Essays? Videos? Podcasts? Everyone has their preference in terms of how they like to receive and consume information. Thanks to those who have provided their feedback to me on their own preferences. I have figured out a way to provide a transcript for my video commentaries and podcasts, so will be providing a link to accompany each one moving forward.
Steve
Thank you for taking the time to read The Warning today. Our growing community demonstrates that we are not alone when detesting the mayhem, degradations and violence that have been wrought by the words and deeds of MAGA politicians.
I encourage you to find voices that can be trusted because integrity matters and so does the truth. It’s why I recommend you follow
to understand what is happening regarding the legal blackholes consuming Trump as his criminal jeopardy continues to grow. Another voice I look forward to reading is that of . His column from yesterday is exceptional.Let’s talk about slavery and education. First, what Mr. Jabbar writes below is a history lesson and its present day application is profound. Read his wise words that argue ignorance is bondage:
The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance—Through Critical Thinking
Not many people realize that the Statue of Liberty has broken chains at her feet. Originally, the chains were going to be placed in her hand, but the tablet eventually replaced that idea. When the Statue’s unveiling celebration took place on October 28, 1886, women’s groups protested the self-congratulatory nature of the day, given that women were not allowed to vote. Making matters worse, of the 2,500 guests, only two women were allowed to be present. Wives and other women watched from a nearby boat. The symbol of freedom is a woman, but the actual women were not free.
The Statue is the result of Édouard de Laboulaye, a French political activist and French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi. They both wanted to promote abolitionist ideals, so the chains were meant to show true liberty cannot be achieved when enslaving others.
Chains are symbols. Yes, they have been literal in the past, but today those chains are metaphoric. We still enslave when we take away or suppress rights, such as women’s rights over their own bodies, voters’ rights to equal access to vote, and a system of education that teaches children how to think critically so they can make independent choices. Give them facts, give them conflicting ideas, and give them the skills to determine the truth. The inability to think logically is a form of bondage. The refusal to think logically is proof of already being bound.
Think about that as you read today’s articles about attempts to lie, distort, and manipulate that would make Lady Liberty weep in shame.
Honestly, when I first read that my immediate reaction was that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar should run for the United States Senate. Getting out of this societal mess requires a combination of intelligence, common sense, dignity, empathy and wisdom that he clearly possesses. The next part of his essay is long, but I am going to quote it at length before reacting to it because every word of it is very deep and very true. Please read:
SUMMARY: A report by the Tampa Bay Times has exposed just how flawed Florida’s new education policy about teaching slavery—that it somehow may have benefited some Black people—really is, with nearly half of the examples provided by the state having never been enslaved at all. The Times reports that the state listed 16 names when pressed to provide proof of how slavery may have benefitted Black people, but the examples were shoddy at best. A museum dedicated to Lewis Latimer, a man touted by Florida education officials as an example, says he was born to free, self-liberated parents in 1848 before he went on to be an inventor that worked on the development of the telephone. The Museum of the American Revolution described James Forten, another example cited by the state, as a Black entrepreneur born to free parents. Henry Blair, Paul Cuffe and John Chavis were other examples provided by Florida, despite them being born free.”
MY [KAREEM’S] TAKE: The original story I wrote about last week was bad enough, but this new information that the examples used to prove their illogical and racist point reveals how contemptuous of education the Florida Board of Education is.
This seems like a good time to dissect just why the Republican national campaign chose to ignore and even rewrite history is detrimental to basic critical thinking skills in schools. Moms for Liberty and GOP politicians have justified changing curriculum and even firing teachers under the dubious argument that “Woke lessons make White students feel guilty.”
Any critical thinking teacher would point out that that sentence is not an argument but a statement of fact. Some children reportedly have said they feel guilty after learning about America’s racist past and the effects on current society. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
To turn that statement into an argument, they have to first define the vague words “woke lessons.” They actually mean to say, “Lessons about the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the horrors of slavery, the injustice of lynchings, murders of civil rights activists, voter suppression, and how those examples of systemic racism still survive to negatively affect Blacks today can make White students feel guilty.”
Now that we have defined “woke lessons” more specifically, to make it an argument, the arguer must not just state that “White students feel guilty” but tell us that doing so is a bad thing. They’d have to add something like “Lessons about the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, the horrors of slavery, the injustice of lynchings, murders of civil rights activists, voter suppression, and how those examples of systemic racism still survive to negatively affect Blacks today can make White students feel guilty which has a devastating effect on their self-worth.”
That is an argument, which the Florida Board of Education would know if they actually understood how basic essay writing works. You need a clear thesis.
The next step, of course, would be to offer evidence that supports the argument. They’d have to prove (1) that a significant number of White students experienced guilt and (2) this guilt caused significant damage to those students. (I know “significant” is also vague, but this is an article, not a doctoral thesis.)
I couldn’t find any polls or studies that determined how many White students complained of guilt. There is only anecdotal evidence (the worst form of evidence) of parents saying their child felt guilt (or shame). That raises three problems: the number of students complaining so far is small, we can’t be sure they actually felt guilt (because we only have the parents’ word), and that the level of guilt they did feel, if any, caused any damage. For example, feeling guilty can develop empathy, which leads to less conflict and animosity among people. That’s demonstrably a good thing. Studies are available to prove this (“The Surprising Emotion That Can Make You A Better Person”). According to one expert, “Guilt is likely to steer us in a corrective direction if it's well placed.”
So, those pushing censorship and misinformation in the classroom offer no clear argument and no evidence of damage, yet continue to dismantle public education from kindergarten through college based on a faulty premise.
Here’s another disturbing fact that makes their behavior worse: 80% of parents in the U.S. are satisfied with their children’s education (“Politicians and pundits say parents are furious with schools. Polls say otherwise.”). This percentage that has held steady throughout the past several years, even through COVID. How is it, then, that a tiny minority is able to hijack so many other kids’ education?
Conservatives cite another number to make their point: This same Gallup poll revealed that only 42% of American adults are happy with the country’s public schools, a percentage that has decreased several points since 2019. But that figure includes all adults, not just parents, and it doesn’t indicate the reasons for discontent. Conservatives want to imply that the dissatisfaction is because of woke lessons. But it could be the opposite. I’m currently unhappy about children’s education in this country because of all the GOP laws dumbing-down lessons and the realization that the officials in charge (in Florida and Oklahoma, for example) are irrational parasites feeding off the school systems.
People make mistakes. The next step after a mistake has been revealed is to acknowledge and correct it, not stubbornly embrace it as truth. To not correct a mistake emphasizes that, to them, promoting the lie is more important than teaching the truth. This is why DeSantis has defended his school board’s mistakes while at the same time distancing himself from their actions (“Ron DeSantis Defends New Florida Curriculum to Teach Slavery’s ‘Benefit,’ Says ‘Scholars’ Are Behind It”).
When told about the errors, DeSantis said he had nothing to do with the policy (which is clearly a lie since the Florida Board of Education was obviously instituting policies he personally applied in other schools). Then he added that “scholars” put together the standards, which he said were “rooted in whatever is factual.” DeSantis was trying to wrap himself in the Cloak of Invisibility but instead slipped on the Hoodie of Absurdity. Calling them “scholars” doesn’t hold up when they’ve made such egregious factual errors that resulted in even worse conclusions. So, not really “scholars” and not rooted in the “factual.”
It really is incredible. The “Hoodie of Absurdity” indeed.
The basic truth is that Florida students are being marinated in lies and propaganda enroute toward stultifying ignorance about American history that incapacitates them as functioning citizens and sovereign adults who can think. They are indentured to idiocy and idiots. What they venerate despises them back. Take your pick, whether it’s Donald, Tucker, or DeSantis, the common thread amongst the deified is contempt towards the cult. Ignorance is a cancer, and it produces dogmas that erode freedom. It is the gateway to fascism, racism, xenophobia, revanchism and control. What are our children to be? Shouldn’t we want to raise lions? Instead, Florida is producing sheep. It is appalling and deeply un-American. Strong nations and people face their history and past.
The story of humanity is a story of brutality, domination and conquest for most of recorded history. Human beings lived short, hard, and painful existences with no rights, privileges or choices. Death, injustice, suffering, filth, war and disease were daily parts of life for generations of humanity until an idea began to form around the transcendent nature of human dignity and rights.
When the American revolution was won the Marquis de Lafayette exclaimed at Yorktown, “Humanity has its victory. Liberty has a country.” Lafayette was strongly opposed to slavery, and believed deeply that the death of slavery was the birth of the American republic. He accurately predicted the power of the ideals and ideas of freedom could not be long contained, and that the last place in the world to abandon the practice of African slavery would be the American Deep South.
Ultimately, the question of slavery in America was settled by a Civil War that lasted for four years and destroyed the American South. Most people didn’t expect that the war would last very long when it began. In fact, the first battles in Virginia were an occasion for Washington, DC, elites to travel into Virginia to watch the battles unfold over picnic lunches. The carnage quickly disabused the crowds that war was antiseptic and chivalrous. Before it was over, more than one million of the three million men in total who fought under arms, were likely killed in a nation of 34 million. Those numbers mark the American Civil War as among the most violent in world history. It was the first war of the industrial age, and it prefaced the battlefield horrors of the twentieth century.
When the Confederacy was destroyed and Blacks were emancipated there was a period of massive change and political progress that saw southern Blacks become members of the US Senate and House. The era was called “Reconstruction,” and it required the presence of the US Army in American states as an occupying force. Ultimately, the occupation ended. The corruption of the election of 1876, the centennial of the country, ended Reconstruction, and along with it, the aspirations of millions of Black Americans who were subjugated under a brutal system of apartheid that was known as “Jim Crow.”
Jim Crow was real and it happened. In fact, it inspired the Nazis when they were writing the Nuremberg Race Laws that stripped Jews of their nationality and civil rights — albeit the Nazis thought that the South’s laws were a bit extreme.
By the way, who gets to decide that America’s children are too weak and addled to know this information? Can it actually be possible that their judgement and reasoning is so broken that they believe that not knowing will prevent the atrocities from happening again? What do they think the danger of knowledge about injustice might do?
Perhaps the worry is less about the past than the present, and a continued opposition to the idea that “all men” means “all people” in 21st century America.
When Martin Luther King looked at the end of his life from atop the mountain from which he saw a just society, he did not speak of recrimination and revenge, but rather of hope. The refusal to acknowledge the past makes it impossible to build a future on top of it. It warps reality and turns politics into a cartoon, It elevates the mean, stupid and malicious, while drowning the kind, smart and decent. Knowledge is strength, and ultimately, possibility. Optimism about tomorrow requires a belief that what has been broken can be healed, and that what was once, can change. This is elemental towards understanding the American story, spirit and character. These things are above politics. They unite us as a people, and though we might not see it in this moment, we are in fact a distinct people. We are Americans.
What binds us is a perfect idea imperfectly lived by a nation of flawed people who have never been able to put down the sins of their parents when it comes to race in America. Ultimately, there will be a generation of Americans that does. When they do it will be because they understand that they owe their descendants more than they owe the failures of the past.
America’s past is glorious and tragic. It is peaceful and violent. It is gentle and harsh. It is filled with long dark nights of racial terror, murder, rape and violence. It is filled with injustice. Yet it is filled with a remarkable and inexorable momentum towards better as evidenced through hard facts.
Free people must be able to think. They must be able to see what is true and real. They must know what is behind them. They must know the monsters are real. They always have been, and always will be.
There has always been a fight between right and wrong and good and evil. Knowing about it doesn’t change that fact, while not knowing might. Thus far, evil has never long prevailed.
This should be read by this extraordinary man to a joint session of Congress just for starters. If that can’t be arranged , then President Biden should read it for him as a preamble to his next State of The Union address.
Then it should be aired as a commercial on Fox News nightly for a month. I can’t imagine any thinking and feeling American who would not be willing to help defray that cost.
That might begin the reconciliation that follows truth.
Exceptional piece on the part of both authors, and should be disseminated far and wide, on our shores and globally, for this work contains everything that needs saying, encapsulates impeccably our past, our present, and provides us glimpses into our possible futures.