A Blog from David Crump
Mehdi Hasa is a British journalist who wears many different hats. I always 
try to listen to him when I can. Over the years he has done reporting for the British version of the Huffington Post, Al Jazeeera (which I also watch regularly), The Intercept, and MSNBC.
He recently did on editorial on American fascism that I believe is worth watching and digesting. I hope you will listen to what he has to say:
Scott Hancock is a history professor at Gettysburg College. He is also a serious disciple of Jesus Christ.
Hancock regularly goes to the Gettysburg battlefield to talk with visitors, hoping to educate them about the roots of the Civil War and the southern states’ investment in defending slavery.
It is amazing to me how often his critics repeat the Confederate propaganda created by the United Daughters of the Confederacy catechism for southern children. (Check out my post on the UDC here).
(I am indebted to John Fea’s blog for directing me to this video).
Adolph Reed is emeritus professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania. He recently appeared with journalists Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi on their pod/video cast Useful Idiots.
Taibbi asks Prof. Reed to discuss the best-selling book White Fragility. Reed then expands his horizons and places the book in the broader context of the “anti-racist” movement currently at work in this country.
Reed discusses ways in which much of the energy invested in liberal anti-racism efforts become a shallow distraction
from the far more significant underlying structural issues of class division, neo-liberal economics, and the bi-partisan political hierarchy defending the status quo.
I happen to agree 100% with the professor.
Here is the link to his interview. He begins speaking at about the 57:40 mark. I encourage you to take a listen.
Professional political blogger, Ms. Johnstone, is very cheeky, and that’s
probably why I read her blog. That and the fact that she, as an Australian, frequently offers insightful political commentary.
Her most recent post “Liberals Are Crazy Idiots” offers an all to brief discussion of how and why so-called liberal news outlets like MSNBC, with pundits like Chris Hays and Rachel Maddow, are nearly as useless as Fox News.
Here is an excerpt:
Liberals are such crazy idiots. They pretend to stand for truth and logic then spend years promoting the fact-free Trump-Russia collusion narrative. They pretend to stand for social justice then drop those values the second it becomes politically convenient, like making homophobic jokes about Trump and Putin, calling Lindsey Graham “Lady G” for being a closeted gay man, and lecturing black political leaders about how black people should think and vote. They pretend to stand for the little guy, then support austerity and war while literally worshipping John McCain.
Just last night on MSNBC Chris Hayes was talking about Trump’s controversial commuting of Roger Stone’s prison sentence and he parroted the completely false and utterly baseless claim that Stone was a “go between” for WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.
“Roger Stone was what he looked like: a go-between between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and then he lied about it, which is what he was convicted for,” Hayes said.
This is just completely untrue. The only communications between Stone and WikiLeaks prior to the November 2016 presidential election were WikiLeaks telling Stone to stop falsely claiming that he was in communication with the outlet and had been getting information from them.
You can read the entire post here.
Kyle Kulinski is a smart guy with a youtube video/pod cast that I often check out. He recently offered his own critique of the popular book, White Fragility.
A few days ago, I posted a piece by Matt Taibbi criticizing this book, as well. Tomorrow I will post a critique by the African-American professor, Adolf Reed.
Today Kulinski jumps into the fray with his own analysis, very much in line with Taibbi’s. If you are interested in this book, I encourage you to watch the entire clip.
So, why am I highlighting these various criticisms of a New York Time’s bestseller about anti-racism? Because we all need to confront America’s racist past and present intelligently and productively, in ways that will bring about meaningful change.
There are many people of all skin colors who are doing this work very well. They need to be heard and their instruction heeded.
Unfortunately, White Fragility appears to be a gross distraction from that cause which, in the end, will only be counter-productive. A lot of white folks may only read one book on this subject. Many will think, Oh, the new bestseller, and choose accordingly.
It will be a shame if America chooses to read this book but nothing else.
Racism is alive and well in America.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the dead bodies of 6 people of color have been discovered hanging from trees in various parts of this country.
In each case, local police are saying the people died by suicide. I don’t buy it.
Below is a video taken by one of several friends who fortunately stumbled upon a lynching in progress and were able to stop it.
No doubt, had these young people not had the good fortune and the fortitude to intervene, we would be hearing the report of yet another black man dying after tying himself to a tree.
Yes, the Confederate statues (primarily erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy) need to be removed and placed in American history
museums where children will learn about this country’s despicable history of slavery.
No, removing public memorials valorizing those who fought a war in order to maintain slavery will not “rob the nation of its history,” as conservatives are now lamenting.
Has Germany’s prohibition of public memorials to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi comrades robbed the German public of its historical memory about the Holocaust?
Of course not.
The current conservative hand-wringing is reactionary balderdash, pure and simple. But then reactionary balderdash is what gave rise to these statues in the first place. It comes as no surprise, then, that contemporary reactionaries are marching in step with the tradition.
Many (most? all?) of these Confederate statues, memorializing men like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, were erected by chapters of a southern women’s organization called the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Their purpose was to keep the southern flame burning for “the lost cause,” which was regularly translated into the rhetoric anticipating how “the south will rise again.”
The monuments were the first resurrection, so to speak, of the southern states’ reassertion of white supremacy.
These monuments were erected as reactionary displays against Lincoln’s vision for southern Reconstruction.
UDC statues stood (and still stand) as cruel reminders to every former slave, and to all of their descendants (who certainly were never consulted about whether they wanted a memorial in their community to the nobility of white slave owners), that they were still surrounded by the living, white descendants of their former, white slave owners who still believed in White Power.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy even published a children’s catechism (a series of questions and answers for them to memorize; many Protestant churches use catechisms), fusing the racist with the religious dimensions of the confederacy together.
Here is an excerpt of what the children memorized about slavery:
[13] How were the slaves treated?
With great kindness and care in nearly all cases, a cruel master being rare, and
lost the respect of his neighbors if he treated his slaves badly. Self interest would have prompted good treatment if a higher feeling of humanity had not.
[14] What was the feeling of the slaves towards their masters?
They were faithful and devoted and were always ready and willing to serve them.
[15] How did they behave during the war?
They nobly protected and cared for the wives of soldiers in the field, and widows without protectors; though often prompted by the enemies of the South to burn and plunder the homes of their masters, they were always true and loyal.
You can read the entire catechism here.
This sort of revisionist defense of slavery remains widespread. I have read it and heard it myself in Christian circles in recent memory.
The UDC is a racist organization, and their statues are a national disgrace. (Please learn more about it here: “7 Things the UDC Might Not Want You to Know About It,” “Time to Expose the Women Still Celebrating the Confederacy.” You can also find a list of their monuments here.)
These UDC statues are foul effigies silently extolling the depravity of slave ownership.
They are cold, marble sign posts directing us to the outermost boundaries of humanity’s lust for dehumanizing and brutalizing “the other.”
They are demonic fetishes elevated through human sacrifice — not of white lives but of black lives.
They commemorate white supremacy and the sacrifice of African blood, blood shed in the stinking holds of innumerable slave ships; bodies dumped into the Atlantic as shark food; human beings stolen, whipped, beaten, raped, sodomized, and sold to the highest bidder.
These statues need to come down.
They must come down.
Matt Taibbi is one of the investigative journalists that I follow regularly. He has written a number of important books, with his most recent publication
being I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street , chronicling the police murder of Eric Garner.
He recently produced an interesting review of the national best-seller, White Fragility. I have not read this book for a number of reasons, one of them being that I suspected that it was exactly the sort of treatise that Taibbi describes it as being. (I have done that sort of anti-racist “training” before, thank you very much.)
Below is an excerpt of Taibbi’s review. He describes a book promoting a perspective based on the worst aspect of post-modernism. (And I do not think post-modernism is a bad thing, necessarily.)
Or you can read the entire (free) version of it here.
If you have read the book, I am happy to hear your reaction to Taibbi’s critique.
DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia. . .
. . .For corporate America the calculation is simple. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There’s a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the “antiracism” prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc.
Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction. . .
For whatever reasons, Jordan Peterson remains a popular “culture critic” 
among evangelical Christians.
The Swedish Hitler scholar, Mikael Nilsson, has an interesting article analyzing Peterson’s revisionist account of Adolf Hitler in Haaretz newspaper, linking it with Peterson’s strange obsession with cultural Marxism (whatever the heck that is). A boogeyman he finds under nearly every bush.
The article is entitled “Exposing Jordan Peterson’s Barrage of Revisionist Falsehoods About Hitler and Nazism.”
I have posted an excerpt below.
The railing against “cultural Marxism” (a phrase with a long antisemitic history) is of course something that Peterson, unfortunately, has in common with Hitler and the Nazis. It is his blind spot, and to what degree this hatred of Marxism has influenced his analysis and understanding of Hitler and National Socialism is unknown.
It’s worth noting that this narrative happens to fit rather nicely with the views of a pool from which he draws many of his fans: the pro-Trump American right, whose leading figures are engaged in a persistent attempt to brand Nazism as socialist and Hitler as a leftist, if not a Democrat.
The New Testament makes no distinction between confession and lifestyle.
Jesus is clear. “A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit. So by their fruit you will know them” (Matthew 7:15-20). And I can tell you right now, There ain’t no bad trees in heaven.
The apostle Paul repeats Jesus’ warnings in his own words. Here is only one example:
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither…thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).
Our lives, our words, our actions, our attitude towards others and how we treatment them all matter. Our lifestyle tells the tale of whether or not we genuinely know the Lord Jesus Christ.
Recently, I heard three stories that have disturbed me deeply.
First, I saw the news of a young African-American woman in Wisconsin who was set on fire by a carload of strangers. As they drove past, they shouted the “N” word, doused her with lighter fluid, and hit her with a cigarette lighter.
Fortunately, she was able to put the fire out and get to a hospital for treatment. When I saw her photo, her hair and skin tone were an exact match to my bi-racial granddaughter’s.
Second, on my Facebook feed I read the story of a local African-American activist who is now being harassed for her participation in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
She had pressed charges against a man who verbally assaulted her as she stood on the sidewalk. Now this man has gathered a number of friends from the police department (not the Kalispell police) who surround her home after dark, pounding on the walls, making loud noises, while shining lights through the windows.
She and her family are terrified.
Third, I spoke yesterday with a former student, a young woman of color now pursuing graduate work in the northwest. She is also a foreign student who grew up overseas.
She shared with me how frightening it has become for her to be a visiting foreigner, a person of color, and a single young woman in today’s United States.
She is afraid that the Trump administration will not renew her student visa.
She is literally terrified to walk outside alone, never knowing who might throw something at her, scream an epithet, or do something much worse. Would the police offer any help or protection?
She also said that her all white church has remained silent about the problems of racism and police brutality dominating our headlines. The very few comments she has heard were criticisms of the recent protests, and admonitions always to obey the police.
She did not mention anyone empathizing with her personally.
No one has approached her to ask how she doing, as a foreign visitor with a dark complexion. How does she feel about life in this country right now?Nobody has taken the initiative to ask her about her thoughts and experiences. About how this unrest is affecting her as a woman of color; how they might be able to help her?
All of these stories are about racism and expressions of white privilege.
I have never faced anything comparable. And I know the reason why – I am a white male. This means that in American society, I am privileged.
I have never had to live my life facing the daily possibility that this might be the day – the day that someone calls me another derogatory name; the day that I am denied a loan, even though I have a well-paying job; the day that the police pull my son over for no good reason and put him in a choke hold; and the list goes on…
The church, too, is infected with this cancer of racism and the blindness of white privilege.
Listen to the chorus of “Christian” people who join the common rebuttal “All Lives Matter”; or deny the existence of any such thing as white privilege; or worse yet, twist their brains into a knot and claim (with Tucker Carlson) that the claims of white privilege are themselves a racist view of the world.
All of God’s people must address these problems specifically, clearly, Biblically.
Do you not know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?
What else is racism but the attempted theft of human dignity?
It is a greedy people’s way of thieving the resources, opportunities, and expectations from one group of people in order to horde them for another.
Most importantly, it is slanderous blasphemy against the image of God – the divine image borne by every human being, no matter the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes (see James 3:9).
Now is an historic moment for authentic followers of Jesus Christ to stand up, to stand apart, to identify themselves. It is a time to protest, to demand change, to examine themselves, to repent, and to correct their misguided, fellow church-goers, even to rebuke those who refuse to listen.
No, such behavior is NOT divisive. It is moral. It is obedient. It is loving. It is necessary. It is what it looks like to follow Jesus.
For, don’t you know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?