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A bit of a rant about today’s courts

Sunday, August 15, 2021

I’m no longer a practicing lawyer, but I’m still interested in legal developments. We now have a federal court system dominated by ideologues for whom the disinterested application of legal principles is important only insofar as the courts will feel obliged to cloak their decisions in language that they can claim shows said disinterested application, all while they actually disregard the obvious intent and clear language of the laws they are interpreting and disregard the reality of the factual situations before them. They are, in short, skilled in legal obfuscation, something that has always more or less been a requisite for the job, though never more so than now. Well, maybe the Gilded Age has us beat (see below).

Which brings me to this case, discussed recently on Diane Ravitch’s blog.

Peter Greene writes about a charter school in North Carolina that had a strict dress code for female students. Parents sued to overturn the rule as a violation of Title IX. They won. But then a federal appeals court reversed the ruling. The judges reasoned that charter schools are not public schools and not subject to the same laws as public schools.

This from the article by Greene:

The two judges, both Trump appointees, ruled that contrary to the assertion of the lower court, that charter schools should not be considered state actors, and are therefore not subject to the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This is yet another way for the courts to work their way around to declaring that charter schools are free to discriminate in any ways they wish. But it also makes one thing perfectly clear–

Charter schools are not public schools. They are not state actors.

Greene, and apparently Ravitch, seem to believe that there is a silver lining in the court’s ruling and they would be right, except there’s every reason to believe that the two judges referenced in the above quote, and the hundreds like them now infesting the courts, will have no problem finding that charter schools are, in fact, state actors, when it suits the purposes of the schools and the judges. To the untutored mind, it would seem that schools largely funded by state funds, usually existing under state sanction and regulation, and chartered for the specific purpose of providing an alternate means of fulfilling a state responsibility, are so entwined with the state that they should be subject to the limitations to which the state would be subject in like circumstances. But that’s inconvenient when it comes to certain things, like the ability to discriminate on religious, racial, or simply arbitrary grounds. But it might not be inconvenient when those schools line up for their share of educational funds or other state assistance, at which time they will argue that they are serving the essential state function of providing education to that state’s citizens.

The job of the modern federal judiciary is to eschew foolish consistency, that hobgoblin of little minds. We can rest assured that these same judges would have no problem turning some judicial somersaults in order to give charter schools any benefit that they can derive from being acknowledged as entities performing a state function. The right wing has always been good at ignoring or denying the obvious, and the case of charter schools will be no exception. The courts will come up with some distinction between charter schools as non-state entities, and charter schools as state actors, but it will be the classic “distinction without a difference” that we learned about in law school.

Ignoring the obvious has a long and dishonorable history in the federal courts. I’m currently reading The Great Dissenter, a biography of Justice John Harlan by Peter Canellos, and I just finished the chapter about Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, the court endorsed the separate but equal dodge employed by the racist white governments of the South to relegate black people to segregated schools and facilities. Everyone knew that, besides the fact that such segregation was clearly inconsistent with the clear language of the 14th Amendment, the facilities and schools provided to blacks were anything but equal to those enjoyed by whites. That, after all, was the point. We are now in for a generation of similar decisions, which will not only undermine the rights of black people, but those of the irreligious, gay people, non-Christians, and, ultimately, all but the rich. I wish nothing but ill to Clarence Thomas, but I hope he’s still on the court when he is faced with the task of joining his right wing colleagues in ruling that, while Brown v. Board of Education is good law in state run facilities (at least for now), it is perfectly okay for private schools, places of accomodation, and employers to discriminate along racial lines if their religious beliefs compel such discrimination. That case is coming and our courts are now stocked with judges who will find a way to cast aside precedent and common sense to bring back Jim Crow.

OFF THE SUBJECT A BIT: The Harlan biography is well worth a read. It is actually a dual biography, as it also traces the life of Robert Harlan, the presumed offspring of John Harlan’s father, James, and a slave woman (it’s complicated). Robert was a highly successful entrepreneur in a number of fields, and a leader in the Gilded Age black community. John and Robert were close, and their relationship may have had much to do with John’s ability to distance himself from the racism endemic in his native South and in the post-Reconstruction judiciary. It took about 60 years, but the court ultimately came around to his point of view. Another 60 years have passed, and we are on the cusp of an era in which the court will likely reject those views yet again. That rejection will include not just Harlan’s views on race, but his relatively enlightened views on worker’s rights. We can already see the court chipping away at union rights, so can a revival of Lochner be far away? As in the Gilded Age, and as with the recent decision on union dues (at the link) these decisions will inevitably be disguised as protections of worker’s rights, just as the Lochner case was allegedly a vindication of a worker’s right to bargain to work a 16 hour day.

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Dean Baker has a modest proposal

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Sometimes you read something, and it strikes you at once that the writer’s point is obvious, and that it will still come to nothing. So it is with this article by Dean Baker, in which he urges the Fed to do and publish research on the likely effects of climate change on the United States economy.

Don’t bother to click on the link, as the article itself is behind a paywall of sorts, which I can breach as I’m a Patreon supporter. I’ll summarize.

Baker begins by recounting the fact that he was warning about a housing bubble years ago before the Great Recession, and that while many other economists also saw it coming, there was a sort of conspiracy of silence about it until the crash. He writes:

During the first decade of this century I was one of the few economists in the country to warn of the housing bubble and the likelihood that its collapse would lead to a serious recession. It was easy to see that the housing market was in a bubble, and that when the bubble burst it would lead to plunges in both residential construction and consumption, which was booming thanks to bubble generated housing wealth.

My favorite remedy for the bubble was talk or more specifically, talk from Alan Greenspan and other top Fed officials about research documenting the housing bubble. The point I tried to make in those years was that the hard data showed we had a bubble. It wasn’t an issue of crystal ball reading.

Likewise, there’s not much doubt that climate change will cause economic disruptions that dwarf a mere housing bubble. Baker provides an exhaustive, though likely not complete list of major economic fallout from climate change, including the risk of flooding and destruction of property, particularly in coastal areas, the ongoing destruction caused by fires, the probable effect on farmland, etc. He concludes:

This list is just the beginning. There are few areas of the economy that would not be affected in a big way, either positively or negatively, by the long-term implications of global warming. Research from the Fed could drive the realities home in a way that would have real impact.

At least as important as the direct economic impact that the Fed’s research could have, it will also help to bring home the fact that global warming has real costs in people’s everyday lives. The question is not just whether we think it would be nice to have a decent planet to pass onto our kids, it’s also an issue of how much people want to pay for their food. It’s a question of whether they want to see their home plummet in value because of the increased flooding or fire risk. It’s a question of whether they want to see an increased risk of future pandemics because of the changing habitats of various species.

This definitely seems like a job for Obviousman, but I’d say the odds are about one in a thousand that the Fed will do as Baker suggests.

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How to win elections if you’re a Republican

Monday, August 9, 2021

By all accounts, Ron DeSantis is committed to killing as many Floridians as necessary to advance his own political fortunes. The only conclusion one can draw from his behavior is that he firmly believes that those fortunes will be enhanced if he is a national leader in openly and devoutly doing all the wrong things in response to the pandemic. Which begs the question: Why does he think loud and proud incompetence amounting to murder is a sure road to political success? In his case, not merely to re-election, but to the presidency, if the former guy does not run.

Before exploring further, let me say up front: He may be right.

It is likely the case that a comfortable majority of voting age people residing in this country who, on paper, have the right to vote and want to vote, would be turned off by the candidacy of a man who is, in effect, a mass murderer. If we were a democracy, or even a representative democracy in which all of the people who fit that description were allowed to vote, he would have no chance of success. But we are not a representative democracy, we don’t allow all eligible people to vote, and our sacrosanct constitution gives outsize power in presidential elections to the state in which reprogrammable meatheads (see below) predominate, all of which significantly enhances the ability of a criminal such as DeSantis to gain and keep power.

In order to win an election, even a partially rigged one, people like him (looking at Ted, Greg, Josh and J.D, among others) must initially become the nominee of a major party. That means they must win the nomination of the Republican Party, for reasons so obvious we need not go into them. The Republican Party, particularly here in the North, still has enrolled members that are not completely Foxified zombies. But their numbers are dwindling, though their votes are still necessary for Republican victories in some places. In any event, the brain dead are now a solid majority of the Republican Party, and you can’t win a Republican primary without their support. So it’s easy to see why DeSantis has opted for the mass murder route if he has a Republican presidential nomination in mind.

It is worth pointing out here that mass murder would not be necessary had the former guy reacted to Covid in a politically astute fashion, by actually getting the Zombies to do stuff like wear masks, take vaccines, etc. Had he done that, those folks would be shooting maskless people on the streets and forcing vaccines on them instead of behaving as they were programmed to behave by the former guy and Fox. Had he so instructed the meatheads (again, see below) he would also, quite likely, have been reelected. But the mass murder route has now become dogma, so DeSantis, like all the rest, must go that route. (End of digression).

Other than in eccentric corners of New England, in order to get a Republican nomination for anything one must cater to a Republican majority that has been completely brainwashed. It was originally thought that this majority could be brainwashed with no ill effect; it would simply go to the polls and vote as instructed, and step aside when the party proceeded to serve the needs of the rich. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. As Driftglass patiently explains:

…the GOP was not a collection of fiscally conservative, Burke-quoting pragmatists with a few, harmless, bug-eyed goofs straggling off in the fringes that professional ratfuckers like Rick Wilson were hired to round up every couple of years to add a few extra votes to the Party of Lincoln’s tally.

None of this was true because the Party of Lincoln had been dead for decades and the spawn of Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Gingrich and all the rest had spent those decades incubating something monstrous inside its husk, while the genial, aw-shucks David Brooks Conservatives you saw on your teevee were tasked with distracting the public from the shitpile of bigots and imbeciles their party had become. With using their outsized media megaphones to perfume the rot and pooh-pooh any suggestion that Republican Party was racing towards out-and-proud fascism as the crackpot alarmism of a few, disgruntled Libtards.

And then along came a loutish Day-Glo Orange bigot who lumbered into the GOP’s crooked game and took it over by doing literally nothing more than running the GOP’s own racist playbook louder and more crudely than everyone else. He found a party of reprogrammable meatheads who had been primed for decades to respond with adoration to anyone who would finally come along and tell them that it was OK to say the quiet, racist, crazy part out loud. In the GOP Trump found a place outside of reality teevee and the New York real estate sewer where all of this grotesque character flaws were suddenly virtues.

In this way, Trump was a strange kind of blessing. He was (caution: Dune reference ahead) the Right’s fascist Kwisatz Haderach, but arrived too soon which screwed up everyone’s long-range scheming. He was the unplanned foreshock of the quake to come: his impact was strong enough to shatter the GOP’s thin and aggressively maintained veneer of respectability and expose the horrors that had been long metastasizing beneath the mask, but he was too wrapped up in his own corruption and petty grievances and too shackled by his own incompetence to complete the Republican project of ending our democracy once and for all.

The days when a Romney, or even a Bush, could be imposed on the “reprogrammable meatheads” are now past. The Republican Party has created a monster, and that monster is now in control. So, if DeSantis wants to be president, he must cater to that monster, which controls the party whose nomination he seeks.

But what then? How does he propose surmounting the obstacles that being a mass murderer places in his path, the primary obstacle being the fact that the reprogrammable meatheads are still a minority in a sufficient number of states to make an electoral college victory difficult if not impossible.

The answer is all too apparent. Suppress the votes in those states with a majority of Democratic voters suffering under the thumb of gerrymandered Republican majority legislatures or, when necessary, have those legislatures steal the electoral votes. There is, in short, a better than even chance that the Republicans will do in 2024 what they have accused the Democrats of doing in 2020: rig and/or steal an election. This is entirely consistent with their history of accusing others of the crimes they are themselves committing. It is also all too apparent that the Supreme Court is ready to give that steal its imprimatur, and that while the court would prefer that the steal be done in such a way as to preserve a veneer of legality, however transparent that veneer may be, it will no doubt swallow hard and uphold anything they do. We will also be treated to the spectacle of the media both siding the situation, comparing the Republicans lying bleats about a stolen election to Democratic complaints of a provable theft.

So, in sum, it is at least plausible that mass murder is an effective strategy to capture the White House.

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Masking up

Friday, August 6, 2021

I must confess I am a bit “mask hesitant”. The CDC has recommended that we once again wear masks in public places, something I was perfectly willing to do last time around, but…

It’s a matter of personal freedom! I have been vaccinated, and I have little to fear from the Delta variant, even if I catch it. I realize that if I do catch it, I can spread it to the unvaccinated, who might die as a result, since they have exercised their freedom of choice to refuse to be vaccinated. When I did wear a mask, I did it despite the impingement it represented on my personal freedom, because I figured if I wore a mask, thereby protecting others, they would in turn wear masks to protect me. After all, I’m all that matters, right? Isn’t that what personal freedom’s all about?

Some might say that I should be willing to re-mask in order to preserve the lives of the unvaccinated, but part of me asks: Why? So they can vote for people who will be destroying our democracy? So they can be around in greater numbers to vote to curtail all the other personal freedoms we enjoy, except for our god-given right not to be vaccinated or wear a mask? To tell the truth, I keep coming around to the argument that we would be better off without them, and if they want to rely on hydroxychloroquine rather than proven vaccines, who am I to interfere with their freedbecause they’re the ones picketing schools to make kids go maskless so they can more easily om of choice? Also, if I don’t wear a mask, I’m supporting their point of view, because they’re the ones disrupting school board meetings so they can spread the disease to the last remaining pocket of people who have not been vaccinated because they can’t be vaccinated. If they’re willing to have their kids (and ours too!) die for their freedom, who am I to deprive them of that right?

I think the nuns at Our Lady of Sorrows would probably have told me that I should not take a not-so-secret pleasure reading stories about anti-vaxxers who have had a change of heart as they struggle to take a ventilator assisted breath and that I should not take even more pleasure reading about the passing of anti-vaxxers who spread disinformation until their penultimate breath. We’ll, I’ll just wallow in that pleasure and count on getting my slate wiped clean the next time I go to confession, which based on past performance, will be never. In the meantime I’m with the Rude Pundit.

Afterword: In these troubled times, it is often hard to tell satire or parody from straight talk. I often read Onion headlines on my RSS feed and think they’re serious news until I see the source. So, just to be on the safe side, I don’t really intend to refuse mask requirements. On the other hand, I haven’t misstated my feelings about the anti-vaxxers.

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I am a horrible person

Monday, July 26, 2021

I am having such a difficult time summoning up sympathy for this asshole person:

Rep. Chris Johansen, a Republican legislator from the Aroostook County town of Monticello who has been an outspoken opponent of coronavirus restrictions, has reportedly contracted COVID-19.

In a recording shared by Mainer News contributor Crash Barry, a man alleged to be Johansen said, “Listen up, I’ve got COVID and I’m really, really sick and I just don’t have time to talk to you today.”

…

Chris Johansen has been an outspoken opponent of state-mandated coronavirus restrictions and has organized multiple protests. In April 2020, he organized a protest in front of the Blaine House asking Democratic Gov. Janet Mills to reopen the state’s economy, as well as downplaying the damage that the spread of COVID-19 would have on communities across the country.

A second protest organized later that month flouted pandemic gathering restrictions.

Johansen was also one of seven lawmakers who refused to wear masks at the Maine State House, a requirement that was left in place even after the state’s mask mandate was lifted as coronavirus vaccination rates started to improve throughout the state. Johansen was subsequently removed from his committee position, but continued to push back against State House rules.

I know I’m not supposed to hope that he suffers tremendously. I am trying very hard not to do so, but I’m having a hard time.

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Perplexed

Sunday, July 25, 2021

It is usually fairly easy to figure out the motivations for almost anything Republicans do. Also, as I’ve noted in the past, it’s usually easy to figure out what evil they’ve been up to by simply taking note of what they are accusing others of doing. But I confess that I’m having a bit of trouble figuring out what’s behind something the Repubicans have been doing lately.

Some, but not all, Republicans, are now urging people to get vaccinated. This is the case even for some Republicans who have been disparaging the vaccines and casting doubt on their efficacy, Sean Hannity being a case in point.

It’s significant that not all Republicans have embraced rationality, though a significant number have done so in the last week or so. I have noted on this blog many a time that Republicans typically speak with one voice, while Democrats have never in recent times (the last 50 years or so) spoken with one voice or unanimously pounded away on a talking point. It’s one of the reasons, and a very significant reason, that Republicans are able to win despite their penchant for screwing their own voters. So the lack of unanimity on vaccines, at least right now, is a remarkable thing.

One can understand the trepidation on the part of those Republican politicians that have stuck with their anti-vaccine talking points, or have gone silent on the issue. They have created a base that is now so susceptible to conspiratorial thinking that a large percentage of that base buys into QAnon type conspiracy theories that were not created by the Republican Party, but to which the party has catered. If a Republican politician vociferously favors vaccinations, he or she runs the risk of being branded a turncoat by the folks running the conspiracy factories.

On the other hand, failing to embrace at least a semblance of rationality puts that politician at risk of alienating the already shrinking cohort of semi-rational Republicans who have not yet come to fully appreciate that the party of their parents and grandparents is now the party of fascism. Republicans can’t win without their votes. Republicans have created a situation in which they must pander to the nutcases, which they can no longer do in code. If they fail to pander, the nutcases simply won’t vote. But the more they pander, the more they drive away the David Brooks reading Republicans who cling to the belief that there is still a respectable center hidden somewhere in the Republican Party.

So, back to my original question. What is driving some Republicans, even Mitch McConnell to speak out ever so reasonably, if in an ever so low key, in support of vaccines. A good rule of thumb in determining Republican motivation is going with the most despicable motivation that comes to mind, but in this case, it’s not clear that will get us an answer.

It has nothing to do, of course, with wanting people to continue to live. They don’t care how many people die, and, in any event, right now the people who are dying are in such deep red areas, a product of Jim Crow and gerrymandering, that those deaths are not likely to really hurt them at the ballot box. Nor is there any sign that the brain dead are somehow coming back to life and demanding some semblance of truth from their propagandists. All indications are that they are quite happy to die for their illusions.

One possibility is that the folks who ultimately pull the strings, the big money donors, aren’t thrilled about the possibility of another shutdown and have put pressure on the Republicans. Another possibility is that despite their public proclamations that the House is theirs for the taking in 2022, their internal polling is saying something different.

It’s all still something of a mystery, though I’m sure things will be clarified over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, it’s somewhat entertaining to watch the Republicans try to satisfy two diametrically opposed points of view at the same time. Naturally, they’re trying to blame the Democrats for the vaccine “hesitancy” they have created. Given the state of our media, that might work to some extent. Watch to see if the media meme becomes “both sides bear responsibility for the fact that people who believe in QAnon, listen to Republican politicians, watch Fox News and Tucker Carlson won’t get vaccinated”. But at the same time Republicans are denying responsibility, they are simultaneously giving aid and comfort to the vaccine deniers, which somewhat undermines the “it’s the Democrats fault!” argument. At least it should in any sane polity.

If not for gerrymandering and voter suppression, the Republicans might be headed for a crushing defeat a year from now, despite the fact that the president’s party usually loses seats in an off year election. It’s possible that even with those advantages, they are headed toward a loss, as a result of which they are uncharacteristically floundering on the vaccine issue.

But it will all work out for them, so long as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to stand up for the right of the minority to deprive the majority of the right to vote and the ability to enact meaningful change.

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Cue the Outrage

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Time for some outrage on the right! Surely in their continuing crusade against cancel culture ! they’ll have something to say about this:

Comcast is helping Fox News kill Americans with anti-vaccination propaganda by refusing to air a new ad from The Lincoln Project.

…

Comcast refused to air The Lincoln Project ad because, “An advertisement may be rejected if it is merely an attack of a personal nature, a direct attack on an individual business or comment on a private dispute. Advertisements may be accepted if the attack is on a business that is in the public forum or the issue is one of public concern.”

Let’s go over that again.

  • Advertisements may be accepted if the attack is on a business that is in the public forum (Check).

  • Advertisements may be accepted if… the issue is one of public concern.” (Check)

Maybe the problem is with the “or” in the qualifying sentence. It can be one but not both.

I can almost feel the outrage on the right building up! Well, actually, no, I can’t.

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Sycophants explained

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

One of my Drinking Liberally friends has it in his head that I’m always wrong, but I disagree strongly. However, I’m sometimes wrong, and it’s time for me to confess a major blunder. Back around December of 2019 I predicted that Biden would win the presidency. I was right about that. But I was wrong when I predicted that the former guy would quickly be consigned to the memory hole by Fox, the Republican Party, and the media generally, where he could keep George Bush company.

It didn’t work out that way, primarily because he refused to concede what was by any measure a blow out election, thereby giving the right wing establishment a choice: try to push him into the memory hole and risk the wrath of the whackjobs upon whom they depend to keep them in power or continue to kiss his ass despite any bad taste that might leave in their mouths.

We all know what choice they’ve made.

What brings this to mind is an excellent Paul Krugman column in today’s Times, in which Krugman distills lessons he gleaned from The Mechanisms of Cult Production, a book by Xavier Márquez, a sociologist from New Zealand. It seems that there’s actually nothing unusual about the sycophantic behavior on display from so many on the right:

Signaling is a concept originally drawn from economics; it says that people sometimes engage in costly, seemingly pointless behavior as a way to prove that they have attributes others value. For example, new hires at investment banks may work insanely long hours, not because the extra hours are actually productive, but to demonstrate their commitment to feeding the money machine.

In the context of dictatorial regimes, signaling typically involves making absurd claims on behalf of the Leader and his agenda, often including “nauseating displays of loyalty.” If the claims are obvious nonsense and destructive in their effects, if making those claims humiliates the person who makes them, these are features, not bugs. I mean, how does the Leader know if you’re truly loyal unless you’re willing to demonstrate your loyalty by inflicting harm both on others and on your own reputation?

And once this kind of signaling becomes the norm, those trying to prove their loyalty have to go to ever greater extremes to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hence “flattery inflation”: The Leader isn’t just brave and wise, he’s a perfect physical specimen, a brilliant health expert, a Nobel-level economic analyst, and more. The fact that he’s obviously none of these things only enhances the effectiveness of the flattery as a demonstration of loyalty.

Does all of this sound familiar? Of course it does, at least to anyone who has been tracking Fox News or the utterances of political figures like Lindsey Graham or Kevin McCarthy.

Apparently this sort of thing has been going on at least since Caligula, and probably even longer.

What is so puzzling about it is that, at least in the case of Trump, and quite likely in most other such situations, the loyalty only goes one way, and nothing you do or say can ever truly guarantee that the object of your feigned attention won’t turn on you. Just ask Mitch, Mike, and Bill.

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Mandatory vaccination was court approved. Who knew?

Monday, July 19, 2021

I was unaware that the Supreme Court ruled a century ago that public institutions could require vaccinations. I don’t find it particularly surprising, since there was a time when even the most conservative judges were merely in the pockets of corporations and had no need, or did not perceive a need, to kill off thousands of people in order to preserve their hold on power.

But that was then and this is now, so I am skeptical about whether a judge’s recent ruling that Indiana University can require students be vaccinated will withstand an appeal.

I think it’s even odds that the Supreme Court will overturn it, but that might make it harder for them to come up with anything approaching a logically defensible position when they overrule Roe vs. Wade, given the argument the anti-vaxxers are making:

A lawyer for eight student plaintiffs had argued that requiring the vaccine violated their right to bodily integrity and autonomy, and that the coronavirus vaccines have only emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, and should not be considered as part of the normal range of vaccinations schools require. He vowed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

I suppose the lawyer, who is an anti-abortion crusader, can come up with some way to thread the needle between arguing that requiring a vaccination violates a right to bodily integrity and autonomy, but forbidding abortion does not. I’m sure the court will be able to do so as well. We have come to the point where logic in judicial decisions is entirely optional.

The article to which I’ve linked makes another good point. The FDA should get off it’s ass and give the vaccines full approval. Certainly now that millions of people have taken them, there is ample proof both of their efficacy and a paucity of side effects. That would remove the one and only somewhat valid anti-vaxxer argument. I agree too that Biden should require vaccinations in the military and other contexts in which he has the authority to do so.

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Book Report

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

We returned from a Vermont vacation a few days ago, which explains the absence of posts, though I can rest assured no one cares. Despite the gloomy weather we managed to fill the time, so I didn’t do much reading, but I did continue to make my way through Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which I finished shortly after we got back. I read The Warmth of Other Suns, her last book, which I thought was good, but this one is far better.

This is the sort of book that indirectly explains the recent right wing rage against Critical Race Theory. I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of Critical Race Theory, but, then again, neither do the right wingers condemning it know precisely what it is. What they do know is that they don’t want to acknowledge the role of racism in this nation’s past history, or in the history unfolding in the present. The last thing they would want to see taught in our schools is a book like Wilkerson’s, which makes a solid historical case for her thesis while also making a solid emotional case. It would be a worthwhile read in any high school American history class, a useful antidote to the societal conditioning American kids are undergoing at that time in their life.

The book is a blend of history and personal memoir. She examines the caste systems in three cultures: the United States, India, and Nazi Germany, but the main focus is on the United States. We don’t normally think of this nation in terms of caste, but as she demonstrates, we very much do have a caste system, and while the people at the bottom (black people always, indigenous people, Latinos and immigrants when it serves the interest of the dominant caste) suffer the most, almost everyone but those in the very most dominant caste suffer as a result of caste, for one overriding concern of the Brahmins of this society is preventing the lower castes from seeing that their interests actually coincide. She makes a compelling case that this country lacks adequate health care, among other basics, because the very most dominant caste has been so successful in keeping lower caste whites obsessed with maintaining their position vis a vis the even lower class blacks. As Dylan put it pithily in giving voice to white politicians of the South, being white is sufficient:

A South politician preaches to the poor white man

“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain

You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.

And the Negro’s name

Is used it is plain

For the politician’s gain

As he rises to fame

And the poor white remains

On the caboose of the train

Well, not exactly on the caboose, since that was definitely reserved for black people.

Wilkerson demonstrates that we are, all of us, infected by the caste system, our mental operating systems being programmed around it. We have the choice of fighting the programming or giving in, but it’s always there. Some of the most disturbing passages in the book are recountings of humiliations that black people have endured at the hands of white people, often when those white people are not being consciously racist, but are merely operating consistent with the societal assumptions with which they have been indoctrinated.

Though I’ve certainly been aware of these issues, the book opened my eyes a lot wider.

I’ll close with a quote from the Epilogue, which I think encapsulates the book’s lessons, though it doesn’t convey her pessimism about the possibility of America destroying its caste system:

A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist-in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be.

Once awakened, we then have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to the subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of the person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity.

If anything, the modern day “Party of Lincoln” is looking to strengthen the caste system. It’s all they’ve got to maintain power, as they’re offering nothing of substance to anyone but the rich.

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