Here’s something to start out today’s APR that’s nearly 10 weeks old and not really punditry but that still merits notice under our current circumstances.
Gen. Robert E. Lee typically gets a pass even from many liberals when discussing the Civil War. Adam Serwer at The Atlantic points out that this is a false assessment in his excellent The Myth of the Kindly General Lee—The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed:
[E]ven if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.” [...]
Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”
The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the enslaved—it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “in their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”
Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them. [...]
There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.
The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.
The question is why anyone else would.
FFS. Steven J. Hadley, one of the key civilian architects of the Iraq invasion, is giving advice about A new, winning strategy for Trump in Afghanistan. The problem is it’s not new. It depends on a central government that just doesn’t match the socio-political reality of Afghanistan. It depends on becoming more directly involved against extremists in Pakistan, something Islamabad is not keen on. It requires new talks with India and Pakistan to deal with their differences and build cooperation. Uh-huh. Oh, and more troops. Always the siren call. And more years. Just a few more, of course. Always just a few. But only until the Kabul government is stable and broadly seen as legitimate. There is no reason to believe will happen before the Milky Way collides with Andromeda. Read this pile if you must.
At New York magazine, Jonathan Chait writes—Trump’s Aides Tried to Conceal His Crazy Racist Beliefs From the Country:
Donald Trump’s aides have been angry with him frequently — indeed, usually — since the beginning of his presidential campaign. But they have rarely registered their dismay as nakedly as they did Tuesday night, when he spontaneously altered a plan to deliver remarks on infrastructure without taking questions into a free-form defense of white supremacists. One official told NBC News that Trump had “gone rogue.” Mike Allen reports that chief economic adviser Gary Cohn is “between appalled and furious,” and that there is a danger one or more high-level officials could resign. Chief of Staff John Kelly’s disgust was registered on his face [...]
It is impossible to recall a presidential aide contemporaneously broadcasting his disgust with his own president.
But it is important to understand the precise nature of their distress. It is emphatically not because they are shocked to learn their boss is a racist, a fact that has been established through numerous episodes, such as Trump’s insistence a Mexican-American judge was inherently biased against him, his call for a Muslim immigration ban, his slander of Ghazala Khan, and so on. They are angry that Trump revealed beliefs they wish to keep hidden.
At The New York Times, Charles M. Blow writes—The Other Inconvenient Truth:
The position of opposing racial cruelty can operate in much the same way as opposition to animal cruelty — people do it not because they deem the objects of that cruelty their equals, but rather because they cannot continence the idea of inflicting pain and suffering on helpless and innocent creatures. But even here, the comparison cleaves, because suffering black people are judged to have courted their own suffering through a cascade of poor choices.
This is passive white supremacy, soft white supremacy, the kind divorced from hatred. It is permissible because it’s inconspicuous. But this soft white supremacy is more deadly, exponentially, than Nazis with tiki torches.
This soft white supremacy is the very thing on which the open racists build.
The white nationalists and the Nazis simply take the next step (not an altogether illogical one when wandering down the crooked path of racial hostility) and they overlay open animus.
This is apparently what draws the ire, what leaves people aghast: open articulation of racial hatred. That to me is a criminal act of denial that refuses to deal with the reality that racism is also signified far more subtly than through the wielding of slurs and sticks.
At The Guardian, Al Sharpton writes—In America, bias, hate and racism move from the margins to the mainstream:
Ministers and civil rights leaders like myself are not only disgusted by the lack of leadership in the current White House, but we are also tired of the silence of others. That is why we are mobilizing from the ground up and gathering in the nation’s capital on 28 August for a Ministers March for Justice.
Rabbis, imams and ministers will join together – 1,000 of us – as we push for continued civil and social justice rights, hold this administration accountable for its efforts to roll back progress and unite to show the world what America truly stands for. Those filled with hate gathered at the statue of Robert E Lee; we will gather at the statue of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
During these difficult and tense times, people look toward leaders to calm tensions and encourage people to come together against evil. When they don’t, that speaks volumes.
At The New Republic, Vegas Tenold writes—The Cops Dropped the Ball in Charlottesville:
A week before this weekend’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, I got a call from a fellow journalist who was heading to Virginia and wanted to know if I was planning on bringing a helmet, a gasmask, or both. There had been much hype surrounding the rally, and both white nationalists and members of Antifa had engaged in a fiery tit-for-tat online about who was going to kick whose ass the hardest. “Virginia’s an open carry state,” my friend said. “Are you going to bring a flack jacket?”
I scoffed and told him that the talk of violence was wildly overblown. There was no way the cops were going to let the two groups come within a city block of each other. I advised him to pick a side to cover during the actual rally, since the police likely wouldn’t even allow journalists to pass between the two camps. [...]
On Saturday morning in Charlottesville, things were already amiss. I was on the upper level of a downtown parking structure talking to Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Workers Party, a fascist white nationalist group and one of the key players in Saturday’s rally. He told me that there had been no co-ordination with law enforcement in advance of the rally. “Nobody told us to use this parking garage,” he said. “We’ve asked the cops to provide us with a way into the rally site, but they haven’t responded at all.”
A few minutes later, a phalanx of 150 or so nationalists filed out of the parking garage, into East Market Street next to the Charlottesville Police Station. They were met by no one. There wasn’t a police officer in sight. I walked at the front of the line, interviewing the leaders as they marched. We approached Emancipation Park, and to my surprise I saw Antifa ahead. There were no barricades and no police, and as the nationalists marched into the waiting arms of their enemies, mayhem ensued. Pepper spray, paint, frozen water bottles, sticks, and clubs flew. The cops had blown their cue and the choreography of the white nationalist rally was thrown into chaos.
An order of sorts was re-established when a contingent of police officers corralled the nationalists into the park, but their control was tenuous, and multiple skirmishes occurred. Then, quite suddenly, the cops were gone, and all hell broke loose again.
At The Guardian, Jason Wilson writes—I was in Charlottesville. Trump was wrong about violence on the left:
Let’s talk about what really happened.
On Friday night, hundreds of white supremacists and neo-fascists had a torchlight march across the University of Virginia’s campus, a place to which they had not been invited. They openly chanted fascist slogans like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us”.
When they reached a much smaller group of counter-protesters gathered around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, they surrounded them, hurled verbal abuse and then commenced beating them with lit torches and fists, and using pepper spray on them. Some protesters told me they had been sprayed with lighter fluid while naked flames burned all around them.
Some of the people trapped around the statue responded with fists and pepper spray, but their actions, and their posture, was entirely defensive from the start.
The “alt-right”, on the other hand, came prepared for violence, and they were spoiling for it.
That night, it was not the left that “came charging, with clubs in their hands”. Quite the contrary.
At The New York Times, Gail Collins writes—How to Handle Donald Trump:
Donald Trump is still president. Hard to know what to do with this, people.
In less than a week he’s managed to put on one of the most divisive, un-helpful, un-healing presidential performances in American history. It’s been a great stretch for fans of Richard Nixon and James Buchanan. [...]
We had no idea how bad this guy was going to be. Admit it — during the campaign you did not consider the possibility that if a terrible tragedy struck the country involving all of our worst political ghosts of the past plus neo-Nazism, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would know the appropriate thing to say but Donald Trump would have no idea.
At The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes—It is indefensible for Republicans to stick with Trump:
We are past the time when mournful comments about President Trump’s disgraceful behavior are sufficient. It is no longer defensible for his lieutenants or Republicans in Congress to tell themselves that they’re staying close to Trump to contain the damage he could cause our country.
If their actual goal was to prevent damage, they have failed. True, we have not had a nuclear war and Trump hasn’t shut down our democracy. But if this is the standard, if these are genuine fears, then Trump should have been gone long ago. A man this unstable, self-involved, uninformed, divisive and amoral — a polite word in his case — should be nowhere near the levers of power.
It should embarrass all who work in the White House (except for the genuine extremists) that after Trump’s unhinged news conference Tuesday, they were reduced to insisting, on background, that everything the president said was unplanned, off-script and shocking to them.
At The Nation, John Nichols writes—Fire the White Supremacists, Topple the Confederate Statues, Crack Down on the Violent Fascists: This is about more than Trump—this is about what America must do. Now.
The president has exposed and confirmed the crisis facing the United States. This country has, for too long, accepted the symbols of racism in our town squares, accepted the presence of racists in high office, accepted the spread of racism by extremist groups.
Now it is time for getting specific about what must be done. And the Congressional Progressive Caucus has begun the process—not just for its members, not just for the Democratic Party, but for all Americans who believe this country must, as Hubert Humphrey proposed 70 years ago, “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
In a statement released as Trump was busy making excuses for the racists who have displayed so much enthusiasm for his presidency, CPC co-chairs Raúl Grijalva, D-Arizona, and Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, said following the violent attacks perpetrated by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia:
Today, Americans of color and immigrant and religious minority communities are grappling with the fact that white supremacists—inspired by President Trump’s racially-charged words and policies—feel empowered to openly march and commit acts of violence in broad daylight,
At The New York Times, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka writes—Richard Trumka: Why I Quit Trump’s Business Council:
On Tuesday, President Trump stood in the lobby of his tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and again made excuses for bigotry and terrorism, effectively repudiating the remarks his staff wrote a day earlier in response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va. I stood in that same lobby in January, fresh off a meeting with the new president-elect. Although I had endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, I was hopeful we could work together to bring some of his pro-worker campaign promises to fruition.
Unfortunately, with each passing day, it has become clear that President Trump has no intention of following through on his commitments to working people. More worrisome, his actions and rhetoric threaten to leave America worse off and more divided. It is for these reasons that I resigned yesterday from the president’s manufacturing council, which the president disbanded today after a string of resignations.
To be clear, the council never lived up to its potential for delivering policies that lift up working families. In fact, we were never called to a single official meeting, even though it comprised some of the world’s top business and labor leaders.
At In These Times, Julianne Veten writes—Silicon Valley’s Techno-Capitalists Have a Low-Wage Worker Revolt on Their Hands:
In one of the nation’s most economically disparate enclaves, the tide of organized labor is rising. Last month, more than 500 Facebook cafeteria workers in Silicon Valley voted to unionize in a move for higher wages, fair hours and secure benefits. Days later, Tesla factory workers demonstrated similar intentions, sending a list of demands to the electric automaker’s board—a product of recent talks with one of labor’s most storied forces, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW).
Unionization is a momentous feat for any labor sector, and in Silicon Valley it’s downright Herculean. California’s hotbed of technological production is notorious for its antipathy to labor rights—a stance that dates back decades. Couched in an ethos of “utopian” futurism, many of the tech industry’s postwar progenitors positioned their enterprises as avant-garde rejections of the union-oriented labor models of the East Coast and Midwest. They claimed their vision of a post-union future, free of the costs and constraints of formal labor-rights structures, would afford them the ability to innovate at breakneck speed. In the early 1960s, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce famously declared, “remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies. If we had the work rules that unionized companies have, we'd all go out of business.”
In unions’ stead, then, came a propagandistic message of unity between labor and management—a paradigm that would breed such perks as high salaries and stock options. Yet the gambit of supplanting steady, controlled hours and collective-bargaining rights with flush rewards hasn’t applied to all workers in Silicon Valley. While programmers and marketing associates receive robust pay, gourmet meals and on-site spas (and soon, company-provided housing) in exchange for the absolute devotion of marathon workdays, low-wage laborers know no such luxuries.
At Wired, James Surowieki writes—Robot Apocalypse: NOT. Everybody Think That Automation Will Take Away Our Jobs. The Evidence Disagrees:
Over the past few years, it has become conventional wisdom that dramatic advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have put us on the path to a jobless future. We are living in the midst of a “second machine age,” to quote the title of the influential book by MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, in which routine work of all kinds—in manufacturing, sales, bookkeeping, food prep—is being automated at a steady clip, and even complex analytical jobs will be superseded before long. A widely cited 2013 study by researchers at the University of Oxford, for instance, found that nearly half of all jobs in the US were at risk of being fully automated over the next 20 years. The endgame, we’re told, is inevitable: The robots are on the march, and human labor is in retreat.
This anxiety about automation is understandable in light of the hair-raising progress that tech companies have made lately in robotics and artificial intelligence, which is now capable of, among other things, defeating Go masters, outbluffing champs in Texas Hold’em, and safely driving a car. And the notion that we’re on the verge of a radical leap forward in the scale and scope of automation certainly jibes with the pervasive feeling in Silicon Valley that we’re living in a time of unprecedented, accelerating innovation. Some tech leaders, including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Tesla’s Elon Musk, are so sure this jobless future is imminent—and, perhaps, so wary of torches and pitchforks—that they’re busy contemplating how to build a social safety net for a world with less work. Hence the sudden enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for a so-called universal basic income, a stipend that would be paid automatically to every citizen, so that people can have something to live on after their jobs are gone.
It’s a dramatic story, this epoch-defining tale about automation and permanent unemployment. But it has one major catch: There isn’t actually much evidence that it’s happening.
At TruthDig, Blackfeet Nation author and lawyer Gyasi Ross writes—The Miseducation of Native America:
White school systems will always fail Native American students unless or until there is a fundamental shift—a transformation—in the way that white schools approach native students.
Western, white schools historically were designed as punitive places intended to destroy the spirit and morale of native students. The United States government referred to this process as killing the Indian “and saving the man.” Everyone knows that. But not everyone knows that in 2017, statistically, Western, white schools are still serving as punitive places that destroy the spirit and morale of native students.
It is a well-chronicled tale: During much of the 1800s and 1900s, Western, white schools stole native children and cut off native students’ hair to demand absolute obedience and conformity. That is historical record. Problem is that today, those schools’ neoliberal descendants continue to disproportionately expel, suspend and push native students into the school-to-prison pipeline and place native children in special education to demand that same absolute obedience.
For native students, cultural difference is seen as problematic, and for those behaviors, statistically, students will find themselves forced outside the educational system. Native educators and parents have made many efforts to redefine the way native students are educated within Western, white educational systems. But they are whitesplained, rebuffed and rejected as evidenced by modern examples of many schools disallowing natives students from wearing eagle feathers on their graduation caps, requiring native students to cut long hair and, of course, criminal underfunding of native education. [...]