"Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people...."

"Now the Harriet Tubman thing is, I’m sick of this black iconography being used by white organization for us to look up to and say 'This is us.' I do not… I own 100% of the Yeezy trademark, but up until now Adidas was getting 85%. And now after this, they either out of business with me or they going to get 10%. I decided not to not make it 15. I decided to make it 10."

Said Kanye West at a rally in South Carolina yesterday. Read the whole transcript. I just wanted to get the part about Harriet Tubman out verbatim, because I'm seeing things like, "Kanye West criticizes Harriet Tubman at his political rally."

He's criticizing white people for taking advantage of black people one way or another. He's not criticizing Harriet Tubman. He's criticizing white people for using Harriet Tubman to show off what they think is their own virtue!

And he's defining slavery broadly to include all sorts of exploitation of black people by white people, including Adidas taking such a large percentage of the proceeds of the shoes they make and sell. He only got 15% for letting them use his name! That's on a continuum with slavery, no?

If it's a good idea to put Harriet Tubman's image on U.S. currency, why isn't it also okay to use her on this debit card? Is it that the user is a bank? Or is it that hand gesture?

Our limited-edition Harriet Tubman Visa Debit Card is a symbol of Black empowerment. Don’t miss out! #GetTheCard today! #HarrietTubman #BlackHistoryMonth #BankBlackhttps://t.co/LWbOmRjNcy pic.twitter.com/okLTuJskXC

— OneUnited Bank (@oneunited) February 13, 2020

I'm reading "This Black-Owned Bank Put Harriet Tubman on a Debit Card and Social Media Lost It/OneUnited president and artist stand behind the design" (AdWeek).

AdWeek quotes 2 tweeters:

• "Harriet didn’t die for this" — Didn't die for black people to own banks and to have their own money and to spend it conveniently? What is freedom? Does it not include the freedom to amass wealth and to engage in commercial transactions and to do so with the convenience of a debit card?

• "Let me guess. A white marketing executive from Beverly Hills came up with the idea of a Harriet Tubman Visa Debit Card doing the Wakanda Forever salute" — But, we are told, the artist, Addonis Parker, says he started the painting before the movie came out and intended the gesture as "love" in American Sign Language. Compare:





The president of OneUnited Bank, Teri Williams says:

“When the decision was made to delay putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, we said we think that we have a role to play here because we can actually put her on a global payment instrument.... We put out many images that are unapologetically black... [b]ecause we believe that it’s important for us to celebrate our culture and to communicate to the world that Black money matters.... This is who we are. We’re black all day, every day.... We’re here for our community, and our focus is really on being unapologetically and authentically black."

You might think the image should look more like what the Treasury Department proposed for the $20:



But the black-owned bank — "unapologetically and authentically black" — chose an image painted by a black artist.

What a travesty to put Harriet Tubman in the center of this cheap, phony politics!

"With an election on the horizon the current administration can't afford to alienate America's bigots" — says the most-liked comment on the Washington Post editorial, "Mnuchin’s excuse for delaying the Harriet Tubman $20 bill is insulting."

The "insulting" excuse is that more time is needed to deal with "counterfeiting issues."

Obama's Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, announced the decision to put Tubman on the 20 in April 2016, when it was too late for him to make it happen, but he had reason to think he'd boxed the next administration in. He said: "I don’t think somebody’s going to probably want to do that — to take the image of Harriet Tubman off of our money?"

The WaPo editors rub in the politics: "No one can blame [Lew] for a failure to imagine that any future administration would be so petty and narrow-minded as to go out of its way to thumb its nose at women, minorities and history."

This is such cheap race-and-gender politics — the choice to put Tubman on the 20, Lew's single-handed showiness, the faux outrage that Mnuchin isn't hopping to completing an assignment that was crafted to make it a political requirement, the gleeful appropriation of the genuine reverence for Tubman.

I had to look back to see how I reacted to Lew's original announcement. Here, in April 2016, I contemplated "The argument that Harriet Tubman wouldn't want to be on the $20 and that it disrespects her and appropriates her to use her that way"— an argument that began on the left:

"If Mnuchin actually cared about accurately depicting American values on our currency there would be no need to now 'consider' Tubman’s face on the $20 bill."

"Instead we would discuss how we could elevate even more abolitionists, racial equality advocates, suffragettes and civil rights champions on our money."

Writes Barrett Holmes Pitner in The Daily Beast.

"It's not about Harriet Tubman, it's about keeping the picture on the $20. Y'know? Why would you want to change that? I am a conservative, I like to keep what we have."

Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) was trying — unsuccessfully — to get the House to vote to forbid the Treasury Department from redesigning the $20 to replace "what we have" — Andrew Jackson — with the sublimely admirable Harriet Tubman.

The conservative gadfly said it is "racist" and "sexist" to say a woman or person of color should be added to currency. "Here's what's really happening: This is liberal activism on the part of the president that's trying to identify people by categories, and he's divided us on the lines of groups. ... This is a divisive proposal on the part of the president, and mine's unifying. It says just don't change anything.... President Obama's on his way out the door.... He's going to do everything he can think of to upset this society and this civilization."

The Rules Committee managed to step up and save the Republicans from the political idiocy of voting against Harriet Tubman.

Actually, I think there should be some way for Republicans to accuse Democrats of racial divisiveness, but voting against Harriet Tubman isn't the right way. King objects to identifying people by categories, and dividing us on the lines of groups, which — at an abstract level — is the best approach for Republicans to counter what Democrats are continually doing with race and sex.

But Harriet Tubman is one, specific person and obviously a big hero. There's political theater in selecting her and enshrining her on the $20 bill that seems motivated by a desire to gratify people in some of the groups that the Democratic Party poses as championing, but there are plenty of other shows in this theater. You picked the wrong one to boo.

I'd like to hear Ben Carson talk about Harriet Tubman's brain surgery.

I see that the brain surgeon was asked about whether Harriet Tubman belongs on the $20 bill and he said something that got him criticized about how Andrew Jackson was "a tremendous present" so maybe Tubman — whom he loves — could go on the $2 bill. (Thomas Jefferson would have to be ousted for that, but whatever.)

I'd like to hear him talk about Harriet Tubman's brain surgery:

Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate slave owner threw a heavy metal weight intending to hit another slave and hit her instead. [She later explained her belief that her hair – which "had never been combed and ... stood out like a bushel basket" – might have saved her life.] The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. She was a devout Christian and experienced strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God....

As Tubman aged, the seizures, headaches, and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. At some point in the late 1890s, she underwent brain surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. Unable to sleep because of pains and "buzzing" in her head, she asked a doctor if he could operate. He agreed and, in her words, "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable." She had received no anesthesia for the procedure and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.

What could brain surgery have been like at that time? I see that Harvey Williams Cushing (April 8, 1869 – October 7, 1939), the "father of modern neurosurgery," did his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1895.



I wonder how sophisticated the surgery could have been in the late 1890s. Here we have this wonderful brain surgeon, Ben Carson, on a show to talk about Harriet Tubman, and there was a fascinating subject squarely within his expertise. I would have loved to hear what he might have said about the history of brain surgery!

The argument that Harriet Tubman wouldn't want to be on the $20 and that it disrespects her and appropriates her to use her that way.

I had not thought of this argument until I read Steven Hayward at Power Line making fun of it:

After years of complaining that America’s paper money featured only dead white guys, a lot of folks on the Left are in a snit that Harriet Tubman is going to replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the twenty-dollar bill.... If these people were any whinier they would be kicked out of pre-school....

Hayward links to Feminista Jones (a mental health social worker). I'll excerpt a different quote:

[I]t’s clear that putting [Tubman's] face on America’s currency would undermine her legacy. By escaping slavery and helping many others do the same, Tubman became historic for essentially stealing “property.” Her legacy is rooted in resisting the foundation of American capitalism. Tubman didn’t respect America’s economic system, so making her a symbol of it would be insulting....

Harriet Tubman did not fight for capitalism, free trade, or competitive markets. She repeatedly put herself in the line of fire to free people who were treated as currency themselves. She risked her life to ensure that enslaved black people would know they were worth more than the blood money that exchanged hands to buy and sell them. I do not believe Tubman, who died impoverished in 1913, would accept the “honor,” were it actually bestowed upon her, of having her face on America’s money.

It's such a huge honor to get your face put on money that we may lose sight of the fact that the government is taking a private individual's identity and using it for the government's interest in branding its currency. With a U.S. President, we can infer that the honor would be appreciated and the use of his face granted freely. But with someone who didn't voluntarily assume a position within government, it's harder to make that inference. Why does the government high-handedly assume the woman would give herself to the government's enterprise of merging its cash with lofty values and moral weight?

Power Line's Hayward also links to Steven W. Thrasher at The Guardian, who makes a somewhat different argument:

[T]here’s something frank and honest about [Andrew Jackson] occupying the 20 dollar bill. I mean, who better to represent what the US treasury has bought, and for whom it has amassed its tremendous wealth, than Andrew “trail of tears” Jackson?...

As historian Greg Grandin recently wrote: “Banks capitalized the slave trade and insurance companies underwrote it.”... This is the shit Tubman was escaping: the enslaved exploitation of black bodies for white profit. And it still happens today....

I am getting tired of the whitewashing of racial exploitation with brown faces. Enough with bullshit like McDonald’s slapping MLK’s face on their predatory and poverty creating labor practices.... Putting Tubman’s face on the $20 would only obfuscate how much exploitation there is still left to fight in America....

Thrasher's idea there is not so much Tubman's self-ownership and the importance of figuring out whether she, personally, would agree to play a role in the U.S. government's currency-branding project. Thrasher isn't talking about how Tubman herself would feel, but how he — and the people like him — feel. He's here now, concretely — on the pavement, thinking about the government — and he doesn't like it. He himself appropriates Tubman: her image and identity should be preserved for use on the things he supports. She belongs to him and the people he thinks he speaks for, and he wants to decide where she goes.

It's not Hamilton who's getting ousted. It's Jackson.

This is the progression:

"Once you manage to effectively work a Harriet Tubman quote into your speech and not have it come off pretentious or grandiose, you’ve won the night..."

... say Tom & Lorenzo, before proceeding to the topic — it's a fashion blog — of what Viola Davis wore.

It’s a good dress.... We just have this thing about this sort of design, where all the embellishments are concentrated right at the waist of a gown. Even if it’s all well-placed and chic, it still looks like one of those visual tricks to fool the eye into seeing a waist smaller than it is. We like the “falling leaves” quality of the skirt, but we dislike the way the bust is completely white.....

Yes. Optical illusions are wonderfully useful, but the illusion is blown when we fixate on how it is an illusion.

The Harriet Tubman quote was: "In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line." Davis's take on that was downright conservative: "The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity." And a deft strike at Hollywood: "You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there."

Jack Lew explains why the Treasury Department is putting a woman on the $10 bill.

I'll save you the trouble of watching that clip. The reason is that women are "important" and it's "important" for "women and men" to know that women are "important." Now, just picture a smarmy smile on a bureaucrat and you've got it.

Yeah, but why the $10 bill? I thought there was a movement to get a woman on the $20 bill... and part of it was about the nefariousness of Andrew Jackson? Why have we turned our sights on Alexander Hamilton?

No answer to that, just some weird assurance that Hamilton will remain on the $10, sharing the space with the lucky woman, who may or may not be Harriet Tubman. A woman can't get a bill of her own?!

Why pick on Hamilton? He was a black man, wasn't he? From Ron Chernow's biography "Alexander Hamilton":

Hamilton was portrayed [by George Clinton, writing as "Cato"] as the uppity “Tom S** t” (Tom Shit) and introduced as a “mustee”— the offspring of a white person and a quadroon. This was the first time that Hamilton’s opponents tried to denigrate him with charges of mixed racial ancestry. Tom Shit is mocked for his “Creolian” writing. In a soliloquy, Tom, a conceited upstart and British lackey, says, “My dear masters, I am indeed leading a very hard life in your service…. Consider the great sacrifices I have made for you. By birth a subject of his Danish Majesty, I quitted my native soil in the torrid zone and called myself a North American for your sakes.” Tom is accused of having sent his “Phocion” essays, defending persecuted Tories, straight from the king’s printer in England. After castigating Hamilton as a treacherous foreigner, the author refers to Washington as Hamilton’s “immaculate daddy,” a snide reference to Hamilton’s illegitimacy.... (Page 245.)

"2020 seems doable, and Jackson seems like the low-hanging fruit as Presidents on the currency goes, so I think they probably have a shot."

They = a group called Women on 20s who think there should be a woman on at least one denomination of U.S. paper money.

Jackson may be low-hanging fruit...

Jackson had strongly opposed the notion of central banking. Plus, he sought—and signed—the Indian Removal Act, which led to the expulsion of Native Americans from their homes.

But you can't beat something with nothing, so who is the woman supposed to be?

5 new national monuments.

Honoring:

Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. Charles Young and the Buffalo Soldiers. The Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico. The San Juan Islands off Washington State. The state of Delaware.

Delaware is my home state, so I'm pleased to see:

First State National Monument in Delaware. The monument will tell the story of the early Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and English settlement of the colony of Delaware, as well as Delaware's role as the first state to ratify the Constitution. The park is comprised of three historic areas related to Delaware's rich history: the Dover Green, the New Castle Court House complex (including the courthouse, Green and Sheriff's House), and the Woodlawn property in the Brandywine Valley.

The name of the monument is based on Delaware's nickname "the First State." (It was the first state to ratify the Constitution.)

"I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman..."

"... to kind of lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility."