Got Paranoia? Street Fighting Edition

One thing that's not being said sufficiently on the subject of the ongoing protests over the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd: nonviolence isn't easy. It's a discipline, and it takes serious training such as used to be offered in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. It's also been a policy from the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, but commentators don't always seem to have gotten that, for some reason suggested by Touré in 2017:

If BLM being described as nonviolent sounds strange to you, then you’re probably watching too much Fox News. The movement has been wildly misunderstood partly because of how it’s caricatured and demonized by right-wing media. “We absolutely don’t consider Black Lives Matter a hate group,” says Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, which tracks hate groups. “Black Lives Matter is not a racist group; anyone can join. It’s a movement to expand civil rights for the oppressed in this society. It’s a peaceful protest against oppression. There’s simply no equivalence between Black Lives Matter and a hate group. It’s truly offensive to equate them.”

The policy of nonviolence is shared by BLM activists around the country. “I refuse to cede the moral high ground to the supremacy we fight,” says Brittany Packnett, an activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero, which aims to end police violence. “We don’t need to become that which we are fighting.”

Also, BLM isn't necessarily organizing this week's demonstrations, and even when it is, as in Los Angeles on Thursday, it isn't necessarily in control of the enormous crowds of untrained sympathizers. Including, I'm sorry to say, an awful lot of white kids with good-hearted intentions who don't know what they're doing or how to do it and who consistently seem to be getting overexcited and breaking and burning things, and giving evidence to a rightwing suspicion that "Antifa" is in charge (they can't imagine any of the black participants being in charge) or dark allegations, reminiscent of Ross Barnet or George Wallace, of "outside agitators".

For the Record: Southern Strategy

Drawing by Tony Auth, June 2008.

Another one of those Twitter lectures, presented not to display how I defeated the choad I was responding to (I didn't, really, he's impenetrable) but as a reference guide to how the evidence goes in a format I thought was pretty concise and well-pointed:

Poem: Honoring it more and more

President Trump cherishing the bust of Dr. King. "Nice Reverend! Doesn't bite, does he?" Via BizPac Review.

Some time after 7:20 PM on January 20 in the Oval Office, during the inauguration festivities for President Donald J. Trump, Zeke Miller of Time Magazine noted that a bust of Winston Churchill by Jason Epstein seemed to have replaced the Charles Alston bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. that President Obama placed to the left of the fireplace in 2009, and sent a couple of tweets to that effect, but realized half an hour or so later that both busts were actually there, deleted the erroneous tweet, and sent a correction at 8:14. It was a "story" for less than an hour. It was never published.

The bust is still there, too, though the rather fine Norman Rockwell picture that hung on the wall above it at the end of Obama's term—of workers, some of them black, restoring the flame of Liberty high above New York Harbor—is gone, and that space is now occupied by a portrait of slaveholder "populist" president Andrew Jackson looming with his fierce Trumpical frown over Dr. King's head, as if he were wielding a whip.

Eleven days later, in any case, at the White House commemoration of African American History Month (also known as Black History Month, but President Trump doesn't use that, because as people in truly American places like Staten Island often suggest, "Black History Month, doesn't that sound a little racist?"—though it is not true that he has officially changed the observance's name), instead of the usual informal remarks, he read an intensely felt and personal poem, in which his pain at the unjust suspicions to which he was almost subjected for half an hour brings him into deeper connection with the African American experience:

Amazing space

Update: Thanks, Steve and Tengrain, for the shout-outs, and a warm welcome to visitors. And hey, stick around for a minute, because today's a very special day!

From that store that I will never be able to visit because of Justice Alito and the 1993 RFRA.

So David Brooks is out with his 112th career use of the word "amazing" in today's Times, on behalf of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the one just passed into law by the Indiana state government, but the old 1993 federal one:

This moderate, grounded, incremental strategy has produced amazing results. Fewer people have to face the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization and prejudice.

Something tells me Brooksy isn't at all clear what the original RFRA did and didn't do.

I'm personally very glad that the right of Native American Church members to perform their traditional peyote ceremonies is established and the sacred character of Native American burial grounds in general protected. I'm also not sorry that it didn't protect the children of John W. and Faythe A. Miller of Sugar Land, TX, from having Social Security numbers, even though the Millers' religious belief held that such numbers would burden the kids with the Mark of the Beast as prophesied in Revelation 13:16-17. But I don't quite see where the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization, and prejudice (all of 'em, Katie!) come into it.

Mississippi gosh darn

Per Think Progress, the Tucson Unified School District must close down its Mexican-American Studies Program in keeping with the new state prohibition on ethnic studies in public schools:

 Insisting that the Mexican-American program taught Latino students “that they are oppressed by white people,” [state Attorney General Tom] Horne equated the program to the Jim Crow era. “It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” he said.

Hey, that explains the whole civil rights movement! It was all the fault of the teachers in those segregated schools--they told the black kids they were being oppressed! I mean, how else would they have been able to find out?

Oh, wait...