See What Happens?

What Happened Next? After the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, overturned its earlier validation of “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, public washrooms, busses and trains for Blacks and Whites, and told the Topeka Board of Education that segregated education is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution? After US Marshalls and federalised National Guardsmen were required to enforce the Court’s ruling? 

SEE WHAT HAPPENS when you convince yourself that your principles are self-evident, true and universal? When all evidence to the contrary is simply pushed to one side and dismissed as aberrant or insignificant?

See what happens when you give up on the prospect of ever persuading Southern Whites to abandon Jim Crow? When your fear of the Klan overwhelms your determination to change the hearts and minds of your neighbours. When you turn, instead, to the civil rights lawyers and begin the long, painful ascent through state and federal, courts. When, in 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States overturns its earlier validation of “separate but equal” schools, hospitals, public washrooms, busses and trains for Blacks and Whites, and tells the Topeka Board of Education that segregated education is in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. When US Marshalls and federalised National Guardsmen are required to enforce the Court’s ruling. When all that Southern Whites see are the ghosts of the Union soldiers who occupied the defeated Confederacy at the end of the Civil War.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when Dr Martin Luther King’s extraordinary strategy of non-violence sears the consciences of not only the liberal North, but also the racist South, setting in motion a national change of heart, only to be condemned as too slow and insufficiently radical by his younger followers? When the ghettos erupt in violence, looting and arson. When the heavily-armed Black Panther Party scares the skin-deep liberalism right out of White America. When the FBI’s COINTEL programme is unleashed upon the Civil Rights Movement. When the final passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 seals the fate of the Democratic Party in the South and sets the Republican Party in pursuit of its racist “Southern Strategy”. When James Earl Ray guns down Dr King in Memphis.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when the Supreme Court upholds a woman’s right to abortion? When seven (out of nine) unelected judges, strike down state laws that, for better or for worse, reflect the values and beliefs of the electors and their representatives in those states. When the opportunity offered to the Republican Party to drive a wedge between the “secular-humanist elites” of the big cities on both coasts, and the “God-fearing” working-class communities of the much smaller towns and cities of the “flyover” states, is simply too good to pass up. When the arguments between the “Pro-Life” and the “Pro-Choice” movements divide not only men, but women as well. When religious belief and political ideology find themselves on a collision course.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when a charismatic conservative, Phyllis Schlafly, attracts more and more conservative/religious women to her cause, and powerful men shower her Eagle Forum with advice and money? When all the easy, liberal states are safely included in the feminists’ “Yes” column, but the hard ones in the South and the Mid-West show no signs of following suit. When the clock is running down on the Equal Rights Amendment, which had sailed so effortlessly through the Democratic Party-controlled Congress, but which now seems certain to fall victim to the United States’ arcane federal constitution. When – yet again – the clear will of the majority will be thwarted.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens when you tell White men, already alienated by the claims and counter-claims of the Black civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-Vietnam War movements, that the liberals are coming for their guns? When centuries-old family traditions of hunting in the forests and mountains of America, and of acquiring the marksmanship needed to bring down game animals, is presented as some sort of political sickness. When the stark reality of a criminal fraternity accustomed to carrying and using handguns has rendered it only prudent for ordinary citizens to similarly arm themselves. When the social and economic conditions that unhinge the most damaged members of American society are routinely ignored, and their bloody rampages are, instead, blamed on the ready availability of firearms. When trust and confidence in the political process has reached such a low point that many Americans feel it necessary to arm themselves against their own government.

Even then, we didn’t learn.

See what happens to a nation when the core values that once encouraged its citizens to refer to themselves as “We, the People”, fracture and are rearranged into antagonistic belief systems? When long-established economic, sexual and racial hierarchies are challenged by those expected to endure their subordinate status in perpetuity? When the rights enjoyed by the privileged few are claimed by the disenfranchised many? When, in short, the purpose and distribution of social, economic and political power are subjected to unrelenting questioning – and there is no agreement as to the answers?

It is only then we learn that the rights we seek are never given. If we cannot summon sufficient strength to take them, and hold them, then we must resign ourselves to living without them.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 29 June 2022.

Struggling Upwards For America’s Soul.

Justice Denied: At the heart of the “Pro-Life” cause was something much darker than conservative religious dogma, or even the oppressive designs of “The Patriarchy”. The enduring motivation – which dares not declare itself openly – is the paranoid conviction of male white supremacists that if “their” women are given personal control of their wombs, then white Americans will soon be “outbred” by Blacks and Hispanics.

THIS IS WHERE it was always bound to end: at the base, not the summit, of the political pyramid. The acceptance of racial equality. The recognition of a woman’s right to choose. These are battles that have to be won on the ground and in the ballot boxes, not at the Supreme Court Of The United States.

Dr Martin Luther King understood this necessity better than most of his white supporters. The whole point of his campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience was to produce not only political but spiritual transformation.

Nonviolence certainly ennobles those who practice it, but of equal importance is the impact on those who resist its objectives. Against the hardened shells of unrepentant racists the disciplined sacrifice of the civil rights activists make no impression. But these lost souls are fewer in number than many reformers suppose.

What many knee-jerk racists saw happening in the streets and at lunch counters across the South gave them pause. It made them think. And when they learned about the children killed in the Birmingham bombing, it made them ashamed.

This was precisely the response Dr King was hoping to evoke. The fight he was engaged in was for the souls of the whites who had been raised to see African-Americans as something less than truly human. He knew the battle for racial equality would never be won until his movement had made the process of dehumanisation morally repugnant – not only to decent America, but also to its indecent bigots. Only when these ‘good ole boys’ no longer had the stomach for repression would the Civil War finally be over.

The great tragedy of the Civil Rights Movement was that it required a measure of patience and forbearance beyond the reach of all but a handful of very special human-beings. The race-riots of the mid-Sixties: in Watts, Detroit and Newark; were catastrophic to Dr King’s cause. “Burn, baby, burn!” let White America off the hook. The violence and destruction, no matter how egregiously provoked by racist police officers, reconfirmed all the old racial prejudices.

Ultimately, Dr King’s moral struggle failed. Supreme Court rulings might compel racism to adapt, but they could not kill it.

Something very similar happened in relation to the struggle for the right of women to control their own fertility. The protagonists for abortion never truly plumbed the depths of their opponents’ determination to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision, referred to simply as “Roe v. Wade”, which decriminalised terminations in the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy.

At the heart of the “Pro-Life” cause was something much darker than conservative religious dogma, or even the oppressive designs of “The Patriarchy”. The enduring motivation – which dares not declare itself openly – is the paranoid conviction of male white supremacists that if “their” women are given personal control of their wombs, then white Americans will soon be “outbred” by Blacks and Hispanics.

The family size of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants has been steadily shrinking for generations. The United States of America, which these “WASPs” regard as their own, could not be permitted to fall under the sway of ethnicities typically producing larger families. Not for nothing did the Far-Right demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, greet Black, Hispanic and Jewish counter-demonstrators with chants of: “You will not replace us!”

It is surely instructive that the legal grounds for protecting American women’s right to abortion is located in the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Passed by Congress in 1866, this amendment guaranteed the bodily liberty of America’s former slaves, along with the “equal protection of the laws”.

The Supreme Court has found that without individual privacy, individual liberty is rendered legally unintelligible. Private decisions about what we do with our bodies, and who we choose to perform those acts with, cannot be the proper business of federal and state legislators.

To revoke Roe v. Wade not only strikes at the heart of women’s freedom, but at the bodily freedom of all Americans.

To “breed” slaves it was necessary to impose a tyranny of terrifying intimacy. Neither the womb, nor the child that issued from it, belonged to the female slave. White Supremacy’s need for this intimate tyranny endures, extending now to the wombs of all American women. With the Supreme Court under its sway, the struggle for America’s soul must toil upwards.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 May 2022.

Losing The "Struggle-Session" Over Climate Change.

Blaming And Shaming: A "property owner" is humiliated before the masses during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Critical Race Theory may substitute "White Privilege" for "Class Privilege", but the inescapability of the offending group's responsibility for "oppression" is exactly the same. The self-abasement of School Strike For Climate Auckland for its "racist" crimes against People of Colour is grimly reminiscent of Mao's Red Guards' "struggle sessions" against the enemies of the Revolution. 

THE GREAT WEAKNESS at the heart of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is its wilful ignorance of History and Anthropology. Its demonisation of “Whites”, along with the civilisations they created, owes more to religion than it does to science. A scientist would quietly explain to the adherents of CRT that the whole concept of race – especially when conflated with skin colour – is deeply flawed. That, genetically-speaking, the human species has always been one and indivisible. Culture may have elevated morphological differences into social, economic and political barriers, but such artificial barriers have always been the cause of racism – not the solution to it.

Just this week we have witnessed CRT in action in the “decision” of School Strike For Climate Auckland (SSFCA) to wind itself up. In spite of its obvious success in mobilising tens-of-thousands of mostly secondary-school students; and materially influencing the breadth and speed of the New Zealand Government’s response to the challenges of Anthropogenic Global Warming; SSFCA – “advised” by Maori and Pasifika groups also engaged in fighting Climate Change – declared themselves to be a racist organisation and handed over the entire cause to their slightly darker-skinned comrades.

The statement released by SSFCA was heart-breaking. To find an historical precedent for the document’s abject self-negation and unqualified acknowledgement of guilt it is necessary to go back to the “struggle sessions” of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s. Or, even further back, to the “confessions” tremulously delivered by the broken victims of Joseph Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The shaming and vilification required to reduce these idealistic young people to a state of such utter intellectual prostration proves conclusively that human viciousness is not a trait peculiar to those whose skins are white.

The fate of the School Strike For Climate Movement in New Zealand must now be considered tenuous – at best. Across the country, activists will be struggling to come to terms with SSFCA’s decision. What should they do? Continue mobilising their generation against the greatest existential threat of our age? Do their best to fight off the CRT-based attacks on their alleged “white privilege” and racism? Or, should they, too, hand over the cause to Maori and Pasifika?

The temptation to adopt the latter course will be very strong. Although the School Strike For Climate Movement can put thousands of young people on the street, it is important to bear in mind that the organisational cores of such movements are actually quite small. Certainly, they are small enough to be intimidated and overwhelmed by CRT extremists ready, willing and able to wear them down in struggle-sessions of ever-increasing emotional intensity. If hardened Chinese Communists, veterans of Mao’s Long March, could be broken by such methods, it’s difficult to see Kiwi secondary-school kids resisting such unrelenting ideological pressures for very long.

The natural human response to such tactics is to say “F**k it!” and simply walk away. Sadly, it won’t just be the activists doing the walking. What’s the bet that a substantial number of those who formerly responded to the SSFC Movement’s calls will walk away with them? Word will spread about what happened in Auckland (and, other places) and a bright, sharp, sliver of iron will enter these young New Zealanders’ souls. They will struggle to resist the temptation to make a racist response, and yet, from somewhere deep inside them, the angry cry will rise: “Bastards!”

“You see?”, the CRT extremists will then respond. “We were right all along. The whole SSFC Movement is deeply and irretrievably racist.”

Not that CRT allows “White People” to be anything else. In essence, CRT is a Manichean system of thought. At its heart, an uncompromising struggle between Good and Evil; where Black, indigenous, people of colour – the righteous – are pitted against the incurably wicked White Supremacists. No room in CRT for the notion that what unites the human species is vastly more important than what divides it. Were Dr Martin Luther King still with us to share his dream that: “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”, the CRT extremists would shout him down.

To defeat global warming, humanity must be united. The zealotry of the Critical Race Theorists is making that much more difficult.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 June 2021.

Correcting Corrections - And Its Minister.

My Department Right Or Wrong: Far from “politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters” being a bad thing, their involvement – along with that of the Ombudsman – constitutes a necessary check upon the unreasonable and unlawful exercise of authority over prison inmates by prison staff. A Corrections Minister who lets it be known that he has his prison officers’ backs – no matter what they do, or have done – makes the correction of Corrections well-nigh impossible.

KELVIN DAVIS is a deeply conservative Minister of Corrections. His response to the Waikeria Prison Riot was one of cold fury, and if his behaviour in the House earlier this week is any guide, that fury has not subsided.

During Question Time on Tuesday, Davis arranged for a “patsy question” to be put to him concerning a pamphlet distributed among prisoners by People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA). The group’s February newsletter praised the Waikeria rioters for “reforming the prison to the ground” and its authors quoted approvingly the Maori Party co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, for insisting that: “When injustice becomes law, defiance becomes duty.”

Davis’s parliamentary reply constituted a cutting reproof of Waititi’s words and actions: “I said from the beginning that politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters would only serve to embolden and encourage more events that endanger the lives of prisoners and staff.”

There was more to the Minister’s reaction than mere rhetoric. Concerned that the content of the PAPA pamphlet was sufficiently inflammatory to “incite a riot”, the Department of Corrections passed it on to the Police.

This could prove embarrassing if the matter ever comes to court. The words attributed to Waititi were, as he himself acknowledged, very far from being his own. The quotation, “when injustice becomes law, defiance becomes duty”, is usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, and was often to be found in the statements and speeches of the Black Civil Rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King. In his own words, Dr King also observed that “rioting is the language of the unheard”.

None of which cut any ice with Davis. Even after Rawiri Waititi had negotiated the peaceful surrender of the 17 prison rioters back in January, and personally led them to safety, the Minister of Corrections pointedly refused to acknowledge the role played by Te Paati Māori in bringing the six-day stand-off to an end. As he has done so often during his time as Minister, Davis very publicly aligned himself with the Department of Corrections and its staff, heaping praise upon their professionalism and backing their response to the uprising.

Davis’s deep-seated conservatism has undoubtedly contributed to this “my department right or wrong” approach to the fraught issues of crime and punishment. It is not, however, the correct ministerial response.

The real and constant danger of those charged with running our prisons behaving badly is recognised by the fact that all Members of Parliament are legally empowered to respond to the complaints of prisoners and must be given access to them. These powers would not have been conferred upon the people’s representatives, by the people’s representatives, if they had not recognised the potential for cruel and unusual punishments being inflicted behind high walls and razor-wire – where few sympathetic eyes are watching, and help is very far away.

Far from “politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters” being a bad thing, their involvement – along with that of the Ombudsman – constitutes a necessary check upon the unreasonable and unlawful exercise of authority over prison inmates by prison staff. A Corrections Minister who lets it be known that he has his prison officers’ backs – no matter what they do, or have done – makes the correction of Corrections well-nigh impossible.

Just how far Davis has strayed from the path of impartial ministerial oversight was revealed in his response to a recent judicial finding that Corrections staff at Auckland Women’s Prison had treated inmates in a “cruel, degrading and inhumane manner”. (Note well, this is the judgement of a New Zealand court, formulated after hearing and weighing the evidence of both sides, and that it has the force of law.)

The Minister’s response to the judgement was shocking. Rather than holding the persons responsible to account and insisting that such behaviour must never happen again, the Minister instead opted to treat the judge’s findings as mere “allegations” and asked Corrections to provide him with “their side of the story”.

With the possible exception of the Ministry of Justice itself, no other agency of the state has more cause to respect and uphold the Rule of Law than the Department of Corrections. If Kelvin Davis cannot accept that prison staff, as well as inmates, must conduct themselves lawfully, then he should resign.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 February 2021.