Monthly Archives: July 2023
Notes of Incredulity
July 18, 2023
A friend lamented how a conversation we had been in together made her angry, angry about all the things happening in our country. Although our group had made some good points about actions that were hopeful, she just wondered if we understood the magnitude, if our heads were buried in the sand. This led me to wonder about ostriches.
An ostrich can be nine feet tall. They do -not–bury their heads in the sand. Obviously, now that we think about it, they wouldn’t do such a thing since they must breathe. Instead, with better observation, they are being good parents, tending their eggs, turning them over, keeping them safe.
After decades of thinking this idea of the ostrich, when attributed to human behavior, meant not being willing to face facts, hear distressing news, or deal with reality, it seems like a fabulous paradigm shift.
Let’s deal, let’s nurture, let’s face it. As Gill says, “why else would we plant trees that we know will never shade us?”
This collection of books has offered me amazement. So many things I just never knew. I include Rabbi Brous and Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, who are not in the texts above, because– I just had to to get started. You’ll see.
I offer a very curated list of things that jumped out, within the context of these books that are full of revelations. Revelations=hidden horrors, denied truths, intentional and insistent silences, knowledge concealed.
Why are things the way they are and what do we do?
Let me know what you see, what piece you found to complete a puzzle in your understanding. This is a conversation. Or, better yet, this is a call and response.
Endnotes offer source and page numbers. Please accept my apologies for wacky formatting. This is Word vs. WordPress.
Here we go!
A Bible printed in 1807 for enslaved people in the British West Indies did not include the story of Moses, the Exodus, the promise of Freedom. Rabbi Sharon Brous
The draft riots in New York City of 1863 were the result of northern Democrats, who sympathized with their Southern comrades regarding slavery, and Republicans who opposed the expansion of slavery. New York City and the cotton trade were booming. Republicans of this era answered the call to join the Union army. The Democrats opposed the federal government’s draft “and its willingness to slaughter white men for Black people.” The first lottery for the draft incited NYC Democrats to riot, to attack federal draft officers, buildings, and then the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children, and at least 119 Americans, mostly Black individuals, died. (my synopsis- see HCR) Heather Cox Richardson
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
Ruha Benjamin, born in Wai, India, is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, founder of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab, author of People’s Science (2013), Race After Technology (2019), and Viral Justice (2022).
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
Lantern laws of the 18th century required Black, mixed race, and Indigenous people carry a candle lantern when not accompanied by a white person. (Today Facial Recognition Technology has replaced the lantern.)
23,000 + gun suicides occur each year, the rate among white men in the U.S. far outpaces those of other groups. “From cuts to the social safety net, to lenient gun laws, whiteness shows reckless disregard for even white people’s safety.”
In 2016 George Zimmerman auctioned the gun he used in 2012 that killed Trayvon Martin. A woman bought it as a gift for her son for $250,000.
Between 2015 and 2020
- LA country spent $238.3 million
- Chicago spent $252.8 million
- NYC spent $1.1 billion to settle police misconduct claims.
“I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth.
We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.” Septima Clark, an adult educator of the 60’s civil rights movement.
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
Mariame Kaba is an author, educator, librarian, organizer, abolitionist, and founder and director of Project NIA envisioning an end to youth incarceration. Kelly Hayes is a Menominee organizer, educator, author, and photographer. She is cofounder of the Lifted Voices collective and the Chicago Light Brigade.
“Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.” Mariame Kaba
“So this has been a lot of my work. To help people open to and become enamored of the
idea that they’d really like to see what was going on. And to open the eyes and open the
heart to discover, again and again, universally in the work, that acceptance of that discomfort
and pain actually reflected the depths of your caring and commitment to life.”
Joanna Macy
Capitalism requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people in order to maintain
itself, which in turn requires us to believe that there are people whose fates are not linked
to our own, people who must be abandoned or eliminated. Absent that terrible belief, we
would not tolerate the horrors that unfold around us each day. We would be collectively
enraged that people live unsheltered, hungry, die of treatable illnesses because they lack
money. We would be horrified…
We do not suffer oppressions identical to those of our ancestors, but the struggle against
our oppressors has never ceased. …shifted in shape…The histories of those struggles and
the specifics of what people endured are intentionally buried in US culture because they are
dangerous: full of revelations and tactical knowledge that could help us more effectively
challenge authority or even shift the course of human experience.
“Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference….” Malkia Devich Cyril
A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the America Mind
Harriet A. Washington is a bioethicist challenging the medical community to revise the narrative on race and research. Her 2007 Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present rocked professionals and involved “prodigious research, “into…long undisturbed” resource materials. A Terrible Thing to Waste continues the revelations.
…Epidemics of infections, including influenza, have been followed by waves of mental disease and cognitive-loss neuro-psychiatric symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety, depression, mania, psychosis, suicidality, and delirium.
Coronavirus seems to be no exception….
“I am somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain
than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields
and sweatshops.” Stephen Jay Gould
The treatment of “poor whites” as a racial group illustrates race is not an innate biological reality but a sociopolitical construct that is useful to maintain political biopower.
But race is a social reality with real-world biological consequences and nowhere is this more apparent than environmental racism.
“sacrifice zones” and “food deserts”—Help ensure brain eroding nutritional deficiencies. “When it comes to exposures that limit cognition, race as a social construction becomes race as biological fate. Unless we chose to intervene.”
… the reduction in gasoline lead was responsible for most of the decline in U.S. violent crime during the 1990s.
Blame the victim—Freddie Grey and Kerry Gaines—victims of police violence and lead poisoning.
“In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything.
There are no secret economics that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a
host of additional costs.” Barbara Ehrenreich
“Every block in the ghetto has a church and a liquor store.” Dr. Walter Cooper
MD 20/20—produced by Mogan David Wine Co. (kosher dessert wines) so potent called Mad Dog—
Night Train Express- Ernest & Julio Gallo 17.5% alcohol
“But you won’t find these hardcore libations among the sedate table wines on their websites….”
{Menthol cigarettes—unavailable except in neighborhoods of color}
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and The Struggle for Racial Justice
Robert Samuels was a journalist for The Washington Post and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. Toluse Olorunnipa is Nigerian- American and the White House Bureau Chief of The Washington Post. The co-authors interviewed childhood and adulthood family and friends, they read thousands of documents, watched videos, and combed the reservoirs of all who knew him to the very end. One human, one man vs systemic impossibilities at every turn.
Born October 14, 1973, in Cape Fear, Fayetteville, NC. George Floyd at thirteen told his sister Zsa Zsa,
“I don’t want to rule the world, I don’t want to run the world. I just want to touch the world.”
He did not get his high school diploma because he failed math which also ended his dream of playing college football. Or basketball. He loved both. Growing up in the Third Ward housing project of Houston, athletics were the exit tickets to freedom. He died Memorial Day, May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, MN.
Menthol cigarettes…..he was purchasing them at the convenience store that day.
Darnella Frazier, age 17, posted on Facebook and Instagram, her live video of Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. According to Dr. Martin Tobin, a pulmonologist who testified at the trial, it is hard to compress below the Adam’s apple—but above is an extremely vulnerable part of the neck with little cartilage to shield from external forces. That is where Chauvin pressed his knee.
Ben Crump, lawyer, watched the video and called it “torture” (he was also working with families of Breonna Taylor and Ahmad Arbury).
Crump:
“About thirty years ago, forty years ago, Black people would get killed by police
constantly and nobody would go to jail and no one would get a chance for civil justice.
If we didn’t start doing what we were doing, making this a public health crisis, they
would continue to kill Black people with no consequence. I’m making it financially
unsustainable for them to keep killing us.”
“Any difficulty and we will assume control, but when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” then president Trump. White supremacists embedded the crowd of protestors and provoked violence and anarchy—Aryan Brotherhood man in black with an umbrella firebombed a store to start.
Medical examiners had misclassified or covered up nearly 17,000 deaths that involved police between 1980 and 2018.
The Asteroid and the Fern
Jacquelyn Gill is Associate Professor of Paleoecology and Plant Ecology at the University of Maine in Orono. Her work is in paleoecology, community ecology, vegetation dynamics, extinction, climate change, biotic interactions. She brings a perspective like no other.
“…In five billion years—nearly as long as the Earth has existed—our sun will explode,
regardless of whether we are very good or very bad at tending to the planets it illuminates.
This fact does not lessen our responsibility to fill that time with as much regard for life
as we can, in the liminal space between Earth’s creation and destruction. We have
always known this, deep down, why else would we plant trees that we know will never shade us?
The great irony of the fossil record is that we wouldn’t be here without extinction. Had the dinosaurs not died out, there would have been no age of mammals and no “us.”
“What could we accomplish if we stood together and faced the danger? What seeds might we plant today that will one day take root above our bones? What if the future was better than the past?
What if it was beautiful?”
in Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
<><><>>>><><><>>>><><><>>>><><><><<<<><><>
To contemplate each thought, each statistic, takes a mindful commitment. It may be overwhelming at times, as has been true for me with each book. Honor the new knowledge, forgive not knowing because much of this content has been intentionally made difficult to find or silenced. Two final quotes to share:
Angela Davis’ mom would say to her, “This is not the way things have to be.”
James Baldwin reminds us, “Wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance because we’re not only disasters, we’re also miracles.”
Let’s be the miracles.
ENDNOTES
Rabbi Sharon Brous
Imagine A Bible with No Moses, No Story of the Exodus
Heather Cox Richardson Letters From An American JUL 15, 2023
How Should Historical Sites Memorialize Trauma? On My Mind July 16, 2023
She notes that “many more people than usual wrote to tell me they had never heard of the riots. There are very few memorials that mention the draft riots, and I wonder, does the lack of those memorials contribute at least in part to that amnesia?”
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin (2022)
Bio& quote https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/
Lantern laws of the 18th century … (148)
23,000 + gun suicides occur each year…(48)
In 2016 George Zimmerman auctioned the gun … (49)
Between 2015 and 2020….to settle police misconduct claims (60)
Septima Clark,…I believe unconditionally… (107)
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kabe (2023)
Joanna Macy interview with Dahr Jamail (2017( 253
Capitalism requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people… (32)
We do not suffer oppressions identical to those of our ancestors …(100-101)
A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assaulton the America Mind by Harriet A. Washington (2019).
Stephen Jay Gould from (1992) The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. (23)
The treatment of “poor whites” as a racial group… (57)
…When it comes to exposures that limit cognition, race as a social construction becomes race as biological fate. Unless we chose to intervene. (57/58)
… the reduction in gasoline lead was responsible for…. (89)
Freddie Grey and Kerry Gaines—victims of police violence and lead poisoning (97)
Barbara Ehrenreich in (2001) Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. (164-5)
MD 20/20. Night Train Express. Menthol cigarettes (191)
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and The Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (2020).
I don’t want to rule the world… (11)
About thirty years ago, forty years ago….lawyer Ben Crump ((259)
Trump/embedded white supremacists (271/272)
Medical examiners had misclassified or covered up nearly 17,000 deaths that involved police between 1980 and 2018 (U Washington study 2021) (303)
The Asteroid and the Fern by Jacquelyn Gill. In Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. (2023). Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua (Eds).
In five billion years…(127-128)
What could we accomplish if we stood together and faced the danger …(129)
*****
vermilyanotes 