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The Terror of Lynching Haunts Black Americans Again |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32158"><span class="small">Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Wednesday, 24 May 2017 13:51 |
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Thrasher writes: "A Mississippi legislator called for lynchings on the same day that a black student was stabbed on a campus. We are facing a crisis of racism."
Richard Collins III was stabbed and killed on the campus of the University of Maryland last week. (photo: Reuters)
The Terror of Lynching Haunts Black Americans Again
By Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian UK
24 May 17
A Mississippi legislator called for lynchings on the same day that a black student was stabbed on campus. We are facing a crisis of racism
 ynching is back in America’s headlines. On Saturday, an African American student, Richard Collins III, was stabbed and killed on the campus of the University of Maryland in what was widely – and rightly – called a lynching. That same day, the Mississippi state representative Karl Oliver wrote on Facebook that people who supported the removal of Confederate memorials to be “should be LYNCHED”.
Both cases are grotesque, obscene, and very reflective of our present racist crisis embodied by the Trump era.
The man who reportedly killed Collins was a white student named Sean Ubanski, who is said to have been involved with a Facebook group called Alt-Reich: Nation.
A lynching is a spectacular murder that serves as a warning to a whole group, as did Jim Crow-era hangings and 2015’s murders at Emanuel AME Church. The Collins killing reinforces the fear in African Americans that there is no space or activity – not buying Skittles in a suburb, buying a toy in a store, or going to a party – which is safe for us.
State representative Oliver’s call to lynch those standing up to Confederate hagiography is a warning to people fighting anti-blackness that we’re in danger. Regardless of intent, Collins’ lynching assaulted African Americans everywhere, as did Oliver’s threat.
Those presenting these kinds of sentiments are being emboldened by the Trump era, in which lynching history and culture are a part of what it means to “make America great again”.
Urbanski and Oliver are white men. So are Dylann Roof, most people who kill police and most people who commit mass shootings. Yet unlike Muslims, immigrants or black people, white men as a group will not be broadly pathologized or stigmatized by association.
Few in media will wring their hands about the violence of white male culture or ask what needs to be done to de-radicalize this dangerous demographic. The American pastime of fear-mongering about “the other” while ignoring murderous white men is a US tradition older the constitution. And it is one that has increased perilously under Donald Trump.
Trump is making racial violence worse in two ways. First, he is overwhelming the news with his own drama and scandal. As charges of a coverup about Russia play out, Trump is guilty of another kind of coverup already: of overwhelming just about every other important story in the nation.
Multiple times a day, Trump’s scandals crowd out everything else (and, being a powerful white man, he gets away with it). Jordan Edwards’ killing by a police officer facing rare murder charges should have been a major story in the past few weeks, as should the lack of punishment for the killing of Alton Sterling and the lynching of Collins. But Trump pushes them off the radar by whining that he’s being treated “unfairly”.
Trump has been legitimizing the violent expression of white nationalist sentiment for years, by calling for the executions of the Central Park Five despite their innocence and by opening his campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists”. Every time Trump has opened a hotline to report illegal “aliens” or tried to ban Muslims from entering the US, he has allowed white, Christianist supremacy to blossom in defending an “America first” stance.
By appointing to the Department of Homeland Security Sheriff David Clarke, a demagogue who ran a jail where a person died of dehydration after being denied water for a week and who called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist” organization, Trump has empowered anti-blackness legally and extralegally.
And in appointing the equally racist, but bureaucratically efficient, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Trump has told white men that there is no punishment for being the kind of man Coretta Scott King would write a 10-page warning about. Quite the opposite: if you suppress the black vote and want to amp up mass incarceration, you could become attorney general.
The rise of Trump has fueled the rise of the so-called “alt-right”. This in turn has led to a not very intellectual, but increasingly openly racist, roster of white supremacist speakers coming to college campuses. Much of the mainstream media has not taken the potential consequences of white supremacists being on the lecture circuit seriously enough, focusing instead on their fashion sense. No surprise, these speakers have led to an increase of white supremacist activity on campuses.
And in this toxic stew, Collins was killed at the University of Maryland. It’s not just that Trump and his cronies have failed to take a lead on racism; rather, they have succeeded in leading on racism, but in the wrong direction. This has created the mess we are in.
Of course, anti-blackness existed before Trump. But while officials have thus far declined to label Collins’ murder a “hate crime”, it’s important to remember that violence cuts many ways, and how it functions once it has been committed cannot be determined simply by the perpetrator’s stated intent.
Asian Americans experienced a specific kind of racial violence in seeing the video of bloody David Dao dragged off that United Airlines flight; black women were subjected to a particular kind of violence when they saw the video of Sandra Bland.
Richard Collins paid the highest price for the violence enacted by his killer. But his lynching – and Oliver’s call for lynching – have a hefty price for all black people living in a country where racist men like President Trump, attorney general Sessions, Sheriff Clarke and Richard Spencer wield so much power.
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We're Seth Rich's Parents. Stop Politicizing Our Son's Murder. |
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Wednesday, 24 May 2017 13:35 |
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Excerpt: "Imagine that every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day."
Seth Rich was a DNC staffer, who was murdered in Washington DC in July 2016. (photo: LinkedIn)
ALSO SEE: Why Sean Hannity
Needed the Seth Rich Conspiracy
We're Seth Rich's Parents. Stop Politicizing Our Son's Murder.
By Mary Rich and Joel Rich, The Washington Post
24 May 17
The writers are the parents of Seth Rich, who was killed in the District in 2016.
 magine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you have no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there are few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case.
Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.
Our beloved son Seth Rich was gunned down in the early hours of July 10, 2016, in his Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Bloomingdale. On the day he was murdered, Seth was excited about a new job he had been offered on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Seth had dedicated his life to public service, and he told us that he wanted to work on the campaign’s effort to expand voter participation because he loved our country dearly and believed deeply in the promise of democratic engagement. Seth had been walking around, calling friends, family and his girlfriend, pondering the broader picture of what the job change would mean. He wondered how he would pick up and move to New York City for four months, the strain that might put on his relationships, and how it would all affect the life he had built for himself in Washington.
The circumstances of what happened next are still unclear. We know that Seth was abruptly confronted on the street, that he had been on the phone and quickly ended the call. We also know that there were signs of a struggle, including a watchband torn when the assailants attempted to rip it off his wrist. Law-enforcement officials told us that Seth’s murder looked like a botched robbery attempt in which the assailants — after shooting our son — panicked, immediately ran and abandoned Seth’s personal belongings. We have seen no evidence, by any person at any time, that Seth’s murder had any connection to his job at the Democratic National Committee or his life in politics. Anyone who claims to have such evidence is either concealing it from us or lying.
Still, conservative news outlets and commentators continue, day after painful day, to peddle discredited conspiracy theories that Seth was killed after having provided WikiLeaks with emails from the DNC. Those theories, which some reporters have since retracted, are baseless, and they are unspeakably cruel.
We know that Seth’s personal email and his personal computer were both inspected by detectives early in the investigation and that the inspection revealed no evidence of any communications with anyone at WikiLeaks or anyone associated with WikiLeaks. Nor did that inspection reveal any evidence that Seth had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks or to anyone else. Indeed, those who have suggested that Seth’s role as a data analyst at the DNC gave him access to a wide trove of emails are simply incorrect — Seth’s job was to develop analytical models to encourage voters to turn out to vote. He didn’t have access to DNC emails, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee emails, John Podesta’s emails or Hillary Clinton’s emails. That simply wasn’t his job.
Despite these facts, our family’s nightmare persists. Seth’s death has been turned into a political football. Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop. The amount of pain and anguish this has caused us is unbearable. With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us.
To those who sincerely want to get to the bottom of Seth’s murder, we don’t hold this against you. We don’t think you are monsters, and we don’t think you are terrible people. We know that so many people out there really do care, don’t know what to think and are angry at the lack of answers.
We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth’s memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare. We ask those purveying falsehoods to give us peace, and to give law enforcement the time and space to do the investigation they need to solve our son’s murder.
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FOCUS: Michael Flynn and the Trump Administration's Lobbyist Secrets |
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Wednesday, 24 May 2017 12:28 |
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Davidson writes: "There is something distinctly dangerous about a government that thinks that what it can hide and lie about does not, for practical purposes, exist - that if no one knows about it, it's not a problem, even internally."
Former national security advisor Michael Flynn. (photo: Jabin Botsford/Getty)
Michael Flynn and the Trump Administration's Lobbyist Secrets
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
24 May 17
 his week, there have already been reminders of how much the upholding of government ethics relies on access to open information—and of how little Donald Trump’s Administration cares about either. Some of those reminders have come in the case of Michael Flynn, the President’s first national-security adviser. Others have come in the Administration’s clumsy attempt to tell Walter Shaub, the head of the Office of Government Ethics, not to do his job. The Administration had said loudly that it would not allow lobbyists to take positions relating to their “particular” lobbying-market niche. It also said, more quietly, that it could issue waivers. And it had, in total silence, issued an unknown number of waivers, as evidenced by lobbyists popping up, without other explanation, at various agencies. (When the Obama Administration issued such waivers, it not only said so but indicated why, in writing.) Shaub had asked various agencies to send him, by June 1st, a list of those waivers, a “data call” of the sort that he is explicitly authorized to make. The White House doesn’t seem to have liked that.
The President’s designated messenger was Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Mulvaney, in a letter to Shaub that the Times obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (a reminder that openness takes work), said that agencies had asked the White House about the data call, and that he was giving them some “guidance.” His instructions amounted to letting the agencies know that White House lawyers might have a problem with them giving out information, and a “request” to Shaub that he “stay the data call”—that is, that he just stop asking. The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department needed to figure out the “potential legal questions” that the request raised, Mulvaney wrote. But there are no legal questions—other than, perhaps, those that might arise from whatever the waivers revealed.
Shaub said no to Mulvaney’s request. In a ten-page reply, he said that he did not do so lightly but because he did not know how to comply in a way that would not be a renunciation of his office’s history and its mandate. He included footnotes and citations regarding his legal authority, for Mulvaney’s “edification.” Mulvaney had complained about the “uniqueness” of Shaub’s data call, but Shaub made it clear that it was Mulvaney’s action that was highly unusual.
And if ever there were a case illustrating why a history of lobbying and other conflicts—factors that the waivers are meant to at least acknowledge—might matter, it is the case of Michael Flynn. He has been implicated in the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election and its possible connections to the Trump campaign, but there are also questions regarding money that his firm took from Turkish interests as an unacknowledged lobbyist for Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s regime. (Flynn registered as a foreign lobbyist only after the fact.) According to another report this week, Flynn withheld information about his Russian contacts from the Obama Administration, in which he had served as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, before being pushed out when his security clearances were being renewed. Flynn is reportedly planning to invoke the Fifth Amendment when he is called to testify, which is his right, and one of the few legitimate and reasonable uses of silence in this story. But his former colleagues in the Administration should not suppose that his potential invocation of the Fifth magically extends to their offices, in terms of a refusal to, for example, produce documents that Congress or investigators might require. And some of those documents may be significant. Among the most disturbing Flynn stories have been those indicating that the Trump transition team knew about Flynn’s conflicts—and even that he was under federal investigation—but signed him up anyway. That is not just stonewalling; it is incompetence. It is of a piece with the entire Trump operation—one can’t talk about the lack of disclosure without noting that the public still hasn’t seen the President’s tax returns. For that matter, the congressional Republicans tried to start their spree of legislating, with the support of a President of the same party, by sidelining its ethical overseer.
But there is something distinctly dangerous about a government that thinks that what it can hide and lie about does not, for practical purposes, exist—that if no one knows about it, it’s not a problem, even internally. People in government, even under the best Administrations, tend to care less about things that are bad if they think that no one will ever find out about them. There is an impulse to hide, rather than to fix. But the Trump Administration seems to have stopped caring at all. The alarming possibility is that the White House doesn’t just think that when something is out of sight it is out of the public’s mind but that it then vanishes from the minds of the President and his aides, as well.
The White House’s evident indifference raises the question of whether, prior to Shaub’s inquiry, anyone there was even keeping track of how many waivers were being granted, and where, and at what cost, or if they were just left out for the taking, like office-party doughnuts. It is, at any rate, a good guess that the Shaub-Mulvaney conflict prefigures any number of fights to come. Some will end up in court, and may have to be resolved by a reëxamination, by the Supreme Court, of the meaning of executive privilege.
Non-disclosure can also involve a false assertion that there is no information to disclose. The Washington Post reported that President Trump asked the heads of intelligence agencies to publicly deny that there was anything to the Russian investigation. (They apparently demurred.) By his own admission, Trump fired James Comey because that inquiry annoyed him. And then there are the Administration’s arguments, in support of its travel ban, that the courts should allow the White House to pretend that the ban has nothing to do with Muslims. But this kind of thing never works for long, or at least it shouldn’t, in a democracy.
Trump and his circle may prefer a different model. On Monday, Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce, appeared on CNBC, discussing the President’s visit to Saudi Arabia. He found it “fascinating” that there was not “a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there.” So much more pleasant than here! And, really, blind nonsense: Saudi Arabia is a repressive regime that silences dissent, with a reputation for corruption that has fuelled discontent and provided fodder for extremists. (Secrets come out, in one form or the other.) Becky Quick, the interviewer, suggested as much to Ross. He agreed that “in theory” fear may have been a factor, “but, boy, there was certainly no sign of it,” he said. “The mood was genuinely good.” Perhaps the mood was helped by the giant portraits of Trump projected on buildings around Riyadh, among the golden hotels and palaces.
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Get Washington's Statues off Their High Horses |
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Wednesday, 24 May 2017 08:43 |
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Keillor writes: "Forgive me if I don't think the removal of Confederate statuary is an issue. I call it decluttering, which is an ongoing project at my house and I hope at yours too."
Pedestrians in Northwest Washington's Thomas Circle. (photo: Bill O'Leary/WP)
Get Washington's Statues off Their High Horses
By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post
24 May 17
 orgive me if I don’t think the removal of Confederate statuary is an issue. I call it decluttering, which is an ongoing project at my house and I hope at yours too. When those crews are done down South, put them to work in Washington. The Frenchman L’Enfant (the name means “immature”) who laid out the streets in this swamp had grandiose ideas, as anyone knows who has attempted to navigate in the capital, diagonal boulevards laid against a grid, which created numerous odd squares and irrelevant circles which, of course, required large equestrian statues to ennoble them, and so you have Thomas Circle at 14th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW named for Gen. George Thomas, who fought at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863. But does this give him a permanent right to loom over us in 2017 and obstruct traffic and cause honking and obscene gesturing? A whole circle devoted to this small historical footnote and how many thousands of children have pointed to him and asked, “Who is he?” and their parents were clueless and thus authority is undermined, trust is eroded, the family is weakened, our children grow up rootless and liable to fall for crackpots and demagogues.
Same for Gen. James McPherson, who died in the Battle of Atlanta (but so did a lot of other people). You’ve got a whole square near the White House named for him. Ridiculous. What this says about Washington is that it is so encrusted with regulations and overlapping commissions and committees and agencies that it is incapable of rational progress. Send in a crane to extract Gen. McPherson and move Duke Ellington in from where he’s exiled over on T Street and you may restore our faith in the relevance of government. “Take the A Train” did more for America than McPherson did. And what about Gen. George McClellan, who was reluctant to engage with the Confederates and who ran for president as a defeatist in 1864? Why is this loser sitting on a horse 32 feet in the air? Who invited him? Why not Jubilation T. Cornpone?
Our nation’s capital has become our nation’s attic, full of stuffed owls and white elephants and antique souvenirs. Drain the swamp, throw out the junk! History moves on as the past recedes and indifference sets in.
In New York, Daniel Webster takes up a big swath of ground in Central Park. Take him down and set him on the sidewalk in Union Square, where people can walk right up and take selfies with him. He’d like that.
In my home town, St. Paul, there’s a statue of a Union soldier standing on a ridiculous smokestack of a pedestal so high you can’t be sure if that’s his overcoat or a pinafore. Someday it’s liable to fall on somebody. Take it down, saw off nine-tenths of the pedestal, and put up a statue of Emmanuel Masqueray, the French architect who designed the magnificent cathedral across the street. Then you’ve got something worth talking about.
Every ethnicity and political faction and interest group has got its monument in Washington — the Italians got Dante, Russians got Pushkin, conservatives got Edmund Burke, physicists got Einstein, pacifists got Gandhi, feminists got Joan of Arc, Boy Scouts got Teddy Roosevelt, intelligence officers got Nathan Hale, and so on and so forth. Everybody but us columnists.
Haul McClellan down off his high horse and put up H.L. Mencken on the pedestal. It’s a handsome horse, so keep that and let Mencken hold the reins, and inscribe his words: “The man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. .?.?. This leaves the field to the intellectual jellyfish .?.?. to the blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and .?.?. the mountebank who is willing to conceal and disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold.” Inscribe it across the horse’s rear end. Put a recycling bin behind it where people can leave their dog droppings. People will stop and look, it’ll speak to them.
I was in Washington last weekend, trying to get from Virginia Avenue over to K Street and attend church and it took so long to find my way, I was hardly in a devotional mood, but that’s par for the course in D.C. nowadays. A whole lot of anger in this town. Edit the statuary collection, including some who have been parked in Congress refighting old wars, and see if it doesn’t improve the situation.
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