Kendi and Tufekci on the January 7th attempted coup

 These are the two points made by two of several guest speakers on NPR’s Here and Now today. These are two of my very, very, very favorite academics ever.

·      Zeynep Tufekci: Yesterday was an attempted coup. It failed.  Will they try again?  That depends on what each of us do next.

·     Ibram Kendi: Is American exceptional?  Was yesterday exceptional?  No. If you think so, you don’t know American history very well.

 

Today on NPR, Ibram Kendi and Zeynep Tufekci were interviewed about their reactions to yesterday’s demonstration and invasion of the capitol.  I have written on FB already about my irritation with Biden who keeps speaking of “we” and “our” as if American is one nation, one people with one soul – it is not.  I had a partner once who always interrupted me when I started a sentence with “we”.  She would say abruptly, “who’s, ‘we’ white woman?”  Kendi addresses this issue in reference to yesterday’s events.

 

I also wrote yesterday about my irritation with the CNN coverage of the attempted coup that happened yesterday.  I always HEARD the criticism of 24-hour news stations.  They turn serious events into entertainment, however morbid or frightening the nature of the entertainment was.  I had never watched them do this.  They did that yesterday by blowing the coup attempt out of proportion.  Tufekci argues that the key take away yesterday was that 138 Republicans voted to overturn the PA election. This was lost in the mayhem of reporting yesterday.

 

Of course, this doesn’t make for compelling TV.  Compelling TV distracts most viewers from what is really serious (Tufekc might say, “mistaking the ridiculous for the serious).  I was pleasantly surprised to hear a lot of commentary about the double standard on clear display between how police treat white people v people of color.  But even that tended to get buried by the looping video of protesters breaking windows and wandering around the House and Senate floor as well as by the competition among the pundits to say the scariest thing.  But that is what the audience wants.  If a car seems like it is going to crash (and fortunately, it didn’t yesterday), then we definitely want to be there to see it happen live, yes?  And while we are watching for hours-on-end to see if it happens, we need to be entertained, an unenviable job. 

 

From HERE AND NOW, January 7, 2021

 

Interviewer: Comparing the storming of the capitol with what happens in Third world countries – we are better, we are above devolving into chaos?  What are you thoughts on this?

 

Ibram Kendi: It’s ahistorical. To read American history, to remember American history, is to remember coup attempt after coup attempt, whether political or economic.  I am thinking, of course, about Tulsa, Oklahoma, or about all sorts of attempted or actual coups during the Reconstruction era, or even the Civil War itself. Or, even in the last year, what happened at the US capitol, has happened at state capitols. And as a result, particularly of people violently opposing shutdowns in their states as a result of Covid 19, or even plotting to assassinate sitting governors.  This is America.  People need to recognize that.  [when people argue that] This is not a third world country  [they are not acknowledging this history].

 

Interviewer:  is this chaos a sign of progress against the yearning for regression?  Is this a by-product of what happens during great progress or is this just truly a devolvement of our democracy?

 

Kendi: I think it is a fundamental clash, and I wrote about this recently the Atlantic.  Historically, American has had two forces  -- the force of justice and the force of injustice.  And certainly when the forces of justice have advanced, the force of injustice has tried to stop that advance. Often times, violently.  Americans need to recognize that both forces are inherent, have existed historically in this country.

 

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Interviewer: what did you see yesterday?  Was it a coup?

 

Zeynep Tufecki:  It was an attempt to steal an election….maybe not very competently, but an attempt…so it was some sort of coup attempt.

 

Interviewer: [given that you grew up in Turkey and experience many kinds of coups], did this feel familiar?

 

Tufecki: absolutely, and, in fact, when you see that picture of the insurrectionists sitting at the Senate and the House…..and basically yelling “Trump won!”, it is intimately familiar…..the President of the United States was attempting to steal the election by falsely asserting that he won it, and trying to mobilize all the extra-legal forces he could muster from his office to try to get them to overturn the election in his favor.

 

Interviewer: and you were making it clear (in your article a while ago) that this was happening long before yesterday…what role you think Republicans and Trump’s allies had in helping him get to this point?

 

Tufecki: of course, the key thing here is, is that people are mistaking ridiculous with not serious.  There are a lot of things going on that are kind of ridiculous, for example the President tweets with all sorts of punctuation errors.  Some people yesterday wearing hats with horns. It looks ridiculous, but it is not unserious.  It’s important to realize that even after the mob disrupted the certification process, The majority of the GOP caucus in the House, 138 representatives voted to overturn the results of the Pennsylvania election. Even the PA representative who was just elected with those votes voted against that election.  These are not normal hiccups of a transition.  These are attempts to steal the election.  There are a lot of ridiculous coup attempts around the world too!  A lot fail the first, second or even third time and then they succeed.  I have to say that the vote in the House and the Senate, trying to throw out perfectly legitimate votes, that should scare us.  Even the armed men and women breaking into the capitol  did not alarm the Republican legislators enough for them to say, fine, this is it, we’re stopping this.

 

Interviewer: You said in your December article “what often starts as a farce may end in a tragedy” Do you still think that after yesterday?

 

Tufekci: it depends on how we react.  A line has been crossed….it’s how we react that determines if they try again.  ….next time it might be more competent…. This is an alarm for a potential 5 alarm fire.  …we need to focus on the crucial need to unite as a country and react.  This is not a partisan issue.

Local Lynching Stories and their relevance to activism today

 These two recent videos tell the stories of a lynching in 1885 and in the 1930s.   The details of specific stories like these are excellent entry points for people to understand the reality of lynching and then to understand how lynching was a tool to reassert white supremacy after the First Reconstruction (1867-77). Thanks to Amy and her friend for sharing the video links with me.

BURN: The Lynching of George Armwood

https://youtu.be/kERIFEu_cyE

Outrage in Rockland

https://youtu.be/mRmxRC4Te8o

 

Lynchings were not about punishing a black person because he or she committed a specific "crime."  The purpose was to terrorize a population, it was about power, about systems and not about individuals. Most white people today think racism is not systemic -- that is the hurtle that needs to be jumped today.

These are excellent videos to show how widespread and deep lynchings have been. They become "family affairs" as a way to forge a white community bonded by the belief that black people are not human - their lives don't matter.   Fear is fundamental and expressed through hatred, anger, arrogance and condescension.  Until whites confront their fears, guilt and ignorance, they will continue to act to suppress black humanity.

The Armwood video:  would allow people to explore how Maryland was an upper South state -- compare it with the state and federal governments' responses to lynching in the deep southern states.  A good discussion of the politics of the different state reactions would lead to an understanding of how the Southern Freedom Movement (SFM) evolved its tactics from 1955-65, and why SFM (aka civil rights movement) morphed into black power/black studies.  

It is essential to the Armwood lynching in its historical context of lynching.  One can do this by starting with James Allen's "movie" of postcards of lynchings.  "They Say" is a very good book to accompany Allen's movie.  Then move to a bigger lens: The First Reconstruction and formation of KKK; The end of Reconstruction and the creation of Jim Crow with lynching as enforcement; then the formation of the NAACP (out of earlier organizations and campaigns) and it's anti-lynching campaign (including the failure of the Dyer Bill, and the NAACP's failed campaign against Birth of a Nation)

To bring this incident up to date:  the mob left Armwood's dead and burned body in the street for a long time -- like the police did to Michael Brown's body in Ferguson The police forced Armwood to confess.  The "Exonerated Five" have recently written an op-ed piece in which they call for support for a NY State bill to tape all the interviews, not just the one leading to a confession.  The video ends with a plea: unless this story is talked about, recognized by whites today, this local history remains a "stab in the heart" to the local black community.  I would add, that because there was a clear pattern to these lynchings, it was systematic, we need a federal reparations commission to make sure white Americans are confronted by lynchings and other crimes against humanity.

Outrage in Rockland, actually provides some of that historical context missing in the Armwood video as well as really offering an access point to discussing the importance of infrastructure. No current story illustrates the importance of infrastructure to the success of political goals than the one involving Stacey Abrahms and many more  (it takes a village).  Over the last 15 years, they created the infrastructure leading to yesterday's Democratic win in the Georgia US Senate races (yes, building infrastructure is hard and tedious and takes a long time (which is why it is mostly women who do it?). Without the proliferation of local civil rights organizations that developed before 1910, there would never have been an NAACP.  What happened in Rockland was repeated throughout the South.  The Churches and local civil rights organizations provided the infrastructure for the "Second Reconstruction" of 1955-65.  

I love and hate the intimacy that these two videos.  Both the heroics of individuals and the depravity of the mob are riveting.  It is really the only way to generally connect people to the larger context, which is more abstract and harder to grasp.  This is where most education fails, the inability to make connections betwee the personal and the political.  And leads people to have no faith in their ability to change things. That Johnson was able to raise money and have a track record of legal successes meant he was a serious threat to white supremacy.  Whites believed that the black community needed to be put on notice  --  blacks might win in the courts, but would not win in the world. This is about power ("justice" v "law").  This is why both legal and nonviolent direct action are required for social movements to succeed.

The Brother of Liberty's legal wins described in the video: RR car, MD bar admission and others I am sure) certainly provoked backlash that including lynchings? The main goal of Ida Well's research was to expose as a myth that black men were lynched because they had raped (or otherwise threatened white womanhood) as justification for lynching.  She had hard data to prove it was not the case. The truth was that white men were raping black women systematically.  The deeply rooted and prevalence of the myth suggests that white men projected their barbarity onto black men.  The apparent arbitrary nature of the targets chosen by mobs conveniently terrorized the entire black community.  This terrorism was part of an entire toolkit used to eliminate the civil rights gains of the First Reconstruction and reassert white supremacy.  Again, the strategy to appeal to federal courts (get it out of state courts) presages the strategy of the Civil rights movement, of the NAACP.  But, again, you can win at the Supreme Court (Brown v Board) but not win in reality (southern states shut down public schools and created private white only ones).  This then required the use of nonviolent direct action in concert with legal action.

Testing, Meritocracy and Inequality

I am now retired and have time to begin to write a bit.

Here is my first foray -- letter to NYT re their editorial on Betsy DeVos

Dear Editors,

I continue to be amazed at our bedrock assumption that test scores are a measure of learning despite the fact that they can never be so.

During the first 16 years after graduating from college, I taught high school history at Groton, and then at three NYC independent schools - was fired three times and then blacklisted, so I moved to San Francisco and got my PhD in education. I then became a community organizer around school reform in San Francisco and co-founded the SF Freedom School.  This led to a job at SF State University teaching political science.  I taught at SFSU for 13 years. During the last four years, I helped to revive the Experimental College (became its first director) and am now just retired at 65.  During my entire educational career, standardized tests have been my nemesis.

While teaching U.S history to rich kids in NYC, I refused to make history boring, a mere recitation of dates, the names of white, rich men, and battles. I wanted them to see history as crucial to their lives as active citizens.  I got in trouble for being good at that.  The constant complaint from administrators and parents was, I "wasn't preparing my students for the test" -- the US History Achievement and US History Advanced Placement tests. So, when I entered my PhD program at UC Davis, I was particularly interested in my Educational Testing and Policy courses.   I learned how standardized tests scores have been misused by policy makers and the media and that business leaders have always driven educational policy.  I have tried (and failed) to persuade teachers and parents that standardized tests CREATE the achievement gap so they can NOT be used as a tool to reduce it. I gave up this fight around 2007, totally defeated.  I had hoped by now that, at least, there might be some question about the role of standardized tests in measuring educational quality if not learning.  Your editorial disabused me of that notion.

Of course, I wonder why?  The only answer I can come up with is that standardized testing is inextricably intertwined with basic American mythology.  Simply, it goes like this:

• Learning should never be measured or ranked.
  
• Legitimacy of social and economic inequality relies fundamentally upon the myth that the US is a meritocracy - more merit, more money.
• Education is believed to be key to gaining merit and money.
  
• But to maintain inequality, we need to measure learning.
• Hence, standardized tests (designed on purpose to create the widest possible point spread) are used to distribute privilege and prestige to those who "deserve" it.
  

We often speak of a third rails in the political system.  But standardized tests seem to be the engine that drives the system.  Never to be questioned or seen for what it is.