Michael Eric Dyson on the way the black church has always served as a convenient target of terror.
Sites and spaces of black life have come under attack from racist forces before, but the black church is a unique target. It is not just where black people gather.
In too many other places, black self-worth is bludgeoned by bigotry or hijacked by self-hatred: that our culture is too dumb, our lives too worthless, to warrant the effort to combat our enemies. The black sanctuary breathes in black humanity while the pulpit exhales unapologetic black love.
For decades, these sites of love have been magnets for hate.
In June 1958, a dynamite bomb rocked the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. ... In 1963, four girls were killed when the 16th Street Baptist Church in the same city was bombed. As the drive to register black voters heated up during Freedom Summer in 1964, nearly three dozen black churches in Mississippi were bombed or burned.
I'm sure Fox News would tell you those attacks didn't have anything to do with race.
That is how it is possible that the doors of Emanuel were open to a young white participant who, after an hour of prayer, raised a weapon and took nine lives. Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of the murdered pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, said one of the survivors told her that the gunman argued: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” The vortex of racist mythology spun into a plan of racial carnage.
Nah, he was just... nope. Sorry. I can't do it. It was racism, pure and simple, from a nation that's still steeped in racism and which is always ready to pretend that racism is a thing of the past.
This is one gf those mornings where I need to remind folks that most of the editorials on Sundays were cranked out some time ago, so the percentage of voices speaking up about the most crucial, and horrific, event of this week may not be as high as you'd like. So come on inside.
Kathleen Parker on the political leadership in Charleston.
How could the shooter sit for an hour of Bible study and prayer with the very people he intended to kill? Suspect Dylann Roof, now in custody, made his mission clear when 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders tried to talk him out of shooting his aunt, Susie Jackson.
No, you have to go, Roof reportedly said. Blacks are “raping our women and taking over the country.”
Then he opened fire. ...
For most of recent history, blacks, who make up about a third of the city’s population, and whites, have governed the city together with the mutual goal of racial harmony and cooperation. Much credit goes to the leadership of Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who was mayor when I began covering him in the late 1970s as a reporter for Charleston’s afternoon paper. ... He is one of the nation’s longest-serving mayors for good reason. Not only did he envision that Charleston could become a tourist destination but he also has been a leader for social justice and racial reconciliation for decades.
Parker's view of the leadership in Charleston is pretty rosy. Whether it's deserved... I'd like to hear from someone whose family has lived in Charleston for "300 years" in a less privileged position.
Nell Painter on just what makes that privileged class.
The terrorist attack in Charleston, S.C., an atrocity like so many other shameful episodes in American history, has overshadowed the drama of Rachel A. Dolezal’s yearslong passing for black. And for good reason: Hateful mass murder is, of course, more consequential than one woman’s fiction. But the two are connected in a way that is relevant to many Americans.
An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.”
Painter goes on to talk about Rachel Dolezal and the "lack more meaningful senses of white identity." But the thing is, who cares what the definition of "white" is? It's not a love of "white" that murderers are lacking. They seems to have plenty of that.
Ross Douthat on the pope's new encyclical.
In Pope Francis’ sprawling new encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” there are many mansions: A meditation on biblical ecology, a discussion of environmental policy, a critique of consumerism, even a reflection on the perils of social media.
What everyone wants to know, of course, is whether the pope takes sides in our most polarizing debate. And he clearly does. After this document, there’s no doubting where Francis stands in the great argument of our time.
But I don’t mean the argument between liberalism and conservatism. I mean the argument between dynamists and catastrophists. ...
Catastrophists, on the other hand, see a global civilization that for all its achievements is becoming more atomized and balkanized, more morally bankrupt, more environmentally despoiled. What’s more, they believe that things cannot go on as they are: That the trajectory we’re on will end in crisis, disaster, dégringolade. ...
So, Douthat goes through the list of items, showing that the pope is factually correct. Only, of course...
However, its catastrophism also leaves this pope more open to empirical criticism. For instance, he doesn’t grapple sufficiently with evidence that the global poor have become steadily less poor under precisely the world system he decries — a reality that has complicated implications for environmentalism.
See? We've opened sweatshops everywhere! The poor are much less poor, and we even put up suicide nets. So how can we be wrecking the planet with the average pay of the poorest on the planet has crept up? I have to say, Dothout never fails to be the first name in equivocation. And can you imagine the pleasure he took from writing "dégringolade?"
The Washington Post on empty aquifers.
When rivers, streams and reservoirs are low, as they are in California, people start digging holes. Large, unseen pools of water are trapped in the spongy rock and soil of the world’s aquifers, sometimes fairly close to the surface, sometimes deep underground. Tapped groundwater can save communities from economic or humanitarian catastrophe. But in too many places, humans are depleting this crucial reserve, just as climate change begins taking its toll.
A call to action on an environmental issue from the Washington Post? Yeah, sure.
The best way to promote rational consumption is to end government subsidies, explicit or implicit, for overusing water, particularly in dry areas, then to establish functioning, transparent and efficient markets for surfacewater and groundwater alike.
There you go. Let them drink... what they can afford.
Leonard Pitts has also been reaching the pope's missive.
There is something I have never understood about the argument over global warming.
That argument was, of course, renewed last week with the leaking, and then the official release, of a new papal letter excoriating human mistreatment of “our common home.” In this latest encyclical, Pope Francis calls for a “bold, cultural revolution” to stem the harm done to the planet from warming that is occurring “mainly as a result of human activity.”
He condemns a fixation on technological advance at the cost of the planet’s health — and the “magical” idea that the free market can reverse this damage if corporations and individuals enjoy a sufficient increase in profits. The refusal to accept that Earth’s resources are finite has led, the letter says, to “the planet being squeezed dry at every limit.”
Nor does all humanity suffer the consequences equally. Pope Francis writes that while global warming is disproportionately caused by wealthier nations, its effects are disproportionately borne by poorer ones. He calls upon the world to come together and reach a consensus for change. “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain,” he writes.
Leonard, Leonard, Leonard. See? Right there the pope is being negative and he's discounting "free market solutions." Surely that means we will dismiss everything of substance in the report. Unfortunately, all sarcasm aside, it probably does.
Steven Rattner on why Hamilton deserves a spot on the $10.
I’m all in for the plan announced last week by the Treasury to put a woman on a piece of American folding money. But in bumping Alexander Hamilton from the center of the $10 bill, we would be exiling the man most responsible for our nation’s having a sound currency in the first place.
The solution is simple: Evict Andrew Jackson from the $20 to make room for a worthy woman. In stark contrast to Hamilton, Jackson did more than most presidents to damage our financial system and our economy. ...
Over Thomas Jefferson’s fierce opposition, [Hamilton] established the Bank of the United States, which facilitated government transactions and the creation of our national currency. Then there’s his 1791 Report on Manufactures, in which he displayed his understanding of the key role government can play in promoting economic development.
Not content to report, Hamilton acted, turning Paterson, N.J., into our first centrally planned industrial hub. If economic policy had been left to the agrarian-oriented Jefferson, we’d all still be farmers.
I agree: Jackson, far more than Hamilton, deserves to tossed. And besides, it's a shame to bump Hamilton just when his
rap musical is on Broadway.
Dana Milban on the revival of the word "liberal."
Since the 1988 presidential campaign, when George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater turned “Massachusetts liberal” into an epithet, the label has been tainted — so much so that many liberals abandoned it for “progressive.”
But new polling shows a significant increase in the number of Americans who describe themselves as liberal and the number of Americans taking liberal positions on issues. Gallup has found the percentage of Americans calling themselves social liberals has equaled the percentage of social conservatives for the first time since pollsters began asking the question in 1999 (when 39 percent identified as conservative and 21 percent as liberal). ...
It used to be assumed that “the public doesn’t like the word liberal,” said Frank Newport, who runs the Gallup surveys. “But that’s changing now. The public certainly finds it more acceptable, when we ask them to put a label on themselves, to use the word liberal than in the past. It would seem that the word liberal is back in vogue.”
The keyword here isn't "liberal," it's "assumed." The public never stopped embracing liberal positions. If they ran away from the label, it's because politicians scattered first.