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You would think that the National Museum of African American History and Culture would be dedicated to fighting the scourge of racism, particularly vicious caricatures and stereotypes of African Americans.

Yet toward the end of May the institution posted one of the most racist documents Ive ever seen, as part of a web page about whiteness. This graphic didnt gain widespread notice until last week, at which point the museum promptly yanked it down.

But the Internet is forever, so here it is:

As of this writing, the museum has not pulled down its link to the source document on which the infographic was based.

Which just goes to prove my theory that the harder you try to be progressive, by todays standards, the closer you get to the alt-right.

Podcast July 24 2020

On today's Bulwark Podcast, Bill Kristol joins Charlie Sykes to discuss the conventions, the debate on policy vs. punish...

What does that infographicand the supposed anti-racist theory on which it is basedtell us?

It tells us that the distinctive characteristics of whiteness and white culture include:

And by implication, its telling us that black people are not characterized by any of these traits.

When I saw this graphic it gave me an immediate, creepy feeling of dj vu. Specifically, it brought me back to that period in late 2015 and early 2016 when all of the white nationalists and alt-right types migrated out of the comments sections at Stormfront and descended upon Twitter.

Do you remember what those people kept insisting? Exactly what the National Museum of African American History and Culture is telling us: That all of these desirable characteristics are distinctive and unique to the white race.

What I remember most vividly from that moment four years ago was seeing two new racial slurs: dindoo and gibsmedat.

Thats dindoo as in dindoo nuffinI didnt do nothing, but rendered in a caricature of a black dialect. The same for gibsmedata caricatured version of give me that. You get the idea. The crude stereotype that was supposed to lodge in our brains is that black Americans refuse to take personal responsibility, want government handouts instead of work, and are incapable of speaking grammatical English.

And now were getting this slime from the dregs of white nationalist Twitter echoed back at us by the Smithsonian Institution.

What the hell happened?

It should go without sayingthough in these confused times I suppose we have to say itthat none of these caricatures is remotely true.

I get why the white nationalists would want to promote them. For the alt-right, its a form of unearned self-flatteryan attempt by a bunch of pathetic losers to puff themselves up as exemplars of hard work and responsibility (which must really take the sting out of living in your moms basement). What seems incomprehensible is why black museum curators would want to denigrate themselves. Worse, why would they want to boost the careers of white academics such as Robin DiAngelo and Judith Katz (the source for that infographic) to spread these vicious stereotypes in corporate anti-racism seminars across the country?

The key to the answer is one item on that list of allegedly white characteristics: individualism.

It is now a standard part of anti-racism to describe individualism and universality as the key components of racism and white supremacy.

It is really quite a spectacular feat, when you think of it, to so completely invert the meaning of a concept. In reality, individualism and universality are the opposites of racism. To view each person as a unique individual is to reject caricatures, stereotypes, and prejudices based on race. To regard ideas and values as universal is to reject the claim that physical differences create an inherent conflict or incompatibility that overrides our shared humanity.

These ideals may be hard to implement fully in practice, but to the extent they are achieved, individualism and universality are anti-racism.

So what is to be gained by turning this on its head? Who benefits by promoting a relentless racial collectivization and building up the artificial divisions between people of different skin tones and ancestral origins?

Sadly, there is political hay to be made out of herding people into separate and irreconcilable interest groups and pitting them against each other.

As one activist put it, while explaining why it is important to capitalize the word black, the idea is to emphasize that this is a specific group of people with a shared political identity. How convenient.

For the profiteers of a tribalistic, us-versus-them politics, the worst threat is the person who sees him- or herself as an individual.

But herding people into collectives requires that we invent inherent differences between them, which requires carving up various attributes of human character, ability, and culture and assigning them to one group or another. One of those groups is always going to end up being assigned the least desirable characteristics.

In a way, though, I suppose todays progressives are going full circle. Recent debates over the legacy of Woodrow Wilsonthe president who brought segregation back to federal hiringhave reminded us all that the first batch of progressives were barking mad racists obsessed with eugenics and steeped in racial caricatures.

Lets not allow their successors to drag us back to those days while insisting that theyre moving us forward.

See the article here:
Where Progressives and the Alt-Right Meet - The Bulwark

This is the point in the campaign when progressive groups begin assembling lists. Whats colloquially known as the Plum Book is the list of the more than 7,000 appointments that a president gets to make.

There are groups making lists of progressives for Plum Book jobs, as well as lists of prospective Cabinet officials. Here is a particularly thoughtful one, from Data for Progress.

The most instructive item is the list of progressive nominees for Treasury secretary. The Treasury secretary needs to know all the byzantine details of the plumbing of how the financial system worksand also the abstruse details of the accumulated financial-engineering abuses that need to be remedied.

Whats interesting is how short is the list of plausible candidates. Wall Street has had such a lock on Treasury secretary and related subcabinet jobs for so long that the bench is rather thin. Under Carter, Clinton, and Obama, lefties simply did not get these posts.

Heading the Data for Progress list is Sarah Bloom Raskin, a genuine progressive who served both as a governor of the Federal Reserve and as deputy secretary of the Treasury. Shes perfect, with both a deep understanding of the plumbing of the financial system and a commitment to reform. As an Obama administration appointee, Raskin doesnt seem all that scary. But she is almost a category of one.

The other proposed nominees are Richard Cordray, former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; former labor secretary and renaissance progressive Robert Reich; and Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, a notable expert on sustainable development and critic of financialized globalism.

Any of them would be great. But the usual suspects would veto them as not sufficiently versed in how the Treasury works. Indeed, the typical definition of that requirement virtually limits it to Wall Street veterans.

Its time to rebuild the progressive bench, so that we have a more plausible farm-team system. Only by breaking the Wall Street link and lineage can progressives take back the government as well as taking back the presidency.

Read more here:
Bidens Cabinet and the Thin Progressive Bench - The American Prospect

In 2018, the Chinese government, under pressure from mounting evidence and United Nations scrutiny, changed its approach: it stopped denying the existence of internment camps in Xinjiang, and instead presented them as vocational skills centres, attended on a wholly voluntary basis by the regions Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims.

This threw up a number of questions: if the students were there voluntarily, why did a single classroom have five surveillance cameras? Why were they dressed in identical jumpsuits, and who volunteers to sit in a classroom chanting I am a citizen who obeys laws and regulations anyway? A researcher, Shawn Zhang, found what he believed to be satellite images of the same centre, which gave a clearer picture of its conditions: surrounded by razor wire and watchtowers. The following year, the so-called China cables were leaked, detailing the nature of this vocational programme the top line, allow no escapes.

Chinas actions are unforgivable, but one thing it can be forgiven for is not taking seriously the censure of foreign governments. While the Trump administration was considering sanctions, Donald Trump himself was guilty of detentions; migrant children were also being separated from their parents in the United States, some dying from neglected medical needs. The UK government, meanwhile, was charged by its own MPs with putting trade before human rights, Theresa May having declared a golden era for Anglo-Chinese relations. The current Conservative administration has conveniently forgotten events as recent as the past 18 months, and is claiming to have always strenuously decried Chinas human rights abuses.

So we enter what has all the hallmarks of a new cold war with a global superpower, under leaders who have variously forfeited their own moral legitimacy, vacillated over decisions such as Huawei for secretive but guessable reasons and prioritised and deprioritised human rights as the mood took them, while simultaneously trying to weaponise a pandemic that really needs no geopolitical dimension to be a crisis in its own right. Its enough to make a progressive quake, but just because Dominic Raab is using the plight of the Uighurs for his own sabre-rattling purposes doesnt mean that plight is unimportant: it is central. There is no meaningful world order that doesnt start at the prevention of genocide. We should take the concept of universalism, rather than capitalism versus communism, as the guiding principle in a forthcoming conflict that hopefully will remain cold but probably will not simply evaporate.

To think about what that would look like in concrete terms, we need to turn to the last cold war, which, at certain points, undid the left. Naturally unwilling to buy into an assumption of capitalist supremacy, many found it hard to condemn elements of communism that were plainly abhorrent. As superpowers fronted up to one another, the discursive space to say Youre actually both wrong, in different ways, to different degrees, at different times, with different consequences vanished, even though it was true.

The exception was the transnational peace movement, specifically the campaign for European nuclear disarmament, which achieved a number of things. First, by taking aim not at ideologies but at the arms race, it was able to build networks between grassroots movements. It didnt have to erase or minimise anyones experience in order to hold an allegiance to one side or the other. This in turn created an alliance between peace and human rights movements across both blocs, which strengthened and extended the ambitions of both, so that what had previously been an argument based on necessity if you can destroy the world with 10 nuclear weapons, why do you need 100? became an argument based on rights: what right has any worldview to destroy lives, or even create the conditions for them to be destroyed? Lastly, of course, it achieved its aim: the end of the arms race, which itself signalled the end of the cold war.

That past doesnt map neatly on to our present, but it does offer some guiding principles. The first is that universal human rights have to remain the ultimate goal. They cannot be up- and downgraded, according to the exigencies of trade or any other international agreement. The second is that any change to the Chinese modus operandi will not come about because a different superpower imposes it by force or sanctions, but from opposition within its own political ecosystem, of which the democracy movement in Hong Kong is the vanguard and not the extent; international manoeuvres must start with the humility of recognising that. Most importantly, none of us can scuttle away from a dire situation simply because we dont trust our own leaders and their allies to be attacking it in good faith. Ones enemys enemy is, inconveniently, sometimes even worse.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Read more:
Progressives can't leave criticism of China to the new cold warriors - The Guardian

The past few weeks have been eye-opening for American Jews. I would have never believed that numerous celebrities could post videos of Louis Farrakhan, Ice Cube could post bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracies, and Desean Jackson as well as Nick Cannon could engage in classic and undeniable anti-Semitism with virtually no broad-based condemnation. There will always be those who stand up against hate no matter where it comes from Jemele Hill, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley come to mind as recent examples. But, those courageous few are unfortunately the exception rather than the rule.

The reason that the toleration of anti-Semitism seems so surprising is that it is being tolerated by those who are supposed to be standing up for groups that are victims of prejudice. Who would have thought that progressives those who spend their days being angry on other groups behalf would somehow let anti-Semitism slip? I sure wouldnt have. But, then again, nobody else did either.

The root of progressive anti-Semitism, however, becomes much more clear once the thin veil of tolerance and acceptance is understood for what it truly is a fragile faade that will crumble at the slightest touch. The truth is that progressives look at Jews as just another group of oppressive white people that are taking advantage of the poor, the working class and the various oppressed minority groups in America. This is a message that finds its chief megaphone in Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. While people claim that Farrakhan and Nation Of Islam are irrelevant fringe actors, the truth is that they have found themselves in positions of tremendous influence. This influence has made its way into mainstream American discourse.

Progressives who subscribe to Nation of Islams pernicious philosophy see the financial success of American Jews, the political success of the State of Israel, and assume that there must have been foul play involved. To them, every disparity can be attributed to discrimination. To them, if that is not worthy of hate, then nothing is.

The issue with this narrative is that it is an outright lie. Over half of all hate crimes committed due to prejudice against a religious group are committed against Jews and all indicators available suggest that anti-Semitism is rising once again. In New York, anti-Semitism accounts for more than half of all hate crimes. It is ignorant at best, malicious at worst, to claim that anti-Semitism is merely an issue of the past. Moreover, we cannot discuss anti-Semitism in a context that ignores the Middle East and the state of Israel. With Irans supreme leader putting out a call for a final solution just weeks ago as well as Hamas Charter, still today, calling for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews around the world, anti-Semitism in America is just the tip of the iceberg.

While anti-Semitism in America seems to have died down tremendously over the past 70 years, and the numbers show that it has, the fact that this singular form of hate is still pervasive in some communities as well as seemingly acceptable in our popular culture and among celebrities is undoubtedly startling. This is not evidence of oppression against American Jews the Jewish people have a far too long history of true oppression to claim that the United States in 2020 can even be compared to our past but rather it is evidence of prejudice that is readily ignored by those who would like to ignore it.

The true irony is that neither anti-Semitism, nor anti-Zionism, (but I repeat myself) are progressive in any true sense of the word.

If progressives see it as their duty to stand up for groups that have historically been victimized, it is truly impossible to understand how Jews could be left out of that equation. The only way to create a fictional history absent of Jewish oppression is one where the Holocaust never happened, there was no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and there is no anti-Semitism in the Middle East. To claim any of the antecedent phenomena never took place would be to engage in historical revisionism as well as anti-Semitism of the highest order.

Beyond anti-Semitism in general, anti-Zionism in particular is not progressive in any real way either. Defining the term will help explain why.

Zionism is, in its most simple terms, the Jewish right to self-determination. Moral humans generally, and progressives in particular, should be standing for the self-determination of all people. So, to somehow come to the conclusion that by standing for the right of self-determination for all groups with the exception of Jews is somehow progressive seems more than a little odd.

It is not only anger-inducing, but also thoroughly depressing, to see the willing and, at times, prideful ignorance of the faux-progressives that occupy our media, popular culture and college campuses. For those who continue to readily ignore some hate, they must realize that anti-Semitism has a long and ugly history one that refusing to acknowledge will not suffice to make it disappear.

Jack Elbaum will be attending George Washington University in the fall. His writing has been featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and the Washington Examiner. You can contact him at jackelbaum16@gmail.com

Read this article:
Progressives, Stop Ignoring Anti-Semitism | Jack Elbaum | The Blogs - The Times of Israel

13th November 1953: Members of Supreme Court. Seated, Felix Frankfurter (far left) and William O ... [+] Douglas (far right). Standing, Robert H. Jackson (second from left). (Photo by George Tames/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

Felix Frankfurter was a man of the Left. He wrote often for The New Republic, and he helped found the ACLU. He lobbied the United States to recognize the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War. He was the foremost proponent of a new trial for the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

While Frankfurter was agitating and organizing as a professor at Harvard Law School in the 1910s and 20s, the Supreme Court was striking down state licensing requirements, consumer-protection rules, and wage-and-hour laws. Like many on the Left of that day, therefore, Frankfurter believed in judicial restraint. Justice Louis Brandeis captured the contemporary progressive attitude in a 1932 dissent. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, he wrote, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

Brandeiss great ally on the court was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It was not progressive principle that made Holmes a restrained judge; it was a bullet in the neck in the Civil War. What damned fools people are who believe things, he once told the socialist professor Harold Laski. Although he said it of a pacifist in a case before the court, the line captures how he saw most things, including judging. Oddly enough, the idealistic Frankfurter worshiped the cynical Holmes. A justice willing to uphold social legislation he thought pointless, even ridiculous, was in Frankfurters eyes the pattern of a sound judge. This might explain why Frankfurters own judicial principles would remain fixed as times changed.

And change they did. Frankfurter became a justice in 1939. The next year, on behalf of an 8-1 majority of the court, he declared that the First Amendment has nothing to say about the expulsion from school of Jehovahs Witnesses who refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States. Local governments must, Frankfurter thought, have the authority to safeguard the nations fellowship. Just three years later, however, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the court voted 6-to-3 to overturn Frankfurters opinion. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, Justice Robert Jackson wrote for the majority, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Now in dissent, Frankfurter fumed about judges who write their private notions of policy into the Constitution. It must be remembered, he wrote, quoting Holmes, that legislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts. True, but not a very compelling point in a case about forcing schoolchildren to swear an oath against their (and their parents) will.

Shortly after the First World War, in fact, Holmes had started to take a more expansive view of the Free Speech Clause. When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, he explained in dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919), they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas. When it came to free speech, Holmes could use his old philosophical skepticism to justify a new judicial assertiveness. His pivot was driven in part by distress at the persecution Frankfurter and Laski suffered at Harvard for their radical views. Yet Frankfurter himself remained in awe of the Holmes who told Laski, just a year after Abrams, that if the people want to go to hell, a judges job is to help them along.

Frankfurter clashed often with a group of justices, led by William Brennan and William Douglas, who placed little stock in text, precedent, or history. This activist wing became increasingly dominant. Frankfurters hour was pastor, rather, had never come. When Brennan, writing for the court in Baker v. Carr (1962), overturned a raft of precedents on the way to declaring that legislative redistricting decisions can be challenged in court, Frankfurter issued a long and bitter dissent, suffered a stroke, and retired.

Frankfurter complained that the courts hard left produced opinions that were shoddy and result-oriented. He might have added anarchic. In 1968 a man wore a jacket emblazoned with the words F*** the Draft in a courthouse. He was arrested and prosecuted for disturbing the peace ... by offensive conduct. In his final months on the court, John Marshall Harlan wrote the decision in the mans appeal. An heir, in many ways, of Holmes, Brandeis, and Frankfurter, Harlan set a trend for many later conservative justices by evolving on the bench. His opinion in Cohen v. California (1971) declared the protester's conviction inconsistent with the First Amendment.

Because the offensive-conduct statute applied throughout the state, the defendant, Harlan concluded, was not on notice that certain kinds of otherwise permissible speech or conduct would ... not be tolerated in certain places. Harlan dodged the key questionwhat counts as offensive conduct in a courthouseby denying that the law can turn on context or matters of degree. Having thus oversimplified the case (and infantilized every citizen), he was free to ask simply whether a state may ban the use of expletives in public. At that point he could at least have knocked down his straw man with a straightforward no. Instead Harlan offered a paean to vulgar relativism, a tract now remembered mainly for the assertion that one mans vulgarity is anothers lyric. As Robert Bork noted in The Tempting of America, that statement is a challenge to all laws on all subjects. After all, one mans larceny is anothers just distribution of goods.

Does Cohen remain a totem of left-wing free-speech jurisprudence? The courts progressives seem to have reversed gear. Take the courts decision earlier this month in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants Inc. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act bans almost all robocalls to cell phones. The Act contains an exception for robocalls that seek to collect a debt owed to the federal government. At issue in Barr was whether this carveout violates the First Amendment. While acknowledging that robocalls are widely despised, the court concluded, by a vote of 6-to-3, that the government nonetheless may not engage in content-based discrimination, baselessly favoring some robocalls over others.

Writing for himself and Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, Justice Breyer argued in dissent that robocalls are not vital to core First Amendment objectives, such as protecting peoples ability to speak or to transmit their views to government. Congress, in Breyers view, should have greater leeway to impose ordinary regulatory programs that pose little threat to the exchange of thought. Maybe sobut this is not the outlook on display in Cohen. Say the government prohibits writing political statements on tax returns. According to the Barr dissent, it is hard to imagine that such a rule would threaten political speech in the marketplace of ideas. Dont count on the wing of the court that let a man say F*** the Draft in a courthouse in 1968 to let you say F*** Taxes on a tax form today.

Why has the courts left wing lost its enthusiasm for free-speech absolutism? One factor is the emergence on the court of a right wing that upholds the free-speech rights of corporations. No longer the only ones patrolling constitutional boundaries, the progressives are more careful about loose rights talk.

Another factor might soon come to the fore. If the Left conquers American culture, sheds liberal values, and becomes a force for conformity, will the progressive justices shift in turn? In the case of a child expelled from school for refusing to acknowledge, and renounce, her privilege, would they chastise the wielders of power and discuss the fixed star in our constitutional constellation? Or would they gain a new understanding of Justice Frankfurters belief in the value of making parents accept the training of [their] children in good citizenship? In the appeal of a man charged with offensive conduct for wearing, amid a hostile crowd, a jacket maligning political correctness, would they use Cohen to lecture the easily offended about simply avert[ing] their eyes to avoid further bombardment of their sensitivities? Or might they suddenly see wisdom in the Cohen dissenters claim that absurd and immature antic[s] are conduct rather than speech?

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The Protean Progressive Free Speech Clause - Forbes