( Tomdispatch.com ) – Donald Trump was the worst president for Black people in the modern era, if not the nation’s history. Given a life of unremitting racial animus, under no circumstances should he receive a single vote from the Black community or other communities of color. After all, he’s never moderated his white nationalist sentiments and count on this: he never will.

Yet, somehow, he has indeed managed to win support from a sliver of the Black community. In 2016, he captured 6% of its vote and that rose to 8% in his losing effort four years later. No, those weren’t the large numbers he claimed he would win, but given who he is and what he’s done his entire life, including during his presidency, far more than he deserved. In 2024, it’s still likely that he’ll only receive single-digit backing, despite earlier polls showing Black support of anywhere from 15%-20% or more, particularly among men.

An early October poll of Black registered voters in battleground states from Howard University’s polling service, the Howard Initiative on Public Opinion (HIPO), exposed Trump’s lie that he’s winning Black voters in large numbers. HIPO (in which I participate) found that 84% of those polled said they planned to vote for Vice President Harris, while only about 8% would vote for Trump, with others undecided or leaning toward a third-party candidate. That’s hardly a great number for the former president, but even a tiny shift toward him or away from Harris might be just enough to give him an Electoral College victory.

Trump has indeed been endorsed by a number of marginalized Black rappers and celebrities. Some were pardoned or given clemency by him, including former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kirkpatrick, rappers Kodak Black and Lil Wayne, and Death Row Records founder Michael “Harry O” Harris and now the political bill has come due. Black members of Congress like Senator Tim Scott and Representative Byron Donalds have also become ubiquitous on Fox News and other stations praising Trump as the second coming of the Lord almighty. Self-interest goes a long way in explaining support from that crowd, but not from those who haven’t been in the spotlight.

How is it possible that a buffoonish bigot who seems to be deteriorating daily has convinced some African Americans he deserves their vote? The trick lies in Trump’s flimflam talents.

He certainly has a knack for diverting attention. His vulgar, ceaseless racist statements and provocations — “shithole countries,” “They’re eating the pets,” and “fine people on both sides” — served the dual purpose of feeding his white base its diet of racial venom and diverting attention from the policies of his administration that caused generational harm to African Americans and other communities of color. And count on one thing: if he returns to the White House, even more racially devastating policies await.

The excuse given by some of his Black (and white) supporters, uncomfortable with his blatant racism, is that he might be crude, temperamental, and a global embarrassment, but his “policies” while in office were distinct positives for the Black community and the country as a whole. Such policy benefits, they assert, should outweigh any reservations about voting for him. In particular, the “Trump economy” is dangled as proof that he should be supported, no matter what.

Unfortunately, much of the media instantly heads for the latest shiny thing dropped by Trump. The more outrageous, the more the coverage steers away from his policies and the devastation they might cause to his behavior and his words. It’s time instead to take an honest look at Trump’s corporate-friendly, white supremacist record while in office as it impacted the Black community.

Trump’s Economy Did Not Do What He Claimed

It bears repeating that Trump took a good economy that he inherited from Barack Obama and ruined it, like so many of his businesses. Obama gave him 75 straight months of job growth. Trump left office as the only president since the Great Depression to depart with negative job growth. Even before the Covid pandemic, which Trump blames for his ineptitude, his job numbers were flailing compared to Biden’s. According to The Hill, “During Trump’s first 31 months in office, employment growth in the United States averaged 176,000 jobs per month. During Biden’s first 31 months in office, employment growth averaged 433,000 jobs per month.”

Trump argues that he had the lowest Black unemployment because, in August 2019, the rate fell to 5.3%, a record at the time. However, he couldn’t identify a single policy or initiative of his that led to that number. When he took office, according to Federal Reserve Bank data, the rate was 7.5% – thank you, Obama! – but as he headed out the door in January 2021, it was 9.9%.

Perhaps the biggest blow to Trump’s boast — and given his disdain for his successor, no doubt to his hyper-inflated ego — is that, in April 2023, after the Biden administration resuscitated the economy following the Trump-driven pandemic catastrophe, the Black unemployment rate fell to 4.8%, the lowest ever recorded.

Trump’s one big economic “achievement” was his 2017 tax cut. Not only was it wildly skewed toward the top 1%, but it also had a negative racial impact. As a New York Times headline announced, “White Americans Gain the Most from Trump’s Tax Cuts,” noting that they were receiving about 80% of the benefits, while African Americans and Latinos got just 5% and 7%. 

Notably, Trump did remarkably little to change the racial income gap, the racial wealth gap, and racial disparities in stocks and investments. Yes, he still sometimes shouts at rallies, “I love Black men,” but he did nothing to close an income inequity gap in which Black men with the same level of education earn only 72% percent of what white men do.

Housing Hell Under Trump

In the area of housing, Trump appointed noted surgeon Ben Carson to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Carson knew nothing about housing policy at any level, nor had he any experience in administering or managing a government agency or department. His scandal-ridden term as secretary included the questionable spending of department funds on furniture and conflict-of-interest problems with his son. Carson was exactly the kind of unqualified hire that he and other conservatives now blame on affirmative action and wokeness.

In terms of policy, one of his first initiatives was a proposal to raise rents on public housing residents. In April 2018, National Public Radio reported that he suggested, “Americans living on housing assistance to put more of their income toward rent and he wants to give public housing authorities the ability to impose work requirements on tenants.” In some instances, under the proposal, many of the poorest renters would have seen an increase to 35% of their gross income, affecting 712,000 renters. Overall, the changes Carson wanted would have impacted more than 4.7 million families.

Trump and Carson also eliminated two anti-discrimination policies put in place at HUD during the Obama Administration to foster fair housing policies and opportunities. The first codified the use of the legal concept of “disparate impact” — looking at racial outcomes rather than the more nebulous idea of racial intent when assessing if racial discrimination has occurred. The second was a rule that obligated local jurisdictions to “identify and dismantle barriers to racial integration.” President Biden reversed those decisions shortly after taking office. 

The racial homeownership divide persisted in the Trump years. By 2021, CNN noted that less than half of Black families, about 44%, owned their homes compared to 72.7% percent, of white families. In fact, in the Trump years, the gap had grown.

Criminal (In)Justice

Trump’s Black supporters ignore his long, racially biased record on criminal justice. They point to the First Step Act, a law sought for years by activists, which Trump signed but played no role in initiating. It provided prison sentence reductions and other needed reforms. After being criticized by both Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence for signing what they considered a “get out of jail free” law, Trump quickly stopped talking about it and there is no mention of the First Step Act on his campaign website where you can buy a “Black Americans for Trump” coffee mug for $25.00.

For the 2024 campaign, he’s returned to form by taking a hard line on criminal justice, while calling for the death penalty for drug traffickers and a return to stop-and-frisk. His fictional “migrant crime” wave is also thoroughly racialized and would, in a second Trump term, undoubtedly lead to sweeps of Black and Brown communities with little regard for due process or human rights.

And remember, under attorney generals Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, the Trump administration carried out policies deeply detrimental to the Black community, including reinstating contracts with private prison corporations, restarting federal executions, allowing police departments to once again obtain military equipment, and supporting “qualified immunity” that protected some particularly discriminatory police behavior.

Trump’s Justice Department also sided with voter suppression initiatives, policies, and laws coming from Republican state legislators and governors, including dropping opposition to a racially discriminatory Texas voter ID law, making it easier to purge voter rolls, and creating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity that was rightly perceived as an effort to have the Trump White House corruptly get voter information it shouldn’t have had while promoting voter suppression. Even some Republican governors refused to cooperate with that commission.

The Attack on Black Health

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, brought healthcare coverage to millions of Americans after it became law in 2011. It was despised by the far right and Republican leaders who derided it as government socialism. Yet it dramatically reduced the uninsured rate for poor and low-income Americans, including communities of color. According to a 2022 report by the Department of Health and Human Services, the number of uninsured African Americans fell by 40% because of the ACA, declining from 7.1 million in 2011 to about 4.4 million by 2019. Uninsured rates for African Americans remained highest in states that did not extend Medicaid coverage as an available option under the law. The 12 states that failed to do so, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Wyoming, were all dominated by Republican elected officials.

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Trump was unable to repeal the law — some Republican legislators and their constituents loved parts of the ACA — and so he tried to undermine it in other ways. As the Washington Post reported, he slashed “federal money for advertising, community outreach, and ‘navigators’ who serve as enrollment coaches.” If left to Trump, millions of African Americans and others would have had zero coverage and have been left to suffer the harshest consequences of an unaffordable healthcare system.

Worse yet, Trump’s Covid response was a masterclass in what not to do. In the early days of the pandemic, he willingly and knowingly let hundreds of thousands of people die, a significant percentage of whom were Black and Latino, for his own selfish political interests. By the time Trump left office, more than 70,000 African Americans had died from Covid, a rate 1.8 times that of white Americans.

Environmental Injustice

Like other far-right conservatives, Trump denied the very existence of human-driven climate change and did all he could to weaken and undermine environmental regulations. His agenda included removing or reducing protections against air and water pollutants and other dangerous environmental toxins. No president in memory was as harmful or neglectful when it came to protecting the nation, environmentally speaking.

For example, as the Center for American Progress reported, he “gutted protections for clean water by weakening the Clean Water Act” and the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result, “communities of color in particular are seeing slow and inadequate enforcement” leading to greater harm and risk.

African Americans and other communities of color are far more likely than whites to be located in areas disproportionately impacted by Trump’s repeal of the Clean Power Plan and his degrading of Mercury and Air Toxic Standards. The need for enforcement and protection is clear as Black Americans are “75 percent more likely to live in close proximity to an oil or gas facility than people of other races” and are “nearly 40 percent of those who live within three miles of a coal power plant” along with other communities of color.

Trump also wanted to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice, which had been created specifically to address the needs of communities of color related to uneven harm from climate change and corporate pollution. Failing in that effort, he unsuccessfully tried to cut its funding significantly in his last years in office.

Education

Trump falsely claims that he “saved historically Black Colleges and Universities” (HBCUs) because he signed legislation extending the years in which Congress would provide funding for them and other minority-serving institutions. Despite his statements to the contrary, his FUTURE Act provided more or less the same level of yearly funding as during Obama’s presidency, roughly $80 million to $85 million (out of a possible $255 million under the law). And that would prove a pittance compared to the Biden-Harris investment of at least $7 billion aimed at HBCUs. It should be noted that Harris graduated from Howard University, one of the nation’s oldest HBCUs. Trump appears to have only been on an HBCU campus once in his life, a visit to Benedict College in 2019 when students were told to stay in their dorms while he gave a talk to a handpicked, bused-in audience.

Otherwise, Trump generally attacked Black educational needs — from proposed cuts at the Department of Education to proposed orders to eliminate any funding for programs related to educational diversity and inclusion to his appointment of Supreme Court Justices who would vote to erase more than 50 years of racial progress by eliminating affirmative action in higher education.

Civil Rights

On September 4, 2020, only months before leaving office, Trump ordered the White House Office of Management and Budget to issue a memorandum that directed federal agencies “to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘white privilege,’ or any other training or propaganda” that might suggest the United States is a racist country. The goal was to cut funding and cancel contracts related to programs or training supposedly employing such concepts.

That attack would have eliminated every program that sought to address the nation’s history of racial discrimination and exclusion. While president, Trump stated (and recently reiterated) that “we will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government.”

Trump Appointments

Trump’s judicial and other appointments while in power mirrored the tone and hue of his businesses: lily white. He had one of the worst records in terms of selecting judges of color at the federal level, including the Supreme Court. At the appellate level, Trump only did better than Ronald Reagan in the modern era. Reagan appointed seven Black judges, while the Trump administration could only find nine, unlike the administrations of Jimmy Carter (37), George H.W. Bush (11), Bill Clinton (61), George W. Bush (24), and Barack Obama (58). Overall, about 16% of Trump’s judges were people of color.

In terms of the Supreme Court, Trump had three appointments and chose folks who looked like him, two white men and one white woman. It’s rare indeed that any president gets three appointments, let alone in a single administration, but Trump did, due to the machinations of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. In short, a minority-elected president and a minority-elected GOP Senate majority claimed three Supreme Court seats and locked in a conservative majority on the court for a generation. 

Black Lives Didn’t Matter

From Election Day, November 3, 2020, until January 6, 2021, Donald Trump spent every breathing moment trying to disqualify millions of Black votes from Atlanta, Detroit, Madison, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Now, he and his Black representatives have the stunning audacity to want those same voters to cast a ballot for him. Consider it a classic lie, a con, a grift. As my grandmother would have said, Trump is trying to sell ice cubes in the desert.

He never has and never will have the Black community’s interests at heart. He counts on lies, misrepresentations, and the hope that folks will forget his disastrous presidency. His rhetoric while in and out of office has been hateful and filled with racist dog whistles and blaring horns. But it’s not just his words that need to be criticized. His past policies and projected ones are a stew of far-right extremism, autocratic and bigoted, that will only send the nation backward into a hell on earth if he’s returned to office.

Don’t be bamboozled. The racism and authoritarianism that were infants in his first term will emerge as full-blown adults in a second one. His pledge of retribution and empowerment of the most extreme elements of his base will generate endless crises, chaos, and generational harm to communities of color.

The task on November 5th is simple. Hold accountable for his misdeeds, deceptions, racist sneering, and autocratic aims, the man whose former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said he was “fascist to the core,” whose former White House chief of staff called him “an authoritarian” who “admires people who are dictators,” and whose former press secretary said, “He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.”

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Consider Donald Trump to be in a racial bind when it comes to election 2024. After all, he needs Black voters to at least defect from Joe Biden in swing states, if not actually vote for him. Yet, more than ever, he also needs his white nationalist base to believe that a second Trump term will be even more racist than the first and he’s been openly claiming that he’ll address the ghost of anti-white racism. Not surprisingly, his evolving strategy for the Black vote has been high on empty symbolism and viral moments, but distinctly low on specific promised policy benefits for the Black community.

Milkshakes and far-right policies are all the presumptive Republican presidential candidate has recently offered Blacks. Take his orchestrated photo op at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta a preview of things to come. The event was organized by Black MAGA supporter and Republican operative Michaelah Montgomery, who recruited some young African Americans, probably students from nearby historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to cheer for Trump when he entered the place. He proceeded to buy milkshakes for everyone. Montgomery herself gave Trump a picture-perfect hug and, to the glee of MAGAworld, stated, “I don’t care what the media tells you, Mr. Trump. We support you.”

Naturally, while there he made false claims about what he had done for Black folks while president. It wasn’t quite a speech, but he more or less mumbled that he had great support in the area because “I have done more for the people of Atlanta than any other president by far. I have done more for the black community than any other president since Abraham Lincoln and maybe including Abraham Lincoln, but since Abraham Lincoln. And it looks like our polling is very good in the state of Georgia overall. We are very happy about it. We have had — you see the support. It’s been really something.”

Note to Trump: You had such great support in Georgia in 2021 that the GOP lost two Senate seats in run-off elections there (while you were trying to overthrow the government). And that was primarily because of the turnout of Black voters who, the previous November, had voted for President Biden and returned to vote Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock into office.

Without actually engaging the students at Chick-fil-A, and speaking in his usual broken fashion, Trump boasted: “That’s really nice. We took care of the — black colleges, university. They are taken care of. Biden did nothing for them. I did everything.”

Note to Trump: The Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act (or FUTURE Act) you signed ensured that permanent funding for HBCUs would remain at essentially the same level as during the Obama administration (about $85 million). The Biden administration, on the other hand, has invested over $7 billion in HBCUs. That includes “$3.6 billion for HBCUs through the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief,” “$1.6 billion in capital finance debt relief for 45 public and private HBCUs,” and “$1.7 billion in grant funding to expand academic capacity and provide support for low-income students.”

MAGA and HBCUs

Michaelah Montgomery is steeped in contemporary MAGA politics. She has ties to the Blexit Foundation, a group started by far-right provocateur and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens to sway African Americans from the Democratic Party. Montgomery states on her LinkedIn page that she was Blexit’s city director for the Atlanta metro region. She is also the founder of Conserve the Culture, a group apparently devoted to converting young African American students to conservative, that is, Trumpublican, politics.

In interviews with the right-wing media, she made it appear that Trump had encountered a group of everyday young Black people at that Chick-fil-A who spontaneously expressed their love for him. In fact, it was a handpicked group that did not represent most HBCU students or the Black community more generally.

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If she really thought Trump had developed significant popularity among Black students, why didn’t she schedule him to speak at an HBCU? Montgomery later said: “The media will definitely have you thinking that if [Trump] were to show up to our neighborhood… that an angry mob of some sort would form or a riot would ensue.” She can pretend otherwise, but if Donald (“the Black people like me”) Trump actually ever showed up to spew his usual lies to any HBCU audience or Black community in the nation, there would indeed be massive protests.

While he claims he’s had great relations with HBCU presidents, he only visited one of those schools during his presidency and it turned into a scandalous Trumpian event. In 2019, he gave a talk at Benedict College in South Carolina to crow about his criminal justice reform policies. However, Benedict students were asked to stay in their dorms, where they were essentially imprisoned for an hour and served lunch while Trump bloviated. The faculty, too, were requested to stay away. According to USA Today, only seven students were allowed to attend the event and they were not allowed to ask questions.

Black and Far Right

Trump’s Black supporters continue to propagate the false notion that he’s going to make a historic breakthrough in voter support in the coming election. Polls are one thing, election results another. While his campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were wish-casting that he would get 15% to 20% of the Black vote, he only won 6% and 8% respectively.

And it should be noted that Trump desperately wants to dump Black votes not cast for him. The Big Lie that he won in 2020 was premised on his contention that voting in Black-dominated cities was corrupt and that millions of votes should have been discounted. Accepting that “reality” is the price of admission to Trumpworld, whether at the Trump-colonialized Republican National Committee or for any prospective vice-presidential candidate.

And worse yet, his African American sycophants continue to drink the Kool-Aid. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott humiliated himself recently on NBC’s Meet the Press when he clumsily refused six (yes, six!) times to state that he would accept a Trump defeat in the fall. Repeatedly asked, he demonstrated that his desire to stay in Trump’s good graces and potentially become his running mate took priority over the most basic stance for maintaining a constitutional democracy.

In the service of Trump, Scott also launched a video series, “America’s Starting Five,” a weekly discussion between him and the other four Black Republicans in Congress, Representatives Burgess Owens (UT), John James (MI), Wesley Hunt (TX), and Byron Donalds (FL). The goal: to convince Black voters that the GOP and Trump are the only way to go if African Americans want to get ahead.

The first episode, however, didn’t focus on policy differences between the Democrats and Trump, but on two ill-advised and well-criticized statements by Joe Biden. In 2019, he said that “poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids,” implying it was a given that white kids were bright and talented. He immediately recognized his mistake and tried to clean it up with gibberish. (“Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”) In 2020, as he was finishing an interview with the popular Black radio host Charlamagne tha God, Biden said, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” At the time, criticism flowed from across the political spectrum in the Black community, chastising the president for seemingly attempting to police Black racial identity.

Scott and the others used those statements to draw a conclusion about Biden’s bigotry and then extend that critique to the Democratic Party. This required, of course, burying decades of Trump’s racist statements and behavior in a memory hole that went deep into the center of the earth. It was an act of epic historical revisionism. They functionally erased the fact that he gave succor to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, attacked voting rights, expressed a desire to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, demanded that there be less immigrants from “shithole” nations and more from Norway, defamed black prosecutors, judges, and district attorneys with racist verbal attacks, insulted Harriet Tubman, and so much more during his presidency.

The Racial Storm Is Coming

Yet consider Trump’s first term nothing but an appetizer, should he be reelected. According to his campaign website, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and Project 47, he will unleash a program of racial authoritarianism unseen since the worst days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. And he’ll be emboldened and enabled by a constitution filled with ambiguities and undemocratic provisions, by an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court he helped appoint, and by millions of his supporters (many of whom have shown a propensity for using violence to meet their idea of his agenda).

Trump’s second-term racial program is already emerging. He stated while president and recently reiterated that “we will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government” and end Biden’s “Marxist executive order that seeks to impose racist and woke sexual ideology across the federal government.”

Believe him.

And it won’t just stop at the federal level or in the public sector. As the Guardian recently reported, MAGA forces are planning to go after all efforts at inclusion (whether related to racial, gender, religious, or sexual-orientation), including in the corporate sector and the non-profit world. Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal group and other far-right actors have already filed suits against Fearless Fund, a venture capital business founded by Black women; Hello Alice, which provides grants to small Black business owners; and the George Floyd Memorial scholarship program at Minneapolis’s North Central University, among other initiatives. America First Legal has been on a hyper mission to end diversity efforts, all of which it perceives as harmful to white Americans.

In a broader context, Trump has stated, “But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white and that’s a problem.” First and foremost, Trump sees himself as a victim of racism by Black public authorities and has been signaling that he’s all in on a campaign of overt white nationalism. It couldn’t be clearer where he’ll focus the resources of the White House and federal government should he return to power.

And one thing is guaranteed: he’ll have support for his actions. As USA Today noted, citing a CBS November poll, “Most white voters supporting Trump believe that racial minorities are favored over white people.” About 58% of Trump voters (as opposed to 9% of Biden ones) believe “racial minorities” are favored over “white people.”

And his plans (as well as those of his GOP allies) to get back into office include not only voter suppression tactics like closing polling sites, ending early voting, and questioning mail-in or drop-box ballots, but attempting to employ an army of Election Day militias who will look for “irregularities” and “illegal” behavior. Is there any doubt where those 100,000 election watchers will be sent (or what they will look like)? And by the way, there has been stone-dead silence from Trump’s Black supporters on the plan to send hardcore MAGA troops to Black and Latino communities in swing states.

Absurd to the End

Trump has said to his Black backers, “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.” That’s his way of attempting to link his own misconduct and corruption to his conviction that the Black community is overwhelmingly filled with criminals. Even worse, he has insultingly compared himself to South African leader Nelson Mandela, one of the most famous prisoners in the world for nearly three decades. Of course, he knows absolutely nothing about Mandela or what sent him to prison, only that he was famous for it. Mandela became a global hero to tens of millions who fought for years for his freedom.

You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, according to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, The Donald had a remarkably low opinion of Mandela. Cohen wrote in Disloyal: A Memoir that, after Mandela died in 2013, Trump told him, “Mandela f—ed the whole country up. Now it’s a s—hole. F— Mandela. He was no leader.”

Of course, Trump knew little and could have cared less about Africa, or South Africa in particular. There is almost no record of him discussing or tweeting about South Africa. The one time he did, based on a news report by far-right commentator Tucker Carlson, he tweeted a white supremacist talking point, falsely claiming that there were “large-scale killings” of white farmers in that country. From former Klan leader David Duke to hard racist websites like the Daily Stormer, white supremacists naturally celebrated Trump’s tweet.

In 2016, every white nationalist and supremacist in this country supported Donald Trump. In 2020-2021, in the wake of the Charlottesville riots, immigration cruelties, and the January 6th insurrection, they supported him again. And now, as the 2024 election looms, and Trump fights “anti-white” racism, he has once more earned their love and their votes.

Singer and activist John Legend who, along with his wife Chrissy Teigen, has battled Trump for years, summed up the former president best. He said: “He’s done very little for us and he is at his core, truly, truly a racist.”

Welcome to the 2024 election season and a world in which Black MAGA is still MAGA to the core.

Copyright 2024 Clarence Lusane

Tomdispatch.com

Ever since the United States’ “war on terror” began, American media has been rife with stereotypes of Muslims as violent, foreign threats. Advocates trying to push back against this characterization sometimes emphasize that “Islam means peace,” since the two words are derived from the same Arabic root.

Indeed, the traditional Muslim greeting “al-salamu alaykum” means “peace be upon you.” Some Americans were already familiar with the phrase, thanks to an unexpected source: hip-hop culture, which often incorporated the Arabic phrase.

This is but one example of Islam’s deep intertwining with the threads of hip-hop culture. In her groundbreaking book “Muslim Cool,” scholar, artist and activist Suad Abdul Khabeer shows how Islam, specifically Black Islam, was a crucial part of hip-hop’s roots – asserting the faith’s place in American life. From prayerlike lyrics to tongue-in-cheek references, Islam and other religions are woven into hip-hop’s beats.

That’s the focus of a class we teach at Boston University. One of us is a professor of religion, history and pop culture, while the other is a graduate student in Islamic Studies.

More than ‘hello’

In Muslim cultures, “al-salamu alaykum” is more than a way of saying hello. It points to the spiritual peace of submitting to God – and not only in this life. Saying “peace be upon you” is a prayer that God will grant heaven to the person with whom you are speaking. Many Muslims believe that “salam” is also the greeting heard upon entering heaven.

The Quran instructs Muslims that “when you are greeted with a greeting, respond with a better greeting or return it.” This means that the proper response to “al-salamu alaykum” is, at a minimum, to respond in kind: “wa alaykum al-salam.”

This exchange has been adapted by several rap artists – including Rick Ross, who does not identify as Muslim, and turns the phrase’s meaning on its head. Ross uses the greeting in the hook of his song “By Any Means,” referencing a famous speech by civil rights leader Malcolm X, who was a minister of the Nation of Islam for many years until shortly before his assassination. In 1964, Malcolm X declared African Americans’ right “to be respected as a human being … by any means necessary.”

Half a century later, Ross rapped,

By any means, if you like it or not
Malcolm X, by any means
Mini-14 stuffed in my denim jeans
Al-salaam alaykum, wa alaykum al-salaam
Whatever your religion kiss the ring on the Don

Ross’s use of the phrase, right after he mentions Malcolm X, appears to insinuate that if one wishes him peace, he will wish them the same. However, if one wishes him violence, he will not hesitate to respond in kind.

‘Peace to all my shorties’

Other hip-hop artists have used “al-salamu alaykum” in many different ways, including lyrics that show broader familiarity with the laws of Islam. For example, it is sometimes contrasted with pork, which is prohibited in Islam, and by extension, the police – the “pigs,” in derogatory slang – though it is more common for non-Muslim singers to use it in this way.

“Tell the pigs I say Asalamu alaikum,” Lil Wayne says in “Tapout,” a song that has little else to do with Islam. Joyner Lucas likewise raps, “I say As-salāmu ʿalaykum when I tear apart some bacon,” in the song “Stranger Things.” Combinations of the sacred and the profane are present throughout hip-hop, not limited to references to Islam.

Finally, many rappers, particularly those who are Muslim, use the greeting in a more straightforward manner. In their 1995 song “Glamour and Glitz,” A Tribe Called Quest raps:

Peace to all my shorties who be dying too young
Peace to both coasts and the land in between
Peace to your man if you're doing your thing
Peace to my peoples who is incarcerated
Asalaam alaikum means peace, don't debate it

Here they affirm and assert that the core of the greeting is one of peace and harmony – not only between people, but between all of God’s creations.

Shared identity

But even if Muslims come in peace, society may not see them that way – and that experience of discrimination often comes through in some lyrics. Rapper French Montana, who immigrated to the Bronx – the birthplace of hip-hop – from Morocco, raps in his 2019 song “Salam Alaykum:”

As-salamu alaykum, 
That pressure don’t break, 
It don’t matter what you do, 
they still gon’ hate you

It’s a harsh recognition that whatever one’s actions, whether violent or peaceful, they may still result in racism – a realization he shares with some fellow Muslim rappers in Europe. A comedic take on this is done by Zuna and Nimo in their 2016 song “Hol’ mir dein Cousin,” where at the start of the song, Nimo states he has a shipment of “haze–” marijuana, but at the end of the video, it turns out the shipment is of “Hase–” bunnies. Yet, throughout the song the rappers speak about violence and drug trade, painting a conflicting picture of innocence versus guilt.

Fatima El-Tayeb, a scholar of race and gender, calls hip-hop a “diasporic lingua franca” in her 2011 book “European Others,” highlighting how an art form created by African Americans, and speaking to their experiences, has become one of the main ways minorities around the world speak about their struggles and successes. Some young Muslims in Europe, for example, use hip-hop as a key way to assert their sense of belonging in societies.

In hip-hop, “al-salamu alaykum” is not treated as though it were part of a foreign culture. These rappers’ beats create a space where it’s OK to be Muslim – a space in which Islam is not merely tolerated, but recognized as a valuable part of pop culture.

Margarita Guillory, Associate Professor of Religion, Boston University and Jeta Luboteni, Ph.D. Student in Religion, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – I was 9 years old when Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” dropped. I have vivid memories of the bass-laden track booming out of car stereos and hearing it on Black radio, like Kiss FM’s top eight at 8 p.m. countdown.

On the track “Move the Crowd,” Rakim – also known as “the God MC” – rhymes “All praise is due to Allah and that’s a blessing.” Growing up as a Black Muslim in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I was already familiar with the phrase. Like all Muslims, I learned to say it during my daily prayers and as an expression of gratitude.

But when Rakim laced those words into the lyrics of what ultimately became a popular song, he affirmed what I was seeing around me in my Brooklyn community – that Islam and Muslims were prominent features of Black life.

A key concept

Rakim dropped another familiar phrase in the song: knowledge of self.

With knowledge of self, there’s nothing I can’t solve
At 360 degrees I revolve
This an actual fact, it’s not an act, it’s been proven
Indeed and I proceed to make the crowd keep moving.

When Rakim extols the benefits of “knowledge of self” to himself as an emcee and a human being, he is drawing on a philosophy that has been critical to Black Islam, a term I use to describe the different forms of Islamic belief and practice found in Black America.

Knowledge of self comes from this tradition, beginning roughly a century ago, which has become known for advancing Black consciousness, resistance and redemption. Knowledge of self is an ethical pursuit to understand one’s place in and relationship to the world in order to positively change it.

In my 2016 book, “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States,” I demonstrate how knowledge of self is fundamental to hip-hop. It is often described as hip-hop’s “fifth element,” the others being DJing; emceeing or “rhyming”; graffiti or “writing”; and dance, from “b-boying” to “pop locking.”

While the phrase and the consciousness that it represents have been mentioned in too many songs to count – from Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop” and Talib Kweli’s “K.O.S. (Determination)” – history shows the term has been a part of Islamic literature for nearly a millennium. For example, the first chapter of the celebrated 12th-century Islamic scholar Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali’s famous text “The Alchemy of Happiness” is titled “The Knowledge of Self.”

The concept of ‘knowledge of self’ was instrumental in Lauryn Hill’s breakout 1998 single ‘Doo Wop:’

In my book, I make the case that Islam, specifically Black Islam, gave hip-hop knowledge of self.

Su’ad Abdulkhabeer, Muslim Cool
Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States.. Click here.

The lessons

Rakim’s reference to knowledge of self’s being an “actual fact” is a nod to the “actual facts” of the “Lost-Found Muslim Lessons,” the catechism taught by Master W.D. Fard Muhammad, who founded the Nation of Islam on July 4, 1930. Master Fard taught these lessons to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who would become the religious movement’s leader.

These lessons are fundamental to the way that the Nation of Islam understands the world and the role of Black people in it. The lessons are also studied by the Nation of Gods and Earths, a related spiritual path, of which Rakim is a member. Knowledge of self comes to hip-hop through these lessons.

Rakim was not alone. During the golden age of hip-hop, a period from about the mid-1980s through mid-1990s, rappers – influenced by Black Islam – steadily proclaimed their knowledge of self in their music. Big Daddy Kane declared there’s “no pork on my fork,” an acknowledgment of the Islamic injunction against the consumption of swine. The Poor Righteous Teachers gave the Arabic greeting as salaamu alaikum with the dome of Harlem’s Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in the background in the music video for “Rock Dis Funky Joint.” And from Brooklyn to the California Bay, acclaimed emcees like Guru and local acts were rhyming about “praying to the east,” a reference to the Muslim practice.

The message

Long before rappers spoke of knowledge of self in the 1980s, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad expounded on the term in his book “Message to the Blackman in America,” released in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In it, he emphasized Black self-reliance – with knowledge of self being a key component.

“The so-called Negroes must be taught and given Islam,” Muhammad wrote. “Why Islam? Islam, because it teaches first the knowledge of self. It gives us the knowledge of our own. Then and only then are we able to understand that which surrounds us … this kind of thinking produces an industrious people who are self-independent.”

In some ways, it comes as little surprise that a term promulgated by a fierce advocate of self-reliance in the mid-1960s would be so widely embraced by hip-hop shortly after it was born as a counterculture in the early 1970s.

Hip-hop’s consciousness

When Black Islam helped hip-hop culture cultivate knowledge of self, it created an aspiration, arguably unique for contemporary popular music as a whole, to not just rhyme about it or write graffiti about it, and so on, but to apply it in real life. As a result, knowledge of self became hip-hop’s consciousness, emphasizing an awareness of injustice and the imperative to address it through both personal and social transformation. Critically, this consciousness, while informed by Black Islam, is embraced by hip-hop community members of all stripes.

Via Pixabay/ Wikimedia.. The 1989 song ‘Self-Destruction’ opens with a sample of a speech by Malcolm X.

The consciousness led to different forms of hip-hop-based activism. Songs against gun violence like The Stop the Violence Movement’s “Self-Destruction” and “We Are All in the Same Gang” by the West Coast All Stars.

“Self-Destruction” opens, not inconsequentially, with a sample of a speech by Malcolm X, the onetime spokesman for the Nation of Islam and icon of Black Islam. The consciousness also contributed to the formation in 2004 of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which set the stage for other, albeit less radical and comprehensive, engagements with politics by the hip-hop generation, like the Vote or Die campaign and the push for Obama in 2008.

Nearly 10 years later, this consciousness was on display at the 2017 Grammy performance by A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and Consequence that was an open call to “resist” in the Trump era. This consciousness also continues to inspire the many organizations like Kuumba Lynx and the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago that use hip-hop as a form of arts-based activism for youth.

And, of course, it remains in the music.

The knowledge continues

On the track “Family Feud,” Jay-Z – like Rakim – praises God, but this time in Arabic: “Alhamdulillah,” Mumu Fresh questions others’ knowledge of self with the line “Good morning, sunshine, welcome to reality/I tried to wake you, but you were sleepin’ so peacefully in your fallacy.” Busta Rhymes dropped “Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God,” full of warnings and prophecies. And in a freestyle viewed around the world, Black Thought rhymes about the wisdom he got at the masjid. This consciousness is so entwined with music that Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” became a Black Lives Matter movement anthem.

Like hip-hop, this consciousness operates globally. Take, for example, the Iraqi-Canadian Narcy, Cape Town’s YoungstaCPT, Cuban hip-hop artist Robe L. Ninho and the U.K.’s Enny, whose works track their own journey for knowledge of self.

Things have changed since Rakim dropped “Move the Crowd” in 1987. Gentrification is pushing my community out of Brooklyn, and Islam and Muslims are more known and subject to the state and interpersonal violence of anti-Muslim racism. Yet hip-hop still affirms what I see around me – knowledge of self is as vital as ever.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Associate Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Inequality.org ) – In our United States today, all of us do not have an “equal opportunity” to become rich — or even comfortable. Rich people like things that way. Grand fortunes only grow grander when the richest among us have plenty of exploitable people around to exploit.

To keep things that way, rich people have gone out of their way over the past half-century to make sure all of us do not have “equal opportunity” to a quality education. This week, with the Supreme Court’s stunning ruling that strikes down affirmative action in higher ed admissions, the most fervent advocates of plutocratic privilege have now completed their squashing of the world’s most ambitious attempt to create a system of public education that can truly guarantee all kids a quality education.

That ambitious effort began all the way back in 1787 when our new nation’s earliest lawmakers, in the Northwest Ordinance, required towns in future states to reserve prime real estate for public schools. Their goal: to ensure that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

“Without education, the founders feared democracy would devolve into mob rule and open doors to unscrupulous politicians and hucksters,” the University of South Carolina Law School’s Derek Black has pointed out. “Our democratic experiment might very well just fail.”

Realizing the founders’ goal of “forever” encouraging public education would end up taking almost forever. Not until the years after World War II would the United States have anything remotely close to a public school system that extended equal opportunity to young people of all colors and classes, to children with and without disabilities. In the 1960s, federal tax dollars finally began helping every community offer all children a quality educational experience.

Those dollars came via progressive tax rates that actually had most of America’s richest contributing something close to their fair tax share.

In those same mid-20th-century decades, we overhauled American higher education. We created networks of public community colleges, all with free or low-cost tuition. We created student grant and loan programs that enabled millions of young people to earn four-year and postgraduate degrees without building up debts that would take them lifetimes to pay off.

Americans who wanted to opt out of this ambitious new world of public education remained free to do so. The rich could still send their kids to private academies. Any families that so chose could send their kids to religious schools — but not on the public dime. Public tax dollars went to fund public education. Those dollars, we believed, were building democracy, teaching people of all backgrounds how to work with and learn from each other.

These noble goals would, of course, regularly go unmet. But the goals themselves — the rhetoric of “equal educational opportunity” — did really matter. Parents and communities, armed with this rhetoric, ventured forth and did noble battle against the still formidable barriers to equal opportunity. They even won many of those battles. We were moving, as a nation, in the right direction.

And then rich people said stop. These rich felt like saps. High taxes on their “hard-earned” incomes were bankrolling the education of other people’s children. Their alma maters, our wealthiest fretted, might even start cutting back on the “legacy admissions” that guaranteed their offspring easy entry into the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities.

The “indignities” these wealthy endured went well beyond the “disrespect” they felt. They saw the source of their fortunes, their “right” to run Corporate America as they saw fit, under direct threat as the United States entered into the 1970s. The federal government — under a Republican president no less — seemed to be hobbling business at every turn.

At the end of 1970, Richard Nixon had signed into law legislation that created a new federal agency to protect workers from injury and illness. Just a few weeks earlier, the first administrator of another new federal office, the Environmental Protection Agency, had announced his attention to give business polluters no quarter. As an independent agency, William Ruckelshaus pronounced, the EPA had “only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.”

Things were clearly getting out of hand. Business seemed to be taking a shellacking from every direction. New federal agencies. A restless labor movement. Campuses full of profs and students who felt free to ridicule business values. Corporate America clearly had to respond. But how? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would put that question to Lewis Powell, a leading corporate attorney.

Powell’s answer would come in a confidential 1971 memo, just two months before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The time had come, Powell declared, “for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.”

Business confronts, Powell would contend, critics “seeking insidiously” to “sabotage” free enterprise. “Extremists on the left,” he insisted, have become “far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before.”

Corporate America, Powell would exhort, must show more “stomach for hard-nose” combat. Yet individual corporate leaders, Powell understood, can only do so much. Real strength, he would go on to explain, lies “in careful long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years.” Real strength demands a “scale of financing available only through joint effort” and “the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

Powell’s 1971 musings, notes historian Kim Phillips-Fein, “crystallized a set of concerns shared by business conservatives in the early 1970s” — and gave “inspiration” to corporate leaders who would later become familiar names and powerful forces, men like arch Colorado right-winger Joseph Coors.

Together, these newly energized corporate leaders would unleash upon America what political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have called “a domestic version of Shock and Awe.” The number of corporate public affairs offices in Washington, D.C. would quintuple between 1968 and 1978, from 100 to over 500. In 1971, only 175 U.S. corporations had registered lobbyists in Washington. The 1982 total: almost 2,500.

Corporate leaders also bankrolled a series of new militantly “free market” think tanks and action centers: the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977, the Manhattan Institute in 1978, among many others.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for its part, would double its membership between 1974 and 1980 and triple its budget.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Complementing this new ideological infrastructure: a torrent of campaign contributions to rich people-friendly pols. In the mid-1970s, U.S. senators were depending on labor for almost half their campaign funding. By the mid-1980s, senators were getting less than a fifth of their funding from union PACs.

By the early 2000s, adds Jacob Hacker, the Republican Party had solidified its intimacy with “very, very, very rich billionaire donors” and corporate groups. The GOP now marched in total sync with the policy priorities of America’s most fortunate: more regressive tax cuts, more deregulation, and more extreme conservatives on the nation’s judicial benches.

The personal payoff from this synchronization would be huge for America’s deepest pockets. Between 1995 and 2007, sinking effective income tax rates saved America’s 400 richest households an average $46 million per year. The “flip side” of this “aggressive pursuit of lower taxes by the rich”? Hacker and fellow analyst Nathan Loewentheil have the consequential answer: chronic government budget deficits and insufficient funds for public goods like public education.

The predictable result? Everything from overcrowded elementary school classrooms to tuition rates that make higher education unaffordable for vast numbers of American households.

George Washington would not approve. In 1796, in his annual presidential address to Congress, Washington opined that our nation’s lawmakers had no duty “more pressing” than “the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter.”

We are failing that youth. We are coddling our rich instead.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

Nothing will change for my institution, the University of Michigan. In 2006 the good people of the state passed Proposal 2, forbidding the use of race as a factor in admissions.

This measure caused the percentage of African-American students to drop. In 2005 non-Hispanic Blacks made up 7.2% of the Ann Arbor undergraduate student body.

Today African-American students make up less than 4% of the undergraduate student body on the Ann Arbor campus. That is a 45% drop. Virtually the same thing happened in the University of California system when they had to stop doing affirmative action.

The University of Michigan drop came despite the university’s attempt to substitute “hardship” as an admissions criterion for “race.” Students wrote in their personal statements about difficulties and obstacles that they faced in life through their high school years. But of course, as hard as life might be for African-Americans in the United States, there are others who face obstacles and hardships — poor whites, LGBTQ+ people, and women, and many of these other disadvantaged people are white. So they seem to have taken up nearly half the slots formerly allotted to Black people.

In other words, “hardship,” which Chief Justice John Roberts admitted in his decision might be considered in admissions, just doesn’t do the same work as race-conscious admissions do.

13.64% of Michiganders are African-American, so they are vastly underrepresented on the Ann Arbor campus.

Leave slavery aside, when they were unpaid labor for as much as 400 years. From the 1930s to 1968 the practice of redlining in Michigan prevented African-Americans from accumulating wealth through home ownership. That gave white families a galactic advantage. Even since redlining was officially outlawed in the 1960s, it cast a long shadow on homeownership rates and pricing of houses by neighborhood. Informal segregation, sometimes abetted by realtors, continues to keep Detroit and Flint among the most segregated cities in the United states.

H/t Urban.org

That bastion of left-wing radicalism, the RAND think tank (which started out as an adjunct to the US Air Force) reports: “The median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other elements of wealth. The median White household: around $189,000,” This happened because of redlining and other elements of systemic racism, not because of any fault of African-Americans themselves.

John Roberts believes that such injustices have already been made up. They haven’t. They haven’t begun to be. Having robbed Black people blind since 1619, the least we can do is try to give them educational opportunities consonant with their proportion of the population.

Personally, I think the University of Michigan should set up a magnet K-12 school in Detroit and promise admission to those who graduate from it with good grades. If it was our school, we should be able to do as we please with its graduates. If it was in Detroit, it would ipso facto have mostly African-American attendees, but that wouldn’t be our problem.

There is a well-known fallacy among economists, called the “lump of labor.” Many people assume that if you increase job-holders among one group, it will reduce the jobs for another, that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done. This idea could not be more false. Look at Turkey in 2016-2017, when the economy grew 4% a year at a time of slowdowns for other countries. Economists concluded that the growth came about because two million Syrian workers had fled to Turkey from their civil war. That meant that farmers who wanted to expand suddenly had access to farm labor, and urban businesses that wanted to expand had access to educated Syrians, adding to the available work force. Turkey could do more work because it had more workers. Syrians didn’t take jobs from Turks, they expanded the pie.

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education believe in a similar fallacy, the “lump of education.” So they think if you admit more minorities to colleges and universities, it will keep out some whites who might otherwise have gotten in. But the colleges and universities might expand their student body. This has happened at my university, In 1984 when I arrived at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus there were a little over 34,000 students, including about 6,000 graduate students. Today we have almost 50,000 students, including 17,000 grads. Michigan’s population was 9 million in 1984. It is 10 million today. The state grew 10%. The student body grew by 32%. Things change. In many cities and states “meds and eds,” medicine and education have replaced traditional industry as contributors to gross domestic project, and we can expect further expansion of education.

There is room in this growing economy for everybody. Let’s find a way to benefit from the talents of all Americans of all races and backgrounds, and not systematically sentence some to menial labor based on the color of their skin.

(The Conversation) – The news was startling.

On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword.

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing battle for equality

Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure “the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Professor of History, Sam Houston State University and Zachary Montz, Lecturer, History Department, Sam Houston State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Joshua Houston leads a Juneteenth Parade in Huntsville, Texas, in a photo circa 1900.
Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library

Shame on those political elites demanding we abandon even striving for a fair country.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

In my view some of the actions Trump took while president were much, much worse than storing some old files in his bathroom. The government over-classifies things and the 1917 Espionage Act, which underpins some of the charges against him, is unconstitutional and should be struck down. Maybe if the Republicans are angered enough by its use against their party’s leader they can be proper libertarians and get rid of the damn thing.

So here are three things Trump did, which immediately come to mind, that should have been crimes that landed him in jail.

1. Trump initiated a formal policy of family separation of undocumented immigrants to the United States. He didn’t change the law, just the way Homeland Security and other agencies viewed the law. It is not intrinsically illegal for people to enter the US without a visa, if, for instance, they are seeking asylum. You can’t really tell the status of their case until they go before a judge. So up until 2017 they weren’t considered criminals. But Trump encouraged law enforcement to disregard asylum claims and to view them as having broken the law for just having stepped foot in the US. If they were criminals they had to be jailed. And children cannot be held in a jail for adults. So the practical outcome of treating the parents as criminals was that their children would be taken from them by child services and placed in juvenile detention or even in foster homes.

The policy had no other rationale but cruelty. Then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, part of Trump’s psychopathocracy, openly boasted about sending a message in this way to immigrant families not to come with their children. There is no, repeat, no evidence that the family separations slowed immigration. The practice did, however, resemble the actions of slavers in the America of the 19th century who separated enslaved families and sold family members down the river. Some of the children taken away were US-born. The government lost track of others. Some children were abused.

Anybody who did a thing like that should go to jail for life. But it wasn’t even illegal, and although 66% of Americans disapproved, 27% thought it was the right thing to do.

2. Muslim Ban. Trump tried three times to come up with regulatory language that would allow him to ban some Muslims from coming to the United States. Discriminating against people on the basis of religion is un-American. Because he finally tied the ban to countries that would not or could not conform to US reporting requirements on would-be immigrants, he finally made it stick. Most of the big Muslim countries, like Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia were not even affected. He managed to make life more difficult for Yemeni-Americans who could not see their grandparents anymore, or for desperate Syrians trying to flee their civil war. As with family separation, the cruelty was the point.

3. Trump’s deployment of force against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters at LaFayette Square in June 2020 was illegal and unconstitutional. His attempt to order in military forces contravened posse comitatus.

Scott Michelman of the ACLU observed, “The President’s shameless, unconstitutional, unprovoked, and frankly criminal attack on protesters because he disagreed with their views shakes the foundation of our nation’s constitutional order. And when the nation’s top law enforcement officer becomes complicit in the tactics of an autocrat, it chills protected speech for all of us.”

Also illegal was his use of federal agents to kidnap protesters in Portland, Oregon, off the streets without due process.

Of course these three lawless actions that harmed large numbers of innocent people are only a drop in the bucket among the innumerable unethical, illegal, unconstitutional or just plain ugly things Trump did to our country. If he goes to jail for stupidly fooling around with some old Pentagon war plans, that will be ironic, since it is probably the least damaging of his crimes.