20200908

Tue Sep 8 06:00:01 EDT 2020 ======================================== Slept from eleven-thirty to six-thirty. Cooler, cloudy. Rain showers and chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then chance of rain showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 60s. Northeast winds 5 to 15 mph. Chance of precipitation 90 percent. Didn't feel like walking in the rain, but paced around apartment for ten minutes in the morning. Work ---------------------------------------- - Patch Tuesday Done. - 1 PM Fifth Third call Done. - Cancel Anydesk license Done. - Review credit card statements Done. Ten-minute walk at lunch. Rain let up, but still damp and overcast. Home ---------------------------------------- - C stuff Done. https://kottke.org/20/09/the-next-reconstruction > Believing in racial equality in the abstract and supporting policies that would make it a reality are two different things. Most white Americans have long professed the former, and pointedly declined to do the latter. This paradox has shown up so many times in American history that social scientists have a name for it: the principle-implementation gap. This gap is what ultimately doomed the Reconstruction project. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-next-reconstruction/615475/ > From 1868 to 1871, Black people in the South faced a “wave of counter-revolutionary terror,” the historian Eric Foner has written, one that “lacks a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.” Texas courts, according to Foner, “indicted some 500 white men for the murder of blacks in 1865 and 1866, but not one was convicted.” He cites one northern observer who commented, “Murder is considered one of their inalienable state rights.” > The system that emerged across the South was so racist and authoritarian that one Freedmen’s Bureau agent wrote that the emancipated “would be just as well off with no law at all or no Government.” Indeed, the police were often at the forefront of the violence. In 1866, in New Orleans, police joined an attack on Republicans organizing to amend the state constitution; dozens of the mostly Black delegates were killed. General Philip Sheridan wrote in a letter to Ulysses S. Grant that the incident “was an absolute massacre by the police … perpetrated without the shadow of a necessity.” The same year, in Memphis, white police officers started a fight with several Black Union veterans, then used the conflict as a justification to begin firing at Black people—civilians and soldiers alike—all over the city. The killing went on for days. > Northerners heard about Lucy Grimes of Texas, whose former owner demanded that she beat her own son, then had Grimes beaten to death when she refused. Her killers went unpunished because the court would not hear “negro testimony.” Northerners also heard about Madison Newby, a former Union scout from Virginia driven by “rebel people” from land he had purchased, who testified that former slave masters were “taking the colored people and tying them up by the thumbs if they do not agree to work for six dollars a month.” And they heard about Glasgow William, a Union veteran in Kentucky who was lynched in front of his wife by the Ku Klux Klan for declaring his intent to vote for “his old commander.” (Newspapers sympathetic to the white South dismissed such stories; one called the KKK the “phantom of diseased imaginations.”) > Still convinced that most of the country was on his side, Johnson sank into paranoia, grandeur, and self-pity. In his “Swing Around the Circle” tour, Johnson gave angry speeches before raucous crowds, comparing himself to Lincoln, calling for some Radical Republicans to be hanged as traitors, and blaming the New Orleans riot on those who had called for Black suffrage in the first place, saying, “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts and they are responsible.” He blocked the measures that Congress took up to protect the rights of the emancipated, describing them as racist against white people. He told Black leaders that he was their “Moses,” even as he denied their aspirations to full citizenship. > Thaddeus Stevens knew that without sufficient economic power, civic equality becomes difficult to maintain. His insight has proved remarkably durable across American history. > The racial wealth gap remains as wide today as it was in 1968, when the Fair Housing Act was passed. The median net worth of the American family is about $100,000. But the median net worth of white families is more than $170,000—while that of Black families is less than $20,000. > Such a call to action would be more promising if Biden himself were not an author of the system he now opposes. He became a U.S. senator in an era of racial backlash. He worked with segregationists to dismantle school-desegregation programs and was part of the bipartisan bloc that expanded mass incarceration. During the “tough on crime” era of the 1990s, he bragged on the Senate floor of the fondness for prisons and harsh punishment in the “liberal wing of the Democratic Party.” Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate is historic, but Harris, a former prosecutor, is no radical on these matters. The glibc manual is actually pretty good. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/index.html Servings: grains 5/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: coffee, cucumber, banana Lunch: apple, wrap with avocado and egg Dinner: Cheetos

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