Antiracist Author: Those Who Don’t Vote Are Saying, ‘I’m a Slave. Just Treat Me as One.’

I am hoping that more and more of us will read How To Be an Antiracist and/or read the other work of Ibram X. Kendi. May we passionately seek to increasingly and authentically be an antiracist. — Molly

  BY THÉODEN JANES

In the 13 months since his “How to Be an Antiracist” was published — and even more intensely so in the three months since it became a hard-to-find book in the wake of George Floyd’s death — historian Ibram X. Kendi has focused his public-speaking opportunities on an obvious topic: how to be an antiracist.

But during an hour-long virtual conversation with Davidson College president Carol Quillen and a few handpicked students Tuesday night, the often-stoic 38-year-old director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University seemed to come alive most when asked about the importance of voting.

Responding to the question from Davidson senior Joe DeMartin (president of the college’s “Davidson Votes” initiative), Kendi started calmly, by saying every American should vote. He acknowledged that there were both young people and older people who were apathetic about politics.

And then he eviscerated those people.

“I don’t think people realize ... that politics is another word for power,” Kendi said. “So when you say ... ‘I don’t do politics,’ it’s equivalent to saying, ‘I don’t do power. No, I don’t want to vote. I don’t want that power.’ ”

Though he didn’t mention President Donald Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden by name, his message — delivered to nearly 1,500 Davidson students, faculty and staff and roughly 4,500 alumni, parents and community partners who had signed in to Zoom to watch the chat — was clear and urgent.

“To say that ‘I don’t want power,’ or ‘I don’t do power,’ is to say, what? ‘I’m a slave. You know what? Please dominate me. Please pass policies that are gonna harm my life. I don’t need to be at the table... I don’t care about myself. I don’t care about my loved ones. I’m a slave. Just treat me as one.’”

HOW TO BUILD AN ANTIRACIST CURRICULUM

Kendi, who holds claim to being the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction (in 2016, for “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America”), was invited by Davidson College for its Reynolds Lecture. The event annually brings a distinguished guest from the humanities, arts, or sciences to campus.

In normal times, the lecture is held on campus in an auditorium that can hold less than 700 people, but this year’s installment was done virtually due to the pandemic. This allowed Davidson to accommodate the “crowd” of approximately 6,000, easily the largest audience for a Reynolds Lecture since the event was founded in 1959.

Parts of the conversation were highly relevant to many of those in attendance.

For instance, Quillen read a question from one faculty member (who noted that the college recently published a report by its Commission on Race and Slavery, stating that antiracism training and reform is a desired outcome) asking how antiracism might be incorporated across the curriculum at Davidson “in an all-pervasive way.”

“For the most part,” said Kendi, “curriculums are based on literature — scholarly literature. And scholarly literature is typically based in research questions that then lead to answers, that then lead to that literature.

“So to me, at the core of antiracist scholarly questions, or at the core of antiracist research, is asking what’s wrong with systems? What’s wrong with structures? What’s wrong with policies? What’s wrong with power? ...

“If we’re asking questions about systems and policies and power, and that is then leading to the literature, that’s then leading to not only the books that we’re offering, but even the questions we’re asking students — even the ways in which we’re framing assignments that we’re offering to students, even the way we’re framing our syllabi. That’s going, to me, lead to a much more antiracist curriculum.”

Please continue this article here: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/books/article245931185.html

Why My Friend Chooses Not To Live in the United States

My friend and former high school classmate Steve Chernysh wrote this. Spot on. And certainly the list could be longer. Like America having 4.2% of the global population but experiencing 20% of the world’s coronavirus deaths. The list also goes on and on as to toxicity and suffering that’s been tragically and exponentially increased under Trump related to the shadow side of our country. Every day a new horror and heartbreak. And the symptoms are glaring that the American Empire is collapsing. May we all unite in working together to birth a new and just nation out of the ashes. — Molly

People wonder why I’m still in Europe and not back in the USA.

Here are a few reasons, just off the top of my head:

1. People who go bankrupt from medical bills

2. People who die because they wanted to avoid #1

3. People who ration their own medicine, or do without a meal so they can take their medicine, because they cannot afford both

3. Women who must return to work immediately after giving birth because they have no maternity leave

3. People who must drive everywhere because of the lack of public transportation

4. People who are shot and killed just because they made the “mistake” of visiting a club, attending a street party, walking through a rich neighborhood, wearing the wrong clothes, participating in a marathon, sitting in a classroom, etc.

5. People who get no sick leave, so must work even when seriously ill.

6. People who get little to no vacation or who fear losing their jobs if they actually take any of their vacation.

6. Active shooter drills for schoolchildren.

 

As Species Are Falling Off the Face of the Earth

Thank you to my friend Betsy Anjani Toll for this one. Heartbreaking. AND this is the news we need to be conscious of. We need to understand what the stakes are if we continue on the death spiral that we've been in on planet Earth for decades and beyond. We need to know, care, and act. Everything, absolutely everything that we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly

Many kudos to "Brain Pickings," from which this is snipped:

"In her bittersweet farewell to the world — [Rachel] Carson never lived to see her work inspire the creation of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency — she beckoned posterity, beckoned us, to face our “grave and sobering responsibility [which] is also a shining opportunity”; to “go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”

"We have failed to rise to her challenge. We have failed our origins and our very humanity. In the decades since Carson’s death, 3 billion birds have vanished*. Just vanished. And as species seem to be falling off the face of the Earth, their names are falling out of the dictionary, out of our consciousness, out of children’s imaginations. If “finding the words is another step in learning to see,” then losing the words is ceasing to see — a willful blindness to our own responsibility, which thrusts us blindfolded on the steep and winding path to redemption."

[note: The bird pictured below is a Kirtland's warbler, an endangered songbird in Michigan that is making a very tentative recovery. Photo by John Flesher.]

[*Today 279 species of birds in the Americas are listed as endangered or critically endangered; 209 of those due to habitat loss. Some large and dramatically beautiful, others tiny and easy to overlook. Those numbers include only the species that have qualified and been 'certified' for official listing – bt.]

 

The Election That Could Break America

CHILLING.

 If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?

Story by Barton Gellman

There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.

The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.

Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the “overtime count”—millions of mail-in and provisional ballots—could keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks.

Barton Gellman spoke with Adrienne LaFrance about what could happen if the vote is close, live on September 24.

_______________________________________

If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.   

As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights.

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”

 Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.

Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.  

The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.

“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.

Please continue this article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/