My Completely Unsolicited Thoughts

If I don't put my rants on paper, they'll build up in me and I'll explode. Criticism welcome, but I don't seriously expect anyone to care about me or this blog: I'm shouting into the void so I can avoid alienating my friends.

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Better Male Answers to “Not All Men”

For several years now, men who give the rote “not all men” response to bad male behavior are met with the appropriate “yes all women” response. And when this response comes from women it makes sense: centering the conversation on the women who are effected by men in general rather than the thoughts and feelings of individual men makes complete sense. But coming from men, the “yes all women” response is unhelpful at best and exculpatory at worst. A better response would be “yes every man.”

Saying that “men are bad” is not quite complete. “Men” are not bad because of something inherent in them: not their biological sex, not their gender assigned at birth, not the gender they choose to present as. Rather, each and every individual man is bad because he chooses to be. And this is not solely because of society, or because of the way the men were raised: every single man has a chance to be good regardless of his upbringing and chooses not to. There are men who model each of the acceptable behaviors that are necessary to be a non-terrible person. But no man exhibits all of the behaviors that would be necessary to not contribute to the marginalization, subjugation and elimination of women. Every man chooses to engage in these behaviors, and therefore “yes every man” is bad. I don’t want men to derail a “yes all women” by keeping the focus on men. But the men who say “yes all women” rather than “yes every man” are generally doing so as a form of self-congratulation.

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3 Meanings of “American Wealth”

When folks on the Left describe “America’s wealth” as being ill-gotten, they are referring to one or more of three different types of American wealth. Each of these is ill-gotten, but each calls for a different type of restitution.

The narrowest definition of “America’s wealth” is America’s natural wealth. America the Beautiful isn’t wrong: the land mass encompassed by the US borders has incredible natural beauty. US land also has a ton of natural resources to sell, especially with fracking and other modern extraction methods. It is hard to overstate how important coal was in building this country: the world is now paying the price for hundreds of years of US coal extraction. The US’ natural wealth was undoubtedly ill-gotten, the product of genocide and displacement. Restitution for this wealth would start with turning sovereign control of national parks and resource extraction to the tribes from which it was stolen. But that would not be full restitution, as we are responsible for mitigating the climate damage caused by hundreds of years of burning our fossil fuels. The US is not the only country to have burned or extracted fossil fuels, but we are certainly responsible for whatever share of CO2 emissions we caused.

Another definition of “America’s wealth” is the US’ wealth as a country (i.e. the national balance sheet). Generally, when people say that “America’s wealth was built on slavery”, they are referring to the US’ wealth as a country. And the US’ wealth was built on slavery: as meticulously documented by Ed Baptist among others, the vast majority of the US’s wealth prior to the Civil War was either in slaves, products made by slaves, and products made by slave-made products (e.g. textiles made from Southern cotton). After the Civil War, the South went from a massively wealthy aristocracy that supported the entire country’s economy to an economically backwards land needing massive federal investment. This decimation means that the responsibility for slavery reparations rests with Northern institutions that profited from slavery (e.g. insurance companies) and the federal government. But the responsibility remains.

The final definition of “America’s wealth” is the aggregation of individual white Americans’ personal wealth. It means comparatively little to say that individual white Americans (most of whom are descended from post-Civil War immigrants) acquired their wealth from slavery and genocide: slavery created the racial caste system that reifies our country’s massive racial wealth disparity, and no white Americans would have any wealth if the indigenous peoples had been left in peace. But the actual wealth held by white Americans stems largely from FDR’s programs that Ira Katznelson calls “affirmative action for white people”: the GI Bill to educate veterans at segregated or tokenly-integrated schools, VA and FHA house loans in non-redlined neighborhoods, and public housing that furthered segregation. Restitution for these massive racial wealth gaps that were the product of deliberate government policy could take a number of different forms: literal redistribution through the estate tax, or home loans for black families in otherwise white-dominated suburbs. But arguments over how to repay shouldn’t obscure the need to pay.

MLK managed to weave many of these threads together in his plan for reparations. MLK’s position was that there was no price high enough to repay hundreds of years of bondage. What was needed was instead a federal government program to remedy the racial wealth gap: what MLK called a GI Bill for black Americans, with the same education benefits and housing loans given to whites after World War II. To today’s politicians, this seems absurd given how long ago the GI Bill was. But such a program would surely be more practical than calculating what 40 acres and a mule would be worth in today’s dollars, or quibbling over an exact dollar amount.

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Minor Inaccuracies are Libel

There has been way too much attention paid to Trump’s stated desire to “loosen up the libel laws” and far too little attention paid to exactly how loose libel already is.

Trump has no control over the substance of libel law, which is up to state legislatures and state judges to define. By himself or with the assistance of Congress, Trump will never get to determine what is or isn’t libel as a matter of law. There is of course the concern that state legislators in red states will, in an effort to punish and gag Trump’s enemies, “loosen up” the libel laws by making virtually any inaccuracy libelous (or even making truth libelous). But here’s the dirty secret: most state libel law already defines any false statement as libel (regardless of intent). And given that truth was not a defense to libel at common law (at least in England), there would be nothing to prevent a state from defining truthful statements about the President as libelous.

The only reason that this does not matter in a practical sense is the Supreme Court precedent of New York Times v. Sullivan. In Sullivan, the Court determined that the First Amendment protects speech regarding public figures that would otherwise be deemed libelous by state libel law. In the jury trial that was on review in Sullivan, an Alabama sheriff had sued the New York Times for printing an ad by civil rights groups complaining of mistreatment by Alabama law enforcement during a protest in Montgomery. The jury awarded the sheriff enough in damages to bankrupt the Times based on the following conceded inaccuracies in the ad: while the ad said that MLK had been arrested seven times, he had only been arrested four times; and while the ad said that schoolchildren had sung My Country Tis of Thee, they had actually sang the Star-Spangled Banner.

So when Trump objects that the Wall Street Journal wrote that he said “I have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un” when he claims to have said “I’d have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un,” in a world with no Sullivant precedent he would be able to sue the Wall Street Journal into bankruptcy for this (assuming he could prove to a jury that he said “I’d”). This is what is at stake with every judicial nomination Trump makes: the power to narrow Sullivan out of existence until the already-existing state libel laws are able to do their work.

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The question as to which is more reprehensible, the alleged custom in Haiti of eating a human being without cooking him or the authenticated custom in the United States of cooking a human being without eating him. The Haitian custom would have, at least, a utilitarian purpose in extenuation.

James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way

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“Won’t Pronounce” vs “Can’t Pronounce”

I’ve seen a lot of statements circulating that “if white people can pronounce Tchaikovsky and Daenerys Targaryen, they can pronounce non-white names.” And that’s true as far as it’s usually carried: nobody should refuse to learn to pronounce or lazily butcher the pronunciation of Nnedi Okorafor or Uzo Aduba if they learn to pronounce Dostoyevsky. But let’s not give ourselves too much credit: white Americans aren’t pronouncing Tchaikovsky exactly correctly anyways unless we speak Russian as a first language. Different languages (particularly languages from different language families like English and Russian) have pronunciations and linguistic idiosyncrasies that make it difficult for any non-speaker to correctly pronounce that language’s names.

My name is Will. Many Latinos who I have interacted with for whom English is a second language pronounce my name Wheel. Why would I correct them? But why also would I accept this as the correct pronunciation of my name? I understand that English is the language of global colonialism, we should all learn non-English languages rather than have other people learn English, etc. I only use English as an example because it is familiar, you can pretend I’m comparing Xhosa and Korean if you like. Point is, there are two levels of mispronunciation: (1) The butchering of a language that you hear from lazy white people in Spanish class; (2) The inevitable inability of most people to pronounce words or names in other languages with 100% accuracy. I am completely on board with demanding an end to the first with regard to names (or any words, for that matter). But I want to lay down a marker to ensure that people don’t confuse the two, because if everybody started yelling at everybody for (2) while also doing (2) themselves, we’d be in for confusing times.

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US Imperialism Can Cause a Reactionary Inflow

After decolonization of the global South in the 1940s-1970s, many former European colonials returned to their European home countries. These colonials were (understandably) incredibly reactionary within the context of their home country’s politics: the contrast between the fuzzy social democracy of post-WWII Europe and the unforgiving colonialism practiced in European colonies is stark. These ex-colonials formed a significant part of a generation of right-wing European political parties, even when these colonials had supported terrorist actions against the colonizer itself in the name of preserving the colony.

A similar trend continues to haunt the US. The US colonials in the Philippines are (thankfully) long dead. But where the US interceded in the global South on behalf of a reactionary government, the result was to push those countries’ reactionaries into the US after the inevitable fall of the reactionary government. The best known example is Cuba: the US supported Batista, Castro overthrew Batista, the Batistianos fled Cuba to the US, and the Batistianos continue to drive the US’s awful policy towards Cuba (see: Diaz-Balart, Rubio, and Lopez-Cantera). But there are other examples: in the linked article, South Vietnamese who fled the North’s invasion after US withdrawal settled in suburban Maryland, and recently objected to the flying of the Vietnamese flag (because it is the flag of the victorious North).

This pattern is not inescapable just because US imperialism continues. For example, Afghan refugees have not been particularly reactionary: there are so many different ethnic groups and power dynamics in Afghan politics that it would difficult to imagine our actions leading to an influx of Afghan reactionaries (not to mention that the reactionary Taliban, for their own reasons, would have no reason to want to come to the US). But that we have been lucky with some of our recent invasions does not mean that we should not keep in mind what often happens when we project our power into other countries.

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“What I’m Allowed to Say” vs “What is True”

Too many whites, myself included, too often confuse what we are or are not allowed to say with what the truth is. For example, the Arab slave trade in East and North Africa predated the European slave trade in West Africa by hundreds of years. As a white person I shouldn’t have anything to say about the Arab slave trade, not just because anything that seems like an attempt to deflect from the horrors of the Middle Passage should be avoided, but also because ending the Arab slave trade was one of the prime excuses for European colonization of East Africa. But recognizing that I shouldn’t talk about it is not the same as trying to defend the Arab slave trade. “The Middle Passage was worse” isn’t a defense of the Arab slave trade, it’s a reason for whites not to talk about it. “The slaves’ lives in the Arab slave trade was not much worse than their lives in East Africa” (see VS Naipul’s book The Bend in the River) is horrifying and completely misses the inherent problems with trading human beings. “It’s Islamophobic to discuss the Arab slave trade” is a reason for whites not to talk about the slave trade, but any suggestion that the Arab slave trade should be discussed only within the confines of the Arab world is bad: surely the people with the most to say about the Arab slave trade ought to be East and North Africans.

A broader example is the general discussion around whether non-white folks can be racist towards other non-white folks. Again, it’s not my place to tell Korean storeowners in LA that they are racist towards their largely black clientele: I can accept the testimony of the families of the Latasha Harlins’ of the world without going around telling Koreans that they are bad and racist. But to go a step further than refraining from calling out non-white racism and deny that non-white racism exists is extremely inappropriate.

Bottom line, don’t confuse the fact that something would be inappropriate for a white person to say with that thing being untrue.

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Honorary Confederate or Just Terrible Person?

In the wake of the removals of Confederate monuments in New Orleans and elsewhere, people (like the ones in the source post) have asked what other monuments should be removed. In many of these discussions, the idea has been put out that monuments to certain people should be removed on the grounds that they are “honorary Confederates.” Prominent examples include Roger Brooke Taney (the mayor’s monument committee in Baltimore recommended removing the city’s Taney monument), Andrew Jackson (New Orleans activists have called for removing his monument), and John C. Calhoun (Yale recently renamed Calhoun College, replacing him with Grace Murray Hopper). Below is a quick rundown of whether these people should be considered “honorary Confederates.”

Roger Brooke Taney. Case for: Famously wrote in Dred Scott that the Constitution gave black folks (free or slave) “no rights that the white man is bound to respect,” concurred in Prigg to the effect that the Constitution required state law enforcement to assist Southern slaveholders to recapture fugitives, and held in Merryman that President Lincoln could not suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in order to arrest treasonous members of the Maryland militia and legislature. When he died, Radical Republicans in Congress rejoiced, and refused to appropriate money for his bust. Case against: Removing SCOTUS justices for white supremacist legal opinions would preclude honoring virtually any SCOTUS Justice (for example, the often esteemed Chief Justice Marshall held in McIntosh that Europeans had title to the land they had stolen by right of conquest, and even today’s Justices have contributed to white supremacy in cases like Parents Involved). Bottom line, being a white supremacist does not a Confederate make. Perhaps most importantly, Taney did not quit the SCOTUS to join the Confederacy like Justice Campbell did (although Maryland, unlike Campbell’s Alabama, was of course not a declared Confederate state).

John C. Calhoun. Case for: Promoted some of the most pervasive white supremacist theories that are still around today, and was guiding force behind some of our worst policies as Secretary of State and Secretary of War. More importantly, led nullification crisis of 1832, a precursor to secession that was too radical even for Andrew Jackson. Case against: Not really much, other than having the decency to die a decade before secession (but only after having a fellow Senator read his last speech threatening secession during the debate over the Compromise of 1850).

Andrew Jackson. Case for: Architect of genocide and land theft against tribes in Alabama and Mississippi (during War of 1812), Florida (during unauthorized raids while Monroe was President), and Georgia (while President, famously culminating in Trail of Tears). Slaveowner and defender of white supremacy: to the extent that he sought to preserve the Union (crushing the nullifiers) it was to preserve a slaveholding Union. Case against: None of these features is unique to Confederates: genocide and land theft were (and still are) US policy, Northerners and earlier Southern historical figures (Washington, Jefferson, etc) were slaveowners, and virtually the entire Northern white population before and after the Civil War were white supremacists to varying degrees.

I don’t want to get too ahead of myself: people are already planning which statutes to take down after the Confederates, but Confederates are still very much alive and well in too many states. And most of the “what about that racist Abe Lincoln” crowd are Lost Causers engaged in deflection: the goal should be to remove the unambiguous Confederates before considering who should later be removed. But if the day ever comes where we have to decide whether certain “honorary Confederate” historical figures are worthy of statuary recognition, I hope we take seriously what defines a Confederate, rather than just a white supremacist, slaveowner, or architect of anti-indigenous genocide.

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Accurate Pessimism vs Lying Aspiration

Many debates over whether a government should take what might seem to be the next logical step in a long path of oppression have the same basic arguments. The pro-oppression arguments run along the lines of “this is no different from what we have already done, so we should do it.” Some anti-oppression arguments run along the lines of “this violates who we are as a people and is nothing like our past actions.” To both of these people, the accurate pessimist says “we shouldn’t do this, but if we did it wouldn’t be a departure from our past history.” I’m not sure which of the two anti-oppression arguments (accurate pessimism or lying aspiration) is better, but I lean towards lying aspiration.

The US was built as an empire: Britain created an empire by wresting land away from the native people, and the future Americans built a powerful economy on the backs of West African slaves (whose kidnapping warped the states from which they were stolen). After independence, America’s empire expanded: we wrested land from Mexico, pushed indigenous people off of their land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and set our eyes on various parts of Latin America (filibusterers invaded much of Central America, several antebellum Presidents tried to buy Cuba from Spain, and Grant sent a treaty annexing the DR to the Senate, which rejected it). But when McKinley took over for Cleveland (who had refused to recognize the American coup in Hawaii and any hints of acquiring overseas territories), American policymakers debated whether to acquire overseas possessions in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. One of the arguments turned on whether acquiring these overseas territories would violate everything that America stood for. Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and other white anti-imperialists argued that acquiring overseas territories bore no resemblance to American history: purportedly a history of anti-imperialism as demonstrated by the Monroe Doctrine and its enforcement, not to mention our country’s creation in opposition to British imperialism. To which Teddy Roosevelt and the imperialists responded that our slaughter of Filipinos and appropriation of Hawaiian land was no different than our treatment of indigenous North Americans: why should overseas non-whites be treated any different than American non-whites?

A similar pattern plays out in the debate over Palestine. To the Israeli left and certain segments of the rest of the world, Israel’s policies in the West Bank are at odds with its status as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East. How could a country that is dedicated to self-determination and democracy be setting itself up for a land grab from the Palestine that most people intend to be created out of the West Bank? To many people in Likud and further right, this is nonsense: Israel was created in its current location because there is no such thing as a Palestinian. If Palestine were real and Palestinians had a right to land in Judea and Samaria, why was Israel able to force them out in 1948? To Likud, Israel has a right to Judea and Samaria for the same reason it has a right to Green Line Israel and subsequent expansions (Golan, East Jerusalem): there is no such thing as a Palestinian.

In opposition to what is commonly represented as the two sides in these debates is the pessimist anti-imperialist. In the 1898 US example, such a person would say that while Roosevelt correctly stated that imperialism is an American tradition, overseas imperialism is wrong for the same reason that Manifest Destiny was: white Americans have no right to stolen land. Booker T. Washington’s anti-imperialist arguments were perhaps the closest to this position of any American whose views were known to a majority of Americans. As for the Palestine example, the “Palestine from Jordan to the sea” crowd in both the international left and the Arab world agrees with Likud that stealing Palestinian land is an Israeli tradition, but argues that Israeli theft is a reason to oppose even Green Line Israel.

Much of the debate among anti-imperialists over whether to be accurate pessimists or lying optimists appealing to purported national values that don’t actually explain national behavior taps into the pragmatism vs idealism divide that the left struggles with. At any rate, it seems to me that lying optimism is usually the only possible solution in the short term: it will be difficult to convince a majority of Americans to end its overseas empire on the grounds that the US itself should not exist, or a majority of Jewish Israelis to end the occupation of the West Bank on the grounds that Israel itself should not exist. Too often, responding to potential expansions of imperialism with “well actually we’ve always been this way” smacks of defeatism, and feeds into the very narrative that the imperialists are pushing. I don’t intend to decolonize the arguments I make to the average American in a way that reduces the likelihood that Americans will support literal decolonization.

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“You Can’t Be Serious About Mass Incarceration If...”

I’ve seen way too many takes over the last couple of days, from both writers who are socially conscious and writers who are only pretending to be, that we shouldn’t celebrate long sentences for violent criminals like the white supremacist birthday party disruptors in Georgia who were just sentenced to 20 and 15 years (with 13 and 6 years respectively to be served in prison). Not because those terrorists didn’t deserve it (or because terrorizing a child’s birthday party is somehow free speech), but because if we’re going to get serious about ending mass incarceration in this country, we need to stop demanding decades-long sentences for violent crimes. My first reaction was the writer from the source post’s reaction: you can’t make me feel bad for these terrorists. But my second thought was that this country can both end mass incarceration and give long sentences for violent crime.

I am much better at narratives than data visualization: if you want charts accompanying my narrative, there is a good visual breakdown here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2017.html Here is one path to ending mass incarceration and its add-on effects without unleashing violent criminals on society: (1) Immediately release and pardon most inmates, parolees and probationers whose only convictions were drug convictions; (2) Immediately release and pardon most inmates, parolees and probationers whose only convictions were weapons possession charges; (3) Immediately release and pardon all people convicted of property crimes where the property in question was worth <$100; (4) Immediately transfer some inmates with severe mental illnesses to non-penal institutions; (5) Immediately release and pardon most inmates whose only crime was a probation or parole violation; (6) Immediately release and pardon all immigrants held in detention who are being held for any reason other than having committed a violent felony; (7) Release many inmates, parolees and probationers over the age of 60; (8) Stop jailing sex workers; (9) Automatically re-enfranchise all prisoners upon their release from prison (to incentivize politicians not to bring back mass incarceration).

There is some finessing to be done around the edges of this plan to be sure: certain prisoners who would otherwise be released under this path should not be released (e.g. abusers or violent criminals against whom prosecutors could only get nonviolent charges to stick), certain prisoners who would otherwise be released might be better off institutionalized (e.g. elderly prisoners who couldn’t get the medical care they need outside of prison), and certain prisoners who would not otherwise be released should be released (e.g. Leonard Peltier, H Rap Brown, and all of the women charged with assaulting or killing their abusers). But the plan would get the US to the point where it no longer leads the world in incarceration. More importantly, it could still get the country to normal incarceration rates even while sentencing violent criminals and white supremacist terrorists to the long sentences they so richly deserve. Besides, breaking the back of white terrorism doesn’t take having indefinite trials forever: when President Grant and Attorney General Akerman vigorously prosecuted the Klan under the Enforcement Acts, it took them about a year to destroy the Klan, who didn’t return until the Wilson Administration.

Long story short: you can be perfectly serious about ending mass incarceration and relish long sentences for violent crimes like the Georgia couple who terrorized those black children’s birthday party.

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The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression

WEB DuBois, John Brown

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How To Handle An Unwanted Award

I’m mad. Mad that Beyonce lost to Adele, mad that Rihanna got shut out, mad that 21 pilots gets to pull weird nonsense that nobody else would be able to pull. But my anger is best expressed by someone else, someone who isn’t the embodiment of the white male stodginess that has led to the Grammys being what they’ve been for at least the last five years. See the source post if you want to read about it, then read more posts about it that aren’t by white writers.

What I do feel comfortable talking about is how Adele or someone in her situation can handle receiving an award that they think should have gone to someone else. I have some experience with this: in high school I had to plan how to give scholarships or awards that might have gone to me to friends of mine for who actually deserved the money and recognition. Some of these awards were even given in a Grammys-like format: fancy party with many nominees and a winner that nobody knows until their name is called. Here is my list of approaches, with my thoughts on their effectiveness and appropriateness.

1. Telling the award givers in advance that if they intend to give the award to you they should give it to your friend instead. The plus side is that nobody will know your altruistic role unless you shamelessly tell everyone. The risk is that the award giver might just give the award to someone else: maybe the Grammy would have gone to Justin Bieber or something. At least you can control the award going to your friend if you accept it.

2. Breaking the award in half so that nobody can have it. It’s not clear what exactly Adele was trying to accomplish by breaking the award in half, but if she was trying to King Solomon that award it was a terrible idea. I’m sure Beyonce (or whoever you think should have gotten the award) would be much happier with an intact award: you breaking it accomplishes nothing.

3. Breaking the award in half to give half to your friend. This is another possible explanation for Adele’s action. It is still bad: it would be better to give your friend the entire award so they can put it on their mantlepiece (unless of course the plaque has your name on it, in which case maybe breaking it is the way to go).

4. Declining the award because you can’t possibly accept an award that should have gone to someone else. This is what Adele’s words suggested. The problem is the same with breaking the award: it’s pointlessly nihilistic.

5. Giving the award to your friend. This is a popular suggestion for what Adele should have done. While I don’t deny it’s better than most of the options on the list, it also has its problems. The award would still be Adele’s award: the list of Grammy winners would always read “Adele,” not “Adele for two minutes then Beyonce.” There is just no good way for Adele to give Beyonce that award without it looking at least a little bit like charity or an act of unnecessary grace. I’d still rather Beyonce have the actual award. But the problem is currently with the academy (for giving Adele the award) and Adele (for accepting it); under this scenario the blame would lie solely with the Academy.

6. The wild card option, and the one that I planned to use in high school (thankfully for everyone, I never won any awards): go to the podium, take the card they read my name off of, and say “there’s been a mistake, this award was supposed to go to x,” and then walk off stage and let x come get the award. This only would work once: Adele would probably not get invited back, and the Grammys would quietly take steps to ensure that nobody could ever pull that stunt again. But for one shining moment, Beyonce would have legitimately won the award, and the Academy couldn’t contradict Adele without embarrassing themselves.

EDIT: After what happened at the Oscars, option 6 is clearly not viable. I had no idea what would happen in such a situation, but now we all do!

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I Hope The Trump Nightmare Ends Some of Our Worst Political Traditions

I’m not the sort of guy to see silver linings in anything about a Trump Presidency. And if Trump stumbles his way into doing something good like killing the TPP, even if it’s for the wrong reasons, I will not give him credit. But I hope that for as long as the Trump nightmare endures, Trump’s noxiousness kills some of our worst political traditions.

I hope the White House Correspondent’s Dinner dies and never comes back. This hope has been expressed in so many think pieces (including the source post) that I won’t belabor it, but for years the Correspondent’s Dinner (and its related dinners like the Gridiron and the Radio Correspondents Dinner) has been more of a spectacle of coziness between government and journalists than anything else. After Donald Trump got roasted at the 2011 WHCD, I can’t imagine him wanting to give it a crack, and I can’t imagine enough journalists wanting to attend a Trump WHCD to make it viable.

I hope that the State of the Union returns to being delivered as a letter to Congress, rather than a speech. George Washington and John Adams did give it as a speech in Congress, but from Jefferson to Wilson no President gave an oral State of the Union. And it’s not as though the State of the Union messages were any less memorable for being written: the Monroe Doctrine was in a SOTU letter, as were Polk’s announcement of the California Gold Rush and several of Lincoln’s most memorable turns of phrase. Can anyone imagine Democrats, SCOTUS Justices, or anyone else attending a Trump SOTU? Certainly not if things continue as they are.

I hope that the backlash against the extravagant security costs for the whole Trump family prompt a reconsideration of the Secret Service’s costs. I’ll be honest: I was as mad as any liberal when conservatives made up fake news stories about the cost of Obama’s security (like when they said his India trip would cost billions of dollars). But I imagine the soaring Secret Service costs under Trump make Congress (under pressure from angry constituents) cut back Secret Service protection for people who aren’t the President, and for Presidential trips outside of DC.

I hope that the “can he do that” reaction to Trump’s violation of so many norms we took for granted leads to Congress codifying those norms. The best example I can think of is Presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. Congress didn’t make it a law because they didn’t think they’d have to: now that Trump has abandoned any pretense of releasing his taxes, Congress should codify this requirement in federal election law.

UPDATE: Well Trump ended up having a speech to a joint session of Congress, which means he will almost surely give SOTU speeches in the future. And most of the Court and virtually all of Congress attended. Another wrong prediction from the guy who’s always wrong.

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What Should White Americans Be Allowed to Say to Refugees?

I try my hardest every day to recognize and point out colonialist narratives. But this refugee/immigrant/lawful permanent resident crisis started by Trump’s executive order has got me wondering what narratives are good and what narratives are bad. Obviously the first priority is to fight Trump’s EO and use the backlash as a springboard for a better, more humane immigration policy. But I do that in my life, not on this Tumblr that nobody reads. This Tumblr is strictly for figuring out what I think about popular narratives. But this time, I’m stuck: I genuinely don’t know what I or any other white American should be allowed to say to a refugee.

As the source post indicates, white American narratives about “my immigrant ancestors suffered when they came to this country, today’s immigrants shouldn’t have to” are bad for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the people who suffered the most in this country were never the European immigrants even when the US was at its most xenophobic: it was the descendants of kidnapped, enslaved Africans and the displaced, murdered indigenous peoples. This is not to play “who is more oppressed”: it’s more that saying “my immigrant ancestors went through hate but now we aren’t hated” ignores the simultaneous destruction of people whose ancestors had no choice about whether to come here (after all, NINA signs coincided with Jim Crow and frontier genocide). Calling the US a “nation of immigrants” or “built by immigrants” erases slavery and genocide.

The other big reason the “immigrants like my ancestors make America great” narrative is so bad was on full display at the Dulles protest I went to. As the source post indicates, waving the American flag and singing the national anthem have very different meanings to the (white) person waving it and their black/native/Latinx friends to whom the flag and the anthem are reminders of the US’ bloody history.

But I’m not sure what all this means for the non-citizens from the seven affected countries whose lives have been flipped upside down by Trump’s EO. If the question is whether white Americans should be allowed to purport to welcome refugees, immigrants and LPRs (because the country is not ours to welcome people to), I understand the criticism but don’t understand what it means for non-citizens. Would non-citizens prefer to be welcomed at the airport by uncomfortably patriotic white liberals or would they prefer a quiet reunion with only their family (plus the immigration lawyers whose work I have seen absolutely no criticism of)? Should a white American with a sign saying “refugees are welcome here” get a better sign because the sign tells a lie about a country that has never welcomed refugees? And must, as the source post suggests, the sign be in Arabic? To the last question at least I’d have to add that people from the seven affected countries don’t all speak Arabic: Iran has the largest emigrant population of the seven, and only 2% of Persians speak Arabic.

My instincts are to read way too much into the fact that the people affected by Trump’s EO are trying to live in this country. As horribly as this country treats Muslims, as horribly as it treats immigrants, as horribly as it treats Sudanese and Somalian immigrants on multiple levels, the people from these countries are still coming here. As one Persian immigrant told the Washington Post, “I didn’t come to America for a better life, I came here for a life.” All the handwringing about whether it’s really appropriate to say “immigrants are welcome here” when they aren’t matters less than the specific needs of the non-citizens as individuals and as a whole. Immigrants are bright folks: they can figure out pretty quickly that the US has a terrible history and a terrible present (and if they don’t get the message right away, Pepe’s army of Twitter eggs will surely remind them). But for every second that they remain here while the US’s foreign policy decimates their home country, we need to listen to their needs and meet them.

[completelyunsolictedthoughts]

Questions for Gorsuch

Republicans never asked Garland any questions, so Democrats should show why questions actually matter and ask about philosophy (not specific cases). My top questions for Gorsuch: 1. Does freedom of religion ever include the right to harm people subject to your influence or control? 2. Is deference to agency actions ever warranted? (Actually his hatred of Chevron might be good given Trump's EO's terrible statutory interpretations) 3. Does a woman's right to Equal Protection include the right to bodily autonomy? (RBG's argument for why Roe shouldn't be about privacy) 4. Is "cruel and unusual punishment" limited to only those punishments that would have been cruel or unusual in 1791? (Clarence Thomas' view)

Any other questions for the strangely old-looking Gorsuch?

[completelyunsolictedthoughts]

Alternative Names for the Pro-Life Movement

Every year (particularly around the time the March for Life floods DC), a few more vaguely pro-choice people get onboard with the movement to stop calling the pro-life movement “pro-life” and start calling it something else. I’ve heard a lot of ideas: forced birthers, anti-choicers, anti-abortionists, and many others. I’d love to see the pro-choice movement coalesce around a single label for the movement presently called pro-life, since most Americans call the pro-choice movement pro-choice. It’s not for me to say what pro-lifers should be called, since the burden of forced pregnancy will never fall on me. But I’d love to hear what people who are capable of pregnancy think.

A few thoughts, since I can’t help myself. “Forced birthers” is accurate, visceral, and subtly ties the pro-life movement to the anti-Obama birther movement that (despite their patron saint being elected President) is still less popular than the pro-life movement is. It’s also hard to see how pro-lifers would wriggle out of the label: part of what makes anti-abortion rhetoric so pernicious is that it centers the fetus over the fully developed woman carrying it. “Anti-choicers” also centers the focus on the effect of abortion restrictions on the pregnant woman, although it’s less visceral than forced birther. Anti-abortionist doesn’t center the focus on the woman like the other two labels do, but it does strip pro-life language of its appeal to saving human life. But one upside of calling the pro-life movement the anti-abortion movement is also one of its weaknesses: the pro-life movement wouldn’t really mind being called anti-abortion. The media is never going to call pro-lifers “forced birthers,” “anti-choice,” or “vile misogynist trash,” but they could very easily call the movement “anti-abortion.”

[completelyunsolictedthoughts]

Why is it Always White Folks Who Say “Kill All the Whites?”

I spend a lot of time in racially diverse spaces where everyone agrees that whiteness as a concept is bad. In these spaces, folks often say that we should dismantle whiteness through white ontological suicide (i.e. eliminating whiteness as an otherizing force). This concept is sometimes misleadingly called “white genocide,” although like the “white genocide” that exists in the minds of white supremacists it does not involve genocide or even murder but individual choices (in the first case, dismantling whiteness as a social force, in the second case, having children with non-white folks). But these conversations always get derailed by white folks who say “we should round up all the whites, set them on fire and bury them in landfills tbh” or something of that nature. There is nothing more predictable or frustrating than this move.

It should be obvious that a white person saying “kill all the whites” can only ever be virtue signaling (unless they are being sarcastic or an agent provocateur, which are even worse). No white person is going around killing even the most reprehensible white folks: not since John Brown has a white person deliberately killed white folks for espousing an anti-black white supremacist philosophy (and even Brown tried to avoid bloodshed if possible). So by advocating for white genocide in a space full of people who know that it won’t happen, the person is communicating both that they want something that they think other races want and that they aren’t going to do anything to accomplish it. If there is a more purely performative form of allyship I have yet to encounter it.

A white person advocating for literal white genocide is also by definition coming from a place of privilege. Casually advocating for white genocide in a racially diverse space is only ever going to attract support from other white folks because non-white folks know better than to support such a statement. This is the case not just because non-white folks (at least the ones that I’ve met) would never want to be involved in a literal white genocide, but because while a white person who says “kill all the whites” is an annoying edgelord, a non-white person who says “kill all the whites” is going to end up on a 4chan “Pepe’s hit list” or something of that nature. Nobody I’ve met who isn’t white is burning with a secret desire to kill all the whites that is only being kept in check by a fear of white reprisal, but even if they were they wouldn’t go around broadcasting it. Interestingly, this is unlike some other marginalized identities: saying “kill all men” is as popular a way of venting among my (cis) women friends as “ban all cis” is among my trans friends. The similarity is that a woman won’t walk up to a strange man and say “kill all men” because of the same fear of reprisal that a black person would have in that situation.

Speaking from experience I can attest that the white imagination always expects white folks to eventually be treated the way we have treated other races. Like Raskolnikov waking up every day expecting to be caught and punished, white folks have visions of being rounded up into reservations, enslaved, and otherwise brutalized in exact parallel with our history. But given how much would have to change for there to be racial equality or liberation, to jump ahead to white genocide is to skip the million steps that would take us from a world of white supremacy to a world of white genocide. Thinking about or advocating for literal white genocide is such a white thing to do because it’s generally only white folks whose imaginations jump right past liberation and envision a new liberated world centered around them, this time as victims rather than victimizers.