"This Is Against My Civil Rights, I Have a Right to Be Serviced!"

This is how I, an anti-masker, think I look:

This is how I, an anti-masker, really look:

You're watching, and I hope listening to, Cindy Falco-DiCorrado, a 61-year-old Floridian warrior for God. (The entire video can be seen here.) She's apparently a well-known character in her neighborhood:

Falco-DiCorrado, a staunch Trump supporter, was forced to resign from her volunteer seat on the County's Community Redevelopment Agency Advisory Board in 2017, following controversial remarks made during a meeting to designate Boynton Beach a sanctuary city.

Falco-DiCorrado allegedly told Black residents at the meeting, "You're lucky we brought you over as slaves, or else you'd be deported too." She later told the Palm Beach Post her comments were misinterpreted and she didn’t mean any harm.

Of course she meant no harm, she did nothing wrong, and her comments were misinterpreted.

While I was looking for an image of Joan of Arc for this post, I noticed that many of the contemporary pictures were devotional, and almost all of those show her with long hair. The one above shows her wearing a long skirt. But Joan was burned partly for her refusal to conform to the gender norms of her day: she cut her hair short, and wore "men's clothes."  It's odd, because her gender nonconformity is a very well-known part of her legend, of her brand.  Yet those who adore her as a saint seem to need to femme her up; why, I wonder?

I think the answer is that she's a saint, so they believe they're honoring her and glorifying her by falsifying her image to suit their prejudices; which means they are actually shrinking her to their own size. It's not just saints: people tend to do this to anyone they admire: artists, politicians, athletes, Messiahs.

My House, My Rules

Y'know, I think I've learned a lesson this weekend, watching some of the fuss over a Virginia restaurant's refusal to serve Trump's press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  That lesson is that many reasonably well-educated people have no idea what "civility" means.

If you haven't heard, Sanders and seven other people drove up to Lexington, Virginia (pop. 7,000), and walked into a small (26 seats) restaurant called the Red Hen.  The staff recognized her and called the owner, who was at home. The owner arrived, asked Sanders to step aside with her, and politely asked her to leave. Sanders politely agreed.

Sanders went back to the table, picked up her things and walked out. The others at her table had been welcome to stay, Wilkinson said. But they didn’t, so the servers cleared away the cheese plates and glasses.

“They offered to pay,” Wilkinson said. “I said, ‘No. It’s on the house.’ ”

One of the servers mentioned the incident on his Facebook page, and the shit hit the fan.  Sanders tweeted about it: "I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so ... Her actions say far more about her than about me."  Other reactions were predictable: Trump fans were outraged, predicted that the Red Hen would soon close for lack of business, many Trump haters were delighted.  Large numbers from both groups posted reviews of the restaurant on social sites like Yelp, even though as the Washington Post article notes, few if any had ever eaten there or ever would.  Some Democrats, also predictably, attacked the owner for lack of "civility," saying that Sanders should have been served no matter what.

I saw a lot of online complaints about the lack of "civility" the Red Hen's owner supposedly showed.  I don't think there was any incivility or lack of respect (as I presume Sanders meant) involved.  The owner was both civil and polite, even respectful.  She explained her reasons and politely asked her to leave.  One of the basic mistakes many of the commentators make is their apparent belief that you can't disagree with, let alone cut off socially or in other areas, a person without being civil -- that civility means maintaining friendly relations with anyone, no matter how vile.  And while Sarah Huckabee Sanders isn't as vile as Donald Trump himself, she's his press secretary, lying for him, defending his vilest policies.  She's personally and professionally complicit in his evil.  Even if you believe (as I do not) that the Red Hen should not have refused her service, civility is a separate question.  The same goes for "respect."  If Sanders meant (as I presume she did) that she'd been treated disrespectfully, she was mistaken.

The owner of the Red Hen did not scream profane abuse at Sanders.  She didn't punch her in the nose. She didn't overturn the table, spilling cheese and drinks over the party.  She didn't invite other patrons to throw food at them.  She didn't lock them into a wire cage and beat them, starve them, inject them with drugs to make them docile, or throw them out on the street months later, unwashed and infested with lice.  Since Sanders and her boss and the people they represent support the right of small businesses to refuse service to anyone whose lifestyle or beliefs they disapprove of, Sanders in particular has no ground for complaint at all.

If Sanders were starving, I'd give her food.  But she's in no danger of starving, now or ever.  There are, as her fans crowed on social media, many restaurants where she and her friends and colleagues will be welcome.  Someone, in a tweet I can't find now, speculated reasonably that she'd traveled outside Washington, where "everybody hates her," to find a place to eat.  It seems she made a small blunder in her choice of the Red Hen, and I wonder who recommended it to her.  According to the Washington Post article, "Lexington, population 7,000, had voted overwhelmingly against Trump in a county that voted overwhelmingly for him."  So Sanders somehow lighted on one of the few places in Red America where she might not be welcome.

Another theme that raged in the line exchanges was Who's A Hypocrite Now?  Both Trumpists and liberals invoked the Masterpiece Cakeshop Decision.  The Trumpists asked how libs could object to refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay male couple, yet accept refusal of service for Sanders.  The liberals asked the reverse: if it's okay to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, then why isn't it okay to refuse to serve Sanders?  Of course I think the liberals have the stronger case.  Some liberals argued that the two cases are obviously totally different and if you can't see that then there's something wrong with you.  I agree that there are differences but I don't agree that they're relevant: the refusal to serve Sanders doesn't constitute legal or unjust discrimination.  And since the Right has been opposed to civil rights laws all along, they can't suddenly change their mind without some pretty hefty explaining.

Contrary to some complaints, it is not clear that "discrimination" was involved, and certainly not "prejudice."  "Prejudice" means pre-judging someone without evidence, or based on irrelevant evidence -- assuming that a pale, rather chunky woman will be a Trump supporter for example.  But the objection was to Sanders herself, a public figure, who has defined herself by her words and her willingness to defend the indefensible.  "Discrimination" is similarly slippery.  Some opponents of public accommodation laws like to point out irrelevantly that we all discriminate all the time.  That's true.  But unlawful discrimination is determined and defined by civil rights laws, and it's rather narrow.  People may use the word sloppily, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service because of her words and actions, the kind of person she has shown herself to be.  Someone irrelevantly quoted Martin Luther King's "judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" line at me.  I don't like it much, because we can never really know the content of anyone else's character.  But they (and we) do show something of our character by our actions, our words, the people we choose to associate with and work for, and Sanders has shown us enough about her character to judge her by.  It's discrimination, all right, but not the kind of discrimination civil rights law is meant to prohibit.

It raises another important question.  Public officials at all levels almost never face any accountability for crimes even greater than Trump's, for moral cowardice even greater than Sanders's.  The feeling of many Democrats (leave the Trump fanatics aside) that Sanders should face no accountability, no consequences for her actions or words, also has to be evaluated in the context of the refusal of the Obama administration to punish Bush-era figures who justified and ordered torture and other war crimes, or to punish the fraud and other crimes of business figures who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008.  Between doing nothing at one "extreme" and, oh let's say public execution by fire (the kind of extreme that centrists will think of to show the impossibility of doing anything other than nothing), there are many possibilities.  Compared to the imaginable extremes, being ejected from a restaurant is pretty small accountability for Sanders, and one that I'm sure she will be able to live with.

Glenn Greenwald posted a challenge today:

Everyone accusing each other of hypocrisy over the gay-wedding-baker and Sarah Sanders cases: please state the general principle you support when it comes to the right of business owners to refuse service to customers. That would be a more constructive way to have this discussion[.]

I think this is a good question.  As I expected, the responses were mostly not very constructive, to put it mildly, except insofar as they showed that most people have no general principles on this issue.  People they dislike should suffer, those they don't dislike should not suffer, and there's an end on't.  "It's very simple," one person said to me, and "Seems pretty straight forward," another said to Greenwald, thus showing how little they had thought about it.  Which is understandable -- how much do most of us think about difficult issues?

This takes me back to a question I've been grappling with for some time, namely under which circumstances it is all right to refuse service to someone, or to remove them from a job for actions or words committed outside (or even during) working hours.  Someone scolded me online that it's never right to refuse service to anyone.  This is obviously false, and absurd.  Bartenders refuse service to people all the time, for example.  At the same time, I disagree, and I think most people would disagree if they took it seriously, that any business owner should be able to refuse service to anyone for any reason. The absolutes are unworkable, so we have to judge actual cases in the middle.  This bothers many people, not only on the Right, who want moral absolutes, with no middle ground.

I don't think that general principles can definitively answer Greenwald's question.  That may be our problem.  General principles are useful but they only take us so far, and from there we must wing it, make judgments that may or not turn out to be right.  There don't even seem to be reliable ways to decide whether a judgment is right or wrong.

"It Is Curious How Thoughtlessly We Use Words"

While I was in Boston recently, someone recommended Patricia Bell-Scott's book The Firebrand and the First Lady,* about the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray (1910-1985).  Roosevelt, I hope, needs no introduction; Murray was an important activist and writer about African-American civil rights -- and, my informant added, a lesbian.  I'd never heard of her, but my interest was piqued.  The ebook was too expensive for me, but the physical book was on the shelves at the public library when I got back to Bloomington, so I checked it out immediately and am now about 180 pages (out of 360) into it.

It has turned out to be a fascinating read.  I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of Murray before.  Her achievements are too numerous to go into here, and her struggle against poverty and ill health (leaving aside racism and sexism) makes them all the more remarkable.  But here's a taste:

In the fall of 1945, Pauli Murray finished requirements for the master of laws and passed the California bar exam.  The publication of her thesis, "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment," in the California Law Review marked several milestones.  It was her first publication in a law review journal; it was the first essays ever published in a law review by an African American woman; and it was the first law review essay on the subject of sex discrimination and employment [177].

Unable to enroll at Harvard (her first choice) to get a doctorate in law, because the Law School refused to accept women of any color, or to find suitable employment despite her many connections, Murray felt obliged to move back east to care for her elderly aunt.

Her belongings were packed and her train ticket booked when she met Robert W. Kenny at her swearing-in ceremony to the California bar, on December 8, 1945.  Kenny was a liberal Democrat, an advocate for fair employment legislation, and California state attorney general.  Having just read Murray's groundbreaking law review article, he offered her a temporary post as deputy attorney general on the spot.  Until she passed the civil service examination, her appointment would be subject to the return of employees on military service leave.  Murray accepted Kenny's offer in spite of the shaky terms.  In doing so, she became the first black deputy attorney general for the state of California [178].

There were many such firsts in Murray's life; eventually, for another example, in 1977 she became the first African American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.  She seems to have lived more in one lifetime than most people could live in several.  I look forward to reading the rest of her story.

Right now, though, I'm chafing a bit at the book's scanting of Murray's lesbianism.  I don't assume that this is necessarily due to authorial homophobia; Bell-Scott is more concerned with Murray's public career, which was eventful enough. (Also with Roosevelt's: The Firebrand the First Lady is really a dual biography, following both women's lives even when they weren't interacting with each other.  And Bell-Scott buries Roosevelt's lesbian connections: ER's beloved friend, the journalist Lorena Hickok, has been mentioned in passing but her lesbianism has not, nor her relationship with Roosevelt.  A look at the index shows that Hickok's "intimate friendship" with ER is referred to briefly once, and her lesbianism acknowledged, once, a hundred pages later.

In Murray's case, she evidently grappled with her love of women from her teen years onward, and it's not always clear which of her women friends were actually girlfriends.  That may be because Bell-Scott doesn't know, but Murray was a compulsive writer and documented her anxieties and conflicts pretty fully.  Maybe more information has been published elsewhere, and more may come later in this book.  But I found this passage, about her state of mind in her late twenties, very interesting.

Since Murray's hospitalization [for an apparent mental breakdown] at the Long Island Home three years earlier, she had been consulting with doctors and scouring the scientific literature in search of an "answer to true homosexuality."  That Murray asked one psychiatrist if she had "a mother fixation" demonstrated her familiarity with psychoanalysis.  Having rebuffed psychiatric treatment and the theory that her attraction to women was a manifestation of homosexuality, Murray constructed an alternative explanation.  She convinced herself that she was a pseudohermpaphrodite with secreted testes (and she would hold this belief until X-rays of her uterus, fallopian tubes, and the surrounding area proved her wrong).  Such a condition pointed to biology -- specifically, the presence of male gonads and hormones -- rather than mental illness as the source of her attraction to women, her tomboyishness and her lack of interest in feminine pursuits, such as housekeeping [57].

I'm fascinated by this glimpse into conceptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 1930s.  How odd that, though she rejected a medical diagnosis of "homosexuality," Murray invented and embraced a no less medicalized theory of herself as a "pseudohermaphrodite."  And, of course, "biology" and "mental illness" have always been intertwined, whether for sex or for other conditions.  Professionals never quite made up their minds, in this period or later, whether homosexuality was purely mental or the expression of a physical abnormality.  ("Homosexuality" was originally conceived of as a social and quasi-legal concept when Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented it in 1868; it was only appropriated by the medical profession later on.)

The reference to Murray's "tomboyishness" understates the case too.  "Just a few years earlier, Murray had proudly asked Nancy Cunard to publish a photograph of Pete, her 'boy-self.'"  I wonder if Murray ever read Radclyffe Hall?  Murray also liked to wear "men's" clothing, and it wouldn't be off the mark to think of her as a "passing woman."  Bell-Scott also recounts a trip to North Carolina that Murray made in 1940 with her friend (nudge, nudge?) and roommate (wink, wink?) Adelene McBean (aka "Mac").  They were arrested in Virginia for refusing to stay in the back of the bus they were riding.  Only a couple of pages into the story, with the two women in custody, does Bell-Scott mention that Murray "was apparently dressed in male clothing and had told officers, according to one passenger, that her name was Oliver Fleming" (63).  Murray "gave her name and clarified her sex status as they were booked" (64).  There's no indication that Murray's cross-dressing or her adoption of a male persona added to their legal problems, though I'd have expected it to.  As I read all this, I began wondering just what Murray's "boy-self" meant to her.  Bell-Scott doesn't say, but it appears that Murray's life is very well-documented, as indicated by the detailed witness accounts of her and Mac's arrest and her custom of thinking through personal issues at the typewriter.

I'm not interested in deciding what Pauli Murray "really was."  Invert, homosexual, Urning, gay, lesbian, transman, bulldagger -- such terms, as I've written before, are "the fossils of ideologies of what men and women and sex are."  Many people nowadays would jump to identify her as transgender, for example, but I don't think our categories today are any more correct than those of a century ago.  I just want to know more about how Murray saw herself, especially since she clearly thought and wrote about these questions, and left a large archive behind her.  Since she lived into the 80s, she must have come into contact with later constructions of sex and gender, and thought about them.  Well, maybe another book by someone else will address these questions.  Right now, at this stage in Bell-Scott's book, I am dazzled by Murray's gutsiness, energy, doggedness, and intelligence -- brilliance, really.

* Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship -- Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Knopf, 2016).

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

Voters in Houston have overwhelmingly rejected a city law that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity -- along with race, sex, color, religion, and other characteristics already protected by federal civil rights law but not by local ordinance. The law had been passed by the Houston City Council in 2014.  Today in the e-mail I got a press release from the National LBGTQ Task Force Action Fund, which referred to

the city’s ordinance that extends non-discrimination protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people--among 13 other protected classes including race, religion, sex, color, age, ethnicity, disability, national origin, marital status, military status, genetic information, pregnancy, and family status.

There's something off here.  I looked it up, and found that, sure enough, the ordinance prohibits discrimination based on "sexual orientation" and "gender identity," along with 13 other traits.  It doesn't specify lesbians, gay men, or the rest, which would have laid the law open to legal challenge.

I confess that some of the confusion was in my own mind.  I gather that "protected class" does not refer to a group of individuals -- it's legalese for the protected characteristic, but in neutral terms: "race," not "African-Americans"; "sex", not "women."  But the related "protected group" is confusing too.  Wikipedia, in a very brief article, says it "is a group of people qualified for special protection by a law, policy, or similar authority... U.S. federal law protects employees from discrimination or harassment based on sex, race, age, disability, color, creed, national origin or religion."  My point is that "sex, race, age, etc." don't refer to groups, but to all individuals.  A law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation protects heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and bisexuals; a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity will protect cisgender as well as transgender individuals; and so on.  I've said before that I don't know what sort of discrimination cisgender individuals might face, but someone's bound to figure out a way to do it before long.  That's one of the generally-ignored pitfalls (or is it a pitfall?) of civil rights antidiscrimination law: it protects majorities as well as well as minorities.  White men have sought and found relief under existing civil rights legislation, as have heterosexuals and bisexuals who were discriminated against by gay men.  And Christians, despite the whining of some of them, are already (in) a protected class. 

In this respect civil rights law is at odds with the dominant multiculti discourse on (for example) racism, which defines racism solely as structural racism and declares dogmatically that white people cannot suffer from racism.  Perhaps not -- it's evidently a matter of definition -- but they (we) can certainly experience discrimination based on our race.  It's written into the law, though as with many laws the consequences may not have been foreseen.  (Remember the article I discussed a couple of months ago, which treated racism as a consequence of innate human tendencies to stereotype people by their appearance, and declared that all white people are racist.  It also conflicted with the dominant multicultural model in treating racism as a matter of individual prejudice rather than structural factors, but neglected to notice that it also proved that all people of color are racist, since they have the same innate stereotyping tendencies.  When I pointed this out to the diversity manager who'd posted the article on Facebook, he floundered: he hadn't noticed the problem, and still didn't get it, caught as he is in the toils of diversity-management / culture of therapy discourse.  That couldn't be what the article meant, because it couldn't be.  That's the big trouble with diversity management in institutions, whether schools or corporations: people are given authority over others even though they don't really know what they're talking about.  But not to worry, they're just following the orders of their DNA.)

I understand why the Task Force phrased their press release as they did; it's a long-established convention to refer to civil rights laws in terms of the minorities they were enacted to protect, so that many people have come to believe that "Civil Rights" means specifically the rights of black people.  "Gay rights" is shorthand for prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, but many people, gay and straight, take it literally; and so on.  Since most people evidently have forgotten, if they ever knew, what the shorthand is short for, I think it's necessary to abandon the shorthand and spell out the actual meaning for a while.  Maybe it won't do much good.  Opposition to civil rights laws doesn't come from a misunderstanding of what the laws are supposed to do; bigots deliberately misunderstand the laws for their own reasons.  But it can't help that supporters of civil rights law don't undertand the laws either.

The Passion of the Moral Mind

Yo, Is This Racist? suddenly erupted onto my Facebook feed recently,* for the first time in months.

Anonymous asked: I came across this libertarian who said she didn't believe in women's rights but individual rights.  Is it safe to say she's a bigot?

Bigots, always think they’ve found some kind of rhetorical loophole that allows them to ignore the obvious nature of existing inequality, that the reason people who aren’t total pieces of shit support “women’s rights” or “black rights” or whatever, is because those groups of people (and others) have fewer rights than the people who control everything, and that allows them to pretend that people who want more equality in the world are over-reacting, or even that we need “men’s rights” or “white pride” or whatever.

It’s telling, however, that if someone only espouses any rhetoric about equality in support of the PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAVE FUCKING POWER, they miiiiiiiiight just be complete piece of shit bigots, or, I guess, if you want to be nice, so fucking stupid and clueless that they’ve been fooled by this pathetic argument. Could be either, I guess.

It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned a book I read lately that I found really useful: The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality,** by the anthropologist F. G. Bailey.  I hope to read some more of his work, but what I want to bring from The Tactical Use of Passion is Bailey's distinction between what he calls "the moral mind" and "the civic mind":

The moral self excludes, we argued, ideas of right and duty.  But it is evident that such phrases as “not oneself” and “above oneself” make sense only if we measure performance against the rights and duties expected of the person.  In some of these cases displays of emotion (for example, being “beside oneself”) indicate a flaw in the self, an inadequacy.  A person who is beside himself is unable to undertake the responsibilities that normally attach to his status.  Often the judgment means that he is absolved from guilt: “He could not help it.”  Evidently this self, unlike the moral self, is validated by accounting procedures.  It is the “civic” self and it includes an element that is apart from emotions, either dominating them as a control or standing as a rival for the use of available avenues of expression.  In other words, the “civic” self signals that a mind is at work.  Let us look at situations in which this idea of the self controlling emotion (rather than being revealed in displays of emotion) appears [51].

... What reasons could be advanced to justify such an image of the weakness of rationality and the strength of passion?  First the moral self carries its own defenses in that it is rooted in the passions and is therefore immune to rational arguments.  It has a facility for twisting and rendering unintelligible negative messages from outside the relationship: a jamming device, so to speak.  This, too, is a kind of façade: a pretense that the real world can be left to go its own way.  It is also a shield keeping away what Weber calls” the cold skeletal hands of rational orders” and “the banality of everyday routine” [77] ...

I hope it will be fairly clear why Andrew Ti's outburst brought Bailey's discussion to mind.  Bailey doesn't consider the "the moral mind" to be bad; it's one way to organize and prepare for action.  "The civic mind" comes on the job when goals and directions have been decided by "moral" means, and it's time to figure out how to get to the goal.

The thing is, in a narrow technical sense, that Libertarian Lady was correct.  Civil Rights, for example, are rights of the individual, not rights of a group.  But facts should never get in the way of a good ragegasm.

So I take Ti to be exercising his moral mind, waxing passionate for Righteousness.  But my civic mind is at work now, and I'm reminded of some of Sartre's remarks on anti-Semitism and irrationality:

I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc."  Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.  They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.  But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.  The anti-Semites have the right to play.  They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.  They delight in act­ing in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.  If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.  It is not that they are afraid of being convinced.  They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.

I recognize the syndrome Sartre was writing about here, and I think this applies to Ti no less than to the "libertarian" he's discussing.

* To be honest, not all that recently.  I'm trying to clear out some posts from my backlog from the Drafts folder.

** Cornell University Press, 1983.

"Special Rights" for Me, But Not for Thee

You know what's funny about this?

Columnist Cal Thomas, radio host Dana Loesch, and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins took part in a CPAC panel on religious freedom Saturday, and they pronounced that times were dire for followers of Jesus Christ.

“I feel like it’s time to make Christians a protected class,” Dana Loesch said, as the discussion reached a fevered pitch of self-pity.

This is what's funny about it, from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, emphasis added:

TITLE II--INJUNCTIVE RELIEF AGAINST DISCRIMINATION IN PLACES OF PUBLIC ACCOMMODATION
SEC. 201. (a) All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

In other words, Christians are already a "protected class." And as apologists for bigotry have been saying for fifty years, if your civil rights are now guaranteed by law, you have nothing to complain about anymore, so shut up shut up shut up.

Of course, there's a catch. The Act doesn't specify which religions you can't discriminate against. Christianity is just one, and the Act refers to all of them. (There are Christians who would consider this persecution in itself, since they insist that Christianity is not a religion but a 'relationship with God', something like that.  So it's a hate crime to say that discrimination against Christians is discrimination based on religion, because Christianity should be singled out by name as a protected class of its own.)  Which means that Christians can't persecute members of other religions, or that right-wing Christians can't persecute other Christians -- and that, of course, they regard as persecution, a "dictatorship of relativism" as a noted Bavarian theologian called it. (Nor are they alone in this: the ultraorthodox Jewish Israeli men who got their jollies by spitting on and vilifying as whores eight-year-old Orthodox girls complained, when they were compelled by other Israeli Jews to stop doing so, that they were being persecuted, just like in Nazi Germany. Yes, really, they did.)

So, when the clowns at CPAC claim that Christians are being persecuted, what they mean is that some Christians -- their kind -- are being persecuted, because they aren't allowed to persecute others for their beliefs. Their kind of Christian isn't exactly a marginal, fringe sect -- there are quite a lot of them -- but they aren't all Christians and they don't speak for Christianity as a whole. But then, NO CHRISTIAN DOES. That includes liberal Christians, who also would like you to believe that they are the True Christians. They aren't. There is no true pure core of Christianity, or of Judaism or of Islam or of any other religion. Which is why the current fuss over whether ISIS is 'really' Islamic annoys me. Of course Isis is Muslim; so are the Muslims who repudiate them. But that's another issue.

Of course civil rights legislation doesn't address all the kinds of discrimination that people can suffer from.  But there is a lot of confusion over what "civil rights" are and what the law covers.  As I've noted before, a lot of people seem to believe that "civil rights" means specifically, the rights of black people.  One indication of this confusion is terminology like "the gay rights movement," which encourages gays and straights alike to believe that adding "sexual orientation" to civil rights laws will protect only gays and not heterosexuals or bisexuals.  (For the same reason, I suspect that there will be some unwelcome consequences as "gender identity" and related language is added to civil rights laws to protect transpeople.  These provisions will also protect cis people.  I can't think offhand of what cis people will need protection from, but as with "sexual orientation," I suspect we'll find out soon enough.)

P.S. While I'm on the subject of unforeseen consequences of legislation, I should mention the Equal Access Act of 1984, which I've seen mentioned in a couple of different books on gay youth that I've read lately.  Christian groups lobbied for the bill to force public schools to allow student religious clubs to meet in school buildings and use school resources, and it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.  According to Melinda Miceli in Standing Out, Standing Together (Routledge, 2005) her book on gay-straight alliances,

... in the hearings leading up to the passage of the EAA, the point was raised that passing the act would also permit school clubs (such as a club for gay and lesbian students) that the religious leaders lobbying for the act did not approve of to meet on school property.  Passage of the EAA was so important to its advocates’ goal of fighting what they viewed as discrimination against religious speech in public schools that they were not dissuaded by this possibility. ... The EAA is now, perhaps, the single most important tool available to students who wish to start GSA clubs, especially after the Salt Lake City case made national headlines for over two years [39].

The EAA was probably intended to get the theocratic camel's nose into the tent, but it had consequences its advocates preferred not to consider.  No doubt they believed that, with Reagan in the White House, they could use the EAA to advance their agenda but no one else could.  But Reagan served his two terms and went back to private life, and imposing reactionary Christianity on the nation has proved more difficult than its adherents expected.  Not only GSAs but student groups espousing non-Christian religions -- or no religion at all -- have found the EAA a useful tool.  I love such little ironies.

Not My Definitive Post on Assimilation

... Nor was this. But I'm getting there.  I'm having trouble with Suzanna Danuta Walters's The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions Are Sabotaging Gay Equality (NYU Press, 2014).  As readers of this blog will know, I'm sympathetic to her position, having written critically on the same topic many times.  But already, just a few pages in, I'm hitting some stumbling blocks.  For example:

No civil rights movement worthy of the name has banked its future on being tolerated or accepted.  Women didn't demurely request tolerance; they demanded voting rights and pay equity.  African Americans continue to struggle not for some bizarre "acceptance" of their skin tone but instead for an end to discrimination in work, in schools, in housing, in the judicial system.  They want, as do all these groups, full and deep integration and inclusion in the American dream.  Disabled Americans don't want to be tolerated; they want streets made accessible to them and laws strong enough to protect them from discrimination [12-13].

Walters has already indulged in an analysis of what "tolerance" and "acceptance" mean, but all the key terms in this passage are just as loaded and ambiguous: "integration" and "inclusion," for example, to say nothing of "discrimination" and "rights."  I've criticized this kind of linguistic determinism before, whether it's espoused by academics or by laypeople: the etymology of a word tells you its history, not its meaning, let alone its use.  Most people, including academics, aren't very clear as to the meanings of the slogans they brandish.  They adopt them because they're timely, in the air, and sound good to them.

Aside from that, it's not obvious to me that the current gay movement puts "tolerance" and "acceptance" ahead of demands for rights and equality and an end to discrimination.  "Rights," "equality," and "discrimination" are frequently invoked in the drive for marriage, entry to the military, and calls for the passage of ENDA, as well as in areas such as religion where they aren't especially relevant.  "Acceptance" and "tolerance" wouldn't have been particularly relevant to the women's movement because women were already part of everyone's everyday life, whereas gays were largely invisible and presumed to have no connection to straights.  "Tolerance" was part of the rhetoric of the movement for African-American equality, though like everything else it was contested.  Martin Luther King Jr. said to an interviewer, for example, "How could there be anti-semitism among Negroes when our Jewish friends have demonstrated their commitment to the principle of tolerance and brotherhood not only in the form of sizable contributions, but in many other tangible ways, and often at great personal sacrifice?" (quoted in A Testament of Hope [HarperOne, 2003], 370).  He also described how "a situation that many had predicted would be the end of the [Montgomery Improvement Association] left it more united than ever in the spirit of tolerance" (ibid., 454).  It wasn't a central theme of his, but he did use it as a term of approval.

 "Civil rights" has come to be understood as referring to the rights of black people only, which supports what I just said about people not understanding what their buzzwords mean.  It's no wonder that many hostile people have come to think that "gay rights" refers to some supposed "special rights" for gay people, when it's at best shorthand for "the civil rights of gay people," and that's still misleading because civil rights laws cover majorities as well as minorities: whites as well as blacks, straights as well as gays.  Many gay people have been surprised when they found out that, when "sexual orientation" was added to civil rights ordinances, they couldn't discriminate against straight people, or even against bisexuals.  And civil rights are only a subset of what any movement for social justice must concern itself with.

Walters must also know that movements for social justice have always been divided internally, not just about tactics but about goals.  Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Dubois represented different conceptions about the struggle for black equality, as did Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  Feminists have always been divided between radicals, liberals, and conservatives, as have advocates for homosexuals.  Walters mentions Magnus Hirschfeld (once), but I haven't gotten far enough yet to know whether she realizes how different the post-1945 European homosexual movement and organizations have been from her ideal of a "civil rights movement worthy of the name."  It seems that her political analysis is less than fully informed historically.  (So, it appears, is her account of what "how it went" to come out in a major American city in the 1970s, which is reminiscent of skewed accounts I've addressed before.)  I'm sympathetic to her complaints, but already she evinces conceptual muddling that forebodes hard reading ahead.  I will try to finish the book, though.

A Legacy of Misinformation

This Democracy Now! report quotes Ann Coulter being stupid -- not exactly news, I know.

Meanwhile, appearing Sunday on ABC’s This Week, conservative pundit Ann Coulter argued immigrant rights should not be considered civil rights. Host George Stephanopoulos asked Coulter about her claim.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Immigrant rights are not civil rights?

ANN COULTER: No, I think civil rights are for blacks.

ROBERT REICH: See, this is essentially the problem. And the Republicans don’t understand—

ANN COULTER: What did we—can I just say, what have we done to the immigrants? We owe black people something; we have a legacy of slavery. Immigrants haven’t even been in this country.

Isn't Coulter a lawyer?  Since she is, she should be able to read a statute, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  "National origin" could apply to immigrants, but the purpose of the Act was also carefully delineated:

To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.

Civil rights, as I hope you can see, are not for only one group.  A good many people are unaware that the Act protects not only blacks but whites, not only women but men, and so on.  Even leaving whites out of it, "race" covers not only people of African descent but all non-whites.  Whether "national origin" can be stretched to include "immigration status," I don't know, but it's not clear how this Act and its successors would apply to immigrants.  Even legal immigrants (until they get a green card) and visitors must get government permission to work in the US, so refusing to hire someone without such papers isn't discrimination under civil rights law.  (If anything, the "illegal immigrant" problem bespeaks a lack of discrimination against undocumented immigrants, since many US employers prefer to hire them: they're cheaper and more vulnerable.)

I think I've mentioned before that many people seem to think that "Civil Rights" means "black people's rights," just as they generalize "discrimination" beyond the specified domains of the Civil Rights act.  You can see this when someone defends, e.g., racism as discrimination by pointing out that there are all kinds of discrimination, like someone five feet tall will not be hired as a professional basketball player.  True, but "discrimination" in civil rights law has a defined, limited meaning.  In the same way, commonly used terms like "gay rights" or "women's rights" are confusing shorthand for "the civil rights of gay people" and "the civil rights of women" -- though, again, forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation ("gay rights") or on sex ("women's rights") also protects heterosexuals and men.  (I believe I've also seen people try to define the "civil" in "civil rights" as "polite," which is not what it means in that context.  Others have similarly misunderstood the "civil" in "civil marriage.")  So Coulter's not the only one who's confused.

There was also this bit, in the same segment:

DR. ALFREDO QUIÑONES-HINOJOSA: We’re all humans. We all have the same abilities. We all have the same potential.

No, we don't all have the same abilities.  But legal equality doesn't mean sameness.  As for potential, there's no way to know what anyone's "potential" is, but there's no reason to believe that everyone has an equal amount of it.  But even people with different abilities and potentials are to be treated equally under the law.  Is this really rocket science?  I've been amazed at how many people don't get it.

Of course, Coulter's remark that "we owe black people something; we have a legacy of slavery" is disingenuous.  The American Right doesn't think that America owes black Americans anything, and has constantly opposed civil rights legislation, let alone affirmative action.  The real reason for antidiscrimination law and affirmative action, however, is not to redress the legacy of slavery but to counter the American tradition of white racism in the present.

It's true that "immigrant rights" aren't civil rights, but that's because "civil rights" refers to a subset of rights, not to the people who are entitled to them.  Everybody gets civil rights.

Christian Pride

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked today to this Washington Post article on the controversy over same-sex marriage in black churches in Maryland.

All of a sudden, they are bigots and haters — they who stood tall against discrimination, who marched and sat in, who knew better than most the pain of being told they were less than others.

They are black men, successful ministers, leaders of their community. But with Maryland poised to become the eighth state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage, they hear people — politicians, activists, even members of their own congregations — telling them they are on the wrong side of history, and that’s not where they usually live.

Sometimes, the pastors say, the name-calling and the anger sting.

Wow! I can totally relate, y'know, because I've experienced anger and name-calling too -- from their side. When you take a moral stand, you have to expect some anger and name-calling, and you don't whine about it.  (If you're a Christian, you're supposed to glory in it.)

... But Thomas and the 77 other Baptist ministers in the association do not see same-sex marriage as a civil rights matter. Rather, they say, it is a question of Scripture, of whether a country based on Judeo-Christian principles will honor what’s written in Romans or decide to make secular decisions about what’s right. In Maryland, as in California and New York, opinion polls have shown that although a majority of white voters support recognition of same-sex marriage, a majority of blacks oppose it, often on religious grounds.

This is a false dichotomy. Freedom of religion, for example, is a matter both of civil rights and of Scripture and religious belief. Many religions, and subdivisions within religions, require the chastisement of people with dissenting beliefs. (At first I wrote "persecution" there, but that's not how the religious see the killing, torture, and expulsion of people with the 'wrong' beliefs. "Persecution" is what you do to me, not what I do to you, even if we do the same things.) For Christians, the target can be non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, "pagans") or it can be other Christians (Catholics vs. Protestants, Anglicans vs. Baptists, and everybody against "heretics"). In the days when Christians took their faith seriously, as a matter of life or death (life for me, death for you), it was absurd to argue that people had a right to believe the wrong thing. As Robert Wilken wrote in The Myth of Christian Beginnings (Notre Dame, 1971),

Most English-speaking American Protestants trace their origins to the colonists who came from England in the early seventeenth century and settled at Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. Parents, schoolteachers, clergymen have told and retold generations of children the tale of persecution and oppression in Europe and the desire of these first Americans to establish religious freedom in the new land so that men might live together peacefully, tolerating different views.

... Even such a fundamental pillar of American life as the separation of church and state is widely thought to be an inheritance from the first settlers. Yet those Pilgrims never dreamed of establishing religious freedom in their colonies. Indeed, they had no idea of toleration. "All Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keepe away from us." And another: "Tis Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration. ..." The land, however, was spacious, and men could, if they found the atmosphere confining, simply move on to form a new colony [8-9].

There's debate nowadays over whether freedom of religion includes freedom from religion. As you can see, freedom of religion in America traditionally meant my freedom to burn you at the stake, unless you exercise your freedom to get the hell out of Dodge first. But we've left those days far behind in our secularist abandonment of all traditional values.

Still, as late as the 1960s and after, the Civil Rights movement had opponents who insisted that the Negro question was not a matter of civil rights but of Scripture, and whether a country founded on Christian values would honor God's wishes or not. The material I'm about to quote comes from the journalist Robert Sherrill's Gothic Politics in the Deep South (Ballantine, 1969), which has a chapter on the topic. Page numbers refer to this book.

The chapter begins with a quotation from the late Senator J. Strom Thurmond: "This war we're in [over desegregation] is basically a fight between the believers in a Supreme Being and the atheist" (234). (Thurmond, you may remember, managed to defy God long enough to father a daughter on his family's black maid.) One of the ministers quoted in the Post article said, "It’s really believers against nonbelievers." Mostly the chapter is devoted to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, "the school that dismissed Billy Graham as a student for breaking rules, later gave him an honorary Ph.D., then reversed itself again and damned him as a heretic in an argument that still rattles the Fundamentalist world" (237).

Sherrill describes with bemused awe the restrictions on BJU students in those days:

A student who is merely caught inside -- not necessarily buying anything, just inside -- any of a dozen anathematized stores near the campus is automatically dismissed from BJU. These are stores -- drugstores and grocery stories, as well as eateries -- that obtained liquor licenses over the protests of the college. Also the students are not allowed to:

Listen to jazz on the radio, or sing or play it themselves.
Go into the gym in mixed groups.
Date off-campus without written permission.
Sit or lie down on blankets anywhere on the 185-acre campus.
Leave the campus after 10:30 p.m.
Borrow anything from townspeople.
Release any information to newspapers without getting it approved by the administration ...

The parade-ground crackle is awesome. Students rise with a bell, and go to sleep with a bell; they must attend all chapels; they must go to all meals; they must study at certain times and not study at certain other times; they must wear certain clothing (stockings for the girls at all times; for the boys, ties to class, coats at evening meal); girls must not loiter in the halls; and all classes must open with a prayer, and all discussion groups close with a prayer [241].

(By the way, I used to work with a man about ten years my senior who thought it a shame that students nowadays aren't required to dress the same way at meals at Indiana University -- a state school, mind you -- as they were when he attended Ball State in the Fifties.)

But then, as "Dr. Bob [Jones], Sr, was fond of telling the BJU students in chapel, 'If you don't like it here you can pack your dirty duds and hit the four-lane highway'" (240). Freedom of religion, just like the Pilgrim Fathers!

The Founder (as he often called himself) explained, "If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty because He made racial separation ... It is no accident that most of the Chinese live in China. It is not an accident that most Japanese live in Japan ... " (247). But Bob Jones III explained to Sherill in an interview:

I don't want you to ... don't misconstrue this as an attack upon the Negro -- it's not. We love the Negro people. Some of the finest Christians I've ever known were Negroes. In fact, they put me to shame. And I have looked at several Negro Christians and wished to God I could be as Christlike as they are. And among Christian Negroes there is no strife between them and us -- we are brothers in the Lord. I'm for the Negro being able to have rights, to be able to ride on the bus with the white man, to eat at a restaurant if he wants to, to have education in a state institution -- he pays taxes like everybody else and he should have the privileges his tax money brings. I believe this and I'm all for it [247].

"He seemed to be heading toward a modest pitch for integration," Sherrill reflected, "but I knew he wouldn't be able to make it all the way" (248). I'd point out that Jones's rhetoric is perfectly mirrored by today's antigay Christians, who assure us that they love us, and are not against letting us visit each other in the hospital, and recognize us (as one of the ministers in the Washington Post article put it) as fellow sinners. "This young man sitting across the desk from me, godlike in his certitude, was also stretching forth a finger to touch the Negro into a life of fellowship," Sherrill continued. "But there was still the small gap, in this case requiring his imagination to effect the bridge, so I knew it would never happen."

Jones did not disappoint.

... Until we have our redeemed, supernatural bodies in Heaven we're not going to be equal here, and there's no sense in trying to be. Here's what I say. The Negro -- and I'm not, it's not my own feeling -- but a Negro is best when he serves at the table, when he does that, he's doing what he knows how to do best. And the Negroes who have ascended to positions in government, in education, this sort of thing, I think you'll find, by and large, have a strong strain of white blood in them. Now, I'm not a racist and this is not a racist institution. I can't stress that enough. But what I say is purely what I have been taught, and what I have been able to study in the teaching of the Scripture [248-9].

I'll spare you the ensuing tirade against the United Nations, but it's worth mentioning because today's Right continues that vendetta.

So, you may be thinking, this is one wacko college, but they only speak for themselves. I quoted the Joneses because they were handy, but I remember hearing the same arguments from racist whites throughout the period. The Christian schools that sprang up all over the country, but particularly in the South, from the 1950s were intended to hide racism behind a religious front. The trouble was, they claimed tax-exempt status as well, and managed to get it for a long time, supported by the Supreme Court. (The same question is arising about Christian schools and gay students.)

Besides, for all its marginality, Bob Jones University achieved a kind of martyr status on the Right when it lost its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating. (BJU had begun admitting black students in 1971, but until 1975 they had to be married, and even after that they could not be in an interracial relationship. Despite Jones Sr.'s remark about God putting the Chinese in China for a reason, the school had always admitted Asian students.) The school took the fight to the Supreme Court, where it lost in 1983, despite then-President Reagan's intervention on BJU's behalf. "Reagan would later say that the case had never been presented to him as a civil rights issue." In 2000 George W. Bush visited BJU to deliver a campaign speech, igniting a firestorm of criticism which led to the school abolishing its policy against interracial dating. Bob Jones III told Larry King that it was "a rule we never talk about" and "We can't back it up with a verse from the Bible." Most damning, BJU abandoned its official racism not under government pressure, but under criticism from the worldly and ungodly. (When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Not even at Bob Jones University.) Keeping up with the Joneses isn't easy.

Funny how these eternal-will-of-God, God's-ways-are-not-our-ways policies have a tendency to crumble over time. But you know, the anger and the name-calling sting. Could it be that Christian opposition to same-sex marriage will go the same way eventually? Probably.

But again, the point of going over this history is to point out how the same themes keep recurring in Christian bigotry. Was racial equality a civil rights issue or a religious issue? It was both, of course. Is same-sex marriage a civil rights issue or a religious issue? Both, of course. In both cases, it's illegitimate for churches or other religious institutions to dictate social policy. That they can't see that they are repeating the same worthless arguments that were made against the Civil Rights Movement a half-century ago speaks very badly for them, as men of the cloth and as human beings. Somewhere the apostle Paul said that if Christ wasn't raised from the dead, then his preaching was in vain and Christians' faith is in vain; and Christians are of all men most to be pitied. That's pride speaking, Christian pride; it's certainly not evidence for the Resurrection.

Back to Nathaniel Thomas, the minister quoted before in the Post article:

Take the word ‘marriage’ out of this bill, and we’re pretty much in agreement,” Thomas says. “Everyone should have full legal rights and would have them with civil unions. You wouldn’t see me down there protesting against civil unions. The state is the state, and the church is the church. I understand that. But put the word ‘marriage’ in there, and now you’re redefining something that is in the Bible and in our principles as one man and one woman. Why do you need to use a biblical word in a civil situation?”

If Thomas and his allies really feel this way, they should be lobbying to take marriage out of the civil sphere altogether, including for heterosexuals, and give civil unions to everybody who wants state recognition for their relationships. Can you imagine the fury that would ensue over that? It would come mostly from Christians. The word marriage is already "in there." (Does he think Loving v. Virginia should have settled for giving the Lovings a civil union while denying them marriage?) Thomas must know that he's lying in his teeth, because the Bible does not define marriage as one man and one woman: polygamy is the Old Testament norm, and the New Testament has nothing to say on the matter. Christians abandoned polygamy to conform to Roman norms, not for biblical reasons. Nor is marriage a biblical word; it can be found in most religions and most cultures. (By his standard, non-Judeo-Christian heterosexuals shouldn't be allowed to marry either.)

As I've noticed before, the biblical prohibitions of sex between men (and I agree that they are there) aren't about marriage: men aren't allowed to commit buggery even if they are not married to each other. Yet Thomas is willing to ignore Romans and Leviticus, even to extend full civil rights to sodomites and sapphists; he only draws the line at civil marriage. How does he justify that? His hypocrisy is staggering, especially here:

Over and over, the ministers return to the image that some supporters of same-sex marriage have painted of the church as hater. “There is not one of us who doesn’t have persons in our family with that lifestyle,” Thomas says. “And I tell them, ‘You are still mine.’ ” His voice cracks; he halts for a moment. “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. No, I will not discriminate against him. We are a people of mercy. But the state may not tell me that I must sanction his behavior, just as I may not sanction behavior of the adulterer or the liar.”

Thomas already sanctions "his behavior," by his willingness to let those with "that lifestyle" have civil unions. Nor will legalizing same-sex civil marriage force him to sanction "that lifestyle," leaving aside the fact that he already sanctions it. The Maryland bill already includes a completely unnecessary religious exemption, since churches are not required to recognize even heterosexual marriages that don't meet their cult requirements. And if this debate is between "believers and nonbelievers," which suggests that it's only non-Christian gays who will want to get married, then what does Thomas have to worry about? (In fact, there are plenty of gay Christians who'll want church weddings, and being Christians they view the First Amendment as a mere piece of paper. But in time the churches will come around without state pressure, just as they did on race.)

Looked at rationally, it's hard to see what the fuss is about. Certainly it's not a religious issue, except insofar as these shameless bigots are making it into one. But all religious issues are made by human beings. Maybe it's not a civil rights matter either; the civil rights issues involved are shaky, in my opinion, but it's not necessary to view same-sex civil marriage as a civil rights issue in order to legalize it. These men may not want to see themselves as bigots; the truth often hurts. But I can't see what else to call them, except fools.

He Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

I've begun reading the late Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm X, which got a lot of attention when it published earlier this year. I'm only about 70 pages in today, but one subject that caught my attention was Marable's account of black people's civil rights struggles in the north, before and during World War II. Lately I've encountered a few references to the Civil Rights Movement by white commentators who seem to have assumed that the movement began in the southern states in the 1950s after the Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. So it's useful to read about matters like this:

In response to blacks' modest gains in employment [in the 1930s and 40s], thousands of white workers participated in "hate strikes" during the war years, especially in skilled positions. In July 1943, for example, white racists briefly paralyzed part of Baltimore's Bethlehem Shipyards. In August the following year, white streetcar drivers in Philadelphia, outraged at the assignment of eight black motormen, staged a six-day strike. In response, Roosevelt dispatched five thousand troops and issued an executive order placing the streetcar company under army control [56].

(No wonder the Right still considers Roosevelt a Communist! He nationalized a streetcar company! Over nothing!) That white Americans were willing to let their racism trump patriotism during wartime is a sign of how deep-rooted -- endemic, to use a word our President doesn't think applies -- white racism is in this country. And the expression of that racism wasn't lost on black Americans at the time.

None of the meaning of these events was lost upon African Americans, many of whom began to question their support for America's war effort. ... Although the vast majority of blacks still supported the war, a militant minority of young African-American males refused to register for the draft; others sought to disqualify themselves due to health reasons or other disabilities.

After a relatively calm period in black-white relations -- or perhaps better put, one with a less aggressive push by blacks for equality -- a new era was opening, characterized by black resistance and militancy. The Negro March on Washington and the civil rights rallies and demonstrations led by [Adam Clayton] Powell [Jr.] in Harlem provoked fear and reaction among whites. Government authorities tried to derail the burgeoning movement by restricting the freedoms or activities of African Americans and to impose Jim Crow even in cities and states without legal racial segregation laws [56-57].

This is an important part of the history that the Right in America wants excluded from history education, because they want the schools to "dispense not knowledge but a compendium of selected events, personalities and interpretations. More important, knowledge was eliminated of such events and personalities as were deemed to have no usefulness by the ideologues" of the Republican party. The words I just quoted, by the way, come from a 1994 letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, but I confess I took them out of context: the writer was denouncing the accurate teaching of American history, which he saw as a page from the strategy books of the Bolsheviks and Nazis. The mindset is still with us, closely associated with the Tea Party movement. So, it's important that we educate ourselves, and each other.