Author: Scott

Remembering 9/11

Posted on by Scott

It’s hard to believe 22 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of that day. I still remembering being on the way to work when I heard the news on the radio of the first tower being hit by a plane. I still remember a lot of my coworkers with children in school leaving the office early to pick them up and go home. I still remember how soon afterwards letters laced with anthrax started showing up in the mail.

I personally didn’t lose any family or friends in the attacks. But a girl I was seeing at the time lost her older sister, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald—a firm noted often in the news at the time for just how much of their staff they lost. I remember spending a lot of time on the road between DC and New York visiting her, and supporting her and her family at the memorial service.

The intervening years have made certain memories fuzzy—fuzzy enough that some people engage in mythmaking when it comes to the country being unified by the attacks. But Spencer Ackerman remembers the way things really were–particularly in New York City. This piece I read yesterday is a stark reminder of how our nation actually treated Muslim Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He plans to post follow-up pieces that I am looking forward to with great interest.

I wrote last year about how this country’s response to 9/11 would ultimately pave the way for insurrection on January 6th. Were I to update that piece today, I would certainly connect Trump’s various (and ultimately successful) attempts at Muslim bans to the surveillance, harassment, intimidation, and discriminatory treatment inflicted on Muslims in Brooklyn by the NYPD, INS, and FBI in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Years after it happened, I recalled that Trump’s initial Muslim ban kept the spouse of one of my co-workers at the time from joining him. A second co-worker at the same job was married to a man from Somalia, one of the seven countries subject to that ban. Ending birthright citizenship (in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) is another idea that gained currency on the political right during Trump’s term, but has had advocates among so-called conservatives before then.

Other anti-democratic impulses unbound by terrorist attacks of 9/11 threaten every American today, but especially those of us more traditionally and more easily “othered”. The Department of Homeland Security was a bipartisan creation, certain of whose component parts were responsible for civil rights abuses of protesters ordered by Trump, others who were responsible for the vile child separation policy at our southern border. The moral outrage that is Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite the end of US troop deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if Biden wins the 2024 presidential election (which is by no means a certainty), small-d democracy remains under threat in this country.

Unremarked Corners of Social Media: Substack Notes Edition

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It’s been about 5 months since Substack introduced Substack Notes. Some Googling to refresh my memory regarding the timing of the announcement and the impact surfaced articles like this Guardian piece that detailed Elon Musk’s petty response to the launch of a (much smaller) competitor to Twitter. The shenanigans regarding blocked links, searches, and false “unsafe link” warnings have long since ended. An alert from one of the Substackers I follow prompted me to look at the service after some time away.

Here’s my Substack profile:

I wasn’t sure what the Claim Your Handle thing was about, so I clicked through to see:

Instead of the suggested handle, I went with the one I’m increasing using on all social media (and this website):


The Notes feature itself is nicely laid out, making it easy to see your “restacks”, original notes, replies, and other engagement from the Substack community. I only follow a few writers here, and I suppose Notes makes engagement easier. But it’s such a small audience it’s pretty easy to see why Substackers came to rely on Twitter so much to drive engagement with their pieces. It might not even be fair to Substack Notes to call it a social media option. I definitely could see engaging with Substack Notes more if I had a Substack newsletter, but I don’t write long enough or consistently enough for that to make sense (I also prefer to own my words, hence the choice to maintain this blog rather than let any one social media option own them).

Everything Old is New Again: Social Bookmarking Edition

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According to this TechCrunch article, a Fediverse-powered successor to del.icio.us is now available. Back in the olden days of the web, I regularly posted links there to articles that I wanted to share or read later. I moved on from del.icio.us to Instapaper, and used it a ton (and actually read more of the content I saved there) because of the send-to-Kindle feature. Enough years have passed that I don’t recall exactly when I switched from using Instapaper to Pocket, but it might have had to do with original creator (Marco Arment) selling a majority stake to another company.

In the true spirit of the decentralized web, Postmarks is available as code in GitHub that you choose where to host (and connect to the Fediverse) yourself. Per the readme file, the creator of Postmarks put his thumb on the scale in favor of Glitch as a place to host your own instance. I played with Glitch briefly back in February when I first heard of it and found it to be a quick and powerful way to stand up new static or dynamic websites for whatever you wanted (within reason). So I started by visiting the default site the creator of Postmarks set up, pressing the Remix on Glitch button, and started renaming things per the instructions.

I used 1Password to generate the ADMIN_KEY and SESSION_SECRET values for my remix of Postmarks. I initially changed the username from the default (bookmarks) but since the Fediverse name Glitch-hosted sites resolve to is @bookmarks@project-name.glitch.me, I though the default (@bookmarks@genxjamerican-links.glitch.me) worked quite well. Other changes I’ve made to the remix so far include changing the size of the read-only textbook on the About page with the site’s ActivityPub handle and changing the background color from pink to more of a parchment color.

Other minor changes I expect to make include:

  • Fonts
  • Unvisited and visited link colors

I’ve tried searching for the new handle with the Ivory client but it hasn’t shown up yet. There are other features I haven’t tried yet, like the Bookmarklet and Import bookmarks features that I will write about in a future post.

The Presumption of Belonging

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In my occasional attempts to learn from people I disagree with, I watched an episode Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast. Her guest last week was Irami Osei-Frimpong, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Georgia and podcaster who has self-branded as The Funky Academic. She invited him on to talk about SCOTUS decision ruling affirmative action unconstitutional (among other topics), but embedded in the first 40 minutes or so of the conversation (beginning around the 16th minute) was a description and critique of American identity from Osei-Frimpong that I found so challenging that I found myself replaying it to make sure I was actually hearing what I thought I did. What kicked off Osei-Frimpong’s response (which I attempt to transcribe below) was a prompt from Gray regarding a recent interview Senator Tommy Tuberville did where he conflated what white supremacy is with what being an American is.

Osei-Frimpong: I think it’s fair to conflate American identity with white national identity insofar as we are the other. No one conflates American identity with the descendants of slaves. Our Americanness is as a degradation of our being. So we exist as like a not real people. There is a way in which black failure is American, but black self-determination would be communist. Part of an American identity is to treat black people like garbage.

Gray: So the condition of our American status is to be a second-tier, third-tier, fourth-tier member of the society.

Osei-Frimpong: And a condition of their American status is to think of us as second-tier, third-tier, fourth-tier. I think part of the middle class identity is to flee black people. Lineage is the American identity. People have to think about Jim Crow as a forward-facing regime. They were saying that not only are you not anything, but your grandkids won’t be anything. The regime as always not just about you, but of your line. Your great-grandparents weren’t anything, and your grandkids won’t be anything. The regime is realized when you look at the outcomes today. The problem is we think of the Jim Crow regime and race in general as like a static moment … when it was always a statement about a line in the past and a line in the future. And I think that line has held. Anywhere there’s a congregation of black people–80% or above–it’s not someplace that you necessarily want to drink the water. And that is not an accident. People think that Jim Crow just affected lineage property holders–which is true. But it’s not just in property holding. [Jim Crow] overdetermined all of our institutional relationships, including the church, education, and family. I think the black family was overdetermined by the needs of surviving Jim Crow.

a recent Bad Faith Podcast with guest Irami Osei-Frimpong

Osei-Frimpong’s argument regarding the status of black people in America isn’t entirely new (as captured in book-length treatments of the subject I’ve read this year), but neither Wilkerson nor Reed make the case as bluntly that this lower status is a condition of being seen as being American and belonging in America. Through the lens of Osei-Frimpong’s argument, the ongoing discourse around Florida’s recent changes in what is taught about slavery can be seen as a variation on this idea of belonging. Defenders of these changes (including Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) insist on the idea that black people benefited from enslavement because of the skills they gained–as if black people had no skills other than those taught by their enslavers. These are not the arguments of those who actually see black people as equals.

Some defenders of these new standards, such as Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, have gone so far as to call Vice President Kamala Harris a liar in print for characterizing the changes this way. But the list of items he compiles, rather than refuting Vice President Harris’ point, actually does more to confirm it. Some examples:

  • Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit
  • Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures
  • Instruction includes the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery
  • Instruction includes the comparative treatment of indentured servants of European and African extraction
  • Exams the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619
  • Instruction includes how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey)
  • Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries (i.e., Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean slave trade)
  • Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian cultures (e.g., Sumerian law code, Indian caste system)
  • Instruction includes the similarities between serfdom and slavery and emergence of the term “slave” in the experience of Slavs

These and other examples make it clear that the aim of this new curriculum is less to educate children regarding the nature of slavery as practiced in American colonies and what would later become the United States, than to draw false equivalences between it and how slavery was practiced in other cultural contexts. Not once in Cooke’s analysis or his numerous bullet points does term “chattel slavery” appear, which would make clear that enslavement was not merely permanent for those originally enslaved, but generational–passed down to any and all descendants.

Others of Cooke’s bullet points seem selected to convey the message that other enslavers were worse than colonial (and later American) ones, such as these:

  • Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease).
  • Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.

Still other select bullet points seek to valorize those in power and the prevailing system of governance as actually working to end slavery, such as these:

  • Instruction includes examples of how the members of the Continental Congress made attempts to end or limit slavery (e.g., the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that blamed King George III for sustaining the slave trade in the colonies, the calls of the Continental Congress for the end of involvement in the international slave trade, the Constitutional provision allowing for congressional action in 1808)
  • Instructions includes how different states passed laws that gradually led to the abolition of slavery in northern states (e.g., gradual abolition laws: RI Statutes 1728, 1765 & 1775, PA 1779, ma & NH 1780s, CT & NJ 1784, NY 1799; states abolishing slavery: VT 1777).
  • Analyze the contributions of founding principles of liberty, justice and equality in the quest to end slavery
  • Instruction includes the contributions of key figures in the quest to end slavery as the nation was founded (e.g., Elizabeth “Mum Bett” Freeman, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay).
  • Instruction includes how Abraham Lincoln’s views on abolition evolved over time.

The word “ordinance” appears a handful of times, but never in connection with the ordinances of secession, the resolutions drafted and ratified by each of the 13 Confederate states regarding why they were leaving the Union (at least 3 of which mention slave-holding in the context of property rights as their rationale).

One of my personal frustrations with this curriculum controversy being focused on slavery is or isn’t taught is the ways in which it has diverted attention from the virtual absence of any instruction at all, proper or otherwise, about Reconstruction and Jim Crow–a period of history spanning nearly an additional century after the end of the Civil War of what Osei-Frimpong described as “a degradation of our being”. Cooke’s analysis mentions Reconstruction just 3 times. Here is one of those three mentions:

Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction polices for freed blacks after the Civil War (white southerns being called scalawags and white northerners being called carpetbaggers) were targeted.

Florida’s State Academic Standards — Social Studies, 2023, page 16

Cooke’s callout on how Reconstruction impacted certain white people (rather than the black people it was intended to protect) reveals as much or more about his priorities than it does about the curriculum in question. References to the word “compromise” in the standards do not appear to include the compromise of 1877 (of which Florida was one of 3 key states), which ended the Reconstruction era and helped usher in Jim Crow. Entirely absent from his analysis is any mention of the Great Migration, which was at least in part motivated by the abandonment of Reconstruction by the federal government (which rates a scant 6 mentions in an academic standards document 216 pages long).

Jim Crow is mentioned just once in Cooke’s analysis, and only five times total in my own search of Florida’s new academic standards. This takes me to Osei-Frimpong’s second point regarding Americanness and blackness, that Jim Crow is incorrectly seen as a static period in time. His characterization of Jim Crow as a statement about the past and future lineage of black people being “nothing” crystallized for me in a way few previous commentaries have that the intent of Jim Crow’s architects was to ensure a permanent black underclass in the same way their predecessors intended chattel slavery to be permanent. When Osei-Frimpong says “there is a way in which black failure is American”, to me it is a reminder of the ways the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, and Jim Crow, deliberately omit from the record all the ways in which black achievements were consistently hidden, threatened, stolen, and/or destroyed. As a result, well-meaning bureaucrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would write The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which would be used by some to reinforce their previously-held stereotypes of black people with no acknowledgement of how the necessities of surviving Jim Crow might have meaningfully and durably damaged black families. I’m reminded also of the ways in which prominent conservative black public intellectuals (Thomas Sowell in particular) both in the past and in the present have used the economic success of black immigrants like my own parents as a rhetorical cudgel to beat native-born black Americans for their relative lack of success with no acknowledgement of the differences in the circumstances between us or the impact of the multi-generational denial of the benefits of first-class citizenship on black citizens.

Defenders of these new standards include two members of the working group who created them. Dr. William Allen’s training is in political science (not history). The initial defense has been thoroughly discredited by Twitter threads like the one below:

Start of a thread discrediting the examples provided by members of Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup

The thread above calls out numerous errors in the examples provided, such as:

  • Numerous black men who were actually born free, or born after 1865
  • Multiple incorrect professions
  • Including the free white sister of George Washington
  • Including a man never actually freed from enslavement

At least so far, I have yet to read or hear any responses the working group to these errors.

One of the things the Supreme Court did in striking down affirmative action was essentially state that black people do not belong in elite higher education. Antonin Scalia said exactly this during oral arguments for Fisher v University of Texas in 2015, a case brought by the same activist behind Students for Fair Admissions v President and Fellows of Harvard College. By contrast, the much older practice of legacy admissions–despite its history and origins as an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Asian set-aside for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants–went unchallenged by the Asian students of Students for Fair Admissions. Legacy students are presumed to belong at elite institutions, even though in many (if not most) cases their academic marks would disqualify them for admission absent their legacy status. The presumption of –if not entitlement to–belonging in elite higher education is apparently acceptable for everyone except (most) black people. It is very much at odds with the metaphorical pats on the head black people receive for their achievements in Florida’s new social studies curriculum.

CRT bans in schools, book bans in schools and public libraries, and threats to corporate diversity initiatives are far from the only things I expect to see when it comes to challenges to the presumption that black people in this country belong anywhere we can currently be found. Within the past day, Matt Gaetz introduced legislation intended to end birthright citizenship–a direct challenge to the text of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to former enslaved people (as well as to me). Gaetz has plenty of company in seeking to restrict citizenship, including presidential candidates who themselves would not be citizens without the 14th Amendment like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. We’ve reached a sad state as a nation when those who seek its highest office have closing the constitutional path to citizenship as part of sales pitch to the GOP electorate.

The Social Media Shakeup Continues: Bluesky & Threads

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Over six months have passed since I first started exploring Mastodon. I’ve switched servers (to hachyderm.io from mastodon.cloud), updated this blog’s sharing settings in Jetpack Social to post to Mastodon automatically (replacing the deliberately-broken Twitter integration), subscribed to the Ivory for Mastodon mobile app, made 1813 posts and gained 338 followers. I only follow 196 accounts, but between that and folks in the Local feed on hachyderm.io I find it to be an informative, enlightening, and fun social media experience.

A little over a month ago, I joined Bluesky thanks to a friend’s invite. The protocol it runs on (the AT Protocol) is federated, like ActivityPub. But as of now, bsky.social is the only place you can sign up (and signups are currently still invite-only). Nor does it appear that you’ll be able to host your own AT Protocol server anytime soon. Bluesky does implement a few interesting ideas that other social networks should borrow (or steal): (1) app-specific passwords, (2) feeds, (3) domains as handles.

I first learned about app-specific passwords in a Mastodon post (which I have not been able to find again because that whole hashtag search thing) announcing the Ice Cubes for Mastodon app had added support for a bridge instance (skybridge.fly.dev) that would let you connect to and use your Bluesky account and your Mastodon account(s) in the same app. The sign in page recommends using an app-specific password instead of the real one and the link text takes you directly to the UI in the Bluesky app to create one. In my limited use of the Ice Cubes account for this purpose, the disclaimer about the bridge not working for every Mastodon client proved true often enough to be annoying. The sign in page recommended the Ivory app as providing the best experience—we’ll explore whether that advice proves true in a future post.

Feeds are the way Bluesky packages algorithms that show certain posts and topics. Beyond the Following feed (the default feed for every Bluesky user), I’ve added feeds including Mutuals (posts from people you follow who follow you back), Likes (every Bluesky post you’ve liked), and Cat Pics (the content of which should be obvious, but occasionally includes pictures of raccoons and opossums). Bluesky has made a feed generator starter kit available on GitHub.com, but I haven’t gotten that code working yet. If I do, and happen to feel particularly ambitious the next step would be to publish and host a custom feed for other Bluesky users to subscribe to.

Domains as handles lets you use a custom domain as your handle (instead of a subdomain of bsky.social). Since I own genxjamerican.com, I took the opportunity to update my handle using the instructions in Bluesky’s April 28 blog post. The process was quick, and the handle change was reflected almost immediately in my Bluesky mobile app (I had to refresh) and immediately in my Ivory app (no manual refresh required). If Mastodon were able to adopt this feature, it might at least make server switches much easier for people with custom domains.

Without much time on Bluesky, I haven’t done much posting, gained many followers, or followed many accounts yet. Some of the people I follow on Twitter for news (like Phil Lewis) and commentary (like Adam Serwer) are on Bluesky as well (along with fun accounts like Bodega Cats).

Threads is the newest kid on the social media block (launched July 5th) and already has over 100 million users, courtesy of its ability to leverage the large installed base of Instagram users as a starting point. Unlike Bluesky, Threads plans to join the fediverse so its Threads users can follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms. But before Threads was even officially named and launched, numerous instance admins joined an anti-Meta fedi pact. The instance admins in the pact agree to block any fediverse instances owned by Meta. As for the app itself, there are the sort of privacy controls and account settings that will make Threads safe for users (and especially for brands, compared to the anti-woke haven Twitter seems intent on becoming)–but not much else. You can invite your friends to Threads via WhatsApp, text messages, email, or just about any other method you can think of. As of yet there are no custom feeds, or lists, or any other features that might let you filter what posts you see. Since Meta is really about selling ads, I presume its only a matter of time before we start seeing (and scrolling past them) in Threads.

Between the three social media apps I’ve been spending more time with since last year, Mastodon is still the one I most enjoy using. I’m still on Twitter, but less often than last year–primarily to engage with a DM group I joined made up of black professionals and academics. When Twitter first looked like it was on shaky ground, some of us exchanged emails to keep in touch, others shared their Instagram accounts. If and when Bluesky shifts from invite-only to broader adoption, it looks like the social media option with the most tools to recreate the sort of community we found on Twitter beginning in the pandemic.

GOP state officials threaten legal action over company diversity policies

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A group of Republican U.S. state attorneys general on Thursday warned the country’s largest companies that certain workforce diversity policies could be illegal in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision effectively striking down affirmative action in higher education.
— Read on www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-state-officials-threaten-legal-action-over-company-diversity-policies-2023-07-13/

Not even a full month after this post suggested affirmative action in employment would be the next thing the Supreme Court majority would rule unconstitutional, GOP state attorneys generals have threatened to sue companies they assert (without evidence) have used race-based practices in hiring. Notable among the companies these attorneys general have singled out are Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Uber. The tech industry is an interesting target for these state attorneys general given it’s historically-poor track record on diversity across any number of metrics.

A brief look at Apple’s inclusion and diversity results show a workforce that is still 2/3rds men over the 7 years (2014-2021) for which they’ve provided data. Asian representation in their workforce has grown the most significantly over the same period, from 15% to 27.9%, while the percentage of black and Hispanic employees have grown by much smaller rates. Of the remaining highlighted companies, only Uber employs a workforce fewer than 60% male, and their ethnic diversity numbers have actually gotten worse in some respects (over 10% of their workforce was Black or African-American in 2021, while barely 9% of the workforce is as of the latest metrics published this year). But in the post-affirmative action American landscape, we can now expect even the good-faith efforts of companies to diversify their workforces to be challenged in court and for those workforces to be less-diverse as a result. We will learn the hard way that diversity isn’t just a “nice-to-have”; the increasing lack of diversity will result in worse products from companies.

Religious Freedom is a Poor Cloak for Prejudice

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One thing I have noticed in the rightward lurch of the federal judiciary over the years, especially the Supreme Court (and rulings that appear intended to repeal the entirety of the 20th century), is how often they grant relief to plaintiffs using religious freedom as their rationale. Such cases used to be about believers being able to observe their religious practice as they chose without being prevented from doing so by the government, or by secular employers, with accommodations being made where possible. At the very start of my career in IT, my employer tried to compel me to work on Saturdays (my day of worship as a practicing Seventh-day Adventist), and I ultimately quit that company rather than yield to the pressure (or pursue a court case).

Now religious freedom in the United States has been distorted to any and every expression of Christian faith in any context, aided and abetted by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, as an exemption to the laws everyone else in this country must adhere to. The latest example of this is the case 303 Creative v Elenis, recently decided 6-3 in favor of 303 Creative. Despite the proprietor of 303 Creative never actually being contracted by a gay couple to create a wedding website, and despite not even having expanded her business to offer wedding website services, “she brought a pre-enforcement challenge to the Colorado law, worried, as Gorsuch wrote, “the State will force her to convey messages inconsistent with her belief that marriage should be reserved to unions between one man and one woman,” according to the Washington Post. So the very prospect of a same-sex couple asking a public business to accept their money in exchange for a service was so alarming that the plaintiff chose to file lawsuits to prevent it. And after numerous losses in lower courts finally received a ruling in her favor from our nation’s highest court.

This idea that engaging in a business transaction constitutes an endorsement of a practice someone deems sinful seems to me either a well-intentioned but significant misunderstanding and misreading of scripture, or a deliberate distortion intended to justify ones pre-existing prejudices. When I think about where in the Bible a Christian might look in order to guide their decisions in a matter like this, I think of the works of the Apostle Paul.

After these events Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus having recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. He came to them, 3 and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them, and they worked together, for they were tent-makers by trade. 4 And Paul was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.

Acts 18:1-4

Tent-making was how Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla earned money to support themselves as they pursued their main goal of spreading the Gospel. If any evidence exists that any of them refused to make or sell tents for Corinthians who were sinners, I haven’t read it in the Bible. If any evidence exists that selling tents was somehow an endorsement of whatever lifestyle Jews or Greeks or anyone else in Corinth was engaged in, I have not read it in Acts 18 or anywhere else in Acts. So how exactly does a Christian in the United States come to the conclusion that making a website for money (or a cake) if the customers are a same-sex couple is an endorsement of same-sex marriage? Are we to believe that the modern Christian in the United States somehow has less religious freedom than Aquila and Priscilla, who were in Corinth after leaving Rome because Jews were being persecuted by the Emperor Claudius? Reading further in Acts, we find Paul engaging with both Jews and Greeks in Ephesus, Macedonia, as well as in Greece.

Given previous rulings by the Supreme Court, I’m not surprised by the ruling in her favor. What was surprising was this article in The New Republic, which suggests that the plaintiff or her lawyers fabricated a gay couple attempting to violate her religious freedom. If true, the owner of 303 Creative built this entire case on a lie.

The start of a thread by Rev. Solomon Missouri

Rev. Missouri, senior pastor at Invitation AME Zion Church in Snow Hill, NC is refreshingly blunt in his perspective regarding the dishonesty of 303 Creative’s position. But the questions he ends the threads with are the most important for anyone who points to their Christian faith as the rationale for their actions:

What gospel ethic—what value is communicated in this? Where is the divine in this?

Rev. Solomon Missouri tweets

While Rev. Missouri asks the question of Christian evangelicals in general, it should be asked specifically of white evangelicals. What gospel ethic is communicated by prevailing upon a secular court to sanction your desire to reject the provision of a service to people who haven’t asked you to provide it? A similar question could be asked of the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. Contrast their example with that of the Apostle Paul, and how he engaged with both Jews and Greeks—both in his trade as a tent maker, and in his ministry work. Christianity spread throughout the Asia of Paul’s day, while many of the membership rolls in Christian churches in the U.S. are shrinking. Numerous Christian denominations (including my own) are still fighting over whether or not women should hold pastoral roles despite claiming to believe in a Bible with numerous examples of women in leadership in both the Old and New Testaments. The same Aquila and Priscilla of Acts 18:1-4 can be found later (in Acts 18:26) explaining the way of God more accurately to the evangelist Apollos. Rev. Missouri’s question bears repeating in this context: what gospel ethic–what value is communicated in denying particular titles to women in the service of God? Is the gospel well-served by putting incompetent and/or untutored men in the office of pastor over women to whom God grants the same spiritual gifts as men?

A friend of mine shared this interesting Substack post with me which asserts that religion has become a luxury good. This quote toward the end of the piece is an unfortunately accurate picture of the state of Christianity in the United States today:

Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life. College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t.

This is also troublesome for American democracy, as well. Religion, at it’s best, is a place where people from a variety of economic, social, racial, and political backgrounds can find common ground around a shared faith. It’s place to build bridges to folks who are different than you. Unfortunately, it looks like American religion is not at its best.

Instead, it’s become a hospital for the healthy. An echo chamber for folks who did everything “right”, which means that is seeming less and less inviting to those who did life another way.

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/religion-has-become-a-luxury-good

Christianity as practiced in the U.S. today is definitely not inviting to those who did life another way, and increasingly not even to those inside the enclave.

What The End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn’t): Addendum

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Finally (for now), the end of affirmative action is far from the end of anti-black rulings from this court. Affirmative action in employment will almost certainly be the next thing to be ruled unconstitutional.

June 29, 2023 blog post at GenXJamerican.com

The corpse of affirmative action (except the carve-out for U.S. military academies) is barely cold, and already (July 3, 2023) the anti-woke hounds are baying at the heels of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/diversity-workplace-affirmative-action-dei-3646683b?st=k0ouhiba4domk8q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

But as a brief glance at the historical record will show, complaints about black people getting “special treatment” originating from people who aren’t black have a rather long history in this country. On March 27, 1866, President Andrew Johnson gave an entire speech regarding why he was vetoing civil rights legislation passed by both houses of Congress. Among his many objections were that black people would receive “Federal citizenship” immediately while 11 states were not represented in Congress. The 11 states (of course) were the ones that started (and lost) the Civil War. Having “just emerged from slavery into freedom”, President Johnson questioned whether or not black people “possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizens”. But here is the passage that perhaps best explains and exemplifies the sense of entitlement—both then and now—that some have when compared to the black people who built and fought for this country:

The bill in effect proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners, and in favor of the Negro, to whom, after long years of bondage, the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened.

Paragraph 4 of the transcript of President Andrew Johnson’s March 27, 1866 speech vetoing civil rights legislation

If there is any meaningful difference between the logic President Johnson applied to reject civil rights legislation and the logic the conservative majority on the Supreme Court used to end affirmative action, it is not readily apparent. Within President Johnson’s objections to the granting of “Federal citizenship” to black people and the states right argument he advances to separate “State citizenship” from it are the seeds of modern arguments against birthright citizenship that we hear today from the same people who find common cause with the Confederates of that day. Should this country put the wrong person in the White House yet again, perhaps birthright citizenship will be among the many rights at risk.

What the End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn’t)

Posted on by Scott
Michael Harriot clarifying what the Supreme Court actually struck down with today’s ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina

Even though I believed affirmative action would die at the hands of the conservative majority, it still stings to see that belief confirmed. There are plenty of professional writers you can read that have already dissected the various and sundry contradictions, dishonesties, and foolishness in the text of the majority ruling. This piece is primarily about what is likely to happen in the aftermath of the ruling.

The end of affirmative action will require every public and private university in the United States to eliminate race as a factor in their admissions decisions (if they haven’t already done so). In Texas, for example, that means UT-Austin will no longer be able to factor race into such decisions, and neither will private universities like Rice and SMU. However, as Michael Harriot succinctly put it, the end of affirmative action does not mean the end of admission preferences for those whose beneficiaries are primarily white (and/or) wealthy. At elite schools that use legacy admissions, those students will still be accepted at rates from 11% to 30% (far higher than non-legacies). Interestingly enough, some of those advocating for an end to legacy admissions can be found on the campuses that use them.

The end of affirmative action will not mean the end of black people being scapegoated by non-black people for being denied admission to elite universities. When I researched the 6 elite colleges Jon Wang blamed affirmative action for keeping him out of, even after you exclude U.C. Berkeley and CalTech (because California banned affirmative action in higher education via Prop 209 in 1996), the percentage of the undergraduate student body that is Asian-American at the remaining four schools are as follows: MIT (33.9%), Princeton (25%), Harvard (27.9%), Carnegie-Mellon University (over 20%). The percentage of the undergraduate student body that is black at those same schools: MIT (7%), Princeton (9%), Harvard (15.2%), Carnegie-Mellon University (3%). Years before this latest ruling, Abigail Fisher blamed affirmative action for the University of Texas at Austin denying her admission, even though 168 black and Latino students with grades as or better than Fisher’s were also rejected for admission.

A hopelessly naive statement about the future of civil rights

A friend forwarded me the tweet above. I’ve reproduced my response to it below:

We aren’t “moving onto the content of our character” portion of civil rights. Barack and Michelle Obama are the most elite couple ever to grace the halls of the White House regardless of race. Christians who actually went to church for non-political reasons. And for the entirety of their 8 years [in the White House] the political right in this country talked about them like dogs. And that’s before you get to the wealthy mediocrity this country elected as a backlash to his presidency. The idea that affirmative action–a policy to which this country’s commitment was uneven at best–should have a time limit of mere decades as a corrective to centuries of chattel slavery and Jim Crow (while legacy admissions continue ad infinitum to perpetuate advantage for wealthy and/or well-connected and mostly white mediocrities who would otherwise be shut out of elite education) has nothing to do with “meritocracy” and everything to do with anti-blackness.

One of my own angry DMs

Contrary to the naive notions of those who have consistently opposed affirmative action—including and especially opposition from certain black conservatives—the end of affirmative action in higher education will not end questions about whether a black person in any elite context has earned their place. Opposition to affirmative action is a very specific, very pernicious form of anti-blackness which rests on two (false) propositions: (1) the number of black people at elite institutions is “unnaturally high”, and (2) native-born black Americans in particular are somehow deficient, even relative to black immigrants. Too many in this country are vested in the notion that no elite institution can be truly meritocratic if too many black people are a part of it. So despite the fact that many in elite spheres are there because of the connections and/or wealth of their parents (rather than their own intellectual or artistic prowess), their presence in the elite is never challenged.

The end of affirmative action will not increase the percentage of Asian-American students accepted to elite universities much–if at all. People of Asian descent are a little over 7% of the U.S. population but are already the largest minority population at elite institutions beyond the half-dozen already named earlier, at three to six times higher a percentage on these campuses than in the general population (over 40% at CalTech for example). Regardless of how badly people want to believe that admission to elite institutions of higher education will somehow be “fairer” in the absence of affirmative action, the reality of college admissions is a far more opaque process. Each incoming class is curated, and the criteria (and how much weight each input to the admissions process is given) are controlled by the institutions–not the applicants. Low admission rates and the relatively small sizes of each class are part of the institutional strategy for maintaining their elite reputations. Legacy admissions almost certainly contribute to the maintenance and growth of the sizable endowments these institutions have. In the years to come, we will see just how few native-born black Americans actually benefited from affirmative action intended for them.

Social media is filled with assertions that elite universities will be able to use socioeconomic status as a proxy for race and still achieve their diversity goals. But this article in the Wall Street Journal reviews data from 8 states in addition to California who banned race-conscious admissions to their higher education institutions and found that there are consistently fewer black, Hispanic, and Native American students despite all the additional efforts the schools put toward achieving their diversity goals through other means. The end of affirmative action will therefore mean far fewer black students (and brown students) at elite higher education institutions. The notable exception to this (which highlights the way in which the Roberts court lacks the courage of its convictions) is military service academies.

Justice Sotomayor calls out Chief Justice Roberts’ hypocrisy in allowing military service academies to continue using affirmative action but not religious institutions

It was cowardly enough for Chief Justice Roberts to put the exception in a footnote. But even had he been bold enough to put the exception in the main body of the majority opinion, his message to black Americans is clear: you do not belong in the elite institutions of civilian life, but you are welcome to risk life and limb in the furtherance of this nation’s military goals.

Finally (for now), the end of affirmative action is far from the end of anti-black rulings from this court. Affirmative action in employment will almost certainly be the next thing to be ruled unconstitutional. Nor do I believe the court to be finished diminishing the voting rights of this country’s black citizens (despite recent rulings preserving what remains of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act).

Memorial Days, Past and Present

Posted on by Scott

According to this article by Dave Roos, the earliest Memorial Day commemoration took place May 1, 1865. Formerly enslaved people and white missionaries staged a parade around the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina, which during the war had been pressed into service as a prisoner-of-war camp for Union soldiers. After the mayor of Charleston surrendered on February 18, 1865 and Confederate troops left the city, newly-freed people exhumed over 260 Union soldiers from a mass grave behind the racetrack’s grandstand and gave them proper burials in a new cemetery. Exhuming and properly burying so many bodies took two weeks.

Like too many stories of the African-American experience of this country, it could have remained in the realm of solely oral tradition (if not lost entirely). But a Union veteran’s written remembrance and the persistence searching of historian David Blight (among others) led to a news account of the event in The New York Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) and another in the Charleston Courier, brought this origin story of Memorial Day into the light.

Memorial Day 2023, the remembrances of American military veterans who have died will include those killed in action as part of Ukraine’s foreign legion.  Malcolm Nance, a U.S. Navy veteran intelligence officer and commentator for MSNBC is perhaps the highest-profile of these volunteers, having joined the legion after his contract with MSNBC expired. He (and others) have done this as private citizens, despite repeated warnings not to do so from the Biden administration. In explaining his reasons for volunteering, Nance referenced the story of Eugene Bullard, one of a small handful of black pilots during World War I, and the only one who fought on behalf of France.

I’m especially struck by the story of Cooper T. Andrews, a retired Marine Corps sergeant who reported died last month at age 26 in a mortar attack while helping to evacuate people from Bahkmut, Ukraine (which recently fell to the mercenaries of Wagner Group). Andrews grew up around Cleveland, Ohio and according to his mother his passion for social justice was fueled at least in part by Tamir Rice’s death at the hands of police in 2014. Also according to his mother, his experiences with his Ukrainian unit were better than those during his service in the Marine Corps, where he experienced racism from his fellow Marines. This in particular reminded me of what I’ve read in history about the Harlem Hellfighters, who fought under French command during World War I. As of this writing, Willow Andrews (the mother of Cooper) is still fighting to have her son’s remains returned to the U.S. for burial, having struggled to do so via the U.S. State Department.

It saddens me that even today it can still be the case sometimes that an African-American finds more kinship and common ground abroad with the fighting men of those countries than in the country of their birth and citizenship.