Doctrine 'n Donuts with Prof S

american university, racism, #blacklivesmatter

Remember even as the world goes to shit, amazing people are making wonderful, weird, thought-provoking things.

Yes, Pennsylvania: you are a bigot. Dear Progressives: I understand that you’re in shock, because I am too. My Nasty Women Vote sticker is stuffed in my desk; I can’t bring myself to let it go even though I know that Nasty Women are outnumbered. As an American, I want to learn my lesson, so I can stop the internal and national bleeding. As a teacher, I know the difference between learning and making an unsupported argument (note to students—your final exams will reflect this). It feels like progressives are doing the latter. I’m hearing: Democrats focused too much on people of color and LGBT people (who apparently don’t work?) and not enough on the “working class.” “Working-class” anger, not racism and sexism, explains Trump’s win. The Democratic Party should simultaneously tack to the Left and stop focusing on progressive values such as reproductive choice and racial justice. “Identity politics” is dead, except if your identity is white, male, resident of a former manufacturing region. If you’re in mourning for America’s Unclean Coal, the Democratic Party should listen. If you’re concerned about your mom being deported, about becoming a mother against your will, or about being arrested for using a bathroom, then please take a seat. Your needs lost us one too many elections already. Yeah, no. First, can we please stop saying Trump won because steel and coal lost? The death of steel and coal predates NAFTA, according to economists, historians, and Billy Joel’s classic 1982 classic “Allentown.” Second, Trump voters weren’t poor and many voted against their economic interests. Knowing this, we have two choices: we can assume they’re stupid, or you can believe something other than steel motivated them. The road to 11/8/16 isn’t lined with shuttered steel mills, but with closed minds. The sooner progressives get used to saying this out loud, the better. Remember when we elected our first black president and many voters lost their collective minds? Trumpism in the form of birtherism was born of an explosive, racist rage among people who saw Michelle Obama as an ape and Trayvon Martin as a thug. Meanwhile—and this hurts, because we love our President– the Obama Administration allowed Republicans to falsely paint him as a divisive, my-way-or-the-highway partisan even when his compromises were enraging liberals. The stimulus bill was almost 1/3 tax cuts the GOP wanted. Had the White House crowed about this compromise, they could have painted the GOP into a corner and killed their message he was a divisive partisan before it could take root. Instead, like Lucy with the football, the GOP got everything they wanted, rejected the bill on party-line vote in the House (three GOP senators voted for it), and won the message battle. Lucy got the football back with health care. Instead of a single-payer system, we got a compromise bill based on a Heritage Foundation model. Again, the Administration failed to convey that this was a compromise bill or sell its own policy to the people who would benefit—the same Trump voters who are about to lose their health care. This enabled the 2010 electoral “shellacking” for which our President graciously accepted some responsibility, though the Democratic voters who stayed home bear just as much. Obamacare and infrastructure investments benefited the very people whom the pundits now claim the Dems forgot in our misguided insistence on insisting transgender people are human beings. The truth is, Obama did good things for working-class people, including millions of Trump voters who rely on Medicaid expansion and health care exchanges. But white America didn’t believe it, for some reason. When the incumbent president’s signature accomplishment is unpopular, you’re going to pay for it at the polls, and Hillary Clinton probably did. In spite of Obama Derangement Syndrome, Secretary Clinton left office with a 64% approval rating— 14 points higher than the President’s. The GOP resumes its war on Clinton, spending millions of tax dollars to wound her. They find no wrongdoing. Nonetheless, by the time Senator Sanders the presidential race on April 30, 2015, Clinton’s approval is down to about 46%. And that’s when it got really ugly. Any progressive who tangled with the Bernie Bros (and then got called a c--- for using the term Bernie Bros, and then got called a c--- again for calling out sexism) can tell you—that primary damaged her. Do you remember? Sanders, not Trump, introduced the rigged system into the election cycle. Sanders painted Clinton as an establishment hack owned by Goldman Sachs and unaccountable to real people. “Weak” candidate Clinton wins the primary anyway, and not because it was rigged. Sanders refuses to acknowledge the math and then claims that superdelegates he’d previously railed against as part of the rigged system should actually rig the system for him precisely because he was successful in weakening her. By the time AP declared Clinton the presumptive nominee on June 6, she was 17 points underwater. Although it’s true the email investigation remained active during this time, her decline among Democrats points to something else going on. Her trend line and Sanders’ go in opposite directions. Meanwhile, the GOP nominates a candidate who on a wave of racism, harnessing the rage of voters who have been seething since a black president was elected. America clutches its collective pearls. Nate Silver says oopsie but doesn’t mention racism because why mention racism? Thanks to pressure from Sanders and his energized base, the Democratic Party assembles its most progressive platform ever. But like Lucy with the football, his revolutionaries still don’t want to play for their own team. Sanders doesn’t do much to change that. After promising to rally his troops around Clinton and stop the bleeding from the primaries, Sanders retreats to Vermont, where he buys a third home, and tweets about billionaires while his disappointed supporters fall for former Lexington Town Meeting Representative Jill Stein, who claims that Clinton is more dangerous than Trump. Then Russia joins the Trump campaign and the FBI helps out (because why should Hillary be able to waltz into the presidency just by beating the GOP and the left wing of her own party?). Our nation holds the first presidential election since a right-wing Supreme Court gutted the Voting rights Act. North Carolina Republicans brag about suppressing black votes, and the results prove they were right to brag. In spite of Russia, the FBI, recalcitrant left wingers, Obama Derangement Syndrome, and the Roberts Court, Clinton still wins close to 3 million more votes than Trump, yet loses the presidency. (Breathe. I’ll wait). It doesn’t take long for the far left to blame Democrats for failing to see the electorate through a class-driven lens. Bernie Sanders takes a dig at Clinton and her supporters, saying “It is not good enough for someone to say I’m a woman, vote for me.” He does not consider that Clinton’s gender caused anyone not to vote for her. In stating that “The working class of this country is being decimated. That’s why Donald Trump won,” he does not account for all of the working class people of color who voted against Trump. Or that the majority of Trump supporters believe President Obama is a Muslim. Our class-first revolutionary says “Identity politics” is a game for middle-aged women. And look where that got us. But funny thing about identity politics is – white people play too, and Trump’s America is proof positive. We have a rash of hate crimes. White nationalists are celebrating with good reason. David Duke has praised Team Trump, including an attorney general designee who once prosecuted voting rights workers (ominously, Trump claims three million “illegals” voted in 2016, foreshadowing federal voter suppression efforts led by AG Sessions). But pay no attention to the chorus of “heil Trumps” behind the screen. With the threat of a Muslim registry, mass deportations, the end of Roe, and renewed assaults on LGBT rights, it’s astonishing—and frankly embarrassing—that so many Democrats believe it’s time to focus on (a) wooing the free college, anti-Establishment (white) youth voters who just weren’t feeling Clinton and (b) charming the working-class whites who were insufficiently alarmed by the "build the wall" and "lock her up" tendencies of Trumpism to reject them. Yes, we need to have a good long talk with those young progressive voters, nine percent of whom voted third party in the face of the Trump threat to progressive priorities. But let’s not apologize for failing to give them the candidate of their dreams. I’m a college teacher, and it’s my job to tell young people when they’re full of shit. Here’s an idea that’s full of shit: it’s a candidate’s job to earn your very special vote, and if she fails to do so, none of the consequences are on you. This idea is the civic equivalent of standing over a drowning person, dangling a life preserver just out of reach, and saying “you didn’t say please.” Saying Hillary Clinton didn’t deserve your vote misses the point. The point is, America deserved better than Trump, and you knew that, and you didn’t step up. Yes, we need to talk to white Trump voters. But let’s not reassure them we don’t think they’re racists just because they voted for a KKK-endorsed candidate who promised to build a wall, register Muslims, and promote stop-and-frisk. To paraphrase Chris Rock, what does a person have to do to earn the term racist—shoot Medgar Evers? The fact is, many voters are racist. Some who acknowledge Trump is racist support him anyway. We’re not going to make this racism go away by pretending white people have a right to be told it doesn’t exist. And so, my dear progressives: I ask you to remember how comfortable we were with saying (accurately) that many Americans rejected President Obama because of racism. Do you? Good. So do I. Now it’s time to acknowledge that Trump benefitted from racism. Now close your eyes and remember how, when only one third of Americans supported marriage equality, we committed to change voters' minds because the long-shot cause of equality was a moral imperative. Do you? Good. So do I. Well, 62.5 million Americans just voted for a KKK-endorsed presidential candidate. We must again commit to change voters' minds, because the long-shot cause of equality is a moral imperative. So say it with me: Yes, Pennsylvania. You are a bigot. Was that so hard?

I'm not a racist but I don't see any difference between the white supremacists' first choice and someone who has Rep. John Lewis's endorsement. I'm not an Islamophobe but I think the risk posed by the two-party system is more significant than the risk of excluding 1 billion Muslims from entering the US and spying on Muslim citizens and residents. I'm not a sexist but I think a Supreme Court packed with extremists chosen by the candidate who just got in bed with the anti-choice movement is preferable to the first woman president because she is "establishment." I'm not an ableist, but I think repeal of the Affordable Care Act is an acceptable risk, when the alternative is the candidate who has released the most comprehensive, bold, and effective plan for disability rights of any candidate in history. I'm against mass incarceration and say I support Black Lives Matter, but I prefer the candidate who said he wants to increase stop-and-frisk in minority communities.* I'm not a nativist, but I think a wall and mass deportations are a small price to pay for my principled stand against a candidate who supports a path to citizenship. Sure, I care about the environment. It's just that one candidate used to kind of support the Keystone Pipeline (maybe?), which we can all agree is far worse than claiming global warming is a Chinese trade war conspiracy and vowing to increase coal and gas production. I'm not anti-Semitic, but what are a few retweets of Neo-Nazi memes between friends? I'm not a sadist, but it's okay if we murder suspected terrorists' families. That's a small price to pay for protecting American democracy from speeches to investment bankers. I support our troops, but if they have to choose between obeying their commander-in-chief or international law (and rules of common decency), I've got no problem. I'm not a hypocrite, but I'll vote for a candidate who doesn't support regulations on guns, polluters, or banks as a way of expressing my displeasure with a candidate who shares my concern about these issues. I'm not rigid and stubborn, but after a year of taking everything my candidate said as gospel, I'm going to ignore his call to keep Trump out of the White House. I'm not privileged, but I don't care who gets hurt by a Trump presidency. I don't have a civic duty to do the most good I can with my vote. Everyone else needs to persuade me that I need to do the right thing. I'm a third-party voter, and I approve this message. *hasn't read the Constitution; doesn't know a president can't do that.

(via GIPHY)

Conventional wisdom says it was a good day for women. On this, the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, five of eight sitting justices ruled that the state of Texas couldn’t deny women access to health care on the pretext of keeping them safe. In a less anticipated, less covered decision, the Court ruled that a federal law banning domestic abusers from owning firearms applied when the abusers were convicted under state laws requiring only “reckless” behavior, as opposed to intentional use of force. On paper, women won two of two. And yet I can’t help but feel exhausted, and frustrated, and singularly uninterested in throwing a tickertape parade. Because this shouldn’t even be a question. Because my daughter’s body shouldn’t be a battlefield. Because “you can’t beat me and stay armed” isn’t a cheer for the team that won. Because “for the time being, you failed to stop me from deciding when to be a mother” isn’t a chant that’s accompanied by popping champagne corks. Because these two modest, obvious, hard-fought wins are part of a senseless, bloody war. Today, the gender gap in gun ownership is 23.4 percentage points. What war do these men think they’re fighting? We know. We know the casualties. On average, one woman per day is killed by a boyfriend or spouse in the US. These men think and say they’re fighting this war in our names. For protection. To keep the family safe. But the body count tells another story. You’ve read the story about gun laws. That the abusive spouse or boyfriend can buy a gun at a gun show, no questions asked. That if and when he does, the risk that intimate violence will become murder increases fivefold. But this story isn’t that story. What I want to know is why we still have to fight for our lives at all. What I want to know is, when’s the cease fire in the battle over my daughter’s body? Here is a fact: intellectually, my daughter can run circles around most of you fellas in any statehouse. Biologically, she could see her future cut short by a rapist, a broken condom, or even a rash decision. Everyone knows this. The Texas legislature knows this. Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas know this. They know that as long as she has a functioning uterus and ovaries, her brain could very well not be sufficient to secure the future she deserves. Her brain plus access to abortion care, on the other hand. That, and only that, is equity. And yet. In every state capitol, someone is trying to make it that much easier for a broken condom, a rapist, or a rash decision to yank her future out from under her. And most recently, to do so in the name of “protecting” her. Like a boyfriend with a gun protects the household. Until he doesn’t. Like a parent telling a 16-year-old she’s too young to choose an abortion, but apparently old enough for labor, delivery, post-partum care, and even parenthood. This hurts me more than it hurts you, young lady. But it doesn’t. When a pink-sneakered filibuster failed to protect my daughter and millions like her, it took years of litigation to do so. It took painstaking efforts to persuade an old white guy to give my daughter back the thread of her future that Texas tried to take. To Justice Kennedy—thanks, I guess, for giving back what was never yours. Much will be written about how the crafty women managed to persuade this one old man to let us go on living. And then the legislatures will reconvene, and the boys will try to do a better job of putting my daughter back in harm’s way. And much will be written about how they succeeded or failed. I hope they fail. I gave a woman presidential candidate $3 today. This is my tired, small, one-click contribution to their failure. But I am exhausted, and sad, and incapable of writing about the law, because they are still trying to win. Because they show no signs of ceasing to try. Because they still see equity for women as a loss for them. Because they want that broken condom to break a girl’s future. They want that boyfriend to be able to buy that gun at a gun show, no questions asked. Maybe they’ll fail. But it’s the fact that they’re trying that keeps me up at night. And to wake up to what passes for winning day for women, in a game we shouldn’t even have to play.