"I just think it's a huge mistake for the world's wealthiest man... to be at, at, at this war with the world's most powerful man who I think is doing more to save the country than anybody — I mean, I'm 40 years old — anybody in my lifetime."

"You think about it, it's a guy who not even a year ago, nearly took a bullet in the process of campaigning, went back on the horse the next day. And if you look — obviously I'm biased — but you look at what we've done on the border, you look at what we've done with trade — fighting back against a generation of theft of the American dream, which is what the president's trade policies are starting to do. I just think you've got to have some respect for him and say, look, yeah, we don't have to agree on every issue I'm talking about. If you're Elon Musk, you don't have to agree with this on every issue. But is this war actually in the interest of the country? I don't think so."

Said JD Vance, talking to Theo Von. Audio and transcript here, at Podscribe. YouTube here.

Vance continues:

"I was interested to see that Hillary called Clarence Thomas a 'person of grievance.' That sounds like a phrase, whether newly minted or not, that Ann might be interested in discussing."

Wrote Norpois, in a comment in last night's open thread.

Is a "person of grievance" someone who overdoes their grievancing? as I think Hillary meant? More generally, aren't virtually ALL Hillary supporters "person of [some sort of] grievance"? I don't necessarily mean that in a condemnatory way. You could say, in a democracy, all political views are expressions of grievance. Is this a new phrase I've missed?

Here's the video clip of Hillary:

"The truth requires a grounding in historical facts, but facts are quickly forgotten without meaning and context."

"The Stanford History Education Group, a research organization, has developed a curriculum called 'Reading Like a Historian,' which assembles material from various chapters of American history and poses a thematic question for students to answer. For example, to answer the question of what John Brown was trying to do when he raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, they read several accounts, including one by Brown’s son, an excerpt from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, and a speech and letter from Brown himself. The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents.... Finally, let’s give children a chance to read books—good books. It’s a strange feature of all the recent pedagogical innovations that they’ve resulted in the gradual disappearance of literature from many classrooms.... The best way to interest young people in literature is to have them read good literature, and not just books that focus with grim piety on the contemporary social and psychological problems of teenagers.... The culture wars, with their atmosphere of resentment, fear, and petty faultfinding, are hostile to the writing and reading of literature. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently predicted that the novels of the next 10 to 15 years 'will be awful … Art has to be able to go to a place that’s messy, a place that’s uncomfortable'..."

Writes George Packer, in "The Grown-Ups Are Losing It/We’ve turned schools into battlefields, and our kids are the casualties" (The Atlantic).

"The statue by Thomas Ball depicts a Black man, shirtless and on his knees, in front of a clothed and standing Abraham Lincoln."

"In one hand, Lincoln holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, while the other is stretched out over the Black man. Ball intended it to look as though the man were rising to freedom, but to many, it looks like he is bowing down or supplicating to Lincoln. Boston artist Tory Bullock, who started the petition, described it this way: 'I’ve been watching this man on his knees since I was a kid. It’s supposed to represent freedom but instead represents us still beneath someone else. I would always ask myself, "If he’s free, why is he still on his knees?"'"

From "Controversial Lincoln statue is removed in Boston, but remains in D.C." (WaP). There are 2 identical statues, the original in Washington and a replica that was in Boston. 

The original statue "was commissioned and paid for by a group of Black Americans, many of whom were formerly enslaved," but they "did not have a say in the design of the statue; that distinction went to an all-White committee and the artist, Ball, who was White." 

Frederick Douglass was present at the unveiling in 1876, and he criticized the statue in writing a few days later: "What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man." 

The question "If he’s free, why is he still on his knees?" is interesting. Whenever stationary art depicts an action, we see a stage of the action. We're in the middle of things. How do you make a statue of a person rising up? If you show him already fully standing, you might lose the expression of the action...

... you don't need to show this figure that close to the ground. And Lincoln looks still and lordly. It is a strange artifact. It's artwork from the past, never the greatest art, but carrying the weight of history, history that includes Frederick Douglass wanting to see a better image of a black man before he died.

***

I looked to see what year Douglass died. It was 1895. I clicked through on the name of his first wife, Anna Murray Douglass:

In financial stress from the pandemic, "Museums Sell Picasso and Warhol, Embrace Diversity to Survive."

Bloomberg reports.

Museums are not only selling works long off the market but acquiring pieces by female, Black and Latino artists, and -- they hope -- gaining new visitors who will see themselves reflected in the hushed halls.... 

This week at Christie’s, Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, sold its sole Jackson Pollock painting for $13 million and Springfield Museums in Massachusetts offloaded a Picasso for $4.4 million.... 

“Museums have amazing power,” [said Adam Levine, the new leader of the Toledo Museum of Art] “When we put something on the wall, it becomes unimpeachably great.” It also becomes unimpeachably valuable, and museums are under pressure to give power and value to those who’ve been underrepresented. Levine’s first acquisition was Black artist Bisa Butler’s large-scale quilted portrait of Frederick Douglass, whose title alludes to his speech to abolish slavery.

Oddly, Bloomberg fails to tell us the title, but let it be known that it refers to his "speech to abolish slavery." (By the way,  "speech to abolish slavery" is also bad writing.) I looked it up. It's called "The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake" and it was made just this year. But once it's on a wall in the Toledo Museum of Art it's "unimpeachably great," so what an admirable acquisition by the museum!

Indeed, every acquisition of the museum is "unimpeachably great," at least in the amazing power of the mind of Adam Levine.

In Baltimore, the city’s encyclopedic museum is selling three signature works -- by Clyfford Still, Brice Marden and Warhol -- to raise $65 million.

These are all white men made unimpeachably great by the hanging of their painted rectangles on the walls of museums. Take them off the wall... and then what?! Dump them on the market — while all the other erstwhile great junk floods the market — and use the proceeds not to keep museum workers on the payroll — these people are losing their jobs like mad — but to heed the call of an "imperative" wafting through the cultural air:

A key Abstract Expressionist who spent the final decades of his life on a Maryland farm, Still gave his “157-G” painting to Baltimore as a gift. It’s estimated to sell for $12 million to $18 million and some funds are to be used to buy works by women and people of color. “The imperative to act and address decades of inaction around equality in the museum is enormously important,” said Christopher Bedford, museum director. He says the emphasis on diversity will “ensure that the story we are narrating is the full and true story.”

Yes, ensure, please, ensure. Here, Andy, quick, paint this: 

Ah! The fullness! The trueness! 

ADDED: I've replaced the link at the top of the post with one that shows various artworks, including the painting Clyfford Still gave to the Baltimore museum, presumably to establish his unimpeachable greatness:

Is the museum somehow ethically obligated to hang onto that, when it can be converted into a 4296-foot-tall stack of one dollar bills? That's my conceptual art: a 4296-foot-tall stack of one dollar bills — representing the low-end estimate of the sale price of that Clyfford Still — 12 million dollars.

"This Fourth of July holiday is one of the most humbling in our history."

"Even at the height of world wars or the Great Depression, America inspired. But, today, the United States is destroying the moral authority it once had. There will still be fireworks. And the Statue of Liberty still towers over New York Harbor. But it is harder today to convince others that Americans embrace—or practice—the ideals that Lady Liberty represents."

Says Robin Wright in "To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful" (The New Yorker).

I'm surprised to encounter reverence for the Fourth of July holiday. If we're going to take this year's events as seriously as Wright wants us to take them, isn't the Fourth racist? Isn't it white supremacy? Why is she calling on us to be truer to its values?

We've had the 1619 Project to instruct us. Shouldn't there now be a call to abolish the Fourth of July as a national holiday? Should we even be calling holidays "national"?

I'm not seeing that suggestion — abolish the holiday. Not yet. It must be brewing out there, though, don't you think? I'm seeing articles that look like they're anticipating that idea and pushing it back before it emerges — aborting it, pre-born.

I'm talking about things like that Robin Wright article, and, more conspicuously, at WaPo — by historian Jonathan Lande — "The Fourth of July is a Black American holiday/Black Americans have long used the holiday to crusade for equality."

"Why are you fighting me?"

“Why are you protecting it?!”

BLM activist gets into a verbal exchange with an older black guy who was speaking up against tearing the statue down.#emancipationstatue pic.twitter.com/4crUOJhDFP

— Sagnik Basu (@_sagnikbasu) June 27, 2020

Possibly the most embarrassingly air-headed WaPo headline ever. Maybe we should just look away...

But here it is: "Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?"

Smashed stereotypes... God help us. This is an idea for a column that should have been considered for 5 to 10 seconds and laid to rest.

Some text, to give you the idea:

The two are separated by race, gender and more than 100 years of history that forged an America that would probably be unrecognizable to Douglass. Still, experts say, their use of photography collapses the distance: Douglass sat for scores of pictures to normalize the idea of black excellence and equality, and Warren’s thousands of selfies with supporters could do the same for a female president.

This is like some nitwit celeb saying that Hollywood is reminiscent of a slave plantation.

"Every sculpture needs space. That is the nature of sculpture. If you put something else there, it changes it."

"Fearless Girl" is “cute,” but “you don’t stand up for women’s rights at the expense of the artist’s rights. Each right is equally important. I am saying this as a woman.”

Said Gabriel Koren, an artist who made a statue of Frederick Douglass that is situated in Central Park, looking into Harlem. What if a second statute — a figure reacting to Frederick Douglass — were put close to it? Should Koren have final say about whether the second statue can be there? I'd say no, but I think she has moral power to influence the decision, and I think that would be enough to preserve the space around Frederick Douglas.

But that's in part because it's Frederick Douglass...



.... not a charging bull. There's a debate to be had about whether things should be put near other things, but the first thing to go up shouldn't become a tyrant. Sometimes putting things together makes a dialogue that benefits the people, who, after all, have our space cluttered by all sorts of art and art-like junk. And sometimes the first thing that goes up is kind of bad or an incomplete statement, and continuing the "conversation" with something else is an improvement.

Considering the urge to take down statues that don't say what the public wants said, we ought to keep open the option of putting up another sculpture nearby and changing the meaning. For example, in New Orleans:

Statues of Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are targeted for removal in New Orleans, after a federal appeals court approved the city's plan to change how it treats symbols of its history. Opponents of the move vow to keep fighting it in court....

In addition to the statue of Lee, [Mayor Mitch] Landrieu and other city officials want to take down a statue honoring Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard and a monument to the paramilitary White League, which launched a Reconstruction-era rebellion against the integrated Metropolitan New Orleans Police Force....

"I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber."

"I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them."

A Frederick Douglass quote that appears in a Ta-Nehesi Coates piece subtitled "Black people: America's premier outlaw class."

"Compare this reception of Sotomayor’s deeply personal dissent with how her colleagues talk about Thurgood Marshall’s time at the court..."

Dahlia Lithwick invites us into the world of comparative race consciousness. There are so many disparate points of comparison. Thurgood Marshall was a black man born in 1908. Sonia Sotomayor is a Hispanic woman born in 1954. And Lithwick is comparing written responses to a written judicial opinion and spoken reminiscences about private personal interactions with a colleague. But anyway, here are Lithwick's musings:

Maybe the outcry at Sotomayor’s reflections on why race and racism still matter is merely a function of her tone. Nobody likes to be told they are out of touch with reality, even if they work in a palace and surround themselves with silent, sock-footed clerks. Or maybe it was different when Marshall lectured them, or browbeat them into changing language in written opinions because he was a man. Or maybe they endured it because he was funny. Or maybe, and I suspect this is it, they could hear him because he was a part of the era that the majority of the current court wants to relegate to history: Marshall argued Brown. But Brown solved racism! 

There's no reason to suspect that anyone on the Court thinks "Brown solved racism!" Does anyone anywhere think that?

Maybe Marshall was allowed to talk about race because Marshall lived in a time the current justices still acknowledge was an era of “real” racism. Which in their view ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Or maybe Marshall was allowed to speak so pointedly and openly about the intersection of race, law and his own life, precisely because, as Justice White explained it, White and his colleagues were well aware of all that they “did not know due to the limitations of our experience.” But maybe the time of acknowledging that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew about race is over. Because, seemingly, and by popular acclaim, racism itself is over.

Where is this "popular acclaim"? Stressing the importance of "reality," Lithwick invents a cartoon picture of how other people think. The issue that divides the Court isn't whether or not racial problems persist, but whether the government should be classifying human beings by race as it goes about trying to solve the various problems and risks making them worse.

And Lithwick never even mentions Clarence Thomas, who would seem to offer a second basis for comparison. How have his colleagues received the things he's written that disrupted the way they wanted to think about race? To be fair, Clarence Thomas did not write an opinion in this new case Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative, Integration and Immigration and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, which had 5 opinions, only one of which was a dissenting opinion. Thomas joined Justice Scalia's opinion, which deserves a separate post. I'm just calling attention to Thomas because Lithwick is ignoring him, even as she patronizes those who act like it's passé to acknowledge that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew about race. Those other people need to acknowledge that they don't know as much as they think, but the things not known surely don't include the things Clarence Thomas has been writing — notably in Grutter v. Bollinger, which begins with a passage from Frederick Douglass, who was born 90 years before Thurgood Marshall. 

The phrase "the Color Line."

The NYT has an opinion piece titled "Cousins, Across the Color Line," about present-day Americans of different races who trace their ancestry to the same white person, for example, those who see themselves as descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

At one point, Gayle [who is black and considers herself a descendant of Jefferson] asked me [a white woman who also considers herself a Jefferson descendant] if I was looking for absolution for what my family did, and we both agreed the word was imperfect. I think instead we are both looking for some present-tense reconciliation. We acknowledge our desire to feel connected to our shared history, and appreciate the fact that we can sit together, looking at the mystery of the past and trying to articulate what it means....

There is something radical in knowing Gayle....

The author, Tess Taylor, doesn't use the term "color line" in her text, though she does mention  reaching "across racial lines." The word "line" is also used in the essay to refer to ancestral lines, but put that to the side. I want to examine the inference, in the headline, that if a black and a white person today are connecting, they are crossing something called "the color line."

The verb "opt."

I like it... and used it in the previous post. ("[O]bviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home." I liked the "obv... opt" combo.) But Meade sniffed at this usage. Is it as off as using "impact" as a verb? (Which I don't do.)

The (unlinkable) OED has the earliest usage of "opt" as a verb coming in 1853 — which is relatively recent — and written by Frederick Douglass:

1853   Frederick Douglass Paper (Rochester, N.Y.) (Electronic text) 16 Sept.,   This course will not suit a discriminating public. They must opt for something more than long winded and rapid declamations.

There are 3 other 19th century examples, and both put "opt" in quotes. ("1899... The two boys 'opted'  for the Navy.") By contrast, the word "option" goes back to the 1500s. So I guess it's like "enthuse," which the OED comes right out and calls "an ignorant back-formation" (from "enthusiasm"). But why isn't "opt" called "an ignorant back-formation"? What makes a new usage "ignorant"? Or does it make more sense to say: There's one thing that makes it not ignorant: when the first use appears in the writings of the revered former slave Frederick Douglass.

"Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!"

Frederick Douglass, quoted by Clarence Thomas.

PJ Media's stupid effort to attack Obama through Derrick Bell's book "Afrolantica Legacies."

Did anyone over there realize how dumb this is?

As a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law Barack Obama supported the activism of Professor Derrick Bell and urged his peers to open their hearts and minds to the words of Critical Race Theory's founder.

I've already blogged about the stupidity of attributing significance to the student who gave a nice introduction to a venerable professor. I won't repeat that. This is about PJ Media's failure to see that Bell is attacking liberals. It's stupid to tear down Bell as a way to attack Democrats. Bell is attacking Democrats!

PJ Media is reading one of the lesser Bell works, "Afrolantica Legacies." It's not available in Kindle, or I'd buy a copy right now, but I see that it's like about the 7 millionth best-selling book over at Amazon right now. The book is a collection of essays, and PJM displays photos of some pages in the book, including a collection of "rules of racial preservation," which is the first thing the PJM article decides to trash. But let's look at Bell's first rule:

No matter how justified by racial injustices they are intended to remedy, civil rights policies, including affirmative action, are implemented only when they further the interests of whites.

Hello? Who implements these race-based policies like affirmative action? Liberals! Derrick Bell is saying that white people do this when and only when it works for their advantage! The critical race thinking you're invited to do here is to understand how, when white people purport to advance black people, they are really exploiting black people for their own advantage. This is an attack on the work of the Democratic Party and other liberals. Conservatives are on the sidelines of this battle.

I am reminded of the dissenting opinion that Clarence Thomas wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, the case that upheld the affirmative action admissions at the University of Michigan Law School: