Mediocrity is for white kids: Debates over Asians and the academic “ethnic divide” are about white entitlement, not oppressive immigrant parents

www.salon.com|Silpa Kovvali

In the midst of a national debate about the effects of affirmative action, elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers have reinvigorated a discussion about the school’s discriminatory practices toward Asian-Americans. One slate of candidates has demanded the release of data on admissions criteria. “The politically charged data holds,” according to the New York Times, “the potential to reveal whether Harvard bypasses better-qualified Asian-American candidates in favor of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and the children of the wealthy and powerful, the group argues.”

The article comes on the heels of another Times piece titled “New Jersey School District Eases Pressure on Students, Baring an Ethnic Divide,” an investigation into the West Windsor-Plainsboro school district of New Jersey. The district, which has seen an influx of East and South Asian immigrants in recent decades, is currently locked in a debate purportedly triggered by high levels of student stress. But rather than focusing on the provision of mental health services, the bulk of reforms were academic, limiting homework, test schedules, advanced programs, and opportunities for outside study. In a stab at faux-empathy, the article quotes sociology professor Jennifer Lee. “What they believe is that their children must excel beyond their white peers in academic settings so they have the same chances to excel later,” Lee says of immigrant parents.

They’ll never escape white rage: The world embraced Obama and MLK — their countrymen would not

www.salon.com|Jason Sokol

Barack Obama’s speeches are littered with quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr., so it was no surprise to hear the president weave one of King’s phrases into his State of the Union address. Obama said that he gained inspiration from those everyday Americans who showed that the nation could be a place of fairness and inclusion. These were “voices Dr. King believed would have the final word,” Obama declared, “voices of unarmed truth and unconditional love.” King uttered these words in December of 1964, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He told the Oslo audience: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

It is significant that Obama chose to quote from King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and a reminder of the many links between the two men. They are two African Americans who have influenced American history in extraordinary ways, and two giants in the black struggle for freedom. They also became grand figures on the global stage. Their Nobel Peace Prizes were reflections of their glowing international reputations. Yet even as the world embraced these two men, they attracted intense hatred from white Americans.

They want to deny his humanity: Obama’s tears, white rage and the right’s phony new line

www.salon.com|Chauncey DeVega

Barack Obama cried during a press conference about his new initiative to confront America’s plague of gun violence. The thought of the horrific murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School–children whose bodies were blown apart, so defiled that some were left unrecognizable by their parents–moved him deeply.

Barack Obama is a fan of “Star Trek.” While President Obama is more like Mr. Spock than Captain Kirk, he will likely appreciate the following allusion.

“Elaan of Troyius” is one of the most entertaining episodes of the original “Star Trek” TV series. Its plot revolves around how Captain Kirk and his crew were tasked with bringing a beautiful—and insolent, rude and uncouth—princess to meet her future husband. Of course, there is a complication in the plan as she stabs the aide who is tasked with teaching her proper manners. Captain Kirk is thrown into the mix, and in a retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” he tries to show Elaan the error in her ways. But Elaan does not easily succumb to Kirk’s charms. She, like the other women of her race, has a special power. Elaan’s tears make men into her slaves; smitten, they are unable to resist her commands. Barack Obama’s tears do not have this power. 

Stop dismissing President Trump: “Smart people” thought we’d never elect Ronald Reagan, too

www.salon.com|W. Kamau Bell and Adam Mansbach

As we gear up for a GOP debate nobody is going to watch because it’s being shown on Fox Business – which narrowly beat out the Trout Fishing Chanel for broadcast rights, apparently – it’s time to do some more soul searching about Donald Trump.

No, not searching for his soul, though according to a letter his metaphysician recently provided the campaign, it’s “fantastic,” “In great shape,” and “the soul of a man half his age.” The question at hand is: Should we be organizing against Trump right now, or not? Do we want to knock him out of the race, or do we want him in it to the bitter end?

There are two ways of looking at this, it seems to me: morally and strategically. I’ll try to lay out the basic arguments and counterarguments on both counts before my kid comes home from school, and then during your kid’s 15-minute nap you can answer.

Donald Trump’s no leader — he’s just the voice that the ugliest Americans have been dying for

www.salon.com|Amanda Marcotte

Monday night, Arianna Huffington caved and wrote an open letter, explaining that The Huffington Post would stop covering the Donald Trump campaign in the entertainment section, moving coverage to where it belongs: the politics section.

The move was long overdue. Putting Trump in the entertainment section may have been a funny stunt, but it had some rather disturbing implications about the role of journalism in the political process. It’s one thing for journalistic enterprises to share opinion and data that helps voters make better informed choices, but it’s another thing entirely for journalists to appoint themselves gatekeepers. It’s not just undemocratic, but, as the Trump campaign shows, it doesn’t work.

That’s because The Huffington Post, and many other journalistic outlets, continue to make a category error when it comes to Trump, assuming that the main reason all this is happening is Trump himself. The assumption is that he’s somehow an idiot savant of American politics, the man who cracked the code, broke all the rules and is rallying voters around his cult of personality. That Trump is a fascist pied piper, playing a beguiling racist song on his flute and leading huge numbers of Americans over the cliff.

Donald Trump & the GOP are literally killing middle America

www.salon.com|Edwin Lyngar

There is no better example of extremism and hopelessness of the white working class than the current standard bearer in the GOP primary. Donald Trump leads with less-educated, working-class white people—the same group that is driving the increased mortality overall. Like a half empty bottle of Scotch, they are reaching for Trump out of desperation, outrage and xenophobia, because they have no idea what else to do. Their jobs are gone, wages are flat and the very idea of building a middle class life with a high school education is folly these days. Thus they have turned to ever more extreme rightwing politics, and with every win things only get worse. They keep going further into crazy town in desperation for a savior—a search that leads inevitably to someone like Trump.

The saddest part is working class America benefits the most from an activist, effective and liberal government, something they fight hardest against. Poor white people use food stamps, pay exorbitant rents and suffer from a lack of educational opportunity. They continue to lose the economic advantages they previously enjoyed, and their rage has turned into irrational and self-defeating behavior.

The decline and fall of White America: Inside the study that has shocked the public-health community

www.salon.com|Paul Campos

A fascinating and disturbing paper from Princeton social scientists Anne Case and Angus Deaton reveals a shocking deterioration of health among what can be called, to echo Michael Harrington’s famous 1962 book on poverty, the Other White America.

The Other White America is made up of the approximately 55 million white non-Hispanic American adults who have no formal education beyond high school. This group compromises a little more than one third of all white non-Hispanics, and includes more than one in every five American adults. If it were an independent nation, the population of the OWA would be larger than the adult population of every European country other than Germany.

The deteriorating health of the Other White America is seen most clearly among its middle-aged residents. In a development that has almost no precedent in the public health statistics of advanced economies, the mortality rate for middle-aged whites with no more than a high school education actually increased by 22.3 percent between 1999 and 2013. This increase correlates closely with educational levels: Over this same time, the mortality rate of middle-aged whites with at least a BA degree fell by 24 percent, which is consistent with the rate of decline in mortality in the rest of the population, both in the United States and in other developed nations.

The real reason Donald Trump appeals to working-class whites

www.salon.com|Robert Reich

I’ve just returned from three weeks in “red” America.

It was ostensibly a book tour but I wanted to talk with conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers.

I intended to put into practice what I tell my students – that the best way to learn is to talk with people who disagree you. I wanted to learn from red America, and hoped they’d also learn a bit from me (and perhaps also buy my book).

But something odd happened. It turned out that many of the conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers I met agreed with much of what I had to say, and I agreed with them.

For example, most condemned what they called “crony capitalism,” by which they mean big corporations getting sweetheart deals from the government because of lobbying and campaign contributions.

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The shocking video of police officer Ben Fields assaulting a black female student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, SC, has gone viral.

Much has already been made of this hideous footage, but it’s worth breaking down exactly what the video shows us: Fields — who, unsurprisingly,has a history of “alleged misconduct and racial bias” — grabs the student by the neck and flips her desk over backwards, before whipping her around by the shirt and throwing her across the room.The teacher does not intervene to protect the student. Nor do her peers in the classroom, who seem to be frozen in place. Throughout the episode, the student barely moves.

If Fields treated a dog in such a manner he would likely be arrested for animal cruelty on the spot. And yet, while he appears to now be on disciplinary leave, pending the results of a police investigation, he remains a free man. All of it begs the question: Would Fields have faced any consequences at all, had the incident not been recorded on video?

Such violence is not surprising in an era when assaults on the black and brown bodies by police are common. Given the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the lack of photographic or videotaped evidence of these kinds of state-sanctioned attacks can no longer be summoned as a defense of white American ignorance about the lived experiences of people of color.

In the age of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Samuel Dubose, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and so many others, to deny such facts is an act of willful evasion, and thus complicity with white supremacy.

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(Political socialization begins in the home. According to recently discovered news reports from 1927, Trump’s father was likely at least a sympathizer with, if not a member, of the Ku Klux Klan.) From the end of the Civil Rights Movement onward, the Republican Party has used a strategy of white grievance mongering known as the Southern Strategy to mobilize its voters.

Donald Trump has presented himself as an “everyman” who can speak for the “regular” people who feel alienated and frustrated by the Washington D.C. “insiders” who do not look out for the “little guy.” This is the crudest form of populist politics. Trump then aims his supporters’ anger towards an enemy: immigrants from Mexico who are coming to American to supposedly steal jobs while they rape and murder white women; or the Chinese he presents as a stereotypical devious and sneaky “yellow peril” Asian foe that only Trump can outmaneuver and conquer.

Donald Trump is using white identity politics to win supporters. Combining overt and subtle racism, part of Trump’s appeal is that he promises to protect the resources and democratic rights of white Americans against their supposed exploitation and theft by non-whites. This is one of the foundations of right-wing producerism.

Donald Trump’s supporters are drawn from the same core of aggrieved and angry white voters who comprise the Tea Party wing of the GOP. Research on this group shows that they are racially resentful, fearful of social change, hostile to people who are not like them, believe in natural hierarchies and order, seek out strong leaders, are deferent to authority, and exhibit a type of “bullying politics.” In many ways, Trumpmania is a frightening reflection of the authoritarian values that have infected American conservatives.

Donald Trump’s nativist, xenophobic and racist politics are the latest version of the 19th century American political movement known as the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings 1856 party platform included demands that “Americans must rule America; and to this end native-born citizens should be selected for all state, federal and municipal offices of government employment, in preference to all others…”

Donald Trump repeatedly talks about “strength” while slurring Barack Obama and other political enemies as “weak” or as “pansies.”

Trump is also not limited by what the right-wing sees as “weak” “liberal” notions of “political correctness” as he insults women and throws verbal bombs at any person who disagrees with him.

Donald Trump’s political success is a product of reality television show culture.

Reality television shows are scripted. The genre is wildly popular among American viewers because it is part of an “empire of illusion” that distracts and confuses the public while allowing them to live out their fantasies and wish fulfillment.

Donald Trump was one of the most prominent advocates of “Birtherism”—a belief that Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president, was somehow not eligible for the office because he is not a “real” citizen.

This is an absurdly racist claim; nevertheless it is one that is still believed by 66 percent of Trump supporters and 45 percent of Republicans. Birtherism was the first of many conspiracy theories that would be invented by the right-wing media in the age of Obama. Obsessions about Planned Parenthood, ACORN and Benghazi would follow. These delusions are part of a long pattern of right-wing paranoia that Richard Hofstadter detailed in his landmark 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

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Instead of comparing him to candidates like Cain (who was relatively unknown, had little media experience, and was unable to consistently raise enough money), it makes more sense to understand Trump as something new. Or new, rather, for the modern era. He’s a demagogic ethno-nationalist of the kind that’s succeeded before in American history, especially during times of great upheaval and dislocation. Think of him as our Huey Long, our George Wallace.

Besides a genius for self-promotion, what Trump has in common with those two men is this: He appeals to a large swathe of Americans who have not only lived through massive social disruption — the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement, respectfully — but who have had their fundamental assumptions about Americanness, and therefore themselves, challenged in the process. When his fans speak of “taking” their country back, they are not being tongue-in-cheek. They are deathly serious.

Black America owes no forgiveness: How Christianity hinders racial justice

Blacks are expected to absolve White America of its crimes. The rules change when the victim happens to be white

www.salon.com|Chauncey DeVega

On the one-year anniversary of the death of an 18-year-old black teenager named Michael Brown by a (now confessed racist) white police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was asked if she forgave Darren Wilson for his cruel and wanton act of legal murder. She told Al Jazeera that she will “never forgive” Darren Wilson and that “he’s evil, his acts were devilish.”

Her response is unusual. Its candor is refreshing. Lezley McSpadden’s truth-telling reveals the full humanity and emotions of black folks, and by doing so defies the norms which demand that when Black Americans suffer they do so stoically, and always in such a way where forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America.

The expectation that black people will always and immediately forgive the violence done to them by the State, or individual white people, is a bizarre and sick American ritual.

Dear White America: I know it’s hard, but you have to acknowledge what’s happening in this country

www.salon.com|Pia Glenn

First of all, I’ve seen people angry about the moniker “white privilege” in and of itself, bemoaning the very existence of this annoying two-word phrase (and even more so the three words “check your privilege”) as nothing more than the verbal folly of the Outrage Committee and Social Justice Warriors who want to ruin the Confederate flag and gay jokes and everything good about America. I can understand the fatigue at the sheer amount of times we say the phrase—I even get tired of saying/typing it. But can you allow for the possibility that we’re saying it so much because you haven’t heard us yet and it’s crucial that you accept it as reality?

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Donald Trump makes clear that he primarily cares about capitalism, about wealth, and about power. While I view his particular performance of right-wing politics and white masculinity as buffoonish, he seems to offer comfort to those on the right who are deeply invested in returning the country’s leadership to someone who looks and thinks like them. What’s interesting, then, is that Trump’s billionaire status likely indicates that he has little in common with the everyday citizen. But his brash and unapologetic political incorrectness bespeaks comfort, a seeming return to normalcy for those Americans who believe that progress and change are happening too fast.

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White America is suffering from a type of cancer. It is hurting you; it is killing your children; it is damaging families; it hurls shrapnel in many directions, maiming and otherwise bringing an end to the lives of those people who are unfortunate enough to be in its blast radius. If you want the truth, this is it: toxic white masculinity, and the backward right-wing politics which nurture and protect it, are hurting millions of you every year.

In New York Magazine’s profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates — timed to coincide with the publication of his new book, “Between the World and Me” — the Atlantic writer spoke at length about his sudden, though demonstrably deserved, rise to national prominence as a uncompromising chronicler of the black experience in America.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells met with Coates in the days after Dylann Roof shot and killed nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church, and together they watched President Barack Obama eulogize Reverend Clementa Pinckney. “There’s a sister over here to the left, she’s natural, no perm, and a very black dude, and then an African-American president,” Coates said, before wondering what that would mean to a 4-year-old white child. “That’s the world as he knows it. So all these people saying that symbols don’t mean anything — that’s bullshit. They mean a lot.”