Institutionalize racism into our federal government

I don’t pay attention to what goes on in popular music – classical is my thing. A couple interviews in Pridesource prompted me to listen to a couple songs – songs with definitely queer lyrics. Ben Platt became famous as the lead in Dear Evan Hanson that was a big hit on Broadway and ran for long enough that Platt became obviously too old for the teenage character he was playing. He has acted elsewhere and recently released his third studio album. The album cover shows Platt and his soon to be husband in a 1950s convertible making out. The song on this album I listened to is “Andrew.” It is a lament of a gay boy who has a crush on his straight male friend, an Andrew. The friend doesn’t seem aware the gay boy would be delighted with a kiss, but the gay boy knows he won’t ever get one. It’s all a cruel joke with no one to blame. Lyrics here. The other singer is Orville Peck. He sings country and is openly gay. He also just released an album, one of collaborations with other country singers. He’s been performing wearing a mask because it helps him feel more comfortable and vulnerable, though in his interview he said with each album the mask feels less important. The song is “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” This song was written way back in 1981 by Latin country musician Ned Sublette. Willie Nelson sang it as a solo back in 2006 – he’s quite the ally. This version is Peck and Nelson alternating verses – Peck has rich sonorous voice. The first verse, which Peck sings, is:

Well, there's many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas There's many a young boy who feels things he can't comprehend And a small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes No, a small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men

And the second half of Nelson’s verse:

Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he's done with his women But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer

Both songs are easily found on YouTube. I finished the book Dearborn, by Ghassan Zeineddine. Dearborn is the suburb directly to the west of Detroit. The city used to have a highly racist mayor at a time when Detroit was becoming increasingly black. The Detroit metro area has the highest population of Arabs outside the Middle East and many of them moved to Dearborn. The city has such a large Arab population the mayor is now Arab and it was the center of protests against Biden for his support of Israel in the Gaza war. The book is ten stories of Arab-Americans living in Dearborn. The people in these stories came from Lebanon or had ancestors who did, so many stories feature why they left – a civil war and a war with Israel would do it. Some of the newer arrivals are afraid of being caught by ICE. A few are hoping for the big sign of success – their company is successful enough they can put their face on a billboard. Some women tell of when they were a teenager and a young man showed up at the house and proposed marriage. Single men and women are expected to live with their parents, no matter their age, until they are married. After the 9/11 attacks they become wary of the FBI. There is even a story of a transgender person, a father and husband who would rather dress as a woman – and quite glad Muslim women can wear garments that cover all but the eyes. I very much enjoyed these stories. I was surprised to learn in the author’s biography that he probably never lived in Dearborn. When he mentions locations and street names I thought all but one were accurate. The one that wasn’t referenced a nursing home on Ford Rd. at the highway. There are two places where a highway is near or crosses Ford Rd. I don’t see a nursing home at either of them. A few days ago I wrote about the mattering movement, the effort to help children and youth feel they matter. On Saturday on NPR reporter Cory Turner visited one elementary school in the Livingston Union School District in California’s Central Valley. The reason for the visit is a kindergarten class that has exceptionally low absenteeism, not just in the post pandemic era of lots of children missing lots of school days, but for several years before. Sujie Shin of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence says there is a basic question related to a child’s success in school: “Is there an adult at school that cares about you - yes or no? That's it.” In another kindergarten class across town Diana Dickey greets each child. When one child is not there they move the child’s photo inside a big heart. That tells children when they’re not there they are missed. Another kindergarten cheers when all students are there. When one boy feels apprehensive about coming another boy waits and they walk in together. The parents are delighted with the school and that their children want to go and are disappointed they don’t go on weekends. Turner said:

By building a school culture where the children feel valued, Mrs. Dickey says students also learn to value and help each other.

The children feel valued. They learn to value each other. That’s the mattering movement. It is giving the students a grounding in mental health. My Sunday movie was Absolute Beginners, episodes 1 and 2 out of six. It is a film out of Poland, so Netflix dubbed it and actor’s lips don’t match the English. This time other actors are credited with the dubbing. Niko and Lena are two high school seniors trying to get into film school. They have been friends since quite young, almost brother and sister, and their parents share a cottage at a seaside resort. When the story begins they have a week to make the film that they’ll submit with the application. But as they get to the sex scene Niko refuses. Also at the resort is a basketball training camp. Igor is the captain of the team. He has a troubled past he hasn’t talked about yet. Scouts will be at the weekend game, a chance for him to go on to something better. Igor has a girlfriend Malwina, whom he’s known all of four days. She’s the daughter of the couple who own the restaurant and feels she will get left behind when Igor moves on. As the second episode ends Lena’s parents say they need to sell their share of the cottage and Niko’s parents don’t have enough to buy them out. Also, Lena tells Igor she has just the right part for him in her movie, the obvious implication is that Igor will replace Niko in the sex scene. I wrote about Justice Alito flying two flags as symbols of support for the 2021 Capitol attack. Daily Kos community member davidkc asks the important question: If that flag flying was in 2021 why is the Washington Post reporting it now? WaPo had an article written three years ago. They didn’t publish it. In it they described the upside-down American flag as a “political charged symbol.” Yet, they said the argument between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor that supposedly prompted her to display the inverted flag was not clearly “rooted in politics.” Which prompts many of us to say: Huh? My friend and debate partner sent me a link to this article, written by Aaron Pellish of CNN, about Chase Oliver winning the nomination for president of the Libertarian Party. My friend sent it to me because Oliver is gay. A gay presidential candidate! He’s also quite young – 38. This article says Oliver’s win signifies an embrace of “wokeness,” though I can’t tell if the person saying that thinks that’s a good thing or bad thing. Back in 2017, when I was working to collect signatures for the anti-gerrymandering proposal that passed in 2018, I spent an afternoon at a table outside the convention for the Libertarian Party of Michigan. The state chair and a few others signed. The convention as a whole voted to reject it. From what little I could hear from my table and from what I’d read elsewhere my feelings of the Libertarians is quite simple. They are so anti-tax their philosophy comes across as “I got mine. Too bad you don’t got yours.” Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about one aspect of the proposed nasty guy administration and the Project 2025 document supporting it. This piece would “institutionalize racism and racial bias into our federal government.” It would accomplish that by redefining “racism,” which would redefine all the laws that mention racism and are meant to alleviate oppression of non-white people. Dartagnan wrote:

For them, “racism” is quite literally reimagined and reconfigured as anything that they perceive as a threat to the continued hegemony of white Americans. We are already seeing an implicit reappraisal of “racism” and civil liberties in several Republican-dominated states, as white people seek to preserve and maintain the racial dominance they have enjoyed in this country since the days of its founding.

Racism becomes defined as oppression by non-white people against white people. So “affirmative action” becomes “affirmative discrimination.”

In recent years, the Republican Party has consciously and deliberately abandoned almost all efforts to present itself as anything but a group devoted to maintaining white power and white supremacy. The political weapon they choose to wield: blame. White Americans—particularly middle- and working-class white Americans—are routinely indoctrinated by right-wing media to believe that their inability to make economic headway in American society is due to the encroachment of other races upon their “status” as white people.

Examples of the lies they use in their blame: Other races are willing to accept lower pay so white people’s pay can’t be increased. Black people are blamed for the high cost of health care, Medicare, and Social Security. Racial preferences hold white people back. Corporate DEI programs discriminate against whites. Nothing in those examples are true, though they are still potent. I’ll try a rewrite those examples to be closer to the truth: Corporations underpay non-white people and use that as an excuse to deny wage increases to white people. Corporations insert themselves between patients and their health care. Rich people block being taxed fairly and Social Security is denied enough money. As for racial preferences and DEI programs white people interpret non-whites being treated equal to themselves as discrimination.

Put bluntly, white people do not need such protections. Civil rights laws were not passed to rectify injustice against white people, because white people—particularly white men—are the nation’s most wealthy, most politically dominant, and by far the most privileged American citizens. Anti-discrimination laws will probably never change that dynamic, but they do preserve some degree of equal opportunity and protection from this country’s apparently immutable racism. Nevertheless, emboldened by a right-wing Supreme Court demonstrably hostile to racial equity, Project 2025’s proponents see this as their moment.

Project 2025 establishes white supremacy as national policy. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos quoted an Associated Press article:

A new report released Tuesday by States United Action, a group that tracks election deniers, said nearly one-third of the lawmakers in Congress supported in some way Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 results or otherwise cast doubt on the reliability of elections. Several more are hoping to join them, running for election this year to the House and Senate.

Pennyfarthing adds:

More specifically, States United Action found that 170 representatives and senators of the total 535 Congress members are election deniers of some kind. Meanwhile, the group determined that two new Senate candidates and 17 new House candidates fall into the same category.

Clio2 of the Kos community wrote this month’s installment of LGBTQI+ Literature. The topic is autobiographies of intersex women. Amazingly, three such autobiographies were published last year. They are by Pidgeon Pagonis, Caster Semenya, and Alicia Roth Weigel. I had heard of Semenya before, but not the other two. Pagonis described surgeries to “fix” her, to remove the male portions of her anatomy. The surgeries were done without her informed consent (for some of them she was too young to consent). Things were not explained well to her parents either. All of the surgeries were cosmetic and not necessary. Pagonis is not working to get such intersex surgeries banned. While growing up in South Africa Semenya discovered she could run really fast. Soon she was entered into races, which was a big help to her family’s finances. When she began to break records she was subjected to a full gynecological exam. Only then did she learn “she had no uterus, no fallopian tubes, and a pair of undescended testicles that produced an elevated level of testosterone in her blood compared with most women.” And the sports community put her through hell. Even so, she brought home a silver medal from one Olympics and a gold from the next. Weigel also had surgery at a young age to remove undescended testicles. Her parents were told it should be done because they might become cancerous (the truth and logic of that is doubtful). After learning about intersex at 27 she became an advocate against the gender binary. That made her a public figure and a target for threats. Clio2 wrote:

Under the orders of -- perhaps not coincidentally, male -- authority figures, each of them subjected to drastic, involuntary medical interventions designed to remodel their bodies, surgically and/or chemically. In order to conform them more closely to a certain conceptual archetype of female. To render them, in effect, "female enough." ... A notion that also is deployed to buttress "traditional" power relations, including racism and the subordination of women. In line with which interest, exceptions must be erased. While "protecting children" is invoked as cover for "protecting the status quo."

A quote from Pagonis’ book:

We are raised to believe that you should just be able to glance at someone for a split second and know not only what lies between their legs but between their ears....[T]here is also supposed to be an inherent synchronicity between the two.

Weigel noted the contradiction of bills in which trans kids who want gender-affirming care are denied that care and in the same bill intersex kids who haven’t asked for such care yet have it forced on them. The demand to “fix” intersex kids is a piece of the demand to prohibit treating trans kids and the demand to “cure” gay people. And that is all wrapped up in misogyny, racism, and all the other things where one group oppresses another.