Does Donald Trump Understand What DACA Means? | The New Yorker

By Amy Davidson Sorkin, www.newyorker.com  May 14th, 2018



"John Kelly, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, last week joined the ranks of senior officials who have reportedly declared that the President is “an idiot,” in this instance because he “doesn’t even understand what DACA is.” (Kelly later said that the report, from NBC News, was “total B.S.”) In fairness to Trump, though, few people in his Administration seem to fully grasp the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—which has been in place since 2012—much less what it means for the seven hundred thousand young people, known as Dreamers, whom it has shielded from deportation.



Kelly, who is an immigration hardliner, also said, according to NBC, that he had stopped the President from making a “hasty deal” that would have helped the Dreamers; on a separate occasion, he had suggested that anyone eligible for DACA who hadn’t yet signed up for it was, perhaps, just “lazy.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions, when he announced last year that the Administration would phase out the program after March 5th, portrayed President Barack Obama as an outlaw for having approved it in the first place. Sessions called Obama’s act “an unconstitutional exercise of authority”—which it is not really his job to peremptorily assert—and said that he was rescinding it in order to “end the lawlessness.”



It takes more than insinuations about the legitimacy of Obama’s actions, though, to prevail in court. A number of parties quickly challenged the Administration’s decision; so far, its arguments, which have also included claiming that judges have no authority to review the decision to end DACA, have not fared well. In the Ninth and Second Circuits, judges found that the cancellation of the program appeared to be “arbitrary and capricious.” Their rulings scuttled the March deadline, and have allowed DACA enrollees to renew their status. On April 24th, in another blow to the Administration, a judge in the D.C. Circuit—John D. Bates, a George W. Bush appointee—found that the Administration had left the legal basis for its actions “virtually unexplained,” and ordered it to begin enrolling new Dreamers in ninety days’ time if it couldn’t come up with better legal arguments by then.



The delays have offered the Dreamers both continued uncertainty and something of a respite. But the legal fight has now arrived at a critical juncture, and it could quickly turn against them. Oral arguments in Trump’s appeal of the Ninth Circuit case, in which the lead plaintiff was the University of California, will be heard next week. The next stop is the Supreme Court. As with other cases—notably, Trump’s attempt to impose a travel ban—the President’s critics have relied on the incompetence of the Administration and the rectitude of the courts to see the country through. Yet those factors may provide only a temporary safeguard. The Administration’s clumsiness has already prompted others to step in. Last week, Texas, joined by six other states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia—filed a suit in the Fifth Circuit against the federal government, challenging DACA’s constitutionality. In effect, Texas is suing the Trump Administration for not doing what Trump has said he wants it to do—that is, end DACA. A ruling in Texas’s favor could create new conflicts between circuits which only the Supreme Court can resolve. Given the composition of the Court, and the room for improvement in the Administration’s legal arguments, the Dreamers could lose.



If Trump needs an example of how badly such an outcome can contort a society, one can be found in the United Kingdom, in what has become known as the Windrush scandal. In 2012, Prime Minister Theresa May, who was then the Home Secretary, said that the Conservative government’s goal was to create “a really hostile environment for illegal migration.” To that end, the government began demanding proof of people’s legal status in Britain for many everyday matters—such as visiting a National Health Service doctor, or applying for a job. This posed a particular problem for members of the so-called Windrush generation, who were born in the colonies and moved to Britain after the Second World War. (The Windrush was a ship that carried one of the early groups from the West Indies.) A 1971 law gave those who had arrived prior to that year leave to remain in the nation indefinitely, but provided no definitive documentation with which they could prove that they had done so. (The government destroyed the archive of landing cards in 2010.) The damage the policy had done was largely ignored until last month, when the Guardian documented cases of people who were denied critical medical care, evicted from their homes, or threatened with deportation to countries where, like many Dreamers, they had not lived for decades. The current Home Secretary has resigned, as the government, now facing a political crisis, rushes to pass around blame, Trump style.



The May government and the Trump Administration seem to have willfully misunderstood how much the Windrush generation and the Dreamers have enriched their countries. But the Democrats also need to reckon with their mistakes on DACA. Even as the cases have been moving through the courts, the Democrats have behaved as though they had all the time in the world to act—the removal of the March deadline seems to have led to procrastination. Perhaps they are trying to forget last January’s bungled government shutdown, which they staged in the Dreamers’ name, but which gained them nothing. The Party will need better tactics to secure a permanent legislative fix—a new Dream Act. The midterm elections are just six months away, and how strongly the Party makes its case for preserving DACA may prove crucial in some states; Texas is home to more than a hundred thousand DACA-enrolled Dreamers, many of whom have family members who can vote.



Trump turned his attention to the midterms last week, at a rally in Michigan, where he made it clear that he thinks border demagoguery will provide the Republican Party with another path to victory. “Our laws are so corrupt and so stupid,” he said. “I call them the dumbest immigration laws anywhere on earth.” He told the crowd, “The liberal politicians who support criminal aliens, and they support them far over American citizens—Nancy Pelosi and her gang—they’ve got to be voted out of office!” The 2016 election showed that, if not adequately countered, bigotry and fearmongering can yield crowds, votes, and the power of high office. In that sense, Trump understands DACA very well. "



Does Donald Trump Understand What DACA Means? | The New Yorker

The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America - The Chronicle of Higher Education

I had the great pleasure of meeting Emory University Philosophy Professor George Yancy, outside of an Italian Ice (Icy in NYC) within walking distance of my home last summer while casually eating a lemon ice.  He had on an Emory hat, the place where I earned my JD, so I initiated a conversation which lasted far too long I am sure for his wife and children.  I subsequently read three of his works on philosophy. His experience is simply the Black experience in America which has been experienced by my family since the first generation born after the passing of the 13th Amendment.  Everyone should read this article.



"...Some of my students of color have asked me, "Why talk about race with white people when at the end of the day everything remains the same — that is, their racism continues?" "Why teach courses on race and whiteness?" "Do you really think that such courses will make a difference?" I find these questions haunting; they nag at my conscience.



Indeed, there are times when I ask myself, "Why do I do this?" After all, I don’t write about whiteness because it is a new fad in philosophy. And I’m certainly not a masochist. There is no pleasure to be had in being the object of hatred. I’m sure that a few of my black colleagues and colleagues of color think that I’ve lost my sanity. Perhaps they think that I’ve asked for all of this and that had I remained silent I would have been fine. The reality, of course, is that they too are seen as niggers. Silence will not help..."



This is is a link to Professor Yancy's many books on Amazon.com



The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Why Trump’s hush money repayment to Cohen may be illegal

Trump administration ends protections for 50,000 Hondurans living in U.S. since 1999 - The Washington Post

"More than 50,000 Hondurans who have been allowed to live and work in the United States since 1999 will have until January 2020 to leave the country or face deportation, the Department of Homeland Security will announce Friday, according to internal DHS memos.



The Hondurans were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 1999, shielding them from deportation, after Hurricane Mitch slammed their country and killed 10,000. But Trump administration has been eliminating the protections, arguing they were never designed to grant long-term residency to foreigners who may have arrived illegal or overstayed their visas.



In the past six months, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has ended the TPS designation for nearly 200,000 Salvadorans, 50,000 Haitians and 9,000 Nepalis, giving those groups a 12 to 18 months to prepare a departure or secure some other form of legal status.



Nielsen extended TPS for 7,000 migrants from war-torn Syria in January.



According to the memos, copies of which were shared with The Washington Post, Nielsen will make the announcement Friday afternoon, characterizing the decision as the result of a careful assessment of conditions on the ground in Honduras.



As with her previous announcements, Nielsen affirms that the dangerous circumstances that followed the original TPS designation-- in this case a hurricane-- are no longer present in Honduras, obligating her to end the protections.



Congress established TPS as a humanitarian program in 1990 to avoid deporting foreigners to countries that have been destabilized by natural disasters or civil strife. Hondurans were the second-largest group of TPS recipients after Salvadorans, and many have lived most of their adult lives in the United States, running businesses, purchasing homes and raising American-born children.



Critics of Trump administration say kicking such immigrants out of the United States is shortsighted and heartless, particularly at a time when nations like Honduras are plagued by gang violence and political killings."



Trump administration ends protections for 50,000 Hondurans living in U.S. since 1999 - The Washington Post

As Caravan of Migrants Begins Entry at U.S.-Mexico Border, Trump Admin A...

Professor Derrick Bell Video Tribute (BLAPA CUT) by Lisa Marie Boykin an...

Report: Feds Wiretapped Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen’s Phones - The Daily Beast

 "Federal investigators wiretapped the phone lines of President Donald Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, NBC News reported. The wiretap was in place in the weeks leading up to the FBI raids on Cohen’s office, hotel, and residence last month—but it’s unclear when the tap was first authorized, according to the network. A source told NBC News that “at least one phone call between a phone line associated with Cohen and the White House was intercepted.” Cohen is currently under investigation for a $130,000 payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with the president. 

Report: Feds Wiretapped Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen’s Phones - The Daily Beast

Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful | The Nation

Has Donald Trump’s relentless demagoguery of Mexicans, Muslims and African Americans made Americans more hateful? Or did Trump capitalize on a white backlash against the election of the first black president to put himself in the White House?

Last week, Reveal, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, identified 150 incidents of verbal harassment or physical violence over the past 18 months in which the perpetrator explicitly mentioned Donald Trump. Reveal’s Will Carless wrote that “nearly every metric of intolerance in the U.S. has surged over [that time period], from reported anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to violent hate crimes based on skin color, nationality or sexual orientation.”

This post-election surge in hatred has been referred to as “the Trump Effect.” But several studies have suggested the spike in racial animosity pre-dates Trump. For instance, George Washington University political scientist John Sides found that the white working-class voters who had first backed Barack Obama only to vote for Trump in 2016 were already moving toward the Republican Party before the campaign got underway. Sides found that the share of these voters who “perceived that the Democratic Party was to the left of the Republican Party on the issue of how much the government should help improve the status of African Americans grew dramatically over the Obama years.” Obama, Sides told me last year, “was clarifying on this issue, and that may have hastened their departure from the Democratic Party.” And a study by Mara Cecilia Ostfeld that was published last week in the journal Political Behavior similarly concluded that “as White Democrats learn about Democratic outreach to Latinos, they become less supportive of Democrats.”

 

But a new, as yet unpublished study presented to the Midwest Political Science Association last month suggests that there’s a causal relationship between Trump’s demagoguery and those reports of racialized abuses. Brian Schaffner, a scholar at UMass Amherst, found empirical evidence that Trump’s rhetoric did indeed lead non-Hispanic whites to express more bigoted views of “the other.”

Shortly before the 2016 election, Schaffner randomly divided almost 1,200 non-Hispanic white respondents into four groups. He showed one, the control group, three relatively anodyne statements made by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the course of the campaign. The second group was given the same three statements, and also shown an excerpt of Trump’s infamous Mexican rapists speech. A third group saw a different inflammatory statement, “Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.” And the final group was shown all five.

Schaffner then asked respondents to say something in their own words about African-Americans, Mexicans, white people, politicians, the middle class and millennials. (One tricky part of conducting a study like this is you have to avoid tipping off your subjects about what you’re looking for. So Schaffner presented the survey as an attempt to gauge how closely respondents were paying attention to the campaign. The inclusion of the middle class and millennials helped hide the purpose of the experiment.)

 

The results were surprising. Respondents who were exposed to Trump’s comments about “thugs” in Baltimore weren’t affected by that inflammatory statement to a significant degree, but those who read his tirade about Mexicans were. They made significantly more negative comments about the groups in question than those who only saw more conventional campaign rhetoric. Eight hundred people were recruited to rate the comments on a scale from “very negative” to “very positive,” and Schaffner averaged out the results.

 

“The finding here that I think is really interesting,” Schaffner told me, “is that Trump’s language [about Mexicans] doesn’t just embolden people to say more negative and more offensive things about the group he’s talking about, but it actually leads them to say more offensive things about all groups.” Schaffner thinks “this pattern is likely due to the fact that the quote about Mexicans is particularly offensive.”

Interestingly, this “Trump Effect” was about equal for whites who backed Trump and those who supported Clinton.

 

It’s hard to nail down precisely what mechanism is at work here. Schaffner considered the possibility that respondents were simply mimicking Trump’s own words when they were fresh in their minds, but he was able to control for that possibility.

 

Schaffner’s own explanation is that Trump is giving respondents tacit permission to be bigots. “People aren’t always sure what the norms are in terms of what’s OK and what’s not OK to say,” he says. “There have been several psychological studies showing that people tend to take cues from their peers when they’re asked to talk about other groups. When they hear somebody saying something offensive about some group, then they basically say to themselves, ‘oh, I can say that because this other person said it so it must be OK.’ And I think something similar is going on here. People hear a politician who is running for president using this inflammatory terminology, and they think, ‘well, if a major party’s presidential candidate is using this language than it must be acceptable for me.’ So I think people are changing their understanding about what the norms allow for, or preclude, based on what they’re hearing from Trump.”

 

Schaffner’s research isn’t in conflict with those other studies which found a white backlash against Obama before Trump arrived on the scene; it’s complementary. Schaffner says that before Obama’s election, political scientists believed that “when candidates used language during a campaign, or during a debate, that was explicitly racist, voters would indicate that they liked that candidate less and were less likely to vote for them. So the idea was that if politicians wanted to make racial appeals, they had to do it in a subtle, implicit way.” But more recent studies – Schaffner points to experiments conducted during Obama’s presidency by Nick Valentino and his colleagues at the University of Michigan – found that those penalties were no longer showing up.

 

It appears that both are true: Obama’s election activated white voters’ racial grievances and anxieties about being displaced by other groups. But it was Trump’s nasty rhetoric that gave them permission to say what they might have kept quiet out loud – and in some cases, to act on those feelings.   

 

Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful | The Nation: ""

Giuliani's history raises legal questions as he takes on Trump defense - POLITICO

"'The big problem here is how likely is he to become a witness in the case, whether it be in a grand jury or otherwise,' said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor. 'You can't be a witness and a lawyer in the same case. That's the big sticking point.'"
(Via.).  Giuliani's history raises legal questions as he takes on Trump defense - POLITICO:

Lies, Lies And More Lies, Trump Says Payment to Stormy Daniels Did Not Violate Campaign Laws - The New York Times

  "WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Thursday that he paid a monthly retainer to his former lawyer and fixer, suggesting that a payment to a pornographic film actress was not a campaign contribution — comments that contradict his earlier statements that he knew of no such payment to the actress who says she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

The president’s comments reiterated a bombshell of an announcement late Wednesday by one of his recently-hired attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said on Fox News that the president reimbursed his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, for the payment to the actress Stephanie Clifford. Though Mr. Giuliani described his interview as part of a strategy, the disclosure caught several Trump advisers by surprise, sending some scrambling on Thursday morning to determine how to confront the situation."

(Via.)   Trump Says Payment to Stormy Daniels Did Not Violate Campaign Laws - The New York Times:

‘Please Give Us Justice’: New California Law Aims to Hold Police Accountable | The Nation

"When Sacramento police shot dead Stephon Clark on March 18, he was the 51st black man killed by cops in 2018. (An additional 15 have been killed since.) Officers Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet fired 20 bullets, seven of them hitting Clark in his back and side according to an independent autopsy conducted by his family. (The official police autopsy report released May 1 showed only three bullets entering his back.) The 22-year-old died in his grandmother’s backyard clutching a cellphone that officers had misidentified as a gun.



Since his death, which was captured on video, activists across California have been demanding justice and accountability. Protesters have disrupted traffic, blocked access to Sacramento’s multimillion dollar stadium, and, for the past month, rallied at District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s office three times a week, prompting the prosecutor’s office to install a temporary 10-foot fence.



Despite this pressure from demonstrators, state courts are likely to side with the police. If precedent holds, landing a conviction against the officers will be virtually impossible. The Supreme Court has ruled that cops can’t be held criminally liable for shooting a suspect if they legitimately feared for their lives when they pulled the trigger—even if they misjudged the threat. In 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported that police in six southern California counties had shot more than 2,000 people since 2004, yielding only a single prosecution. The officer in that case was later acquitted.



In response to the public uproar, Democratic lawmakers Shirley Weber and Kevin McCarty announced a “first of its kind” bill in California that could raise accountability standards statewide by implementing stricter guidelines governing how and when officers may use lethal force. The legislation is aimed at making it easier to bring cases against law enforcement.



The Police Accountability and Community Protection Act (AB-931) would raise the current guideline from “reasonable force” to “necessary force,” requiring officers take deadly action “only when it is necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death” and if, given all circumstances, there was no reasonable alternative. Assemblymember Weber said lawmakers must ensure the state’s policy “stresses the sanctity of human life.”



According to UCLA law professor Joanne Schwartz the current standard of “reasonable force” affords police too much discretion. The language of the 1989 Supreme Court decision in Graham v. Connor, which forms the basis of many police departments’ policies, has been interpreted to look at use of force in the split second it was delivered—not the totality of circumstances or whether it was necessary."



‘Please Give Us Justice’: New California Law Aims to Hold Police Accountable | The Nation

Pence calls Arpaio a 'champion' for 'rule of law'. This is one reason I have always had problems with the branch of Christianity which brands itself as Evangelical. ”Anybody depending on somebody else's gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.” - Zora Neale Hurston

Mueller raised possibility of presidential subpoena in meeting with Trump’s legal team - The Washington Post

418 U.S. 683  United States v. Nixon (No. 73-1766) . Decided: July 24, 1974
"...2. The dispute between the Special Prosecutor and the President presents a justiciable controversy. Pp. 692-697.

(a) The mere assertion of an "intra-branch dispute," without more, does not defeat federal jurisdiction. United States v. ICC, 337 U.S. 426. P. 693.

(b) The Attorney General, by regulation, has conferred upon the Special Prosecutor unique tenure and authority to represent the United States, and has given the Special Prosecutor explicit power to contest the invocation of executive privilege in seeking evidence deemed relevant to the performance of his specially delegated duties. While the regulation remains in effect, the Executive Branch is bound by it. United States ex rel. Accardi v. Shaughnessy, 347 U.S. 260. Pp. 694-696.

(c) The action of the Special Prosecutor within the scope of his express authority seeking specified evidence preliminarily determined to be relevant and admissible in the pending criminal case, and the President's assertion of privilege in opposition thereto, present issues "of a type which are traditionally justiciable," United States v. ICC, supra, at 430, and the fact that both litigants are officers of the Executive Branch is not a bar to justiciability. Pp. 696-697.

3. From this Court's examination of the material submitted by the Special Prosecutor in support of his motion for the subpoena, much of which is under seal, it is clear that the District Court's denial of the motion to quash comported with Rule 17(c), and that the Special Prosecutor has made a sufficient showing to justify a subpoena for production before trial. Pp. 697-702.

4. Neither the doctrine of separation of powers nor the generalized need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. See, e.g., Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177; Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 211. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, the confidentiality of [p685] Presidential communications is not significantly diminished by producing material for a criminal trial under the protected conditions of in camera inspection, and any absolute executive privilege under Art. II of the Constitution would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under the Constitution. Pp. 703-707.

5. Although the courts will afford the utmost deference to Presidential acts in the performance of an Art. II function, United States v. Burr, 25 F.Cas. 187, 190, 191-192 (No. 14,694), when a claim of Presidential privilege as to materials subpoenaed for use in a criminal trial is based, as it is here, not on the ground that military or diplomatic secrets are implicated, but merely on the ground of a generalized interest in confidentiality, the President's generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial and the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice. Pp. 707-713.

6. On the basis of this Court's examination of the record, it cannot be concluded that the District Court erred in ordering in camera examination of the subpoenaed material, which shall now forthwith be transmitted to the District Court. Pp. 713-714.

7. Since a president's communications encompass a vastly wider range of sensitive material than would be true of an ordinary individual, the public interest requires that Presidential confidentiality be afforded the greatest protection consistent with the fair administration of justice, and the District Court has a heavy responsibility to ensure that material involving Presidential conversations irrelevant to or inadmissible in the criminal prosecution be accorded the high degree of respect due a President, and that such material be returned under seal to its lawful custodian. Until released to the Special Prosecutor, no in camera material is to be released to anyone. Pp. 714-716.

BURGER, C.J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which all Members joined except REHNQUIST, J., who took no part in the consideration or decision of the cases. [p686]
Mueller raised possibility of presidential subpoena in meeting with Trump’s legal team - The Washington Post

‘Barracoon’ and ‘Slave Old Man’ Approach the Trauma of Slavery With Care and Kinship - The New York Times

"In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes and debates about cultural appropriation.



A recent, very long round was set off by “Open Casket,” a painting by Dana Schutz, which portrayed, in an abstract swirl, the body of Emmett Till, the black teenager tortured and lynched in 1955. There were calls for the painting to be removed from the Whitney Biennial — even destroyed. It is “not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun,” read an open letter by the artist Hannah Black. An essay by Zadie Smith (which proved contentious in its own right) distilled the furor down to the question: “Who owns black pain?”



The debate over “Open Casket” followed in a long line of such controversies, including a public reading by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, in which he performed, as a poem, the autopsy report of Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.



Lost in conversations about the ethics or propriety of this kind of “borrowing” is another, simpler question: Why is this art always so bad?



On the nature of black pain, works like those by Schutz and Goldsmith can feel as useful as “The Cat in the Hat.” They’re strangely callow — capable only of pointing at suffering — and marked by a titillated interest in “the black body” evacuated of all personhood or individuality.



These limitations are especially stark compared to the wealth of black art and scholarship about trauma: work by the historian Saidiya Hartman, the poet Claudia Rankine, the memoirist and novelist Jesmyn Ward — and so many others who participate in what the writer Christina Sharpe has called “wake work,” art that bears witness to the shadow of slavery and conceives of itself as a kind of care over the living and the dead.



Two new books fit beautifully into this tradition. Written almost 70 years apart, and in very different genres, both tell the stories of Africans captured and sold into slavery in the New World: “Slave Old Man,” a novel first published in France in 1997, by the Martiniquais writer Patrick Chamoiseau, and “Barracoon,” the true story of a survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, by Zora Neale Hurston.



“Slave Old Man” is Chamoiseau’s strongest work since his masterpiece, “Texaco,” awarded the 1992 Prix Goncourt. It’s the story of an unnamed old man, his master and a monster — the plantation mastiff trained to hunt down runaways. Children and adults tried their best to keep the animal from catching their scent — “with that in its nostrils, it could sculpt you in its dreams, taste in anticipation the splendors of your blood.”



The book unfurls as an extended chase sequence. One day, the old man flees for the forest, the mastiff in pursuit. As he goes further into the woods, he moves deeper into his own past. He encounters “once again the nightmares of the slave-ship holds” and hallucinates “blocks of blood that scatter into shrieks.” He channels the history of the island and of the slave trade. In his mind he plunges into the watery graveyard of the Atlantic: “He sees himself as bone powder transforming into seaweed and rusty chain links. He sees skulls sheltering translucid fish.”



“Slave Old Man” is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed — but every page pulses, blood-warm. “Literature in a living place must be taken alive,” Chamoiseau once wrote.



The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief. Chamoiseau writes “with both studied care and fond disrespect for words,” according to the book’s translator, Linda Coverdale. He jumbles together Creole and French — bricolage is his ethic and his aesthetic. “You can’t go to a library and find out what really happened in Martinique,” he once said. “You have to go to the oral tradition. For the people who were dominated, there is no history, no past. These people don’t have a voice. The Europeans tell our story. So you have to go to the storyteller.”



This is the technique of “Barracoon” — and was, for a long time, its major liability in finding a publisher. In 1927, Hurston, at the behest of a mentor, the anthropologist Franz Boas, went straight to the storyteller, traveling to Alabama to interview the 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, the last living African brought to America aboard a slave ship. (“Barracoon” is a word for the barracks built near the coast, where the enslaved were kept until they boarded the ships.)



The book was completed almost a century ago. Publishers considered her use of dialect too alienating, and there was a worry that the blunt description of Africans selling their own into slavery was too incendiary.



Hurston herself is present only at the edges of the narrative, but she is unmistakable. She is most beloved for her novels, particularly “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” but she was also a gifted folklorist, and the qualities that distinguished her are on display in this early work: her patience, persistence and charisma; her ability to read her subjects; her tact. She has an unerring instinct of when to push Lewis — and when to slip away and leave him to his memories. She brings him gifts and company. They talk over “a marvelous mess of blue crabs,” “excellent late melons” and huge quantities of clingstone peaches.



Lewis was a widower when Hurston found him. Many of his children had died, and he was desperately lonely. He asked for his portrait to be taken in his family graveyard, where everyone had vanished to — “dey lonesome for one ’nother.”



The details he shared with Hurston are indelible. He was captured as a teenager and marched into the ocean toward a slave ship, the water reaching his neck. He told of days in darkness in the hold of the ship, and the sour water given to drink twice a day, acrid with vinegar to prevent scurvy.



This term — “the hold” — is emblematic in Sharpe’s concept of “wake work,” referring to the psychic persistence of this space in black life. Chamoiseau returns to it often — “the holds-wombs of slave ships.” But this literature meets the horror of “the hold” with the injunction “to hold.” There is, in Chamoiseau’s conjuring and Hurston’s attentive gaze, not restitution but the consolations of kinship and witness, the sweetness of clingstone peaches, of the life built within the constraints.



Hurston once arrived at Lewis’s home and was sent away. He had no time for the past that day. He wanted to work in his garden.



‘Barracoon’ and ‘Slave Old Man’ Approach the Trauma of Slavery With Care and Kinship - The New York Times

Opinion | Ida B. Wells and the Lynching of Black Women - The New York Times

“A Woman Lynched” read a headline in The New York Times on Aug. 20, 1886. A mob had taken “Eliza Woods, colored” from a jail in Jackson, Tenn., and hanged her for supposedly poisoning her employer.
The journalist Ida B. Wells protested the lynching in an editorial for The Gate City Press, a black newspaper in Kansas City, Mo. Eliza Woods “was taken from the county jail and stripped naked and hung up in the courthouse yard and her body riddled with bullets and left exposed to view!” Wells later wrote in her diary. “Oh, my God! Can such things be and no justice for it?”
At least 130 black women were murdered by lynch mobs from 1880 to 1930. This violence against black women has long been ignored or forgotten. Not anymore. Eliza Woods’s name is now engraved on one of the 800 weathered steel columns hanging from the ceiling of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened Thursday in Montgomery, Ala.
The inclusion of black women who were lynched is an important step in the long struggle to acknowledge the violent history of racial and gender inequality.

Names of lynching victims are inscribed on columns suspended from the ceiling at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala.CreditAudra Melton for The New York TimesWhen most Americans imagine lynching, they envision the tortured and mutilated body of a black man accused of raping a white woman. They rarely think of a black woman “stripped naked and hung.” Wells, however, was well aware that black women were victims of Southern mob violence and also targets of rape by white men.

In 1892, when mobs across the South murdered more than 200 African-American men and women, including one of Wells’s closest friends, she began to systematically investigate lynchings. As I’ve noted in my academic work, she soon discovered that few victims had even been accused of rape. In an editorial, she wrote that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” In retaliation, a white mob destroyed her press and warned Wells, who was in New York at the time, not to come back or risk death.
Wells was not intimidated. Instead, she crossed the country lecturing on the evils of mob violence. She traveled to Britain, where she started an international crusade against lynching. She initiated one of the first public hearings to address both racial and sexual violence. Wells also sought to protect black women against rape by white men.
From the start, she relied on the support of a network of black women. At a fund-raiser at Lyric Hall in New York, Wells described the group as “the greatest demonstration ever attempted by race women for one of their own number.” The proceeds from the event allowed her to publish “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” the first anti-lynching pamphlet.

In “Southern Horrors,” Wells made clear that white men perpetrated sexual violence against black women, while black men were brutalized by white mobs for having consensual sex with white women. And by showing that only about 30 percent of the black victims of lynch mobs had actually been accused of rape, Wells challenged the idea that lynchings resulted from it.
She argued that the portrayal of black men as rapists put them “beyond the pale of human sympathy.” And she suggested that such a focus concealed the rape of black women. And it gave cover to whites’ violent efforts to rob African-Americans of their rights.

Drawing attention to the sexual crimes of white men, she noted that chivalry “can hope for little respect from the civilized world when it confines itself entirely to the women who happen to be white.” Wells uncovered the long history of white men raping black women. “Not one who reads the record as it is written in the faces of the million mulattos in the South,” she wrote, “will for a minute conceive that the Southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstance placed in his power.”

Wells’s genius lay in her ability to flip the script, casting white Southern men as the lustful rapists of black women and the hypocritical murderers of innocent black men. Alone, she was not able to stop lynching. But with the help of other black women, she did put mob violence on the reform agenda and brought to light the rape of black women.

Yet when most Americans remember Wells, they remember her solely as a campaigner against lynching. We hear little of the woman who linked economic exploitation, lynching and sexual violence. Erased is the person who believed that lynching was a way to control white women’s sexuality, especially those who had sexual relationships with black men. Gone is the radical feminist who insisted on women’s rights to sexual justice and equal protection.

A history of lynching must remember black women like Eliza Woods. It should recognize that the rape of black women devastated communities. And it ought to highlight how black women organized against rape and lynching. Anything less prevents one of the most radical movements for racial and sexual justice from speaking to the many challenges of our time.
The memorial and museum in Montgomery are long overdue. And they represent a call to action that begins with an acknowledgment of hidden truths.

Opinion | Ida B. Wells and the Lynching of Black Women - The New York Times: ""

Remembering a past many Americans would rather forget - The Washington Post

 "A prominent congressman blames a lack of jobs for Americans on millions of immigrants. A far-right hate group accuses leftists and minorities of trying to suppress its freedom of speech. And, before thousands of cheering supporters, a populist orator asks his supporters to help “restore America to Americans.”

These could easily be contemporary headlines in the United States — but they’re not. All of these events took place in the 1930s, and I encountered them on newsreel footage that is part of a new exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“Americans and the Holocaust” is a comprehensive accounting of the political conversation in the United States as the country observed the run-up to World War II in Europe and then entered the epochal conflict. America’s role in defeating the Axis powers and liberating Nazi death camps dominates the country’s perception of the war. But, as the exhibit makes clear, popular imagination has glossed over a far more troubling and complicated history.

The exhibit commences in the early 1930s, with American society ravaged by economic woes, chronic unemployment and racial tensions. It goes on from there, charting the political battles between isolationists and internationalists, communist sympathizers and zealous Christian campaigners, Jewish civil-society groups and the early proponents of “extreme vetting.” Ethnic Germans hold pro-Nazi rallies in U.S. cities; anti-Japanese agitators sport pins and tout licenses authorizing them to “hunt Japs” on U.S. soil.

There was rampant fear, particularly about immigrants and refugees. Popular media was suffused with warnings and stories of a dangerous “fifth column” of alien undesirables stealing into America. Lawmakers described unemployment as a problem “transferred from foreign lands,” urging deportations of foreign-born workers taking American jobs.

Even children were not exempt, as shown by a letter to the editor published by The Washington Post in 1939 criticizing a thwarted plan to shelter thousands of Jewish children from across the Atlantic. “There are many times 20,000 children in the country with no future! Help the American child,” it read. “He deserves our help more than the German child.”

There was certainly some sympathy for Jews and other persecuted groups, but American officials hardly took heroic steps to act on it. The exhibit showcases letters and petitions sent in support of granting visas for European Jews, along with the correspondence that came back rejecting or advising against these applications. Albert Einstein, the great German-born scientist who eventually found safe haven in America, bemoaned how Washington sought to “make immigration impossible by erecting a wall of bureaucratic measures.”

Between 1933 and 1938, the United States permitted a maximum of 25,957 visas to be given to German-born individuals each year. In practice, it issued far fewer. And even after the horrors of the Holocaust were exposed and the war ended, only 5 percent of Americans in 1945 believed it was right to expand refugee quotas.
The echoes of the present are so loud they barely need be mentioned. Politicians, from the White House down to the lowest offices, have railed against the supposed threats of immigration to America, whether economic, demographic or terrorism-related. As the war in Syria drags on and global humanitarian crises have mounted, the United States has lowered its refugee quotas and ground the admission of Syrian asylum seekers to a standstill. Anti-Semitism has again become a disturbingly regular feature of politics.

Both then and now, America's apathy and wariness did not come from a lack of information. The exhibit's curators combed archives to show how coverage of Nazism and the threat of the Third Reich appeared in newspapers around the country. “Antisemitism is the life and soul of Hitler’s movement,” wrote correspondent Dorothy Thompson in a famous 1932 profile of Hitler in Cosmopolitan magazine. “The Nazis lose no opportunity to insult the Jews.”

But rather than reacting with horror, many Americans nodded along. The Rev. Charles Coughlin, an influential priest whose Detroit-based radio show was syndicated nationally, pumped a steady diet of anti-Jewish rhetoric into the American body politic. “We have lived to see the day that modern Shylocks have grown fat and wealthy, praised and deified, because they have perpetuated the ancient crime of usury under the modern racket of statesmanship,” Coughlin once said.

He defended the Nazis after the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany in 1938 and, not unlike his descendants on right-wing American talk radio today, focused his ire on devious atheists, leftists and foreign interlopers. At a rally of close to 20,000 people in New York City, Coughlin urged his supporters to work to “restore America to Americans.” His brand of isolationism, shared by the like-minded America First committee, would die out over the course of the war. But his arguments carry the very vocabulary of Trumpism.

As an institution, the Holocaust Museum in Washington feels a responsibility for the present — for example, its scholars warned of the threat of ethnic cleansing in Burma long before last year's rampages against beleaguered Rohingya Muslims.
“There is no doubt that we see rising forms of hate, anti-Semitism and extremism in the world today,” the exhibit’s curator, Daniel Greene, told Today’s WorldView. “Engaging with this particular history provides an opportunity for visitors to think about these dangers and our own roles and responsibilities as citizens today.”

These painful reckonings are only slowly taking place in America. My colleagues reported last month on the stunning new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., which forces the visitor to confront the brutal history of white people lynching black people, a legacy of racial terrorism that preceded decades of legalized inequity in the American South. “We’re not doomed by this history. We’re not even defined by it,” the monument's creator, Bryan Stevenson, told The Post's Fred Hiatt. “But we do have to face it.”

Remembering a past many Americans would rather forget - The Washington Post

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