other times committing to others and the common good (only sociopaths—one to four percent or so of the population—are oblivious to good). I do believe that we are tipped to be good but only when certain conditions prevail.”
–Michael Fullan, writing on “The Unity of the Human Race: Our Precarious Future”
For me, my non-belief in race theory compels me to see insidious forms of competition showing up where others see “racism.” I see “racism” showing up on the surface of the iceberg, having emerged there from systems of structural competitiveness operating within the far greater iceberg mass at far greater depths below the surface, so not readily seen. I see calling it “racism” as actually perpetuating “racism” on account of doing so distracts from looking below the surface of the iceberg to make visible any systems of structural competitiveness operating down there and dealing with them before they emerge.
I see the manifest murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin as emergent structural competitiveness, just as I see looting as emergent structural competitiveness. Reasons, justifications, and rationales aside, both exemplify someone(s) having figured out how to win for themselves by making someone else the loser(s). Hence, win-lose vicious cycles to ultimately become lose-lose vicious cycles.
“We are being ruined by competition. What we need is cooperation.” –Deming
Indeed. Public schools should be about ensuring “certain conditions prevail” that “tip[] us to be good.” I believe public schools offer the highest leverage to do so, something charter schools cannot possibly do, for competition is the selfish heart of their seed. Assured destruction of democracy is what we will ultimately get with charter schools.
This is the fundamental political science question that differentiates conservative and liberal thought. Do you believe given the opportunity to do act selfishly or not? Those who answer the former are fundamentally conservative–as Fullan is–and those who answer the latter are fundamentally liberal. We see it in the mask debate and behavior. Those who refuse to wear them are fundamentally conservative reactionaries, I have seen them a lot in the past few days. Was stuck on a delayed flight with then Congressman and later Senator Talent. We had a spirited, friendly discussion on this for hours. As I said to him then, conservatives fear their neighbors, liberals give them a benefit of a doubt. He didn’t disagree.
I do not know Fullan’s work, but here he is not saying humans are intrinsically selfish. It’s a pretty nuanced statement. Classic conservatism leans toward encouraging the selfish side, in the high priority it places on individual rights. [I do not consider today’s mask-refusers & social-distance-scoffers true conservatives. They are reactionary, dittohead spinoffs of the overweening libertarian encroachment.] Liberalism acknowledges the selfish side, promoting govtl organization & laws that curb it to benefit the collective. I see no naive trust in innate unselfishness there.
Perhaps man is basically neutral. The tabula raza. Perhaps we are mostly products of our environment. Raise a human in bitterness and without hope and he will loot a store he sees as a symbol of oppression or an opportunity in the face of a societal breakdown. Raise a man to fear and hate and he will resort to power, power from the muzzle of a gun or from a structure that permits aggression toward other human beings.
Perhaps we are the inheritance of original sin. Man cannot hope to live in harmony with his neighbors without a loving God who promises redemption. Perhaps we are basically good. Man is corrupted by society dominated by autocrats.
Thanks for the post. I love to think.
Yes. I like the Fullan quote. Look no further than the two sides of the hunter-gatherer societies from which we developed: cooperation and tribalism.
Heard a CSPAN caller-in today, veteran of ’60’s urban riots, admonishing other blacks to take care of their own communities, that looting is greed not protest – this really misses the mark. People in a riot destroying community property are expressing rage that the community fails to protect and provide, that they are excluded, harmed, denied opportunity by govt institutions. It’s the same reason gilet-jaune protests have ended up in turning over cars and setting fires in France – those not about race, but class– about workers and individuals reqd by law to take the brunt of economic policy on the chin. Here, racism & classism are like chicken and egg.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/video-joe-biden-says-george-floyds-death-shows-open-wound-of-us-racism/
“The original sin of this country still stains our nation today. And sometimes we manage to overlook it. We just push forward with a thousand other tasks in our daily life. But it’s always there. Weeks like this, we see it plainly, that we are a country with an open wound.”
–Joe Biden
“The truth is,” Mr. Biden had boasted a year earlier in a speech on the Senate floor, “every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.”
The Democrats tell us that beating Trump is the single most important possible thing that needs to be done. Yet they put their thumbs heavily on the scale for an old, demented, lying, racist, misogynist to run against the old, demented, lying, racist, misogynist in chief. Actions vs. words, folks.
I know I should not be shocked when your try to normalize the racism of Donald Trump – king of the birthers, fighter for shooting non-white protestors, normalizer of the “good people” who marched in Charlotte and who bring assault weapons to their mass demonstrations instead of signs.
I think the “action” of serving as Barack Obama’s Vice President for 8 years and having a myriad of civil rights leaders endorsing him likely trumps a white (supposed) Bernie supporter with no sympathy for all the African Americans who have died because of Trump’s “me-first” pandemic response lecturing other people about how racist Biden is.
You do realize that by your non-stop attempt to “educate” African-American voters about how Biden’s racism is just like Trump’s racism reveals a lot about you.
Biden won because he won the votes of African American voters while Bernie won the votes of white voters. The fact that you think that if the candidate that white people wanted didn’t win, that means that the democrats must be “putting the thumb on the scale” reveals a lot about you.
Think about what your posts reveal about your own view of the illegitimacy of African American voters. Think about what your post about how white people know more about who is a real racist than African Americans reveals.
NYCSP, not sure why you expend energy with this one. If everyone agrees with her, she will switch sides to the contrarian position. Not once have a seen a comment by her that suggests solutions. She only lives to have the opportunity to say, “I told you so!” Having written that, I also can’t control myself with some of the idiocy.
Hey you two . . .
Whether you agree with Dienne or not, it’s more than okay to scrutinize our allies and party. In fact, it’s healthy. I support Biden only because he is a softer version of what we have now, and Trump MUST go!! But keep in mind that a vulgar vampire compared to a polite Frankenstein is less preferable. Yet, monsters are monsters. We have to work with what we have and get this virus OUT of the Oval Office.
It’s pathetic that the best we can come up with is Joe Biden. Trump is a rotten piece of fruit with no preservatives; Biden has preservatives and chemicals and BHT galore, making him seem healthy and ingestible for our country. He’s more palatable. We could have had Bernie, but he made the grave error of referring to himself as a socialist democrat instead of a New Deal Democrat. Biden is a great politician and a pretty bad person. Bernie is a very good person and a pretty lousy politician.
Why not have a conversation with Dienne before you jump to conclusions as to who she is and what she stands for?
Robert,
I disagree with you. Biden is not a “softer” version of Trump. Trump is a fascist, a man who is threatening right now to send troops to shoot down protestors. He is a grifter, a racist, and a xenophobe who glories in hatred and division.
You may not like Biden, but he is a decent man. He will surround himself with knowledgable and experienced people who will spend years repairing the damage that Trump has done to every department of the government as well as the environment and the judiciary.
Biden is not a bad person. How can you say such things? The only purpose of such negative comments is to persuade some people not to vote, giving four more years to a man who looks at the KKK and sees some “very fine people.”
I liked this comment simply for the great metaphor. “Trump is a rotten piece of fruit with no preservatives; Biden has preservatives and chemicals and BHT galore, making him seem healthy and ingestible for our country.” Great visualization of the rock and hard place many are stuck between.
Robert, she stands for nothing and I’m guessing based on your response, neither do you. Only to be argumentative and contrarian. Show me one thing that she has ever written that is constructive analysis with action plan ideas to change the world for the better. It may well be pathetic that Joe Biden is the choice. But he’s the choice. As I have argued over and over and over again, I will vote for him and, should he be elected, I will be willing to oppose him when his administration is wrong the minute after the election is called. Will you? At a minimum, I know I’ll fight tactical fights, not the existential fight for the nation.
And have a conversation? Are you kidding me? One who NEVER has a constructive thing to say? One who constantly denigrates others that they are not open to argument when she, herself, never acknowledges anyone else’s view. Pul-leez.
Greg,
I am asking you and NYCPSP not to engage in attacks o other readers. Stick to the discussion of issues, not ad hominem responses.
Has anyone done a close reading here, to steal a line from the vile David Coleman?
Biden’s brother is linked to charter schools. Biden was and is still linked to Rahm. Biden is another corporate, more-of-the-SCDD Democrat, despite his virtues. His speaking style appears not as sharp as Trump (speech mannerisms, not actual content, to clarify!), and unfortunately, style very much counts in the USA, even more than substance, alas.
However, I did say that I support Biden because Trump MUST go. How is that discouraging young people not to vote for him? What I tell young and old people and all people is that we must do everything we can to get Trump out of office. I too fear that 4 more years of Trump will turn us into Brazil, a veritable police-state oligarchy. It’s ALL on a spectrum, and we are further along that spectrum because of how the USA has evolved socio-politically.
So I will say it again, rephrasing it, taking off my assistant principal hat and donning my teacher hat in order to differentiate for some students: Biden is not a good choice, but he’s the best we have, pragmatically speaking, and we should support him to get Trump out of office. A slower acting chemical leaves us time to get an antidote; Trump is anything from slow acting.
Once again, It think it’s healthy to have discussions like this, ones that sometimes involve respectful disagreement. We ultimately find that the overlaps far outnumber the incongruities. I hope we are all cognizant enough to see that. An echo chamber produces strong discussions, but not rich ones. One needs both to grow.
You are speaking on the privacy of this blog, so to speak. Just think of the implications of your message if it were the official message of the party. It would depress turnout and turnout is crucial for draining the Trump Swamp. Imaging what will be left of this country if Trump is re-elected. That’s enough to make me wet eager to vote for Biden. Trump would be so emboldened that he might put David Duke on the Supreme Court and Mitch McC would let him.
I hope you also teach your students how the American system of governing is designed to function, how the framers rejected a parliamentary system. They did so because they wanted avoid factionalism in the governing process and force parties and interests to sort them out as much as possible after elections ended. They did so to remove individual citizens from participating directly in governing. The role of the citizen was to monitor and influence politics and governing, which is a continuous process and does not stop with voting. That means one can hold ones and vote for one with whom they disagree, but they must remain engaged should that person be elected. We see in the current era more than ever what the framers sought most to avoid: never-ending political partisanship at the governmental level that only lives on the passions of the day.
I completely agree with you, GregB. You raise such an excellent point! Thank you for saying this.
Civic participation continues permanently (or should) after you submit your ballot. I also have taught students and shaped curriculum culture such that stakeholders have discussions about issues rather than too often including presumptuous comments on the stakeholders themselves.
It’s a great lesson to teach and learn. It integrates psychology sociology, politics, critical thinking, public speaking, and even etiquette while still allowing for endless passionate discussion. Very often, I had seen youth emerging strongly as better debaters than some older, veteran adults. Can you imagine?!
Robert, glad we agree on this. As I used to tell my government students in the short time I was a “teacher” (I can’t claim to have been a real teacher when I see what so many people like you here do day in, day out), the American system of government is frustrating, it’s designed to be so.
Not my ad hominem response: “Yet they put their thumbs heavily on the scale for an old, demented, lying, racist, misogynist to run against the old, demented, lying, racist, misogynist in chief.” Sigh.
Also, Robert, I wish I could be back in the classroom right now to build a reading and discussion class on this song, which relates to topic of this post:
I see a wide variety of POVs within our camp and can empathize. I see yours, Diane, as well as Greg’s.
I am inferring, therefore, that this blog is read more than “privately” (privately vs. publicly?) and can influence young people. Is that what you mean? I don’t think that it’s an outlandish possibility, wanting to tap all faucets. I just wish we had better, but I will say again that everyone MUST support Biden and we MUST get Trump OUT of office ASAP.
I am scared and infuriated.
The multiple protests (and many of which and parts of which are turning violent) are exactly the civil strife I have been talking about on this blog and outside of it for more than 15 years. I have warned against it. Michelle Goldlberg, who I really don’t care for, did write an op-ed in the NYT about America being a tinderbox. It is the blood filled revolution I have discussed often but it is a factionalized, divided one, which only empowers the ruling class further.
With 4 more years of Trump, we will have our public support systems exist minimally or nominally, having privatized everything but the military. Our form of peaceful protests (Occupy Wall Street. for example), if too near commercial activity and transactions, will be legally deemed “economic terrorism”, with a provision that all protests must be a minimum of 10 miles distance from the site where a controversial politician is standing. This is the tip of the iceberg. The Germans did not see it in the 1930s because they were too angry with the Great Depression and found someone to blame. It brought out the worst in their humanism. And eventually, once in too deep, it was too late for them to overtly change their political views without dire consequences. Trump is where this acceleration into fascism begins.
But I am most angry at most of the members of the the great duopoly who sit back and say and do nothing. Shame on them, as well as disease, plague, and tornadoes upon them!!!
Thank you Diane, for the friendly reminder to GregB about ad hominem attacks . . . . And thank you, Greg, for recognizing that I actually do stand for something, and that “something” has some validity. I learn so many things from you, GregB. I appreciate the enrichment you provide. I hope others do also.
Robert, I respect you immensely as a teacher and I will point out when I think you are wrong as I hope you will do with me. I’ve found in my life that I often learn a lot from people who disagree with me on the basis of substantive ideas. Even if I continue to disagree with them, I have a better idea of where they’re coming from.
I also refute that my or NYSCP’s comments on one individual’s comments (they are addressed to the comments, not the person) are “ad hominem attacks.” As NYSCP points out repeatedly (because the assertions are repeated), this individual “normalize[s] the racism of [the Idiot].” This is not an “ad hominem attack.” It is a succinct way of refuting the “what about?” sophistry upon which many–if not all–of the individual’s comments rest. Whataboutism is not a valid method of making any claim. When I point out the libel of “Yet they put their thumbs heavily on the scale for an old, demented, lying, racist, misogynist to run against the old, demented, lying, racist, misogynist in chief.” and call it idiocy, it is not an “ad hominem attack.” It is the least potentially offensive term I can use to point out what seems to me to be an “ad hominem attack” based on willful ignorance and hate. If you consider this to be an “ad hominem attack,” so be it. I’ll ignore this individual’s comments from now on. I urge others to join me.
GregB,
I’m not a teacher. I’m an assistant principal of a high needs, mostly low income public school.
I see that as a distinction without difference! You work every day with teachers and students and try to make them more effective. Good teachers aren’t always in the classroom. For further confirmation, look up Diane Ravitch. 🧐
GregB,
Thank you very much for doing a much better job than I ever could in explaining why I respond to dienne77 and others.
I am responding TO ad hominem attacks, not throwing those attacks out. And the reason that I am responding is because in 2016 too many people remained silent while others made those ad hominem attacks and gave those attacks a legitimacy that convinced a huge percentage of voters that the Democrat running for president was MORE corrupt, more criminal, more awful, than the Republican. Or at best, equally as bad. And that was a lie that was allowed to stand because everyone who tried to point out the lie was accused of being mean or launching ad hominem attacks themselves! Ignoring those attacks instead of pointing out that they were wrong and dishonest gave those attacks legitimacy the way that our ignoring of police brutality gave that a legitimacy. In order to de-legitimize those things, it needs to be called out loudly, not ignored.
Ironically, my critics always attack me for writing long, overly wordy, and admittedly very boring posts. But I do that because I am NOT trying to throw those attacks, I am trying to point out with reasoned arguments why the people making those attacks are not being honest.
“Biden is a great politician and a pretty bad person” — sorry, but that is the kind of false rhetoric that needs to be delegitimized and maybe – just maybe – the people who casually repeat that will start to realize how much damage they are responsible for causing. Biden is a flawed human just like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are flawed humans. Biden has supported policies that are more conservative than I like (but so has Bernie on gun control) and in the long ago past Biden has supported policies that turned out to be racist but also supported many policies that were designed to combat racism. The notion that so many African American voters — especially older ones who were well aware of Biden’s history — would coalesce against a racist who is no different than Trump is absurd and insulting to those voters. And then promoting the lie that it was really the corrupt DNC cheating for Biden? To me, there is only one reason to promote a falsehood like that — to get people to hate Democrats so much that they stay home and allow the racist Republicans to remain in power. It worked in 2016. We should not let it work in 2020.
All white people are guilty of being racist at times. Bernie Sanders himself demonstrated that when he made that unthinking comment exonerating white people who refused to vote for any African American politician as “not racists”! Throwing all politician like Bernie and Biden and Trump into the same pot — “they are all racists” — is wrong because it normalizes the racism of Trump and the Republican Party — the party that seems to have devoted itself to disenfranchising non-white voters by every means possible.
I too greatly preferred Bernie or Warren to Biden. But having more conservative policies than I like is not “bad” and overall Biden is offering more progressive policies than any recent Democrat and rejecting him as a “pretty bad person” is an ad hominem attack. I don’t believe that pointing that out should be considered an ad hominem attack, and I hope it is not, but if it is, then I am guilty and I apologize.
^^^I intended to add that I have utmost respect for Robert Rendo and I find many of your comments to be incredibly enlightening and valuable and I thank you for posting. I hope that my attempt to explain the one phrase I didn’t like is not construed as an ad hominem attack. I enjoy reading your comments, even when I may disagree with some point of view.
^^^
Action = Republicans doing everything they can to disenfranchise black voters
Action = Democrats doing everything they can to prevent that disenfranchisement
Truly, you have to be a racist white person to believe that democrats and republicans are equally racist.
Dienne,
To begin with, the Democratic establishment did not pick Biden. The African American voters of South Carolina did. His campaign was moribund when his SC victory stunned the party. Other candidates started dropping out and they all endorsed Biden.
Beating Trump is the single most important goal of the election of 2020.
The lying sociopath must go. Were you cheered when he announced today that the US would withdraw from the World Health Organization?
Did you like his tweet in which he threatened that the military would be sent to Minneapolis, prepared to shoot looters?
Are you pleased with his total abdication of leadership in the pandemic?
I’m sorry Biden talks to Rahm.
But as reader John Ogozalek said in another comment, I would crawl over broken glass to vote for Biden and oust Trump.
Diane, I am an age mate. The ugly instances and pictures of racist hatred I recall go back past the 60’s to Little Rock, Birmingham, Newark. Sometimes when I see photos of Trump supporters raging about freedom or whatever their faux victimization, I am struck by the ugliness, particularly, of white women–mothers, daughters–who look just like those women of the 1950’s screaming at CHILDREN! All these years later, those images are hard to release as they appear again and again, more dangerously with the open carry weaponization of their racism.
In 1969 as part of my study of early childhood education at a New Jersey state college, I spent a semester practice teaching in a first grade in Newark at the Ann Street School. You may remember the name Anthony Imperiale. He issued a call to arms to keep Black children out of the school and the neighborhood. A very tense time.
I rode to the school with two fellow students–a white guy and a black guy and me a white girl. We were stopped by police for no reason that we could figure out other than the configuration of the three of us riding together.
Frankly, these are devastating times. Thank you so much for keeping me and your readers informed on much of what is going on.
If you haven’t seen it, see the image Bernice King posted:
https://www.upworthy.com/mlk-daughter-shares-powerful-kneeling-message
Good article.
A restaurant owner in Minneapolis whose building was damaged during protests has added his voice to the chorus of activists seeking justice after police killed a Black man in their custody by kneeling on his neck until he became unresponsive.
Gandhi Mahal, an Indian and Bangladeshi restaurant located about a block from the Minneapolis Third Police Precinct, was one of several businesses damaged by fire during protests over the killing of George Floyd, who died Monday.
Gandhi Mahal’s owner, Ruhel Islam, declared his solidarity with the protesters, his daughter Hafsa wrote in a Facebook post about the damage to the restaurant.
“Let my building burn,” Hafsa wrote, quoting her dad. “Justice needs to be served, put those officers in jail.”
“Gandhi Mahal May have felt the flames last night, but our [fiery] drive to help protect and stand with our community will never die!” Hafsa wrote in the post.
Islam told BuzzFeed that he was heartbroken by the damage, but that he understood the protesters’ anger.
“Life is more valuable than anything else,” Islam told the publication. “We can rebuild a building. But we cannot give this man back to his family.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gandhi-mahal-minneapolis-protest-george-floyd_n_5ed142a8c5b6bc97e7682588
Wow, what incredible empathy and generosity of spirit at a time when he could have been forgiven for feeling angry.
“We can rebuild a building. But we cannot give this man back to his family.” Brings tears to my eyes. That America is out there but has been silenced by the loud voices telling us that hating others is making America great again.
Beautifully stated.
Brought tears to my eyes. I will visit his restaurant next time I’m in Minneapolis to give him a hug.
This give great hope! Very humbling and empowering. Filled with restraint, wisdom, and great power, coming from this proprietor.
Fred Rodgers was right: “Look for the helpers.”
I cannot, will not argue any of the above but there is another dimension to this which David Brooks brought out tonight, Friday on the PBS newshour.
[He made some very interesting comments in connection with this.]
It is necessary to equalize opportunities for all citizens, housing, job opportunities, etc, all the things needing a measure of equality about which have been discussed but never sufficiently implemented.
People like Trump do not wish this to take place in my view. They must bolster their ego by believing they are the superior race.
In my view there is within them a deep void because they have never discovered who they are as a human being and that void must be filled by ever increasing adulation, money, fame etc. Because that void can never be filled by such ephemeral things they require ever larger amounts of that fame, adulation etc
David Brooks is a hypocrite. A few years ago, I spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival, surrounded by faux reformers and charter lovers. I said that charters don’t solve the root problem in education and society, which is poverty and inequality. Brooks was in the audience and he wrote a column in The NY Times lambasting my views.
I agree about David Brooks hypocrisy. If he actually cared about racism, he would have abandoned the racist Republican party long ago. Instead, he seems to be the Susan Collins of opinion writing — willing to criticize Trump at times as long his criticism doesn’t impede the ugly power grab and empowerment of the right wing Republican party.
Brooks is one of those guys who would suddenly start seeing the problems with charters if those in power he seems to admire so much suddenly decided your vision of education was the right one. I suppose the best that can be said is that Brooks’ right wing views are not ideological, and if the power brokers suddenly became anti-charter and pro-public education, Brooks would follow.
Exactly, NYC
I can’t listen to the drivel and chyme coming out of David Brooks’s mouth. He is at the NYT mainly as part of its obsessive agenda to be “balanced”. It has only recently starting to show a semblance of balance in the last 2 years because in order to stay relevant and in business, it is now forced to listen more to the masses and defend itself from Trump and company. You take what you can get.
I like David Brooks because his smarmy double-talk serves to hone Mark Shields’ articulate arguments, rendering Shields ever more persuasive!
As I wrote my college advisor a little while ago, there are four things I never subject myself to: reading or paying attention to Brooks, Bret Stephens, David Frum, or Thomas Friedman. All are walking, talking definitions of sophistry and hypocrisy and all have made very good livings doing so. Don’t get fooled (again). Apologies to Pete Townshend.
Do Frum, Stephens and Friedman compare to Brooks in terms of hypocrisy?
A few years ago, Brooks married his research assistant (she’s twenty years younger) after divorcing his wife of 28 years. The book written by Brooks and his muse/assistant, published after his divorce, was about “character”. BTW- the resumé of Brooks’ current wife includes Philanthropy Roundtable, an organization that posts articles from the spin tank, AEI, home of Frederick Hess. Her resumé lists her work at Philanthropy Roundtable as a project titled, the “Character Initiative”. Bio’s describe her as a “thinker” and they list her stint at the religious, Ethics and Public Policy Center (an organization that recently posted an opinion declaring the morality advantage of religious schools).
With humor, the site, AWL, shared the couple’s wedding gift registry, adding appropriate comments about $40 Eucalyptus napkin rings.
The Philanthropy Roundtable is an organization of rightwing philanthropies who meet to learn about the latest anti-government ideas and reassure one another that destroying the Public sector is laudable. Reputable philanthropies don’t belong.
Did not know that. Great to know, comedy gold! Frum is a real walking caricature on Capitol Hill. He wanders around various restaurants with thick books, sits alone and “reads” to demonstrate how “intellectual” he is. An odd kind of narcissism. And he really doesn’t like to be reminded about his “axis of evil” speech.
I think David Frum is more intellectually honest than Brooks. He recognized a lot of what was wrong with conservatism and the Republican party instead doing what Brooks does and spending enormous effort normalizing today’s Republicans.
Frum is no progressive, but neither is he a Republican whose guiding belief is power and how to keep it. I agree that his Axis of Evil speech was one of the low points in his career. But he has an intellectual honesty that David Brooks is sorely lacking, even if the policies they support may be more similar than different.
Frum was to Bush as Miller and Bannon are to the Idiot. His “axis of evil” speech and advisement of the Bush administration as both a staffer and later at AEI saw the solution of every foreign policy issue with war as the first option. Anyone who laments the loss of life and other waste caused by the second Iraq war and the willy-nilly incursion in Afghanistan need look no further than Frum and Cheney working in lockstep to get us there. There is nothing intellectual or moral about him. His criticism of the Idiot does not absolve him of his grave sins and no progressive should ever pay attention to him.
GregB,
I thought that Frum’s article in The Atlantic from yesterday was worth reading.
“Trump Is the Looter: The president is exposing problems in America that most did not want to see.”
As someone who also did not realize at the time that the Iraq War was going to be such a huge mistake and cause the kind of damage it did, I suppose I am more forgiving of Frum simply being deluded and wrong, but not evil, when he wrote that. I put Frum in the same category as John Merrow, someone who had a change of heart and spoke up when having that change of heart was NOT something that was going to help them financially or career-wise. I certainly have been wrong on a lot of issues in the past, and not because I was corrupt or evil — just someone who believed something that turned out to be wrong.
(Maybe also because I’m old enough to remember when some on the left were angry that George HW Bush ended the Iraq War 1 too early and gave up his chance to easily get rid of Saddam Hussein and all the horrifying things he was doing — and they were really, really horrible. Of course, we were all wrong about how easy it would have been and all the blowback that would cause.)
I completely understand why you despise Frum, and you have every right to do so, just wanted to explain why I am more inclined to read what he says, even if I don’t agree with some of his policies.
I agree. I always find it interesting and important when Republicans like Frum recognize that Trump is a menace, is destroying our country and also the Republican Party, which has been completely captured by a sociopath.
I respect and accept your views, but to me the element that is missing from many of these “Never [he whose name will never again be said by me]ers” is contrition. Where is Frum’s contrition about the seminal role he played in getting our nation into a criminal war? Where’s the contrition for the more than 700,000 Iraqi deaths, the journalists and aid workers killed, the 4,424 deaths and 31,352 wounded American soldiers, and the unleashed chaos that lives with us still? (As I mentioned in an earlier post, where’s Rick Wilson’s contrition for running a savage, lying propaganda campaign against Max Cleland?) To me, Frum has more in common with Albert Speer than anyone else I can think of right now.
We should be very careful about ascribing rational thought to mass gatherings. Lynch mobs were not so much the product of moral outrage at a potential perpetrator as they were collective response to an immediate removal of stable authority. You can bet that the Trump campaign is already gearing up to use the riot to create fear, just as the Nixon campaign used the unrest in 67 and 68 to paint the country as in desperate need of a strongman. This has been part of the Republican playbook ever since. We will protect you, the opponents will not. If the majority of voters who go to the polls agree, we will get four more years of the present administration.
No one with any empathy at all can support the behavior of the police in this situation. No one with any sense of reality can deny that police work attracts some who desire power over the members of their community. But for every business owner who stands in solidarity with the protest (see above comments) there will be five people who live somewhere in America who will see this as a vindication of their own negative views of whole groups of people. This will lead them to vote for the administration that has convinced them that he is the only thing between them and a threat. Any threat will do. Let us hope that this one will not become the ticket to re-election.
What we are living through:
A pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu.
A depression and unemployment on the scale of 1929.
Incompetent leadership / corruption on the scale of Warren G. Harding.
A need for racial justice on the scale of the 1960’s.
As someone commented on Twitter, I feel sorry for students of America history when they get to 2020. It’s gonna big a heavy chapter.
“A pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu.”
Covid is bad, and I am wearing my mask when I go into the grocery, but I pray this is not allowed to be the disaster the 1918 flu became. The virus I grew up hearing about from my father’s generation (my father’s family was very old compared to my peers) took possibly a fifth of the world’s population. That pandemic, of course, was impossible without the massive movement caused by the Great War and by the collective placing of the war aims above international health. To the degree that the modern wish-I-could-be-a-fascist or a king movement is trying to ignore Corona, it is very serious. Still, I insanely hope for man’s better nature to prevail.
Reportedly, the Minneapolis policeman charged with murder is now facing divorce from his wife who described him as the big softie.
You may be correct, Roy. Did we lose a comparable percent of Americans in three months of the Spanish flu? 104,000 people are a lot.
Kind of stark when you put it together like that. The American Dream has become the American Nightmare, perhaps even the World’s Nightmare.
I’ve been trying to hold it together for my three adult children, Greg, but I kind of lost it yesterday reading aloud to my son the comments of the restaurant owner in Minneapolis. I’m usually pretty sanguine about the shortcomings of our nation historically, but all these things taken together are a lot.
I have a weird feeling that my life has been preparing me for this moment. I understand better than ever why the grandfather I never met was executed for relatively small, but important gestures of resistance against Naziism while being a border patrol soldier in the German army. I think I understand now why he was at peace with the decisions he made. But I too have to try to hold it together when certain gestures or acts inspire me. Perhaps that’s why I seem shrill to some. I just hope I have the courage to put my life on the line should the unthinkable happen later this year.
There can be no equality of any flavor as long as there are the “haves and have nots.” Black lives do not matter, nor do white lives. People aren’t living for anything of value – they just want more…the newest iPhone, sneakers, luxury car and so on. It’s all a game – a competition for status and power. Really, not much has changed in thousands of years…there are just a lot more people and way less resources to go around. Capitalism doesn’t work, but socialism won’t work either. What is the answer? Probably a reset for humanity.
Sometimes, the most thoughtful, articulate observers are themselves outsiders. So it is here with Trevor Noah:
Excellent, Chisritine . . . Noah is a luminary and an intellect . . . . . a side of himself that is not cmmerial enough for his backers and production studio, but he’s unabashed to show it and use it for the greater good.
What really annoys me is a bunch of pundits and quack analyst-type(on both left and right) are still seeing racism/violence a partisan issue. You might have heard something like “protesters are looters(Trump), “systemic racism is a myth(Fox News, Tucker Carlson), “those who got arrested in violent protests are a left Antifa (William Burr),” “Russia has been involving in instigating racial tension (a MSNBC legal analyst Barb McQuade making a debunked conspiracy)” etc.
I just can’t believe local/national leaders are still echoing a robocall like “follow-the-order” mantra without even bother looking at a root cause of systemic corruption in police-prosecutor-attorney-judicial system pipeline. That’s what has restored institutional racism, militarization of police force, cover-up of murdering innocent civilians of color, exoneration of killer cops from blatant murder. Minneapolis is one of the cities that have a long history of injustice, where public officials like to act in pretense for the lives of blacks, hispanics, Asians, and immigrants. People like Gov.Minnesota Tim Walz and Senator Amy Klobuchar are not really helping, either. Their statements only fly in the face of utter blindness and hypocrisy.(Walz is echoing Trump’s sentiment by attributing violence to outside protestors without corroboration. Klobuchar actually exonerated Derek Chauvin from his previous record of police violence while she was a state attorney) to the core of systemic injustice against people of color.
Time to reset the mental clock and get ready to dismantle the cycle of systemic corruption in public institutions. We need to choose the right people at local/state/national level. We need a thorough and transparent accountability. We need to weed out the ALEC and likeminded private think tank/philanthropy pests in order to stop the spread of ever-lasting corrosion. It’s long overdue.
There is a video of a bunch of white people in Minnesota — mostly men, a woman, and some holding skateboards — systematically breaking windows in a store, one after another, when one of the leaders of what had been a peaceful protest (holding a megaphone) asks them what they are doing and follows one of them as he walks away.
Yes, there is a lot of understandable anger by people protesting, but the vast majority of those marching out there are not trying to destroy. The white young people who systematically broke the windows of the store were looking to destroy and by “normalizing” that destruction, encourage those around them to do so.
So it certainly seems as if those people ARE outsiders. But William Barr wanted to blame it on the left, while Democrat Tim Walz rightly pointed out that they are much more likely on the right. The attitude of the white guy toward the female African American woman with the megaphone was clearly one of disdain, not one who supported the cause the protest was about.
In fact, in NYC, two white sisters from upstate NY were arrested after one threw a molotov cocktail at the police. That sister had an arrest history going back 3 years of causing havoc. They were outsiders and I doubt very much that their concern for racist policing was anything but an opportunity to destroy.
And instead of targeting and arresting those people, too often it seems that police were simply targeting the groups of peaceful protesters.
I do agree with you that the systemic corruption and racism in public institutions does need to be weeded out. But I think that Gov. Walz agrees with you as well, and his pointing out that outsiders were trying to de-legitimize the movement was in service to that, not a denial of that.
i write about racism too on my blog, very interesting topic.
Thank you for writing this. The final sentence, “vote as if your life depends on it” was poignant.
I am a woman of colour, in the UK and recently wrote a piece on white privilege. https://duskuntilyawn.wordpress.com/2020/06/05/what-is-white-privilege/ I’m so tired of some white people pretending that these privileges don’t exist, because they do. The privileges are so invisible and embedded in our world so people don’t notice.
I still believe humans are smart enough to fix the racial problem and we will start thinking how we would feel if we were treated in the way we treat others one day. It is hard for me to believe that something so simple could be so difficult for us to do. Great post
I watched that second video of the murder of Raychard Brooks and I couldn’t sleep all night. That is awful. We all need to learn to live differently and not to generalize when it comes to people of different colors or backgrounds.