"Nothing has come to fruition. Look at the schools, the playgrounds, the parks. Downtown is struggling. In our community, typically, we vote for Democrats."

"How has that panned out for us? You’re so bold and loud when you want to help transgender people, immigrants. [Harris] said she wouldn’t pass anything for just Black people, but you had no problem with the LGBT community. Give us some hope you’re listening to our concerns."

Said Ahmad Taylor, 47, of Pontiac, Michigan, quoted in "In a Michigan city, Harris has failed to catch fire with Black men/In December, Black men in Pontiac told The Post they were unenthused about Biden. Now, some feel the same about Harris" (WaPo)(free-access link).

The internal link in that quote goes to this video, about reparations:

"Once, her daughter’s drama teacher assigned her the monkey role in a school play. 'I think it was The Wizard of Oz'...."

"'My daughter at the time was young enough not to know what the message was, but I did, so I went right down to the school and I said, "Any time you’ve got Black kids in your class none of them are going to be the monkeys."' Mendez said that she learned later that another Black parent had the same conversation with the teacher two years earlier. 'We all have those stories in Amherst,' she said. 'And so, for me, this reparations program is about changing it for the next generation, chipping away at the systemic racism we have here and creating a place where there’s affinity and facility as well as prosperity for people of color.'"

 

From "Activists split over whether reparations should go to Black immigrants" (WaPo).

Mendez = Yvonne Mendez, who, as a second-generation immigrant, would be left out if slavery reparations are limited to the descendants of American slaves.  

"Is this a bad time to point out that 'moving to San Francisco in the 1940s' almost certainly means being part of the wave of black arrivals who took cheap houses from the Japanese people..."

"... who had been deported to quickly convert Japantown into the Western Addition and Fillmore? Are those black families going to pass those reparations on to the Japanese families they dispossessed?"

That's the top-rated comment on the NYT article "Can Reparations Bring Black Residents Back to San Francisco? San Francisco has proposed the nation’s most ambitious reparations plan, including $5 million cash payments and housing aid that aims to bring people back."

"In the United States, Black activists, writers and thinkers are among the clearest voices articulating this spiritual malaise and its solutions..."

"... perhaps because they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism more than other groups of Americans. Tricia Hersey, a performance artist and the founder of the Nap Ministry, an Atlanta-based organization... says she discovered the power of naps during a draining year of graduate school at Emory University, an experience that inspired her to bring the gospel of sleep to fellow African Americans whose enslaved and persecuted ancestors were never able to properly rest. She argues that rest is not only resistance, it is also reparation. Ms. Hersey now leads events across the country focused on the transformative power of rest, and she has influenced other Black intellectuals, including Casey Gerald, the author of the transcendent essay 'The Black Art of Escape.' In it, Mr. Gerald reflects on a year he spent in what he calls a 'disappearing act,' lying flat in Texas, ignoring the calls of friends and admirers to join them in the fray of protest politics, which he’d come to view as a sure path to self-annihilation. 'Claim your inheritance,' Mr. Gerald enjoins. 'Miss the moment. Go mad, go missing, take a nap, take the day, drop a tab. You’re free!'"

From "Work Is a False Idol" by Cassady Rosenblum — "a writer who recently quit her job as a producer at 'Here & Now,' a National Public Radio news program, and is living with her parents in West Virginia" —  (NYT).

Objectively, on the substance, this post would get my "laziness" tag, but I'm wary of connecting it to a racist stereotype. Does that mean the essay has a racism problem? Or does that reveal that the stereotype is propaganda that manipulates people into not using their power to resist?

"The flagship commemoration event to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre was scrapped after three survivors demanded $1 million each to appear."

"Monday's Remember & Rise event - which was also set to feature John Legend and Stacey Abrams - was called off on Friday after survivors Viola Fletcher, 107, her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, upped their appearance fee from $100,000 each to $1 million each."

The Daily Mail reports. 

"The cause of justice demands proprietariness about the meaning of 'reparations,' and we object to these kinds of piecemeal and misleading labels."

"True reparations only can come from a full-scale program of acknowledgment, redress and closure for a grievous injustice."

Write A. Kirsten Mullen and William A. Darity Jr. in "Evanston, Ill., approved ‘reparations.’ Except it isn’t reparations" (WaPo). The Evanston program only offers $25,000 grants for repairs or down payments on real estate.

The authors demonstrate their "proprietariness about the meaning of 'reparations'" by spelling out 4 necessary elements: 

1. Careful delineation of eligibility — including, necessarily, a requirement of an ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S., and self-identification as black on an official document for at least 12 years before the program starts.

2. Erasure of the black/white wealth gap. The authors think $14 trillion is needed.

3. Direct payments to individuals. Not programs like Evanston's, which centers on home ownership.

4. Paid by the federal government. Only the federal government has the kind of money that is demanded, so state and local government should be excluded from using the word "reparations."

Here's a good comment over there: "By describing 'true' reparations as only something that is both politically and practically unachievable, the authors reveal that they are more interested in maintaining the 'systemic racism' grievance industry then helping the country move past its issues with race."

By the way, I don't think I'd ever seen the word "proprietariness" before. It doesn't mean "propriety." The word is not in the OED, but I can see that the "-ness" ending is making a noun out of the adjective "proprietary," which means property-owning or relating to property. It's an unusual word. A google search on it is dominated by references to "male sexual proprietariness" (a man's sense of owning his wife's sexual and reproductive functions). I couldn't find 1 use of the word in the NYT archive, but I did find 6 uses in The Washington Post archive, including a piece from last October about reparations in California:

William Darity Jr., a Duke University economics professor and reparations expert, told the website Cal Matters that no single state could launch an action large enough to be called “reparations.” 

 “I have a sense of proprietariness about the use of the term reparations, because I think people should not be given the impression that the kinds of steps that are taken at the state or local level actually constitute a comprehensive or true reparations plan,” Darity said in Cal Matters. “Whatever California does perhaps could be called atonement, or it could be called a correction for past actions.”

"Reparations" is a brand. There is a claim of ownership over the word itself, and politicians attempting to use the brand for their programs will be pushed back by those who have this sense of proprietariness. 

"I’m careful [not] to over-acknowledge people just reading books by black people....I don’t think it should be a revolutionary act. It’s something people should have been doing for a long time."

Said Jazzi McGilbert, owner of Reparations Club in Los Angeles, quoted in "Demand for anti-racist literature is up/These black bookstore owners hope it lasts/Library and book sales data show how interest in anti-racist
and social justice titles exploded after George Floyd’s death" (WaPo).

I love the word "over-acknowledge."

The Reparations Club is a store in L.A. Here's its website and here's a NYT article about it, "Buying Black, Rebooted/In the newest iteration of the Buy Black movement, entrepreneurs are creating marketplaces that pool black-owned brands in one space":

Why did Glenn Loury refuse to sign that "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" published last week in Harper's?

From "The Weekend Interview with Glenn Loury: A Challenger of the Woke 'Company Policy'" (Wall Street Journal):

Mr. Loury says he "politely declined" an invitation to sign "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" published by Harper's on Tuesday. Endorsed by some 150 liberal academics and writers, it denounces President Trump as "a real threat to democracy" before criticizing leftist repression.

"I declined for two reasons," Mr. Loury says. "First, I'm not 'on the left' and felt no need to signal solidarity with the left before criticizing cancel culture. And second, I don't view Trump as the greatest threat to democracy in this country." The truth, he adds, is "quite the opposite. It has been the refusal of the left to accept the democratic outcome of 2016 which precipitated the intolerance about which [the signatories] were complaining. So I did not sign."

"It’s $500 billion dollars — $200 to $500 billion dollars — payment of a debt that is owed. That is what reparations is."

"We need some deep truth-telling when it comes. We don’t need another commission to look at evidence, I appreciate what Congressman O’Rourke has said. It is time for us to simply realize that this country will not heal. All that a country is is a collection of people. People heal when there is some deep truth-telling. We need to recognize when it comes to the economic gap between blacks and whites in America. It does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with. That great injustice has had to deal with the fact that there were 250 years of slavery followed by another 100 years of domestic terrorism. What makes me qualified to say $200 to $500 billion dollars? I’ll tell you what makes me qualified. If you did the math of the 40 acres and a mule given that there were four to five million slaves at the end of the Civil War and they were all promised 40 acres and a mule for every family of four. If you did the math today it would be trillions of dollars. And I believe anything less than $100 billion dollars is an insult and I believe that $200 to $500 billion is politically feasible today because so many Americans realize there is an injustice that continues to form a toxicity underneath the surface and an emotional turbulence that only reparations will heal."

Said Marianne Williamson at last night Democratic Party candidates' debate, quoted by Eugene Scott at "Marianne Williamson makes the case for reparations in her breakout debate moment" (WaPo)(Scott writes "million" for billion in this piece that went up 6 hours ago, and no one at the Washington Post has noticed yet).



Scott writes:

Reparations has not polled particularly well with the American public, but the topic has seen renewed focus this year as many presidential candidates have been asked to address it and the House held a hearing on it earlier this summer.

From the comments over there: "Reparations is the dumbest idea democrats have ever had. If you want to motivate republicans try this bs." I guess that means it's a "dumb" idea because it's politically dangerous for Democrats. It's not a dumb idea in terms of moral reasoning. It has some practical and legal problems. And it might be a smart idea politically if your goal is to impede the progress of excessively left-wing candidates.

Anyway, I give Williamson high marks for rhetoric and delivery. She's on fire.

I want to make a close study of a section of the transcript of last night's debate — the part about race that ended with Kamala Harris yelling at Biden.

I could not listen to the substance last night. With TV, I'm tuned into the images and emotion. I'm not going to be distracted by the substance, and I know I'll have the transcript later. (I got mine at WaPo.)

I feel that the emotional high point came when Kamala Harris was yelling at Joe Biden. Here's how Drudge depicts it:




It was the emotional high, so that means I was at my lowest substance absorbency. I need to parse the transcript to see exactly how that rolled out and how I think about it in the dark storm of morning.

It began right after the break, with the second set of moderators, Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow. Maddow's first question, addressed to Pete Buttigieg, was very specific:

"A congressional hearing erupted when Quillette writer Coleman Hughes trashed a bill to study slavery reparations as a 'moral and political mistake,' forcing the chair of the hearing to tell the audience to 'chill' several times."

Mediaite reports (with video).

The audience at the hearing booed Hughes after he said, “Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.”

“Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today,” Hughes noted, adding, “They told me that even though I have only ever voted for Democrats, I would be perceived as Republican and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans, I would end up angering the other half of the country. And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we have become. Of one another. That’s how divided we are [a]s a nation[."]......

As the audience booed Hughes, subcommittee Chairman Steve Cohen banged the gavel and said “Chill, chill, chill, chill!” As the chamber quieted, Cohen added: “He was presumptive, but he still has a right to speak.”

He was presumptive?! What does that mean? Uppity?

"Can I tell you why I’m frustrated by this reparations conversation? It’s because it’s being reduced to a box to check..."

"... on a presidential list when this is so much more of a serious conversation. Do I support legislation that is race conscious about balancing the economic scales? Not only do I support it, but I have legislation that actually does it. In fact, I’ve got the only legislation, I think, in the entire congress that Columbia University says would virtually eliminate the racial wealth gap in our country. It’s something called baby bonds.... [I'm for] not only trying to right economic scales from past harms, but to make sure we are a country that creates a more beloved community where all dignity and humanity is affirmed of every single person."

Said Cory Booker, quoted in "6 key moments from Cory Booker’s CNN town hall" (Vox).

Baby bonds?

Booker’s plan would offer all newborns $1,000, and then add up to $2,000 annually for children in low-income households. By age 18, that could add up to serious money; Booker’s team estimates that for kids from lowest-income families, the nest egg would average some $46,000....

[E]very newborn would start out with $1,000 in a low-risk savings account managed by the Treasury Department. Booker’s team assumes in their analysis (as does Zewde) a 3 percent rate of return.

The perverse power of the Democrats rule that a candidate with 65,000 donors gets into the debates.

WaPo explains, noting that the obscure candidate John Delaney is offering to give $2 to charity if you give him $1. Delaney is wealthy and self-funded. So he can do something like that easily.

The Democratic Party also set the fundraising threshold with the goal of expanding the early debate stage to include as many as 20 candidates, who will be randomly divided to appear on consecutive nights in a two-day June debate hosted by NBC and a two-day July meeting hosted by CNN.

Using polling alone to filter the field, especially this early in the process, would almost certainly have meant a far smaller group of candidates onstage. Recent national polls have shown no more than a dozen candidates with 1 percent support, the criteria used to qualify for the first Democratic debate in 2015....

“We are about 40 percent there, so we are getting there,” said Patricia Ewing, a spokeswoman for [Marianne] Williamson, a self-described spiritual teacher who gained fame for her work with Oprah Winfrey.

Yikes. Why wouldn't 40,000 Republicans give Williamson $1 just to make the debates more fun/weird/horrible?



"And I also like you because you want to give $100 million in reparations to black people"/"No more than that."

ADDED: That quote is mispunctuated. She didn't say "No more than that." She said "No, more than that. 200 to 500 is the number that I sort of landed on."

Richard Cohen (the WaPo columnist) doesn't "quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations."

He's got an image, but he can't picture it. I picture something like this:



But damn, I find it annoying, starting off a column so lazily.

I don't quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations. Given a Republican incumbent who has never exceeded 50 percent in Gallup's approval ratings poll and who won the presidency thanks to a dysfunctional electoral college, the party is nevertheless determined to give Donald Trump a fair shot at re-election by sabotaging itself....

Yes, yes, I know, it's perfectly predictable, the point you're going to make. But you waste my time with a cliché, and you don't know how to use it. It pops in your head and you just start jabbering, padding out your column with the tedious news that you don't understand your own unfresh metaphor. How do you head anywhere in a basket? Is someone carrying the basket? Is it a basket with some automotive power? Is it a basket placed for some reason — by whom? — at the top of a slippery slope?

I'm so glad I stopped to ask, rather than to continue to read the scribblings of Richard Cohen (who is not, I hasten to add, the Richard Cohen to whom I once said, as quoted in the previous post, "Maybe it's not right to bring children into this world"). I presume the column continues to point out the obvious, which you're free to expound on in the comments. I want to talk about going to hell in a handbasket.

First, here's the fantastic Hieronymus Bosch painting, "The Haywain Triptych" (click to enlarge):



Wikipedia explains the painting:

The central panel features a large wagon of hay surrounded by a multitude of fools engaged in a variety of sins... An angel on top of the wagon looks to the sky, praying, but none of the other figures see Christ [in the cloud] looking down on the world. The rightward bow of the figures around the wagon provides the force for the viewer’s eye to move with them on their journey and the cart is drawn by infernal beings which drag everyone to Hell, depicted on the right panel.

So it's a hay wagon, and the movement toward Hell is generated by some nasty characters:



I found that through the Wikipedia article "To hell in a handbasket," but a hay wagon is not a handbasket. A wagon has wheels. So how does a handbasket — which doesn't sound like something with wheels — work as a coveyance to hell?

"Going to hell in a handbasket", "going to hell in a handcart", "going to hell in a handbag", "go to hell in a bucket", "sending something to hell in a handbasket" and "something being like hell in a handbasket" are variations on an American allegorical locution of unclear origin, which describes a situation headed for disaster inescapably or precipitately.

So apparently, not only doesn't Richard Cohen know, Wikipedia doesn't know! But it does offer this:

I. Windslow Ayer's 1865 polemic alleges, "Judge Morris of the Circuit Court of Illinois at an August meeting of Order of the Sons of Liberty said: "Thousands of our best men were prisoners in Camp Douglas, and if once at liberty would 'send abolitionists to hell in a hand basket.'"

That's the idea of sending and not simply going. Notice that in Cohen's locution, getting into a handbasket is a quick way to go to Hell. But why? If someone else puts you in a basket — Mrs. Gulch or the Sons of Liberty — then they've got themselves in good position to take you wherever they want, the nasty demons....



But Cohen imagines the Democrats getting into a handbasket on their own. Won't it just sit there, going nowhere?



Cohen hasn't thought this through, so I will. Once they get in the basket, they've made it easy for their antagonists to pick up the basket and throw it wherever they like. And it won't be the White House.



Oh! There's Trump, building his wall!

"In Portland, Ore., organizers of the 'Reparations Happy Hour' invited black, brown and indigenous people to a bar and handed them $10 bills as they arrived..."

"... a small but symbolic gift mostly funded by white people who were asked not to attend.... 'It was only $10, but when I saw them I saw their eyes light up,' he said. 'What I saw there was that people felt like they were finally seen.'"

The NYT reports.

So let's see... white people get off making black people "light up" by handing them money — a 10 dollar bill.

Portlandia.

ADDED: What if men at a bar funded the practice of offering a $10 bill to women who would come in? I guess some women would step up to take the bill, but I assume a lot of women, like me, would scoff and think you are so pathetic and quit insulting me.

ALSO: This reminds me of those affirmative action bake sales where opponents of affirmative action offer cookies for sale for, say, $1 if you're black and $5 if you are white. Except liberals rankle at that.

Apparently, it's right-wing to find the "Hotep Jesus" Starbucks reparations video hilarious.

I had no idea that I was evincing right-wingery by laughing, but now I am learning, reading "Right-Wing Media Promote An Anti-Semitic Extremist To Mock Starbucks Controversy" (at Right Wing Watch).

I thought it was kind of a Saul Alinsky/Yippie move, but I guess nothing is supposed to be funny anymore. Oh, yeah, I'm remembering I have a tag for these times — the Era of That's Not Funny.

Here's the original video — high-level comedy:

Starbucks is racist https://t.co/fPf3ERMlXX

— Hotep Jesus 🧠 (@VibeHi) April 15, 2018

Brilliant! So much to talk about. It's really a Borat-style stunt. I assume the barista isn't playing a role but spontaneously responding to Hotep Jesus's demand for "reparations" and embodying all the empathy she's learned to show, even as she's videoed doing something that must be a firing offense, handing out free coffee.

Yes, there is something wrong with making light of reparations, but that's what makes it funny. It's transgressive. I'll group this with the story of Randa Jarrar, who extracted dark humor from the death of Barbara Bush. Oh, no! Death is super-serious. Don't laugh at death!

These are the very things we should be laughing about — death, racism — not because they aren't serious but because they are.

Help me, Randa.

"India's share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%."

"By the time the British left it was down to below 4%. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India."

Reparations?

"That's a $500,000 vagina tax."

(Warning: Rubber penises that have kind of a sourdough smell are displayed and waggled about in this video.)



Reparations, baby. And we've got a number. None of this Ta-Nehisi Coates we-can-figure-out-the-number-later business. The number is $30 trillion. Pony up!

Aunt Jemima's descendants want their share of that pancake money.

"The great grandsons of Anna Short Harrington, who was hired as the American pancake icon in 1933, claim that her family is entitled to a percentage of the company's revenue every time her likeness was used. They're now seeking $2 billion in compensation, plus a share of future revenue."

This is more of a public debate... or a shakedown. I can't imagine how any conceivable legal claim could survive a statute of limitations defense. But it's a publicity problem for Quaker Oats. And if you're going to apply moral pressure, it's convenient that the company is named after a religion associated with high moral values. At this point, the company's response is that Aunt Jemima is a fictional character symbolizing "a sense of caring, warmth, hospitality and comfort." The plaintiffs are leaning on us to see Aunt Jemima as "one of the most exploited and abused women in American history."

I wonder what the descendants of Larry have in mind litigation-wise? You know what I'm talking about? Larry? This is Larry:



Reparations... micro-reparations. If micro-reparations are $2 billion, just think what the reparations would be for all of the most exploited and abused people in American history.

"The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie."

"Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans," writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in "The Case for Reparations."

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

And here's Isaac Chotiner in "Get Ready for a National Debate About Slavery Reparations."

The best argument against Coates's proposals is simply that they will prove to be more trouble than they are worth, i.e. that their practical effect will be a negative one... But... [i]f we can't even have the conversation he wants because people are so defensive or unwilling (or plain racist), it's just more evidence for what his essay rightfully bemoans.

ADDED: Look at the fluid interchangeability of "reparations" and "the conversation." Are we talking about "the conversation about race" that we've been talking about (not) having for the last 2 decades? This almost feels like a negotiation about the conversation, where the demand for "reparations" is designed to get your attention and to prepare you to feel relieved that all you really need to submit to is the conversation.

But, as has often been observed, the supposedly desirable conversation isn't a real conversation. On one level, there's nothing to debate. No one who is to be taken seriously opposes the high level abstraction that is racial equality. On a less abstract level, debate isn't really wanted. The conversation-seekers want to teach lessons and have those lessons acknowledged and taken to heart. There is resistance to that kind of conversation, and I don't think it will be overcome by presenting it in terms of "reparations."

Coates speaks of "spiritual renewal." He professes concern about our national spirit, our our national "consciousness," and our national "self-image," our national "psyche." This is the stuff of religion and its substitutes. I don't believe in or really want awakenings on a grand scale. The human mind belongs to the individual. I would resist the charms of relocating psychic and spiritual matters to the nation.

AND: Coates's analogy to the recovering alcoholic makes my point. The recovering alcoholic is an individual, with an individual problem, going through a personal psychological (and physiological) process. It's imaginative but ultimately specious — and dangerous — to think of the nation as a person.