Life Inside and Israeli Prison. Hear the Testimony of my Friend, Munther Amira
Category: Systemic Racism
More Evidence For the Practical Importance of Critical Race Theory
Colin Gordon is a history professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in the history and long-term effects of American public policy.
Professor Gordon recently wrote a highly informative article for Dissent Magazine which asks the question, “Who Segregated America?”
In this article he demonstrates the pernicious role played by private business interests in pioneering the highly discriminatory methods that would eventually be used by public, government policies to permanently entrench racial segregation through America’s neighborhoods.
Here is one more example of why an understanding of American racism and its dissection though tools like Critical Race Theory are so important to our educational system.
Frankly, it is impossible to understand either our history or our current racial predicament without it.
Below is an excerpt of “Who Segregated America?”:
Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.
Recent scholarship and reporting on racial disparities in the United States have emphasized the role of public policy—especially federal policy—in the creation of what the 1968 Kerner Commission famously dubbed “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This is especially true of housing policy. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) skewers the stark exclusion of African-American veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) offers a damning synthesis on how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) embraced Jim Crow. More recently, the digitization of the infamous “residential security” redlining maps prepared by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s has spurred academic interest in the connections between the HOLC’s bluntly racial assessments and contemporary disparities.
This condemnation of federal policy is certainly warranted. Even the constraints of the New Deal coalition (in which the Democratic majority was, as Katznelson observes, a “strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa”) cannot excuse the FHA’s slavish deference to racial prejudice in private realty. One can and should expect more of a public agency, wielding billions in housing subsidies in one hand and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause in the other, than a set of underwriting guidelines that “could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws,” as housing activist Charles Abrams observed in 1955.
But is it true, as Rothstein’s subtitle suggests, that “government segregated America”? Not really. As new work on the scope of private racial restrictions underscores, racial segregation in American cities (especially Northern and border cities) was largely accomplished by private interests and private action long before the FHA spent a dime or the HOLC opened its first bottle of red ink.
Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) “wholly of the Caucasian Race.” The result was a sort of pointillist apartheid, filled in parcel by parcel, block by block, and subdivision by subdivision, on a scale sufficient to quarantine existing pockets of African-American residency and mark new developments as largely off limits. . .
(Observe in the following graphic how “Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) ‘wholly of the Caucasian Race.'” In other words, private racial regulators orchestrated the creation of black ghettos and white suburbs with all the damaging consequences.)
. . . More to the point, the FHA and other federal housing policies were always—and remain—little more than a poorly regulated trough for private housing interests. They exist not to secure homeownership but to sustain the residential construction and home finance industries with direct subsidies, socialized risk, and tax breaks. In that role, they have always parroted the goals, motives, and prejudices of private interests and deferred to their assessment of what boosted—or threatened—the value of private property.
The segregation of the American city was conceived, accomplished, and justified largely by private action in response to the demographic upheaval of the Great Migration. Federal housing policies unconscionably doubled down on both segregation and its assumptions, but the damage was already done.
Read the entire article here.
Israel convicts World Vision official despite evidence he’s innocent
Israel-Palestine news recently published a story about Israel’s arrest and conviction of a Christian official with the humanitarian organization, World Vision.
But this is a standard Israeli move. Despite a lack of evidence — in fact, the defense produced abundant evidence demonstrating that the accused was completely innocent — Israel moved aggressively on its bogus charges.
You can find the article by Kathryn Shihadah at Israel-Palestine News. It is titled “Israel convicts World Vision official despite evidence he’s innocent.” I have reproduced the article’s highlights below:
Israel found Mohammed El Halabi guilty of diverting $50 million from World Vision charity, ignoring compelling facts: the total budget for 10 years was under $23 million; El Halabi’s alleged ‘confession’ was directed by Israeli authorities; independent audits showed Israeli charges were unfounded; and both the Australian government (a major donor to World Vision) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) conducted special reviews and found no wrongdoing.
In violation of international law, Israel kept Mohammed El Halabi in prison for weeks before he was allowed access to an attorney, and before informing his family of his whereabouts. He reported that his Israeli interrogators beat him – the UN says his treatment “may amount to torture.”
Israel’s reliance on highly questionable “secret evidence” to convict El Halabi (and thousands of other Palestinians) indicates a deeply flawed judicial system.
Click here to read the entire piece.
Frederick Douglass: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”
All understanding is relative.
Any adult who does not understand this simple truth has not been paying attention to the way life works. But, then, many of us go through life with our minds closed and our eyes firmly shut.
To these folks, my understanding of life is the only possible, the only acceptable understanding. And it probably should be enforced onto anyone who disagrees with me.
It remains the case that, even in today’s America, race, class, education, political, and economic opportunities all play a sizeable role in determining how people evaluate their lives, set their priorities, and consider their circumstances.
Frederick Douglass was an American statesman, abolitionist, author, orator, and an escaped slave. In 1852, Mr. Douglass was asked to give a speech about the significance of the American Day of Independence, July 4th.
As a former slave fighting in the front lines against the institution of American slavery, his perspective on Independence Day celebrations was very different from that of the average, well-off, white person.
Then, as today, race and class matter. They matter greatly. They make all the difference in how a person understands life, and what events appear worthy of celebration.
As I argue regularly on this blog, similarly stark differences in perspective ought to be heard in Christian evaluations of this secular holiday, the 4th of July.
The fact that the average American Christian typically applauds in the front row of this annual standing ovation for American “freedom,” brazenness, and over consumption is additional testimony to our cultural captivity, not to mention our spiritual blindness.
Listen to what Mr. Douglass said:
You can read the complete text of Douglass’s powerful speech here.
Although Douglass’s entire speech is brilliant, for me, the special genius of Douglass’s wonderful oratory is on fullest display in the following excerpt. (The emphasis is mine):
. . . What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour…
Part Two of My Conversation About Christian Nationalism with ‘Determine Truth’ Podcast
My friends, Rob Dalrymple and Vinnie Angelo, at the Determine Truth 
podcast have posted the second part of our recent conversation about the crippling dangers of Christian Nationalism within the evangelical, Christian church.
They have also conveniently listed a number of websites where listeners can find the books and authors we mention in our conversation. If you want to investigate this issue further, these resources are a good place to start.
Click here to find part two of our discussion.
For those who missed part one, you can find it here.
Rob and Vinnie provide their own excellent discussion and analysis of the errors of Christian Nationalism here and here.
Check Out My Essay About Critical Race Theory at Comment Magazine
Today the online version of Comment magazine published my essay about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the conflict is has generated in American
society, but especially in US evangelicalism.
This essay began as a review of the best-selling book by Voddie Baucham, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, a book that is highly critical of CRT describing it as a major threat to the Christian church.
What began as a simple book review evolved into a larger essay discussing the broader historical and social context of our current culture-wars over CRT.
You can find my essay HERE. The title is “Among the Tailings of Southern Segregation and Western Imperialism.”
I appreciate the editorial staff at Comment for their willingness to publish this article, as well as for their acute editorial eye.
I hope you will find my essay helpful, educational, and suggestive of the changes needed today in the American church.
Have your friends read it too!
Is Mega-Church Pastor John MacArthur a Racist?
I recently came across this interview with the well-known US, mega-
church pastor, John MacArthur. He is being asked about Critical Race Theory, which he describes as THE greatest danger to the evangelical church in the last 100 years.
Really?
Check it out below. My thoughts appear afterwards:
First, the majority of MacArthur’s remarks are, frankly, incoherent. He is rambling. There is no logic to anything he says. He is simply making “authoritative” declarations, without any apparent logical connection linking them together, while expecting his listeners to take him seriously.
Apparently, MacArthur has basked in his status as an adored, authoritarian mega-church preacher for far too long.
Second, MacArthur is obviously a dedicated American individualist, as are most evangelicals in this country. He speaks strictly in terms of individual sins and personal responsibility. But that is only half the picture. Every society is a collective enterprise in which the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
Thus, social evils are always sins of the collective. And the collective is only changed through new legislation, restructuring, and advocacy for a renewed type of social conscience. MacArthur is either unwilling or incapable of recognizing this fact. Thus, his comments have little relevance to people working to improve the broken social structures in which we live.
To pursue justice within a society, it is not only possible but necessary to address the problems of BOTH individual AND corporate, collective sins. Like far too many evangelicals, MacArthur cannot or will not acknowledge this fact.
Third, MacArthur believes that the current controversies over “social justice” (SJ) within evangelicalism pose the most dangerous threat to the church in the past century!
Frankly, that assertion strikes me as a remarkable “chicken little” type of over statement, to put it mildly.
Why does he believe the social justice movement is so dangerous? Because, (a) in his view, social justice is actually socialism, the eternal boogey-man for American conservatives. [Does he honestly not understand that history has been filled with godly Christian socialists?] (b) He further claims that SJ is simply a “euphemism for equality of outcomes.” (c) “Critical Race Theory only wants to destroy,” “to abolish everything.” And (d) CRT insists that individuals are not responsible for evil; only society bears that responsibility.
MacArthur’s claims are nothing more than fear-mongering falsehoods. Frankly, he does not know what he is talking about, plain and simple. Each of these points is demonstrably false.
CRT uncovers the many ways in which western society, constructed by white Europeans, has legalized an unequal social system that has historically granted significant advantages to white folks while denying them to people of color. That sort of system needs to be torn down in same way that slavery was torn down by Christian politicians in 19th century England.
Every follower of Jesus, who sees every fellow human being as made in the Image of God, should want to see all racial privilege and systemic inequalities abolished! There is nothing the least bit radical about any of this!
The fact that SJ is now “dividing the church” simply reveals how deeply paternalistic, reactionary conservatism — more specifically, white, paternalistic, reactionary conservatism — is embedded within American evangelicalism!
It is always difficult for those who rest easy in the enjoyment of their social privileges to recognize, confess, and repent of their ignorance and indifference to the difficulties created for others by the very system from which they have always benefited.
I do not know John MacArthur’s heart. But I will say that he is a misguided, reactionary white man whose “criticisms” of SJ and CRT are very similar to the arguments used by Southern segregationists as they combatted the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 70s.
Leaders like John MacArthur need to be ignored when they address important topics with such arrogance and self-satisfaction.
Mehdi Hasan Explains Today’s Supreme Court Decision Upholding New Arizona Voting Laws
I am sure that almost everyone knows by now that, all across the country, Republican state legislatures are proposing a variety of new election laws
that will effectively disenfranchise large numbers of voters, particularly the elderly and people of color.
The Supreme Court has just upheld the legality of two such laws in Arizona.
In contrast to the CBN anchor, Gordon Robertson, who simply vents his spleen against “liberals” while misrepresenting everything at stake in these current voting rights contests, Mehdi Hasan provides a well-informed discussion (approximately 13 minutes) of what is at stake in this Supreme Court decision.
Let’s remember some important details crucial to understanding the context of the court’s decision.
- The gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act began in 2013 when the Supreme Court invalidated the provision requiring Southern states to seek federal approval for any intended changes to their state’s voting laws. This pernicious ruling, which Justice John Roberts defended by saying, “Our country has changed,” opened the barn door of voter disenfranchisement and let all the ghost horses of Jim Crow run loose again.
- Consequently, the conservative lament about the dangerous feds who are working to “take control over state elections” (watch the CBN link above) is ahistorical malarkey. The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government supervisory and enforcement power over every state proposal for a change in its election laws. What is happening now is the step-by-step destruction of that crucial supervision. Do we really need another reminder of the many ways Southern states effectively denied their African-American citizens the right to vote? Excuse me, but John Roberts is a bone-head. No, it is clear that America has not changed, Justice Roberts.
- Republicans recognize that there is a direct correlation between the numbers of people who vote in an election and the likelihood that they will lose. Donald Trump admitted this himself during his reelection campaign, acknowledging that if everyone was allowed to vote, Republicans would never win another election. It is not rocket science to figure out that the current slate of voter restriction proposals is intended to suppress citizens’ access to the voting booth. These bills are being called “the new Jim Crow” for very good reasons. The Republican party is working to ensure that they will not lose the next presidential election, pure and simple.
- Finally, ALL of these voter restriction proposals are premised on a lie. Time and again Republicans defend their odious proposals as admirable efforts to “protect v0ter integrity.” They then proceed as if Trump’s mountain of lies about significant, nation-wide “voter fraud” were all accurate and substantiated. In other words, these voter suppression proposals are being offered to correct a non-existent, mythical problem. (Read the latest report identifying this problem written by a Republican state legislator in Michigan). They are a modern, political equivalent of medieval practice of blood-letting — let’s kill the patient with a thousand cuts while pretending that we are doctors!
The leaders in the Republican party continue to march towards authoritarianism, proving day after day that they really do not believe in democracy or the right of every citizen to vote.
Now, the US Supreme Court is helping them.
The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950. Why?
Last summer David Leonhardt, a writer at the New York Times, published the
results of several recent studies examining the historic rates of wage increases (or decreases) among white and black workers in America.
He states that “recent research indicates little progress since the Truman administration.”
Since the Truman administration!!!
The results of these studies point to two culprits.
One, the long-term effects of institutional racism.
And two, the growing income gap between the upper- and lower-classes of our society.
Here is Mr. Leonhardt’s article. (All emphases are mine). The original contains a number of important charts and graphs that will not copy to this post. (Probably because I am technologically impaired.)
If you can read the NYT online, I highly recommend checking it out. The charts make the raw data jump off the page.
Government statistics suggest that the earnings gap between black and white men is substantially smaller than it was 75 years ago. It shrunk in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s and has remained largely stable since then.
That’s remarkable. Despite decades of political change — the end of enforced segregation across the South, the legalization of interracial marriage, the passage of multiple civil rights laws and more — the wages of black men trail those of white men by as much as when Harry Truman was president. That gap indicates that there have also been powerful forces pushing against racial equality.
Before getting into the causes, though, I want to explain the difference between the best-known wage statistics and the more accurate version. The traditional numbers are incomplete in a way that many people do not realize: They cover only workers. People who don’t work are ignored. This group includes students, full-time parents, people who have given up on finding work and people who are incarcerated.
Excluding them wouldn’t present a problem if the percentage of nonworkers had remained fairly stable over time. But it has not. “There’s been a tremendous run-up in non-work among prime-age men,” says Kerwin Kofi Charles, an economist and the dean of the Yale School of Management.
One reason is that many middle-aged men — of all races, although disproportionately black — have dropped out of the labor force, and are neither working nor looking for work. The shrinking number of decent-paying blue-collar jobs has left many people who didn’t attend college without good job opportunities, and they have responded by no longer actively looking for work.
A second reason that more men aren’t working is that vastly more of them are incarcerated. Incarceration rates are especially high for black men — about twice as high as those of Hispanic men, six times higher than those of white men and at least 25 times higher than those of black women, Hispanic women or white women.
Becky Pettit, a sociologist at the University of Texas, refers to these incarcerated men as invisible. She has written a book titled, “Invisible Men: Mass incarceration and the myth of black progress.”
People considered “unemployed” represent a small — and declining — share of those out of work.
The traditional statistics on the black-white wage gap ignore these trends, because they examine only people with earnings. As social scientists put it, the traditional numbers ignore the “zero values.”
This means that the statistics on the wage gap are looking at a shrinking share of the population over time. They overlook the roughly 30 percent of black men and 15 percent of white men between the ages of 25 and 54 who had not been working in a given week during recent years. (Those shares are even higher now, given the economic downturn.)
“It’s a weird hole,” Mr. Charles says.
He and another economist — Patrick Bayer of Duke — undertook a research project to fill that hole. They collected census data dating back to 1940 and constructed wage statistics that included men who were not working. They are also conducting a follow-up project about women, Mr. Bayer said. The gap between black and white women may have narrowed, but only modestly.
The research by Mr. Charles and Mr. Bayer shows that once all men — working and not working — are included, the picture changes.
The black-white wage gap shrunk substantially from 1950 to 1980, and especially during the 1960s. Civil-rights laws and a decline in legally sanctioned racism most likely played some role. But the main reasons, Mr. Charles said, appear to have been trends that benefited all blue-collar workers, like strong unions and a rising minimum wage. Because black workers were disproportionately in blue-collar jobs, the general rise of incomes for the poor and middle class shrank the racial wage gap.
One law was especially important: the 1966 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. When Congress passed the original law, during the New Deal, it deliberately exempted service and other industries with many black workers from the minimum wage. “Just expanding the minimum wage to those industries,” Ellora Derenoncourt, a University of California, Berkeley, economist, said, “boosted the relative wages of black workers substantially.”
Since 1980, however, the wage gap has increased again, and is now back roughly to where it was in 1950. The same economic forces are at work, only in the opposite direction: The minimum wage has stagnated in some states, unions have shrunk, tax rates on the wealthy have fallen more than they have for anyone else and incomes for the bottom 90 percent — and especially the bottom half — have trailed economic growth. Black workers, again, are disproportionately in these lower-income groups.
One nuance is that the racial wage gap has shrunk somewhat among higher-income men. That’s a sign that more African-Americans have broken into the upper middle class than was the case in prior decades.
This history also points to some of the likely solutions for closing the racial wage gap. An end to mass incarceration would help. So would policies that attempt to reverse decades of government-encouraged racism — especially in housing. But it’s possible that nothing would have a bigger impact than policies that lifted the pay of all working-class families, across races.
“Black people are concentrated in low-paying jobs if they have jobs,” Ms. Derenoncourt said. “This has been one of the most egregious forms of inequality over the last 40 years: There has been almost no wage growth for the bottom half of the wage distribution.”
David Doel Invites Us to Share in the Grief and Anger of Dante Wright’s Family
Canadian reporter David Doel of The Rational National shares the speech made by Dante Wright’s aunt at the family press conference held yesterday.
We all need to listen to her. Hear why she not only grieves the death of her nephew but is angry over the way he died. She points out details in the shooter’s actions that raised my eyebrows, too.
Afterwards, Mr. Doel goes on to provide excellent commentary, placing Mr. Wright’s murder in its historical context. His challenge must be taken seriously by everyone, please.