Category: Government

Give Me A Break…

.Reading time 4 minutes.

“During Jim Crow…the black family was together.” – Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL)

There is no sentence in a rational world that begins with “In Jim Crow times…” and ends with any variation on “…things were better.”  If Byron Donalds’ black conservatism needs to use legal apartheid as part of the equation for black success, he might want to go back to school and learn a thing or two about his own history.  These are the metaphoric “boot straps” that did nothing but trip black people up.  Jim Crow set us back in the arc of moral justice by at least 100 years.

Black families being strong during Jim Crow was not because of the policy, but despite the policy.  Black families surviving through lynching was not because of the threat, it was in defiance of the threat.  Black families existing in the wake of the 400-year slave industry that created the institutional and generational wealth of white western modernity is not a product of that system, it is a miracle of survival.

I have nothing against black people who identify as conservative.  Although I will actively and publicly push back against any people who support policies that create second or third class citizens out of women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people with disabilities or anyone who doesn’t aspire to be or can’t physically be a white, able bodied, Christian male.  If that identity is an aspirational fetish for Rep. Donalds, so be it.  But framing black conservatism in relation to Jim Crow as any kind of positive force in the lives and legacies of black Americans?  Give me a break!

Lurking behind Donalds’ argument is a deranged version of a black equivalent to white racial purity culture.  The idea that racial integrity should be a major social and policy priority and that it relies on segregation and isolation is, to say the least, difficult.  This is particularly hard to swallow in a country that grew its population based on the rape of black women by white men while simultaneously enforcing powerful miscegenation laws until 1967.  But most crucially in today’s environment, making a case for racial purity and “our country” and the myth of American homogeneity is the foundation of the anti-diversity/anti-equity playbook.  Donalds is serving up the “anti-woke” agenda in blackface.

The main issue is that black history is too important to play political games with…to be reduced to memes and slogans.  Donald Trump can play loose and fast with facts.  That is brand Trump.  It is the way he keeps his fans happy and tuning in.  It’s a game for him.  It is ratings and crowd size.  But Trump has never been black and has never cared about “the blacks” outside of his need for attention. Trump as a property developer, as a television personality and as a politician has proven time and again to be toxic to black people through his attitudes, his policies and his political alliances.  This is the dangerous similarity between Donald Trump and Jim Crow: neither has ever been any kind of blessing to black people.

Black history still matters Rep. Donalds.  We have not yet overcome.  People like the brilliant Abby Phillip are working way too hard to actually move the dial on racial (and gender) equality to let you rewrite some kind of Jim-Crow-as-Blacktopia myth.  So to quote someone who should run for president (RuPaul), “Don’t fuck it up!”

–ALD

When Belief Becomes Policy…

.Reading time 7 minutes.

I recently began studying for a Master in Public Policy degree at Tufts University.  Someone asked me why I was doing this when I already had a Master of Divinity degree and they wondered how the degrees were related.  My answer is playing out in real time this week with the 2020 United States Presidential Election.  Although my initial impetus to pursue the degree came from a desire to counteract the harmful ways in which I recognize religion is being turned into a policy weapon, I see that this violence is much more wide spread.  Nor is it specific to one religion’s (Christian) fundamentalism.

…we are living in the age of the…“celebritician.” These are people who are not so much public servants who wish to help govern our society as they are eager to craft and promote a brand that has a high market value.

As we watch an electoral map unfold in what is an unthinkable way for many people on both sides of the political spectrum, what we are seeing is a combination of things. First, there is the vast difference in which sources people use to acquire news.  With the emergence of Fox news as a veritable state television network for Trumpism and with CNN working to create some kind of counternarrative to that bias, news and news sources have become inherently political.  Add to this the plethora of podcasts, YouTube channels, vlogs and blogs, none of which are regulated or assessed for bias, people are capable of creating their own comfortable echo chambers tuned specifically to what they want to hear…24/7.

Next, we are living in the age of the celebrity politician…“celebritician.” These are people who are not so much public servants who wish to help govern our society as they are eager to craft and promote a brand that has a high market value.  We first flirted with this with Jack and Jackie.  Then Ronnie and Nancy literally brought Hollywood to Washington. The Clintons monetized their political lives to a level that has been questioned by GOP pundits as criminal.  Michelle and Barack were the total anomaly that we couldn’t/can’t get enough of…and are willing to pay for no matter what the cost.  The pinnacle of celebritician has been “The Trump Show” fully produced for syndication with story arcs, villains and heroes, costumes and characters and of course fabulous hair.  Think Dallas in D.C.  Where this becomes problematic is when a celebritician becomes the total embodiment of what we expect to see as the face of public policy.

The final piece of this toxic equation is the level to which aspirational culture has taken over our political sensibilities.  I recently described this through the metaphor of how people attach a personal affinity to sports teams.  For many people in the United States, we attach a personal sense of ownership and aspiration to what sports teams do on the field, ice or court.  We don’t just cheer them on, we invest in knowledge about their training and the makeup of the team.  We follow and work hard to predict the statistics on how well they will perform and we believe on a certain level that we can will them to an outcome.  We project on sports teams a level of aspiration to “win” that may or may not be healthy from a psychological standpoint, but when applied to politics and policy is obviously doing us all tremendous harm.

What I’ve realized is that together these elements (information, embodiment, aspiration) add up to the reason I’m pursuing my degree.  Together they create the framework for something that is the cornerstone of what ministers are trained to understand deeply: belief.  Religious belief is based on a source of information, how it is embodied either by prophets or within the self and how that information and embodiment add up to aspirations for everything from having an afterlife to literally turning your body back into the earth.  Ministry is the business of belief and more and more so are our politics.

But it is not just that we have entered into a time where politics are beliefs, it is that we have no modern, evolved tools or language to process what that means.  This leaves the left and right hunkered down in their opposite corners assuming that every move made by the other side is going to be one of aggression or attempted erasure.  Ministers will tell you that living in suspicion is much more dangerous than living in fear.  Suspicion is the ground in which assumption grows and assumptions are what eventually become underpaid women, caged immigrant children and dead unarmed black people.

We are in a desperate need of a way to completely rethink what it means to be political.  We have to ask tough questions about what it means to navigate the world we have created where belief drives policy.  What are the common sources of information, the embodied sources of mutually respected leadership and the unified goals and aspirations that we can all work toward within a wide range of belief systems?  These are the questions that our policy makers must learn to be asking.  That is what I believe the future of public policy will hinge on.  Without it, we may literally tear each other apart.

–ALD