The real (Sojourner) Truth by Suzie

          I keep seeing Internet posts that misconstrue Sojourner Truth’s positions.  Some praise Truth for confronting racist white suffragists in her famous 1851 speech, usually titled “Ain’t I a Woman?” The latest example is by the Rev. Valda Jean Combs.
          Frances Gage published the best-known version of Truth's speech. (You also can read her speeches at the Sojourner Truth Institute.) Truth concluded:

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

          Truth addressed her remarks to a white man who didn’t want to give women equal rights. If her speech was meant as a rebuke to white suffragists, no one seemed to notice at the time. They counted her as an ally and reproduced the speech.
          Combs makes another statement that has currency on the Web:

Sister Sojourner spoke out despite the pleas of white female suffragists who thought that demanding the vote for former slaves would doom their cause to failure.

          This is the opposite of what happened. Some people who wanted to guarantee rights for black men were afraid that extending rights to women would be too controversial. In an 1867 speech, Truth said:

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.

          That proved prescient, as it took until 1920 for the United States to give women the vote. By then, the KKK was reaching the height of its power, and many black men had been kept from voting. Black men and women would continue to face intimidation until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 
          Combs speaks of white women as if none worked for abolition and civil rights. In her book “Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol,” Nell Irvin Painter describes how Truth, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many others worked against slavery and for the rights of women and blacks before the Civil War. During the war, they focused on enslaved blacks.

In 1863, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Women’s Loyal League, the first organization to petition Congress to make emancipation permanent and universal in the 13th Amendment.

          After the war, some people, such as Douglass, considered this the “Negro’s hour,” by which they meant “black men.” They thought women’s rights were too controversial to include in the 14th and 15th Amendments. They said black men were in greater need of rights because they were more oppressed. Some black women agreed with them, as did many white men and women.
        Anthony, Stanton and other women were outraged. They had worked all their adult lives for rights for women and blacks. They refused to support the amendments unless women were included.
       (It's not an exact match, but a modern-day equivalent might be the controversy over whether to support a bill ending employment discrimination based on sexuality if it didn't also include gender identity.)
        Stanton was furious that uneducated men, both black and white, were getting to vote before an educated woman like herself. She ripped into them, with every nasty description she could use. These days, a lot of people point to her statements as proof she was racist. But Douglass still considered her free of racial prejudice, as Painter points out. After all, Stanton wasn’t talking about an educated and eloquent man like Douglass. This was mostly a class issue.
        (The bias against ignorant people voting remains today. Many progressives say nasty things about people they consider ignorant, such as “white trash.” Look at what people have said about the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries.)
           The fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments led to a split in the suffrage movement. Although she eventually sided against Anthony and Stanton, “Truth sought to heal divisions in her community,” Painter says. In 1872 in Rochester, she, Anthony and others tried to vote in the presidential election, even though they knew it was illegal. (Anthony was arrested for voting.)
           Read Stephanie Coontz for more about the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments.

         Combs says: “Sojourner's place was to speak when she was asked, and to sit down and shut up when her agenda diverged from that of her suffragist sisters.” I disagree, I think she contributed to the debate. Perhaps she can set an example to Democrats as they try to come together in the general election.

     ETA: I didn't mean to imply that the Voting Rights Act stopped all intimidation, only that that was its intent. Clearly, problems continue to the current day. 

"A deeper black" (by Suzie)

          I like identity politics when it brings about changes or benefits candidates I support. But it drives me crazy when it results in discussions over who is more authentic.
          In an article for The Nation, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes “blackness as a big tent” that can cover many ways of being in this world. But some ways of being clearly delight him, as he describes Obama’s haircut, his TV habits and his handshake.
          He calls Obama “the blackest man to take the public stage ever.” Obama doesn’t need to talk about racism, just as most African Americans think little of racism or white privilege, Coates says. “This is the blackness of Barack Obama. It is an identity that asserts itself without conscious thought.”
          But this goes against what Obama has written in his memoir, in which he examines his roots and searches for his place among other African Americans. We build our identities over time, and this may be especially true of someone like Obama because of his biracial, multicultural background.
         Coates asserts that it’s “a deeper black” to be confident, to think of blackness as a “garland,” rather than an “albatross.” Although he credits a new generation, his ideas echo the racial pride of the black power movement.
         Coates’ assertion strikes me as a false dichotomy, however. A person can be proud of being black while still fighting racism.
         Just to be clear: I’m criticizing Coates, not Obama.
         In the same article, I think Coates also misreads Frederick Douglass. Coates says Douglass “throttled his slave breaker [and] fled to the North.” Frederick did grab one of his masters, but he would later escape from another. Anna Murray, an older and free black woman whom he later married, helped him escape. I think it's important that she not disappear from his history. I’ve read that she borrowed money to help him, but another account says:

“Anna sold many of her belongings to help Frederick purchase the train tickets for his escape. She also sewed the sailor uniform he wore as a disguise and accumulated the necessary items for starting a household.”

          Coates says, “Douglass was vilified in his time.” Of course, pro-slavery people hated him, but he also was a popular speaker whose autobiography became a bestseller. While he spent much of his time traveling, his wife ran the household and aided the Underground Railroad.
Those interested in this history should visit the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in D.C. Its Web site also has much historical information.

Douglass, Stanton and the 15th Amendment (by Suzie)

          I’ve posted recently on Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the 15th Amendment. The politics of the abolition and suffragist movements fascinate me.
          I highly recommend a NYT article on the subject by Debby Applegate, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher. (If you read the whole article, which you should, let me note again that, when Stanton referred to the “lower orders” of men, she was talking about the poorest and least educated. Socioeconomic class became entangled with racial and ethnic bigotry.)

         ... there was no intrinsic reason both blacks and women couldn’t attain the rights of citizenship or suffrage at the same time.
        Of course, it wasn’t black men or white women who decided that there wasn’t room for them both to enter. After all, neither group could vote in the ratification process. Stanton and Douglass may have had a lot to say to each other and the press, but neither of them had any say in the wording of the amendment.
        Instead, this was decided by a coalition of Republican politicians in Washington who supported black suffrage — and thus the creation of a sure new population of black Republican voters — as a way to shore up their precarious majority in Congress. (There were nobler motives as well, but the timing of the amendment was all politics.)
         The exclusion of women was also a partisan decision, since enfranchising white women would run the risk of creating as many new Democratic voters as Republicans. The Republicans’ public line, however, was that the amendment would have no chance of ratification if it were so bold as to offer universal suffrage.
         … The 15th Amendment marked the end of the public’s commitment to major social change. Within the decade, the Republican Party had shed its progressive activism to become the party of big business and laissez-faire policy.
         …. if history offers a lesson here, it is not that Americans cannot handle too much change at one time or that we must inch our way, one by one, through the door of equality. Rather, it is that opportunities for genuine change are rare and when they occur we must kick the door off the hinges while we can. It is much harder to pry open the public mind once it has shut itself up again.

Earthly Fertility Figurines

Reading with care is a useful activity. Consider this writeup of an exhibition concerning an early European culture in the Danube Valley:

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture's visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta "goddess" figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

Bolds are mine, dear reader. You may have heard about Marija Gimbutas who wrote several books on her theories about these small female figurines. She saw them as evidence of a Mother Goddess religion. But that's not the view this article seems to support:

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and provocative of the culture's treasures. They have been found in virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves, house shrines and other possibly "religious spaces."

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called the "Thinker," the piece and a comparable female figurine were found in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking, or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips. The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. "It is not difficult to imagine," said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco State University, the Old Europe people "arranging sets of seated figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the larger, seated ones."

Others imagined the figurines as the "Council of Goddesses." In her influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to the divine, but in "a shared understanding of group identity."

All the bolding is mine. I wanted to point out the contradictions in those paragraphs, beginning with the possibly "religious" context of the figurines, so carefully qualified, and then quickly moving to the argument that the sexuality of the figurines invites an interpretation of them as earthly and having to do with fertility. But of course that interpretation is carried out by people who live today, not by members of the old civilization itself. In that it shares all the problems of Dr. Gimbutas' theories.

I also find it hard to see why non-divine explanations are necessarily any more conservative than divine ones. They leave the purpose of the figurines undefined, true, but at the same time they have nothing much to say about the greater prevalence of female figurines. Are they indeed just earthly fertility symbols, prehistoric porn, if you like? If so, why are they found in graves and shrines? How would such figurines be interpreted if they were mostly male?

Now I'm all irritated. In my opinion Gimbutas' theories reach too far from the available evidence. But I see almost the reverse taking place in this writeup.

Never Give Up What Is Rightfully Ours

Almost unedited thoughts by Anthony McCarthy

In the huge disappointments of the increasing troop deployments in Afghanistan, the blocking of real universal healthcare coverage and numerous other shortcomings in these first eleven months of the Obama administration it is tempting to give up. Indeed, you can hear that all over the leftist blog threads.

The story might be a myth, for all I know, but it’s one of the stories of my childhood , that when Abraham Lincoln proposed a “back to Africa” policy for freed slaves that Frederick Douglass said, no, that black people had a large hand in building the United States and so had a right to their part in it. It’s an unanswerable argument. Why should people who have built something not insist on their ownership of it? Why should the results of those years of toil and sacrifice be left to be enjoyed by others? It’s part of the necessity of justice that the results of labor are the property of the laborer. Lincoln, himself, said it best in an ambiguous statement in answer to arguments about racial inequality he said about a hypothetical black woman

“ her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.*”

Why should the left, which put President Obama, the Democratic majorities in the Congress and Senate in office, give up eleven months into the present administration? It would be foolish for us to abandon what is rightfully ours, a position as a major player in shaping policies and laws, along with others who put these people into office. We’re not going to get everything, we won’t even get most of what we want. But the possibility to get something from these people is there, still. We have to insist on being heard and on getting what results we can. These people will lose without us. President Obama will be a one-term president, Democrats will lose their majorities in the House and Senate without us.

People seem to have short memories. Remember what George W. Bush was doing a year ago, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down and much that was for himself and his cronies as he prepared to leave the office he gained by theft. He was doing so with the help of some of the same people who President Obama has foolishly kept on at the Fed and in Treasury. That was the biggest mistake he has made so far. There is push back from the left in the Senate, my heartfelt thanks to Senator Sanders (and a handful of Senate Democrats), may your hold on Bernanke’s renomination have an impact. My thanks to the members of the House and even in the Senate who have been agitating against the market idiocy of and making life difficult for Summers and Geithner, may your efforts prosper.

My thanks to the members of Congress and the Senate who are resisting the troop build up in Afghanistan. In the United States it is always a lot easier to get into a disastrous war than it is to get out of one. Afghanistan was a lost cause when Bush installed a corrupt crony from the oil industry to run it. Lots of us predicted it would be a disaster even before he invaded Iraq. Indeed, many on the left knew Afganistan would be a nightmare for the United States when Ronald Reagan began arming and training the worst of Wahabist fundamentalists and corrupt warlords, and we said so at the time.

If President Obama and his administration find it hard to resist the war mania that is promoted by the corporate media, that’s hardly new in this world. But it is a good thing to remember how we got started there and it was largely through the incompetence of Republicans and blue dog Democrats twenty five years ago that we find ourselves in this quagmire today. It is the right that is responsible for these disasters. You’ll hear mighty little of it on TV or in the major dailies, certainly not on hate talk radio or the useless NPR but the left has been warning about that going back to the beginning. We have been right on foreign policy, on military policy, on economic policy, on environmental policy, on health care, education, civil rights, justice, on literally everything. But you won’t find that reflected in the corporate media because doing the right thing results in economic justice, it’s economic justice which has been and always will be anathema to the rich and powerful, you can’t build up an obscenely rich oligarchy in a country which is founded in justice and which practices it. It is no surprise to us when a corporate media, concentrated based on welling itself to the highest bidder, does the bidding of their owners. They have sold us out, they use their freedom to freely serve The Peoples’ enemies here and abroad. President Obama’s decision to not re-institute media fairness, public service and other requirements essential for democracy might be the mistake that ends up in destroying his administration. He should forget what he learned in law school about that, the prevailing dogma on that issue is just too opportune for the opponents of democracy**. If there is one thing that is clear, he doesn’t understand that the corporate right of the media is subservient to The Peoples’ right to the truth in order for us to govern ourselves. Unless that basic misunderstanding is corrected, the misunderstanding of the relationship between the obligations of The Peoples’ right to self government and press freedom, democracy is doomed.

We don’t have an effective, democratic, media, we do have our votes and the power to influence our elected officials. We can have some influence with the Democrats in office by the power of our vote. We will never get the Republicans to do what we need and want. It’s a basic misunderstanding of many on the left that you would think forty years of political powerlessness would have corrected, we’re not going to be able to do more than influence decisions.. Not today. We have to do what we can, today. We’ve got to get through today to get to tomorrow. We’ve got to do what we can to get there. We don’t have any alternative to take disappointment and to fight on.

*While the full statement, itself, was hardly a model of racial or gender enlightenment, it was a lot farther along than those it was answering. Part of that was due to the exegencies of politics, without which any politician on the left will win major office. Here, as used by Mary Francis Berry, is a quotation from Carter G. Woodson on Lincoln’s changing positions:


Lincoln, as President of the United States, could not carry out his own personal plans. In a situation like this an executive must fail if he undertakes a reform so far ahead of the time that his coworkers cannot be depended upon to carry out his policies....
As the experiment had not been made, the large majority of Americans of Lincoln's day believed that the two races could not dwell together on the basis of social and political equality. A militant minority of the descendants of those Americans do not believe it now. The abolitionists themselves were not united on this point. Lincoln, moreover, gradually grew into the full stature of democracy.

It is our job to persuade President Obama that he not only can but must put more of our agenda into effect. It was never going to be easy to stop the two wars that were handed off to him or to fix the results of the thefts of the Bush II regime. But, as he, himself, said, one of the essential parts to making progress is by real healthcare reform..

** The libertarian superstition that giving the broadcast and cable media a free hand will be good for democracy is an experiment that has failed the test of reality. The media that has enjoyed virtually no restrictions has been the foremost tool used by the wealthy to destroy democracy. The dangers of regulation for democracy are more than matched by the dangers of concentration and the freedom to peddle opportunistic lies. The dangers of an elected government distorting reality through the media are real and possible, the dangers of an unelected elite doing so are an absolutely certain and now entirely predictable.

"And is This Massachusetts Liberty?" An Update [Anthony McCarthy]

Today’s paper carried what could be an update on my post yesterday, an account of one of the most shameful episodes in Boston history, the arrest of Thomas Sims and his return to slavery in 1851, fully authorized and executed with the full backing of the law. Since Newt Gingrich has proposed a return to that decade, maybe we should note what it with special attention to how the contemporary left acted. Passages have been put into bold by me,

Boston abolitionists were furious about the law, which they viewed as one of the great outrages in the history of the republic, and were perhaps even more furious that their own senator - Daniel Webster - had played a key role in crafting it. They vilified him, often personally, with the venom reserved for traitors and turncoats.

Yet despite its expressions of outrage, Boston's abolitionist community did little more than watch unhappily after Sims was captured on April 3. Higginson, urging some kind of militant action to free Sims, pronounced himself disgusted by his fellow citizens' unwillingness to act. A handful of individuals had tried in vain to spearhead rescue attempts - including a failed plot to help Sims escape by jumping from his open third-story window onto a pile of mattresses - but most of Boston's leading abolitionists took no concrete action.

During secret abolitionist meetings to discuss ways to free Sims, "where everyone present had to be identified and every window closed," Higginson wrote, passiveness, inertia, even timidity, prevailed. Most members discussed the fugitive slave's predicament in academic, even hypothetical tones. Even the redoubtable Garrison, who had railed against Daniel Webster in The Liberator and launched a petition against the senator, seemed more concerned about "preparing next week's editorial" than actually acting to rescue Sims. Brave pronouncements and a "dedication to the cause" filled the small room, Higginson declared, but the group could not bestir itself to actually do anything.

Legal efforts failed, too. A Massachusetts judge refused to rule the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional. Later, the court issued a certificate attesting that Sims was indeed the property of James Potter of Georgia, and identified the former slave as "a chattel personal to all intents, uses, and purposes whatsoever." The legal proceedings in the case were over. Despite Sims's protestations to his lawyer - "I will not go back to slavery" - he was ordered back to Georgia.


Thomas Sims was sent back to slavery by the city, state and the federal governments in the form of a large group of armed men in the early hours of the morning.

At about 4:15 a.m., police officers and volunteers assembled in the double-filed hollow square formation, and marched to the east door of the courthouse. "The dreaded moment was at hand," historian Leonard Levy wrote. "The authorities meant to sneak Sims back into slavery while the city slept. It was not the bravest way to uphold the constitution, but it was the safest."

Nearly 200 horrified abolitionists looked on as the main doors of the courthouse opened and a tearful Sims appeared. Abolitionists accompanied Sims and his armed guards down State Street, hissing and shouting "Shame!" and "Infamy!" but one witness noted that, even now, "no other attempt at disorder was made."

The entire mass finally arrived at Long Wharf, near the site of the Boston Tea Party, where once Colonists disguised as Indians had dumped tea into the harbor to protest oppression, the irony of which was not lost on the abolitionists. The brig Acorn, its sails unfurled, was ready for sea. The ship stood in the glimmer of dawn just breaking across Boston Harbor, prepared to transport its human cargo to Georgia.

As Sims was led to the Acorn's deck, a man standing on the wharf cried out, "Sims! Preach liberty to the slaves!" With the last words he uttered in Boston, Sims answered with a sharp rebuke to his captors: "And is this Massachusetts liberty?"

Within two minutes, at just after 5:00 a.m., the Acorn was moving.

Sims's capture and forced return were bad enough, but Boston abolitionists were further outraged when they received word one week after the fugitive's departure that, upon his arrival in Savannah, Sims was whipped in the public square. He was administered 39 lashes across his bare back.

Grief-stricken, former slave and prominent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass expressed his fury: "Let the Heavens weep and Hell be merry!"

That is how the decade Newt Gingrich proposes we relive started. Of course, it ended in up with the Civil War. A large difference between then and now is that the Union troops were largely experienced in the use of guns. I’m certain that a lot of the people reading this will be horrified by my pointing that out, but it is a real difference between the side that ended slavery then, and the side that would be defending freedom now. When it’s a matter of which side is armed and which side is not, that’s about as big a difference as you could possibly have. The Supreme Court, conservatives in the legislative and executive branches and the organized gun lobby have created the situation that fascists here have run with. We didn’t create it, but we would be insane to ignore that it is as real as can be.

Emmett Till, lynching and white women (by Suzie)

Racism and sexism are intertwined, sometimes in ways that aren’t apparent or can’t be discussed without angering people. I was reminded of that when reading an old Ms. magazine that mentioned Emmett Till being lynched for "flirting” with a white woman.

A lot of people blasted Susan Brownmiller for her 1975 commentary on the case, some accusing her of suggesting the 14-year-old deserved to be tortured and murdered for harassing a woman. Brownmiller has denied this, writing in 1999 that: “Till and the men who lynched him shared something in common: a perception of the white woman as the white man's property."

Some critics don’t consider what Till did harassment and think any mention of his actions is an attempt to blame the victim or lessen the monstrosity of his murderers, who were never brought to justice.

Others criticized Brownmiller for "centering" a white woman. Kimberle Crenshaw wrote in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” published in “Feminist Legal Theories” in 1997:

While patriarchal attitudes toward women’s sexuality played a supporting role, to place white women center stage in this tragedy is to manifest such confusion over racism as to make it difficult to imagine that the white antirape movement could be sensitive to more subtle racial tensions regarding Black women’s participation in it.

Till was murdered in 1955, and the case had a huge impact on the civil rights movement. When Brownmiller wrote two decades later, she didn’t have the power to make the white woman more important than the boy, even if she had wanted to do so. Even though it’s taboo, I still think talking about her commentary helps people understand how white male supremacy has worked to control white women and people of color.

In “White Man Falling,” Abby Ferber notes how sexuality continues to be integral to the thinking of white supremacists.

Defining black women as promiscuous and oversexed, combined with the belief that all women were the property of white men, meant that the only form of rape that was actually considered such was the rape of white women by black men. In this case, rape is seen as a violation of white male property rights.

In English law, rape was a crime against men's property rights, explains Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson in "A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America." They note that, after the Civil War, African Americans saw the rape of black women by white men as an affront to the manhood of black men.

Karen, in the Feminist Mormon Housewives blog, wrote about her research into rape cases in the antebellum South. She said enslaved black women had no legal recourse if they were raped, nor did any wives against husbands, although attitudes against both of these actions existed.

In the 19th century, all-male juries were skeptical of rape claims in general, and a woman had to prove that she was physically forced. If she couldn’t, she was seen as licentious. If she could prove rape, a white woman from a “proper” background would still be seen as tarnished. Before the Civil War, Karen found, enslaved men accused of raping white women usually were not brought to trial or convicted because white men wanted to protect their economic investment in slaves.

After the war, that changed, of course. White men feared black men would infringe on white men's rights to white women, and the protection of white women was used as an excuse for the political and economic domination of black men. Into the 1900s at least, the perceived morality of the white woman affected the treatment of black men accused of assault, according to Lisa Lindquist Dorr in "White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960."

During witch-burning times, women had been seen as earthy temptresses. Slavery was one strong impetus for white women to be recast as good and pure, with black women being seen as bad. "White women had to pretend to be the former, and black women were doomed to be seen as the latter," Hine and Thompson wrote. The authors also quote Hazel Carby:

The institutionalized rape of black women has never been seen as powerful a symbol of black oppression as the spectacle of lynching. Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting sexual attack.

While fighting lynching, Ida B. Wells-Barnett capitalized on this thinking about rape when "she declared that no one really believed black men were raping white women," Hine and Thompson wrote. Instead, she suggested, accusations cast aspersions on the morality of white women.

Nevertheless, she and Frederick Douglass noted that most lynchings did not stem from white women's accusations of sexual assault. Even when assault was the excuse given, the motivation often was economic, and almost all of the lynchings were committed by white men.

That brings me back to the Emmett Till case. Roy and Carolyn Bryant owned a store whose customers were mostly black sharecroppers. Roy Bryant was often on the road, leaving his 21-year-old wife alone, or with her sister-in-law and their children. She saw Till as big as a man, and she said he grabbed her and talked about dating her. If this was true, then it wasn’t flirting; it was intimidation. She didn’t tell her husband initially, but word got out in the small town.

Others say she lied, and I find that just as plausible, but it’s hard to know the truth because testimony conflicted. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the Bryants were racist, and Roy Bryant committed murder.

But racism would have to work differently if sexism was taken out of the equation, if men no longer used women as proxies to fight each other, if men didn’t see women as property, if men no longer tied their status to women’s sexuality.

What If We Dodge The Bullet? by Anthony McCarthy

Three pieces.

I. How Close We Are To It Happening Here This Time, October 2008

The news that is coming in shows that Republicans are again attempting to suppress the vote in minority communities and among others they believe will favor Democrats. This is in addition to and perhaps along with, the Supreme Court’s ruling last term allowing states to place burdens on the abilities of citizens to vote in the complete absence of the proof of a problem needing to be remedied and in full recognition that it could keep some of the same groups from voting.

The other day I saw that a “reporter” from CNN had been given a voter registration paper which had been submitted for confirmation, which he waved on TV as “evidence” of Democrats trying to rig the vote. I hadn’t been aware that the officials in custody of such documents could hand them out to the press, especially if they were potentially evidence of a crime. You would have thought that a state or federal prosecutor was the proper channel for possible evidence of crimes, not CNN. Have the cabloid flacks been deputized? If so, they are going about it the wrong way. I believe those poll workers in Indiana could well have a partisan motive and should be investigated for abuse of their position and fired and/or, prosecuted as warranted. It all has the smell of a Florida 2000, Ohio 2004 style Republican election stealing campaign. It smells like the activities flowing out of some of the branches of the Resolution Trust Corporation which became centers of Republican propaganda in the early stages of the White Water putsch attempt. Crime, including voter fraud, has to be punished but this doesn't look like an attempt at due process, not in the least. It looks more like the Jim Crow era propaganda from The Birth of a Nation with sound and modern dress.

Anyone who pretends that this is not a continuation of the line of activities including the infamous Bush v. Gore ruling is lying willfully. It is exactly in line with Republicans’ activities before the last election, which, among other things, led to the firings of the U.S. Attorneys because they were unwilling to participate in a partisan Republican attempt to use the Justice Department as an arm of the Republican campaign. We know of at least one member of congress and a Senator who were involved with that.

The late William Rehnquist, who got his start in politics by intimidating minority voters and who was placed on the court despite perjuring himself about it in sworn testimony, works on in the votes of that narrow court majority and Republican officials in may places. Reconsidering the role the judiciary has played during this decade, nothing short of making judicial election rigging a felony seems prudent to me. Justices and others who attempt to deprive citizens of their right to cast a legitimate vote must be removed from the bench and punished severely.

All of this, all of the past several decades is conclusive proof that tinkering with the process in order to prevent disastrous government such as we experience here and now, hasn’t worked. It didn’t prevent the most corrupt administrations under Reagan and the Bush family, it didn’t prevent the Gingrich and Hastert congresses or the activities of Tom Delay and Karl Rove. It has not prevented the post-Warren court from progressively making those more possible. If we are not lucky, we might be in for much worse, despite the best efforts of Common Cause and other diligent process patchers. How long does the effort get to fail before we try to get at the reasons for that failure or try something else?

Any process reform without a change in the basic constitutional structure will either be nullified by corrupt courts, such as we have now, or gamed by the massively funded anti-democratic hirelings of would be oligarches and plutocrats. The difficulty and length of time that the shoestring budget process reformers need to pass watered down reform makes it in impractical way of saving democracy from its subverters. And that isn’t considering the disparity of funding that the opposing efforts work within. Corruption pays off for those with money and the influence it buys, of course they aren’t going to lose to public interest groups with neither. And if there was any danger of that happening, they can always find an ally on the courts to stall it if not stop it. And that legal community suffers no professional or social cost for their anti-democratic efforts. Many of them are quite genteel and work quietly at some of our most respected universities. They are the placid, acceptable PR face of despotism.

The assertion of the Unitary Executive, the denial of the right to vote by the Supreme Court, and a myriad of acts subverting democracy have not woken up enough of those who purport to believe in the superiority of democracy to the real and intentional danger it is in. It’s time to prod them awake now.

The Unitary Executive, which John Yoo felt safe enough to state in its clearest and least dishonest form*, is a bald faced advocacy of real fascism here and now. This is clearly a partisan, Republican ideology. Yoo definitely doesn’t see a Democratic president as having that level of power, he argued that Clinton didn’t have the powers he claimed for Bush II. Samuel Alito was one of it’s theorists. Antonin Scalia’s stealth introduction of aspects of that abomination into actual Supreme Court argument is more than just a sign of what they intend. There is no indication that John Roberts intends to be anything but the golden boy of the Republican-far right who will deliver the monster full term. Clarence Thomas, is the reliable fourth vote, so long as it is a Republican who is to be handed the power.

If we dodge the bullet this time, it will not be due to the process, the judiciary or the press working, it will be due to The People facing the military and financial disasters that the Republican oligarches have brought us and, at least this time, making the right decision. It all depends on The People voting for democracy instead of against it next month.

Democracy cannot last that way. It cannot depend on disasters due to incompetence and corruption to come to its rescue. We’ve had close calls before, the Bush II regime is the closest one yet. It could easily happen here. Americans are not a different species which is immune to the allure of dictators, we are not insusceptible to being led into it unawares or being propagandized into accepting it.

We have to change the flaws in our constitutional framework and present The People with the truth. You cannot have competent, free government without The People, who - not the Constitution - are the REAL foundation of our government, taking their responsibilities as informed adults to do what’s right and necessary, not what’s transiently felt to be agreeable on the basis of false, brainless, anti-democratic, TV and video propaganda.

* "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

"No treaty," replied John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying President Bush's policies on torture, "war on terror" detainees and domestic surveillance without warrants. Yoo made these assertions at a public debate in December in Chicago, where he also espoused the radical notion of the "unitary executive"

As the quoted article continues, Yoo asserts that a president is not bound even by laws made by Congress.

Yoo's interlocutor, Douglass Cassel, professor at Notre Dame Law School, pointed out that the theory of the "unitary executive" posits the president above the other branches of government: "Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo" (one of Yoo's memos justifying torture). "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that," said Yoo.

If anyone needs reminding, this wasn’t a frustrated, fringe nut case far from the hope of gaining power. John Yoo was working in The Bush Office of Legal Counsel, he is presently working at the Law School at a university as well respected as Berkeley. Perhaps he’s just biding his time before reentering the government. Perhaps he is on someone’s short list for a permanent position.

The Unitary Executive, when coupled with the Bush era creation of permanent, undefined and undeclared wars, isn’t the equivalent of fascism, it is fascism by any definition. It is identical with the ways and means of fascism as defined by the founders of it. War is seen as a means of gaining, exercising and maintaining concentrated, unified power. War, at best a horrible and occasional necessity of last resort in a democracy, is a virtue for fascism. John Yoo, member of the Bush administration acceptable faculty member at a major university, is all the proof any honest person needs that American fascism is now in the Republican main stream.

If Republicans were in a position to put him there, Yoo could be a Federal judge. Look at what is known about those they have placed on the Supreme Court. Alito and the rest of the ascendant wing of the Supreme Court are in place as you read this. Despite that cute rule about saying the word “fascist” losing you the argument, talking about fascism is essential to preventing it happening, no matter how uncomfortable that makes luke-warm liberals feel. The creation and promulgation of that stupidly cute bromide was a real service to actual fascists.

If it turns out we are lucky, we are about one vote short of making the Unitary Executive Supreme Court enacted law. “If” because democracy might depend on what Anthony Kennedy has for breakfast any given day. These people are that close to doing it, but one suspects not during an Obama administration.

If Republicans who don’t share the views of Yoo and Alito don’t like being associated with fascism, it’s their responsibility to actually purge them from their party and publicly denounce them. It is their responsibility to remove the Unitary Executive from being just an acceptable ideological position. They are the ones who have made it respectable enough to place one of its architects on the Supreme Court. It isn’t our responsibility to ignore this in order to spare the tender feelings of the most genteel of “moderate” Republicans’. Not only is that misguided kindness not an option, we don’t have the right to remain silent on this.