'Gone With the Wind': The real Southern heritage

by Susan Grigsby   DAILY KOS

　

Dr. Samuel Green, a Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, at Stone Mountain, Georgia on July 24, 1948, flanked by two children

Southerners have got to realize that Margaret Mitchell was a writer of fiction. She did not chronicle the romance of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. She made it up. Of course, she was helped by historians like Edward A. Pollard, author of the 1866 whitewash of the war, The Lost Cause (The Standard Southern History of the War of the Confederates). She was also helped by the articles of Jubal Early, and the autobiography of Jefferson Davis, all of whom claimed that, in spite of all written evidence to the contrary, the Civil War was not fought over slavery. But it was always a fairy tale.

Southerners stole people. They robbed people of their freedom. And they did not just rob them of their liberty and their labor, they robbed them of their progeny. They robbed their descendants of a future. This is the heritage of the South. This is the infamous Lost Cause that many today still consider so noble that they have enshrined it into a veritable altar at which we are expected to pay homage. Or at the very least respect.

I don't respect treason.

I was born and raised in Chicago, perhaps the most segregated city in the United States, populated by racist blue-color workers who succeeded in keeping the migrants from the South, who came with hearts full of hope, locked up in crowded tenements. Who refused them mortgages and robbed them of their right to buy a home that could provide a foundation for the American dream that they wanted for their children. I writhe in shame when I think of what my hometown did and how its residents rioted when Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit. Bull Connor had nothing on Chicago bigots.

The difference between myself and the Southerners who insist that their flag represents their heritage, is that I don't deny what that heritage is. I recognize the evil that was done in my name, not just to blacks, but to the people who lived here long before the Europeans even knew that the Americas existed. I am ashamed of what was done and lack any desire to dress it up, to build statues to it, and demand that its victims honor and respect it.

The South needs to realize that it is not, nor has it ever been, a separate nation. It failed to achieve that. Its heritage is the same one shared by every Yankee from Maine to Washington—save the treason, of course. And the slavery. Confederate soldiers were not the only ones who died — their treason resulted in the deaths of at least 750,000, and perhaps as many as 850,000, Americans. The Union dead deserve respect. They died to make men free. Not to keep them enslaved.

The peace terms offered to Robert E. Lee by Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox were incredibly generous. Officers were allowed to retain their side arms and baggage, all troops were permitted to take their own horses home with them after giving a parole that they would no longer fight the United States. So noble were both generals at Appomattox that the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was called "the Gentlemen's Agreement."

And Grant, on hearing a rumor that the was a movement to arrest Lee for treason, said that he would resign his command of the Army before he would execute such an order. Lee refused to countenance any talk of a continuing guerilla war.

This is how the South repaid that generosity and lack of malice: They agreed to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops after a little more than a decade's enforcement of Reconstruction, and the promise to provide equal rights of citizenship to all residents of the South, regardless of color.

They lied.

Immediately after the removal of U.S. Army troops, steps were taken to disenfranchise blacks, while their numbers were used to inflate the representation of the Southern states in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Slavery was re-introduced in the Southern states through the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, eventually allowing blacks to be sentenced to prison for theft of as little as $10. While in prison, their labor was sold by the state to whoever was willing to pay, including many Northern entrepreneurs. There was no responsibility assigned to the purchasers of such labor. They never worried about the health of their slaves because they were so easy to replace.

Within 20 years, of the almost 1 million men who died in that war, only monuments remained. There were no real changes to the Southern economy, which was always based on slavery, or the Southern attitudes, which were always based on white supremacy. The rest of the nation, focused on the gilded age of the robber barons, had little energy to spare for the men and women they fought to free and who were now just as tightly enslaved under Jim Crow as they had been before the war.

This is the heritage the Southerners want us to respect and to honor. This heritage of deceit, treachery, and hate.

From Ira Katznelson's work, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, in his inaugural address of 1909, William Howard Taft stated:

"It is not the disposition or within the province of the Federal Government," Taft declared, "to interfere with the regulation by Southern States of their domestic affairs."

And that made the Southern victory in the Civil War official.

According to Katznelson, "the southern historian Ulrich Phillips searched, in the late 1920s, for 'the central theme of southern history,'" and found it in "the South’s commitment to white supremacy":

"white folk [are] a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained— that it shall be and remain a white man’s country." This, Phillips approvingly concluded, was both "the cardinal test of a Southerner" and "the central theme of Southern history," whether "expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician’s quietude."

In 1934, W. T. Couch, director of the University of North Carolina Press, summarized white southern racial views in "The Negro in the South," quoted by Katznelson:

There is no question as to what the dominant opinion is. It holds that the Negro is inferior to the white man, and shades all the way from the prevailing opinion of two centuries as given in the Dred Scott Decision to the less extreme opinion that the Negro, while inferior, nevertheless has some rights and should be encouraged to develop a culture parallel to and dependent on that of whites.

In the middle of the greatest economic depression that the nation has ever known, the South once again refused any accommodation to its doctrine of white supremacy. (The skinheads are not new, they have been around in the South since the days of the colonies. Nothing has ever been able to trump white supremacy.) Social Security could not be passed unless blacks were excluded from any benefits, and so all agricultural and domestic workers were not covered. In the South, where the overwhelming majority of American blacks lived, they were allowed no other occupations. This I have never been able to understand. This selfish, soulless Southern attitude that not only were whites superior, they were to be the only ones to derive any benefit from the taxes that blacks paid.

Ralph Bunche, writing in the early 1940s, discussed the heterogeneity of the South, writing that the only things the Southern states had in common was:

... its traditional adherence to the doctrine of white supremacy . . .
and to the political derivative of that doctrine— a blind allegiance to the one party system.

This is the real Southern heritage. It is not found in Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind. It is found in a belief that for some reason white men and women are superior to all whose skin color is any different. There is no other separate Southern heritage except treason.

It is a heritage that should cause them to writhe in shame. It is a heritage of the kidnapping, subjugation, forced breeding and selling of a free people. It is a heritage of treason and treachery. And hate.

It is time they got over it.

Here is the face of the Republican party of Newt Gingrich Karl Rove Dick Cheney and Roger Ailes. This man has been hustled all his life by smart men selling 'resentment' politics. "You are a slave to the black man, you work pay taxes and the black man gets your money Welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, a higher minimum wage and all this foreign aid come from you! You are the slave and the lazy black folks live on your nickel!"

And it works. The "Southern Strategy" Invented by Kevin Philips and Pat Buchannan for Richard Nixon, played to the paranoid south. Fox News Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage thrive on 'Resentment' Politics.

Times are changing and as you see this man above, he's not young and in fact he probably does not vote.

Bigotry sells, ask Vladimir Putin, he whips up the rural Russians and city workers with fantasy and resentment.

Be certain the GOP in 2016 will blame the liberals and the blacks for "EVERYTHING" and more than a few while men lost in fabricated rage will vote for the Republicans oblivious to the fact the GOP sees them as fools!

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof

Roxane Gay NY TTIMES

I DO NOT forgive Dylann Roof, a racist terrorist whose name I hate saying or knowing. I have no immediate connection to what happened in Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness, but I do not foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.

My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt. I do not believe in the death penalty so I don’t wish to see him dead. My lack of forgiveness serves as a reminder that there are some acts that are so terrible that we should recognize them as such. We should recognize them as beyond forgiving.

I struggle with faith but I was raised Catholic. I believe God is a God of love but cannot understand how that love is not powerful enough to save us from ourselves. As a child, I learned that forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance. We must admit our sins. We must atone for our sins. When I went to confession each week, I told the priest my childish sins — fighting with my brothers, saying a curse word, the rather minor infractions of a sheltered Nebraska girl. When I didn’t have a sin to confess, I made something up, which was also a sin. After confession, I knelt at a pew and did my penance, and thought about the wrong I had done and then I tried to be better. I’m not sure I succeeded all that often.

Ever the daydreamer, I spent most of my time in Sunday Mass lost in my imagination. The one prayer that stayed with me was "Our Father" and the line "and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." I always got stuck on that part. It’s a nice idea that we could forgive those who might commit the same sins we are apt to commit, but surely there must be a line. Surely there are some trespasses most of us would not commit. What then?

Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive. The bodies of the dead are still being buried. We are still memorizing their names: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson.

We are still memorizing these names but the families who loved the people who carried these names have forgiven Dylann Roof. They offered up testimony in court, less than 48 hours after the trauma of losing their loved ones in so brutal a manner. Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, said, "Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, everyone’s plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love, and their legacies will live in love." Nadine Collier, who lost her mother, said: "You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul."

I deeply respect the families of the nine slain who are able to forgive this terrorist and his murderous racism. I cannot fathom how they are capable of such eloquent mercy, such grace under such duress.

Nine people are dead. Nine black people are dead. They were murdered in a terrorist attack.

Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative vigorously embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.

We are reminded of the power of whiteness. Predictably, alongside the forgiveness story, the media has tried to humanize this terrorist. They have tried to understand Dylann Roof’s hatred because surely, there must be an explanation for so heinous an act. At the gunman’s bond hearing, the judge, who was once reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench, talked about how not only were the nine slain and their families victims, but so were the relatives of the terrorist. There are no limits to the power of whiteness when it comes to calls for mercy.

The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.

Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

Mr. Roof’s racism was blunt and raggedly formed. It was bred by a culture in which we constantly have to shout "Black lives matter!" because there is so much evidence to the contrary. This terrorist was raised in this culture. He made racist jokes with his friends. He shared his plans with his roommate. It’s much easier to introduce forgiveness into the conversation than to sit with that reality and consider all who are complicit.

What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

Roxane Gay is the author of "An Untamed State" and "Bad Feminist" and a contributing opinion writer.

Jim Galloway  AJC columnist

A Southern Baptist leader on Confederate banner: ‘White Christians ought to think about what that flag says’

Atlanta Journal Constitution

This column by Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, originally appeared in the Washington Post. It is reprinted here in full with his permission:

This week the nation reels over the murder of praying Christians in an historic African American church in Charleston, S.C. At the same time, one of the issues hurting many is the Confederate battle flag flying at full-mast on the South Carolina Capitol grounds, even in the aftermath of this racist act of violence on innocent people.

This raises the question of what we as Christians ought to think about the Confederate battle flag, given the fact that many of us are from the South.

The flag of my home state of Mississippi contains the battle flag as part of it, and I’m deeply conflicted about that. The flag represents home for me. I love Christ, church and family more than Mississippi, but that’s about it. Even so, that battle flag makes me wince — even though I’m the descendant of Confederate veterans.

Some would say that the Confederate battle flag is simply about heritage, not about hate. Singer Brad Paisley sang that his wearing a Confederate flag on his shirt was just meant to say that he was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan. Comedian Stephen Colbert quipped, "Little known fact: Jefferson Davis—HUGE Skynyrd fan."

Defenders of the flag would point out that the United States flag is itself tied up with ugly questions of history. Washington and Jefferson, after all, supported chattel slavery too. The difference is, though, that the United States overcame its sinful support of this wicked system (though tragically late in the game).

The Confederate States of America was not simply about limited government and local autonomy; the Confederate States of America was constitutionally committed to the continuation, with protections of law, to a great evil. The moral enormity of the slavery question is one still viscerally felt today, especially by the descendants of those who were enslaved and persecuted.

The gospel speaks to this. The idea of a human being attempting to "own" another human being is abhorrent in a Christian view of humanity. That should hardly need to be said these days, though it does, given the modern-day slavery enterprises of human trafficking all over the world. In the Scriptures, humanity is given dominion over the creation.

We are not given dominion over our fellow image-bearing human beings (Gen. 1:27-30). The Southern system of chattel slavery was built off of the things the Scripture condemns as wicked: "man-stealing" (1 Tim. 1:10), the theft of another’s labor (Jas. 5:1-6), the breaking up of families, and on and on.

In order to prop up this system, a system that benefited the Mammonism of wealthy planters, Southern religion had to carefully weave a counter-biblical theology that could justify it (the biblically ridiculous "curse of Ham" concept, for instance). In so doing, this form of Southern folk religion was outside of the global and historic teachings of the Christian church.

The abolitionists were right — and they were right not because they were on the right side of history but because they were on the right side of God.

Even beyond that, though, the flag has taken on yet another contextual meaning in the years since. The Confederate battle flag was the emblem of Jim Crow defiance to the civil rights movement, of the Dixiecrat opposition to integration, and of the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils of our all too recent, all too awful history.

White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our African American brothers and sisters in Christ, especially in the aftermath of yet another act of white supremacist terrorism against them.

The gospel frees us from scrapping for our "heritage" at the expense of others. As those in Christ, this descendant of Confederate veterans has more in common with a Nigerian Christian than I do with a non-Christian white Mississippian who knows the right use of "y’all" and how to make sweet tea.

None of us is free from a sketchy background, and none of our backgrounds is wholly evil. The blood of Jesus has ransomed us all "from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers" (1 Pet. 1:18), whether your forefathers were Yankees, rebels, Vikings, or whatever. We can give gratitude for where we’ve come from, without perpetuating symbols of pretend superiority over others.

It's time, take it down.
The south should invent a new flag that respects all of us.

On guns and race, America is a nation shackled to its past

Jonathan Freedland LONDON GUARDIAN

The Charleston shootings show that for all its might, the US still cannot cure its two critical birth defects

Jon Stewart and Barack Obama are men of a similar age with, on some days, a similar role. Sometimes it falls to both of them to help their fellow Americans digest what’s happening around them, to make sense of it. Yesterday it was the murder by a white supremacist of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.

The TV host did something unusual, dispensing with his usual gag-packed opening to deliver a joke-free monologue. Obama, by contrast, did something that has become all too usual, delivering what is now a rhetorical genre of its own: the presidential post-massacre speech. "I’ve had to make statements like this too many times," he said. By one count, it was the 14th time he had had to speak in such a way after such a mass shooting.

Stewart’s emphasis was on America’s enduring struggle over race. Obama chose to focus on the country’s equally stubborn problem with guns. But what was striking was that on both questions – what my colleague Gary Younge rightly calls America’s "twin pathologies" – both the presenter and the president struck the same tone. They matched each other in weary resignation.

Stewart said Americans had been forced to peer into a "gaping racial wound that will not heal". Then, with a comic’s timing, he added that he was confident that "by staring into that and seeing it for what it is … we still won’t do jack shit".

For his part, Obama began with a declaration that "it is in our power to do something about" the guns epidemic. But then he dampened any expectation of action. "I say that recognising the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now." Mindful of a hostile Congress that has thwarted him at every turn, all he could promise was that America would, "at some point", have "to come to grips with" the issue of gun violence, and "shift how we think about" it.

You can see why both men – nearing the end of their terms of office – have given up hope that change is on its way. When it comes to both race and guns, there have been episodes so shocking that people assumed action was bound to follow. And yet the brutality, especially police brutality, shown towards black Americans – those doing nothing more threatening than walking or breathing or swimming or praying – goes on.

When in 2012 a 20-year-old man walked into Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and six adults, many assumed this would finally expose the limits of American indulgence of gun rights. Obama declared enough was enough and proposed a raft of gun control measures. They seemed to be making progress until the National Rifle Association got busy, pressuring wavering senators facing tough re-election battles, and the effort was crushed.

Race and guns are the birth defects of the American republic, their distorting presence visible in the US constitution itself. The very first article of that founding document spelled out its view that those "bound to service for a term of years" – slaves – would count as "three fifths of all other Persons". Meanwhile, the second amendment enshrines "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms".

The three-fifths rule was eventually discarded, but the legacy of slavery hangs heavy. In South Carolina the flag of the slave-owning Confederacy still flies. The church where those worshippers were gunned down was on Calhoun Street, named in honour of a luminary of 19th-century white supremacism. As for guns, a rule written in the age of the musket, designed to protect an infant republic from the return of King George’s redcoats, still holds – allowing a 21-year-old bent on provoking a race war easy, legal access to a weapon that lets him commit what, in a different context, would be called an act of terror.

A rule written in the musket age, to protect an infant republic from the return of King George’s redcoats, still holds

The result is paralysis and a desperate fatalism. The paradoxes are obvious. America, the land of restless innovation, is shackled to its past. The United States sees its own wounds and cannot heal them, its hands tied by a constitution that in almost every other respect is a manifesto for liberation.

This is obviously a catastrophe for Americans, and not only because of the damage guns and racism inflict both separately and when they collide, as they did so devastatingly in Charleston. It also feeds a corrosive cynicism. Americans are already sceptical of their democracy, which can seem more like a dynastic plutocracy, a perennial battle of the House of Bush against the House of Clinton, bankrolled by unseen corporate giants. But when they see a US president apparently impotent in the face of the gun menace, what are they meant to think of their own power to change things for the better?

Americans like to tell themselves anything is possible, that their destiny is in their own hands. Politicians describe the country as "this great experiment in self-government", insisting they can make America anew if they want to. Yet the persistence of arms and racism and armed racism suggests that the people are, in important ways, powerless: a nation still ruled by its ancestors; a nation that has forgotten the wisdom of one of its greatest revolutionaries, Thomas Paine, who understood that "government is for the living, and not for the dead; it is the living only that has any right in it".

All this matters beyond America too. US influence in the world does not rest solely on its wealth and military might. It also requires America to be admired. As Bill Clinton said five years after the Iraq invasion: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

Every one of these mass killings, or police shootings of innocent black men and women, undermines that example. It makes America look like a basket case, a country that seems to think it’s normal for a toddler to find a gun in his mother’s purse and accidentally shoot himself dead, a country that saw 12,600 of its people shot dead last year and believes itself incapable of doing anything about it.

To change will mean looking to the rest of the world, and recognising that, as Obama said, most "advanced countries" do not have this problem. It will require a reckoning with the circumstances of America’s birth – and the courage to say that the US is not the country it was more than two centuries ago, and can no longer be bound by those rules: that it has changed – and that it can be so much better.

In memory for those who died in Charleston, South Carolina.

When will this madness end?

TPM Cafe: Opinion

Hey, Seinfeld: Don't Blame PC Culture For Your Lackluster Jokes

ByAmanda Marcotte Talking Points Memo

I can’t say it surprises me to see that Jerry Seinfeld, whose "observational" comedy felt dated when he was at the height of his popularity, has drifted right into cranky old man territory with a string of broadsides about how he and his are oppressed by the kids these days and their "political correctness." Earlier this week, Seinfeld, on "The Herd with Colin Cowherd", complained that colleges are too politically correct for comedians of his generation to play. His evidence of this was an anecdote about his 14-year-old daughter.

"My wife says to her, 'Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys,’" he riffed. "You know what my daughter says? She says, ‘That’s sexist.’ They just want to use these words: 'That’s racist'; 'That’s sexist'; 'That’s prejudice.' They don’t know what they’re talking about."

His daughter had a point. There is a sexist stereotype of the boy-crazy teenage girl that doesn’t accurately capture the complex feelings adolescents have about self-identity and sexual desire. More importantly, it’s downright weird to use an anecdote about a teen girl trying to get her mom off her back to draw some larger conclusion about the atmosphere on college campuses, an atmosphere that his daughter, being only 14, isn’t part of anyway.

But Seinfeld wasn’t done, which is no surprise, given that he came under fire last year for dismissing the value of diversity in comedy. On Tuesday, he went on Late Night with Seth Meyers and complaining that people might complain about a joke he does with a punchline that rests on stereotypes about gay men being effeminate. He complained that a joke he does comparing people who have smart phones to a "gay French king" makes audiences squirm instead of laugh. "I could imagine a time where people say, ‘Well, that’s offensive to suggest that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing motion and you now need to apologize,’" he argued. "I mean, there’s a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me."

Clearly, Seinfeld is entitled to your laughter, audiences of the 21st century, particularly you young’uns! If you’re not feeling it, just imagine that you are courtiers in a pre-revolutionary Versailles and he’s one Louis or another making a boneheaded joke, and cough up that polite chuckling. No need to speculate about his sexual inclinations either way, unless picturing him doing the deed with his socks on helps bring forth your indulgent giggles.

In a sense, this is all our collective faults for ever pretending Seinfeld was funny and giving him money to observe at us at length. Wasn’t the joke on Seinfeld that he was a second-rate hack? At some point we must have forgotten that and started to think that because he’s a sitcom star, he must be a funny guy. What he’s blaming on "political correctness" might just be audiences waking up to a truth that was always there if we were willing to see it.

Unfortunately, as the conversation that followed between Seinfeld, Meyers and New Yorker editor David Remnick shows, this idea that political correctness is some great bogeyman gobbling up all sense of subtlety and humor has a lot of traction these days.

This is a delicate conversation to have. On one hand, it’s true enough that there are, as Lindy West noted in the Guardian, "some individuals use political correctness to disguise what is, in reality, a regressive devotion to propriety" and others who "simply have no sense of humour." The Internet has given these people an opportunity they never had in the past to do what puritans do, which is try to impose their grim humorlessness on others. No use in denying that’s an issue, not while the world "problematic" remains in heavy circulation on Twitter and Tumblr.

It’s also true that some on college campuses use lefty politics as a weapon to try to censor or police the language and ideas of professors and fellow students. It’s a serious enough problem that many college professors are legitimately afraid of being investigated for saying the wrong thing.

All that said, there continues to be no substantial evidence that these eruptions are anything but a marginal bit of infighting on the left, as opposed to a serious cultural shift towards hypersensitivity or censorship. The real and larger problem is people who use "political correctness" as a catchall defense against legitimate criticism.

Take, for instance, the joke that Seinfeld is so defensive about. Odds are people aren’t laughing at it because it’s, bluntly put, not particularly funny. The main target is people who are using smartphones and think they’re all that, so it’s not a big surprise that as the phones become ubiquitous, the stereotype of phone users as spoiled brats loses a lot of its salience.

But yes, Seinfeld is probably right that another huge chunk of it is that a lot of straight people have grown sour on the tired "gay men are bitchy" stereotype that he employs in the joke. That joke has been tired for at least 60 years now, but as straight people become more accepting of and used to gay people, more of them are beginning to realize that stereotype doesn’t really have that much truth to it. Sure, some gay men are bitchy. So are some straight men, though they may express it differently. But most gay men are not bitchy. Like straight people, gay people come in all personality types and forms of self-expression, and as more people realize that, jokes that rely on believing otherwise aren’t as funny anymore.

It’s a good thing for comedy if hackish comedians are finding it harder and harder to rely on half-baked and unfunny jokes that rest on the premise that straight guys are better and cooler than everyone else. If that means that audiences increasingly notice that Jerry Seinfeld is really not that funny, so be it. He can go home and count the millions made off a simpler, less discerning era.

Amanda Marcotte is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about liberal politics, the religious right and reproductive health care.

Who Gets to Go to the Pool?

By BRIT BENNETT NY TIMES

IN a 1948 speech to fellow Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond famously declared that the entire United States Army couldn’t force white Southerners to allow black people "into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

I’m always struck by his invocation of swimming pools as a battleground for racial segregation, although perhaps I shouldn’t be. After all, some of the most potent symbols of Jim Crow involve water, from segregated drinking fountains and toilets to swimming pools and beaches.

In a YouTube video of a pool party that took place in McKinney, Tex., on Friday, a white police officer appears to shove, handcuff and pull a gun on a group of black teenagers. He grabs a black girl by her hair and drags her to the ground. He puts a knee on her back as she screams. According to the McKinney Police Department, officers responded to calls of a "disturbance" involving multiple juveniles "who do not live in the area or have permission to be there."

The officer in question has reportedly resigned, and the department announced an investigation. Black teenagers at the party have told news outlets that before the police arrived, they were accosted by white adults who told the black children to leave the pool and "return to Section 8 housing."

After the episode got national attention, a local reporter shared a picture of a sign posted outside the pool: "Thank you McKinney PD for keeping us safe." If an officer pointing a gun at unarmed teenagers protects a community, then what danger do black kids at a swimming pool pose?

We don’t yet, and may never, know exactly what happened at this particular pool, but the image of an officer manhandling black children in swimsuits calls to mind the long fight over who can access water and who cannot.

Water has long been a site of racial anxiety. Integrating city pools has led to riots, such as in 1931, when young black men in Pittsburgh were held underwater, dragged out and beaten by white swimmers while police officers watched. Segregated beaches were an early battleground for integration in Mississippi. When more than 100 black people held a wade-in in 1960, a white mob attacked them with pool sticks, lead pipes and chains. A news account referred to the attack as the "worst racial riot in Mississippi history."

Segregating water is not just a Southern tradition. In California, Mexican-Americans were excluded from "whites only" restaurants, schools and of course swimming pools. In a 2010 Los Angeles Times interview, Sandra Robbie, a filmmaker curating a walking tour of Orange County’s civil rights history, described the segregation she saw growing up in the area. "Monday was Mexican Day," she said. "And the next day they’d drain the pool and clean it so whites could use it the rest of the week."

In "Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools," Jeff Wiltse argues that the racial tension over integrated swimming pools boiled down to two major anxieties: contamination and miscegenation. Pool use had once divided along class lines, where the white middle class avoided swimming with poor European immigrants, whom they viewed as ridden with disease. After the Great Migration, this fear became racialized, where whites of all social classes feared that swimming with blacks would infect them. In Pittsburgh in the 1930s, black swimmers were pulled out of a city pool and commanded to produce a "health certificate" to prove they were disease free. White swimmers were not.　

Perhaps an even stronger anxiety, Mr. Wiltse notes, arose when city pools began to allow males and females to swim together. "Northern whites in general," he writes, "objected to black men having the opportunity to interact with white women at such intimate and erotic public spaces."　

In Baltimore, following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, a city solicitor argued that racial segregation must continue at city pools because "swimming brought males and females into ‘physical’ and ‘intimate contact.’ " Judge Roszel Thomsen agreed and upheld segregation in the city’s pools. He explained, Mr. Wiltse notes, that "swimming pools were ‘more sensitive than schools’ because of the visual and physical intimacy that accompanied their use."

In a white supremacist imagination, these anxieties are one and the same. Racial intimacy is contamination. To mix is to be infected.

I grew up in a beach town but I cannot swim. My parents tried to put me in swimming lessons as a child but I hated every part of it: dunking my head underwater, smelling chlorine, getting my hair wet. Water has always been natural and unnatural to me, a threat and an inevitability.

My mother does not swim either, although she dutifully drove my sister and me to our swimming lessons at the city pool one summer. She grew up in southwest Louisiana, where the closest bodies of water were rivers and gulf beaches. She went to a segregated school and attended Mass at a segregated church with a cemetery where black and white bodies rot in segregated dirt. My mother also went to a segregated beach. Separating physical spaces — like church pews or school buildings — is conceivable, but how do you segregate an ocean, water itself?

"It’s foolish," my mother says, "because water mixes. Water can’t decide which way it’s gonna go."

For decades, white swimmers feared sharing a beach with black people because they worried about catching disease, yet hired blacks to cook their food or nurse their children. Mr. Thurmond rallied against race mixing and yet, after his death, it was revealed that he had a daughter with a black woman who had worked in his family’s home. There’s a strange intimacy in racism, and water exposes the inevitability of this intimacy. Water touches me, then touches you.

Brit Bennett is a fiction writer living in California

Magaluf's new drinking laws flouted and doubted in first 24 hours

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Magaluf Spain The Guardian (London)

 

Local scepticism appears warranted as Britons continue bingeing along Punta Ballena strip despite drinking curfew backed by heavy fines and police presence

David is sitting on the pavement, tucking into a polystyrene tray of chips and gravy, two cans of Stella Artois propped up against his foot. Behind him, his mate leans against the wall, pale, swaying and being violently sick. “He’ll be alright,” said the 19-year-old through a mouthful of chips. “When you’re in Magaluf, you keep going.” Tapping the beer cans, he grins and adds: “The drinking’s not gonna stop here.”

It is 2am on the Mallorcan resort’s infamous Punta Ballena strip and David is far from the only one on this street of bars, clubs and strip-joints clutching a drink. Large plastic cups filled with clear, pink, blue and green liquids can be spotted in the hands of hundreds of the late-night revellers, the majority of whom are British.

Magaluf crackdown: Spanish authorities call time on drinking in the street

Yet, while this is scene is hardly out of the ordinary during the summer season in Magaluf, midnight on Monday marked the introduction of a series of new laws designed to crackdown on the behaviour of the island’s British visitors. An estimated 1 million of them holiday here every year, bringing hundreds of millions in tourism – but also a reputation for drunken debauchery and sexual depravity.

Drinking has now been banned on the street between 10pm and 8am, while fines between €750 (£550) and €3,000 will be issued to anyone caught urinating in public, flashing or swimming naked. Bar crawls, which are one of the most popular and profitable activities on the strip and can attract more than 100 people at a time, are now to be restricted to a maximum of 20 – and bars are only allowed to have one a day having given the authorities seven days’ notice.

In an attempt to prove it is serious about clamping down on the “Shagaluf” culture that has shamed Mallorca and occupied the British press for the past year, the local Calvià council has promised a greater police presence on the streets and will bring in an extra 36 officers to ensure the laws are enforced.

But the raucous scenes on the strip on Monday night proved they have a challenging task ahead of them and most locals and holidaymakers are united in their belief that it will not work.

In a quiet bar off the strip, David, a waiter who was born in a town neighbouring Magaluf, said 36 extra officers were nowhere near enough to enforce real change, adding that drinking on the street was not where police efforts should be focused.

“We are talking over 5,000 people in a single road, how many more police do you think you need to actually make any changes? A lot more than 30, that’s for sure. It would be good if it made a difference but it has to start in the hotel when they [tourists] arrive, making sure British people who come here know the rules and know they will have to pay if they break them. That hasn’t happened so I am not very convinced.”

The source of the drunken troubles, he added, lay more with the cheap prices of the alcohol in the bars and not the drinking between the bars. Blazoned across numerous clubs and British bars up and down the strip are deals such as €7 for two hours’ unlimited open bar, while pints of vodka and Red Bull, and sex on the beach cocktails sell for between €3 and €5. While there is already a law in place that bans drunk people being served, a quick scan of any bar on Monday night proved this was being virtually ignored.

“I don’t think these new rules will stop people coming to Magaluf,” said David. “It is so cheap. They all stay in all-inclusive hotels where they get unlimited alcohol. So it doesn’t matter if they have a drink in their hand or not, by the time they get to the strip at night they are already drunk, they will already kick that bin, cause chaos, start smashing windows or whatever.

“But they will still get served more alcohol in the bars. So what’s the point of bringing in new laws when the old ones aren’t even getting followed?”

One British migrant, who worked in a club on the strip and did not want to be named, said there was so much competition between the bars that they all broke the laws that ban promoters from serving obviously inebriated customers to get people into the clubs and venues.

The one shift many locals said they hoped the laws would bring about was an end to the destructive pub crawls, which often result in scores of drunk holidaymakers tearing through the streets. José, a waiter from the island’s capital, Palma, said he had already seen police stop a group of about 50 on Monday night and issue them with a warning. He hoped it was the beginning of a new era, but predicted there wouldn’t be any real change for years.

“You think when you see 150 people walking down the street, drinking, screaming, shouting, being sick, that is nice for Magaluf? I don’t think so. I hope this will put a stop to it,” he said.

But on the main beach on Tuesday afternoon, Vanessa and Toni, both in their early twenties and from the UK, were among the numerous promoters still illegally canvassing to get people to sign up for various pub crawls and parties happening that night. Neither believed that the new laws were anything other than hot air and said that, for now at least, the 20-person rule for pub crawls looked like it was being ignored.

Back on the strip, Hayley, 32 and from Surrey, works behind the bar at Alex’s, pre-slicing limes to accompany the hundreds of tequila shots that will be knocked back that night. This is the venue that made headlines last year as the club where an 18-year-old woman performed oral sex on 24 men to get a free drink. A video of the act, known as “mamading”, went viral.

Having spent 11 summers in Magaluf, Hayley said she had noticed an increased police presence on the strip on Monday, but added that she was unconvinced it would have any long-term impact on the “street of shame”.

She said: “It’s good that they’re doing it but there are other things they should be concentrating on if they want to clean up Magaluf. The prostitutes are a real problem and muggings are so much worse than people carrying a drink from one bar to the next. And frankly, the fact they are carrying a drink in the two seconds it takes to get from one bar to the next bar is hardly what’s causing the problems. They get there and buy another drink anyway.”

Magaluf, Hayley insists, is no different from any other resort favoured by young Britons looking for a good time. She believes the town has an unfair reputation in the UK press.

“They made a big deal about what that girl did to 24 guys for a drink, but it’s not like that’s happening all the time,” she added. “When they come here they let their hair down – and yes, I’ve seen things over the years that’s made me think, ‘Bloody hell, if I was your mother…’..

“But I can’t see this as the beginning of some radical change or Magaluf ever being a quiet place just for families where nothing bad is going on and no one’s getting naked.”

Exposed

The ‘Invisible’ White Man Holding the Camera in McKinney

Arthur Chu The Daily Beast

The video of Officer Eric Casebolt shoving an unarmed, black 15-year-old’s face into dirt before holding her at gunpoint is proof: Only white people can choose to be invisible when the police come.

The most telling detail about this weekend’s viral video from McKinney, Texas, is the part you can’t see: the race of the man behind the camera, the one who’s holding the phone.

Brandon Brooks, the man who took the video, casually walks around from place to place filming Officer Eric Casebolt performing a tuck-and-roll, as though dodging imaginary gunfire, before grabbing a 15-year-old girl in a bikini, shoving her face into the dirt, and pulling a gun on bystanders.

None of that too-forceful police work—like being forced to sit on his hands, being shoved to the grass on his face, having a gun brandished at him—happened to the guy holding the camera. Brooks says Casebolt "didn’t even look at me. It was kind of like I was invisible."

That’s one of the definitions of "privilege." Sometimes it means being visible when it’s time to hand out awards or make the movie. And sometimes it means suddenly becoming invisible when the shit hits the fan.

The "bystanders" at a protest I attended in Cleveland two weeks ago seemed perfectly calm and certain they weren’t about to suddenly be targeted by cops, forced face-down onto the ground and be taken to jail to wait 48 hours before hearing from a lawyer. But that’s exactly what happened to 71 protesters marching in objection to the acquittal of Officer Michael Brelo, who is a free man after firing 49 shots at two unarmed people.

One of the bystanders in Cleveland even called out "Thank you, officers!" as men in riot gear marched past him. It mirrors the people who are now putting up signs at the pool in McKinney thanking police officers. The ever-ethical journalists at Breitbart wasted no time smearing the victims by pointing out they used black slang on their social media accounts, which apparently is evidence they were acting unlawfully.

Privilege means being invisible when the police sense trouble. It means feeling like the bullets and batons will never be used against you. It means feeling safe.

It means that when disruptive harassment from uninvited guests at a planned event leads to fights breaking out, the white harassers will be ignored while the black guests will be the ones assaulted. Regardless of who initiated the dustup, being black and belligerent makes you, in Casebolt’s words, "part of the mob."

It means that you can call the cops on any random black dude holding a fake gun—even if he’s 12 years old—and instantly get him killed.

Dave Chappelle once joked that the worst part of being black and wealthy was that if he were robbed, he couldn’t even call the cops. When they saw him in his house, he said, they’d instantly assume he was the burglar and shoot him. It was painful to laugh at then; it’s even harder to laugh at now, after we’ve witnessed the ridiculous spectacle of a Harvard professor arrested for trying to open his own front door.

Privilege means, basically, that if I go to someone else’s party, insult the guests, call them racial slurs, and start a brawl—I can then call the cops and get them arrested.

Police apologists often make the argument that cops have to make decisions in the "heat of the moment"—that when called to an incident in progress, they have to make split-second judgments to protect people, and we should hesitate to second-guess them. One veteran cop and Ph.D. even posted a scary op-ed in The Washington Post saying police have the right to do anything they want to us—especially if we don’t instantly comply with any police officer’s demands.

Privilege means getting arrested is a matter of choice.

In other words, we all have to accept that we are living in a climate of fear. In this line of thinking, when some cop decides to abuse his power, we all must trust that the system will eventually take care of it. After all, in the actual moment a police officer pulls out a gun and threatens you, that Ph.D. veteran cop has a point—you have no rights. (This is exactly what we use the pejorative "police state" for—to prove we live in a "free country" that would never share traits with one.)

OK, but how universal is that rule, really? We’ve seen story after story of certain people who are able to get away with brandishing weapons at police officers and not get killed. We’ve seen stories of certain people who can create organizations dedicated to armed resistance against government authority and not get killed. We’ve seen stories of people who committed actual mass murders and were still taken into custody peacefully and with dignity.

In the "heat of the moment," when cops come to assess a potentially dangerous situation, they’ll target whomever seems disruptive or out of place. And when you’re the privileged race, you’re never the one who’s out of place.

You can get arrested if you stand up and confront cops who are arresting the protesters—or the 14-year-old partygoers—next to you. But, otherwise, you can wander around as you please, observing events as a "bystander" at your leisure.

Privilege means being presumed not dangerous until proven harmful, not innocent until proven guilty, and not shoved down to the ground and restrained, in Casebolt’s words, "until we get this figured out."

We like to give speeches full of high rhetoric about our nation being one of freedom and equality, a place where everyone is judged only on the content of their character, a place where the vicious racial caste system has long been defeated and buried.

In the heat of the moment, we know that this is a fiction. In the heat of the moment, the truth comes out.