Daily Archives: January 27, 2022

For the first time, the United States has been added to the list of backsliding democracies. And majority of young people no longer believe that they will do better than their parents, a key indicator of faith in the American dream.

Few may doubt that the United States is in one of the darkest, most challenging times in its political history, one rife with cynicism and pessimism. Fourteen months after the election, many in the Republican Party still do not accept that Joe Biden won the presidential election of 2020.

But history shows that politics change, sometimes beyond expectations. Fewer than 10 years ago, few may have thought that American democracy would be as imperiled as it is now. Likewise, positive political shifts that were once hard to imagine have become widely accepted, including the abolition of slavery, universal adult suffrage, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, easy access to birth control, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.

Time and again, politics has changed in unlikely directions, sometimes resulting in heartening new political horizons.

In American politics, long periods of political order and stability are regularly followed by shorter bursts of significant political change. There have been six great political realignments in the history of American politics, and they have typically occurred during major crises such as the Great Depression or the Civil War.

Recognized realignments include the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, which reversed a trend of growing national power and higher taxes that had dominated politics since the founding of the nation. Andrew Jacksons election in 1828 led to universal suffrage for white males, increasing the electorate substantially.

Abraham Lincolns victory in 1860 led to the abolition of slavery, and national power again became dominant when the Union prevailed over the Confederacy in the Civil War. Following William McKinleys win in 1896, progressive reforms such as the federal income tax and antitrust laws were instituted to address a growing wealth gap.

Franklin Delano Roosevelts election in 1932 led the national government to regulate the economy, creating a vast web of New Deal programs that established for the first time a social safety net for people devastated by the Great Depression. The funding for many of those programs was slashed and national power was devolved back to state and local governments after Ronald Reagans landslide victory in 1980.

Adjustments in political times recur every 40 years or so in U.S. politics, and it is long overdue. The periods prior to realignment are typically quite politically unstable and politically divisive. For example, mob violence between pro and anti-slavery forces broke out prior to Lincolns election in a series of incidents known as Bleeding Kansas, which has been called a small civil war.

Food riots and labor strife were rising prior to McKinleys election, due to the economic panic of 1893. Hunger marches and makeshift housing called Hoovervilles emerged across the nation, named as a jab at then President Herbert Hoovers inability to address the economic fallout of the Great Depression prior to Franklin Roosevelts election.

Radical politics often become more visible in the mainstream. For instance, in normal times, it would be unusual in mainstream American politics for a Democratic socialist to gain as much traction as Sen. Bernie Sanders did during the 2016 presidential election, gaining over 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries.

Similarly, communist organizing was as strong as it has ever been in the United States during the 1930s and other revolutionary groups gained great visibility in the 1970s.

It is quite possible that the United States is in the midst of a major political realignment. It is true that a majority of Republicans continue to remain loyal to former President Donald Trump, believing that he won the election of 2020. Rep. Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney stood alone on the Republican side of the House chamber during recent events commemorating last years attack on the Capitol.

And yet, the evidence suggests that Biden defeated Trump soundly. The one-term Trump presidency yielded few major legislative victories apart from cutting taxes and judicial appointments.

Scholars have called this kind of political failure a disjunctive presidency, to indicate that the coalition supporting a long dominant party is fragmenting, a phenomenon that typically occurs right before a major political realignment.

Elected in 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter was a failed, one-term president who could not hold together the fragmenting New Deal governing coalition, right before the Reagan landslide in 1980 ushered in years of Republican dominance based on small government, lower taxes and devolution of power from the national government to the states.

Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats came to dominate politics after winning over 60 percent of the popular vote in 1936, and for many years thereafter.

Despite these recurring patterns across U.S. history, many people may find it impossible to imagine a different political order other than the one they are in at the moment.

Political history provides reasons for citizens to hold on through challenging political times. To be sure, it is hard to live through political instability, not knowing what will come next. But the certainty offered by cynicism and pessimism, however comforting in the short term, leads to political dead ends in the long run.

Historical patterns suggest that it is far better to have faith that this political darkness will end. But faith without works is not enough. Freedom from slavery, the minimum wage, and votes for women, were only won after years of organizing, resistance and activism.

Cynicism and pessimism make such work impossible. Though it may be painful, democracy requires nothing less.

Susan Burgess is a distinguished professor of political science at Ohio University, a senior professional lecturer at DePaul University and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project. She wrote this for The Fulcrum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems.

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Susan Burgess: Keep the faith: History shows dark night of politics will end - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

Conservative groups across the US, often linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors, are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.

Literature has already been removed from schools in Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Librarians and teachers warn the trend is on the increase, as groups backed by wealthy Republican donors use centrally drawn up tactics and messaging to harangue school districts into removing certain texts.

In October, the Texas state representative Matt Krause sent a list of 850 books to school districts, asking that they report how many copies they have of each title and how much had been spent on those books.

The Texas Tribune reported that the books included two by Ta-Nehisi Coates; LGBT Families by Leanne K Currie-McGhee; and Pink is a Girl Color and Other Silly Things People Say, a childrens book by Stacy and Erik Drageset. Krauses list sparked panic in schools, and by December a district in San Antonio said it was reviewing 414 titles in its libraries.

In Pennsylvania, the Central York school board banned a long list of books, almost entirely titles by, or about, people of color, including books by Jacqueline Woodson, Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X Kendi, and childrens titles about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Lets just call it what it is every author on that list is a Black voice, one teacher told the York Dispatch.

Four high schools in Utahs Canyons school district removed copies of at least nine books, the Deseret News reported, including Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe; the Bluest Eye, a book by the Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison that addresses racial and gender oppression; and Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez, a story about romance in a racially divided 1930s Texas.

Groups purporting to be grassroots efforts have frequently led the charge, petitioning school boards or elected officials to remove certain books. Though some of these organizations present themselves as a local effort that sprang up around groups of parents united behind a cause, many of the groups involved in banning books are in fact linked, and backed by influential conservative donors.

Most of the books relate to race or gender equality, at a time when some Republicans are mounting an effort to prevent teaching on race in schools by launching a loud campaign against critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Associations Office for Intellectual Freedom, said the number of attempts to ban books had soared through 2021.

Whats unique is it appears to be an organized effort by a number of advocacy groups to activate members in local chapters to challenge books in school libraries and public libraries in the United States, she said.

Weve noted that there are a number of groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education that have particular views on what is appropriate for young people, and theyre trying to implement their agenda particularly in schools, but also taking their concerns to public libraries as well.

Caldwell-Stone said ALA received 156 book challenges an attempt to remove or restrict one or more books in 2020. In the last three months of 2021 alone, the organization saw 330 book challenges.

In most incidents there is a common format. According to the conservative groups, one parent of a child at school has spotted an allegedly unsuitable book, and has raised the alarm. But the movement is far from organic.

The name Moms for Liberty might suggest a homely, kitchen-table effort. In reality, Moms for Liberty is associated with other supposed grassroots groups backed by conservative donors, who appear to be driving the book-banning effort.

Moms for Liberty groups are promoted on the website of Parents Defending Education (PDE), another conservative group, and in May Moms for Liberty joined with PDE to write a letter to Miguel Cardona, the US education secretary, expressing concerns over federal efforts to include teaching about the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in US society.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment.

Asra Nomani, PDEs vice-president for strategy and investigations, has appeared on Fox News to rail against some books, including Woke Baby and Gender Queer, being in Virginia libraries, and PDE carries a list of books it deems problematic on its website.

PDE, which launched in spring of 2021, has emerged as one of the key organizations in the conservative fight for influence in public schools. The group describes itself as a grassroots organization, but has ties to deep-pocket conservative money and influence.

PDEs president, Nicole Neilly, was previously the executive director of the Independent Womens Forum and worked at the Cato Institute, a rightwing thinktank co-founded by Republican mega-donor Charles Koch. The Intercept reported that the IWF has received large donations from Republican donor Leonard Leo, a former vice-president of the Koch-funded Federalist Society who advised Donald Trump on judicial appointments.

PDEs website offers templates as to how aggrieved people can get involved. The group is behind an effort to create a web of coordinated Instagram pages that highlight perceived liberal bias at specific schools, and offers a step-by-step guide to doing the same, from how to create a specific gmail address to match the mission to how to describe the instagram account. The guide advises: For the full name field, use Woke at [school name]. For the username field, use wokeat[school name].

PDE, which has also railed against critical race theory, even tells parents they should spy on teachers online activity to seek incriminating material.

Look at the social media pages of teachers and administrators at your school. They are often quite proud of what theyre doing and sometimes post incriminating statements or materials, PDEs website says.

Another aim, beyond banning books, is exposed in PDEs efforts to encourage conservative parents to run for school boards an often ignored position that wields a considerable amount of power.

PDE offers a guide on how parents can run, and while also describing how to gain influence on Parent Teacher Student Associations. It even offers specific questions disgruntled parents can pose to their school boards.

PDE did not respond to a request for comment.

No Left Turn in Education, whose chapters are promoted on PDEs website, is another of the groups leading the charge. No Left Turns website contains a list of more than 60 books it deems inappropriate.

Again, the group has links to deep-pocketed conservatives. The Milwaukee Journal reported that Elana Fishbein, No Left Turn in Educations founder, has provided free legal representation for parents wishing to challenge school districts. According to Journal, most of those lawyers are affiliated with the Liberty Justice Center and Pacific Legal Foundation, which receive funding from the prominent GOP donor Dick Uihlein, a Wisconsin-based billionaire.

No Left Turn in Education did not respond to requests for comment.

The banning of books about race or LGBTQ issues does not just affect those communities, said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association. It also withholds the opportunity for all students to learn an honest and accurate truth of our history.

Censoring the full history of America impacts all of us as a country, Anderson said.

If were not willing to embrace the beauty of America, which is that our diversity is our strength, then we weaken the core idea of America. So its offensive, certainly, to people of color and other Americans who have traditionally been marginalized, but ultimately were short-changing every single student if we dont tell the truth.

In Texas, Krause, who was running for state attorney general when he released his list of 850 books he has since dropped out of the race did not respond to the Guardians questions about how he came up with his list of books.

Krause told Education Week he chose to act after school boards began reviewing books of an inappropriate nature.

None of us wants grossly inappropriately material in our schools, he said.

As the conservative effort has grown, there has been pushback in many states, from authors, teachers, librarians and students. Carolyn Foote, a library advocate who co-founded the group FReadom Fighters to push back against banning efforts, said the conservative efforts represent a danger to democracy.

The supreme court protects young peoples right to choose library materials to read as a first amendment right. It also is growing to include more and more titles, which is concerning, and a minority of parents are impacting all students, Foote said.

The Pennsylvania ban was overturned in September 2021 after students protested outside their York County high school and outside school board meetings. In Virginia, high school students managed to overturn the Spotsylvania book ban in similar fashion, while Caldwell-Stone said the ALA will continue to highlight the book-banning efforts.

We dont oppose the ability of parents to guide their childrens reading, she said.

What we have deep concerns about is one parent, or one small group of parents, making decisions for an entire community about what is appropriate reading, based on their own moral and religious values.

Continue reading here:

US conservatives linked to rich donors wage campaign to ban books from schools - The Guardian

As businesses plan for the new year ahead, we've taken a look at what to expect in employment law in 2022.

Employment Law Bill

In the Queen's Speech in December 2019, the government announced that a new Employment Bill would be brought forward to seek to protect and enhance workers' rights post Brexit. While we still do not have a timetable for the long awaited Employment Bill, government has confirmed that it intends to bring it forward "when Parliamentary time allows" and it is anticipated that it will be published at some point in 2022.

The measures expected to be included in the Bill are wide-ranging (see Horizon Scanner) and we have highlighted some of the key developments below.

New Single Enforcement Body

In June 2021 the government published its response to the consultation on the proposal to create a single enforcement body to offer better protection for workers in relation to National Minimum Wage, holiday pay, Statutory Sick Pay, modern slavery and labour exploitation. The new Single Enforcement Body will bring three existing bodies into one organisation with wider powers to protect employment rights and improve employers' compliance.

The statutory provisions to create the new Single Enforcement Body are expected to be included in the awaited Employment Bill.

Flexible Working

The government consultation on flexible working closed last month and we now await their response. The consultation considered five key proposals: making the right to request flexible working a day one right, whether the eight business reasons for refusing a request all remain valid, requiring the employer to suggest alternatives, the administrative process underpinning the right to request flexible working, and requesting a temporary arrangement.

It also looked to consider how to make the most of the lessons learnt from working practices during lockdown and employers' responses to new approaches to working and to consider how to secure genuinely flexible working friendly cultures across and within organisations. Last month CIPD published new guidance on flexible working which was commissioned by the government's flexible working taskforce. (See Update: New Guidance on Hybrid Working)

Depending on the response to the consultation, any measures proposed on flexible working are likely to be included in the Employment Bill.

Harassment in the Workplace

In July 2021 the government announced it will introduce a new mandatory duty on employers to protect workers from harassment and victimisation in the workplace and strengthen and clarify laws on third-party harassment. It is expected that employers will be required to take "all reasonable steps" to prevent harassment and that an incident will need to have occurred before an individual can make a claim.

Although we still do not have a date for the new mandatory duty, it is expected in 2022 and will ensure that harassment will be very much on the agenda for businesses in the forthcoming year. Employers should now be strengthening their efforts to create an environment in which harassment complaints can be reported and investigated properly and deliver or refresh training for staff.

National Disability Strategy

In July 2021 the government published a National Disability Strategy setting out various steps that it will take to remove barriers faced by disabled people in all aspects of their lives including work, justice, politics, transport, housing and leisure services. A government consultation on workforce disability reporting (voluntary and mandatory reporting) has recently been published and will close in March 2022 so we may expect to see the government's response to it later in the year.

Social awareness and a greater understanding of disability issues will continue to grow into 2022 and employers will want to ensure that their policies and practices reflect that knowledge and understanding, keeping disability inclusivity firmly on the agenda for the coming year and beyond.

Diversity and Inclusion

Following on from the FCA's discussion paper in July 2021 on diversity and inclusion in the financial services sector it is likely that the regulator will explore the introduction of new rules and regulations designed to put D&I at the forefront of corporate governance in the sector moving forward. While there has been widespread discussion within the financial services sector and from other professional regulators, this is a subject which resonates across every sector.

Changing customer and shareholder expectations is driving a culture of encouraging diversity and inclusion in the workplace. While many organisations now have strategies in place to promote D&I, there is still a visible gap between the aims of the businesses and the reality in the workplace. Board rooms will want to ensure that D&I is very much on the agenda for 2022.

Expected Cases

Our Horizon Scanner has a round-up of future key cases for 2022.

Originally posted here:

What's ahead in employment law for 2022? - Lexology

By Steven Monacelli

A report commissioned by Mayor Eric Johnson about the Dallas workforce released in November revealed only 40 percent of jobs in Dallas pay more than $32,000 significantly less than the family-sustaining wage of $42,000 or more identified by the report and that Black workers hold just 15 percent of those jobs despite making up 25 percent of the population. This job and income inequity is a part of a broader constellation of racial inequities solidified over decades of slavery and Jim Crow oppression that persists to this day despite significant federal, state and local reform.

As the City of Dallas continues to engage in conversations regarding racial inequity and what can be done from the perspective of local government, a nonprofit organization called OneTen is hoping to tackle the issue of racial wealth inequality from the perspective of the private sector. To achieve that, OneTen has built a network of employers, education and training programs, and community organizations who work together to address the various barriers that limit the access to opportunity for Black job seekers.

OneTen says 79% of family-sustaining jobs in the United States require a four-year college degree, a credential 76% of Black adults in America lack. This is a massive barrier that keeps Black families from accumulating wealth. It isnt one that Black families face exclusively. Nationally, 66% of White adults in the workforce lack a four-year degree. Yet Black families have $155,000 less net worth than White families, reflecting the barriers to developing long term family wealth that are particular to the Black community.

OneTen sees this in large part as a problem of unnecessary credentialism and does not believe pushing for more four-year degrees is the necessary solution. Rather, OneTen advocates for employers to shift focus from credentials to skills and replace four-year degree requirements with clearly defined competencies that will open up new pathways for employment. They estimate that 4 million jobs could be re-credentialed to remove the four-year degree.

To date, OneTen has secured buy-in from 57 major employers and 53 education and training programs across the nation. In the Dallas area, 25 employers have agreed to eliminate college degree requirements from family-supporting career opportunities. They will work with OneTen to connect prospective employees who face barriers to employment with community partners who can provide additional assistance such as childcare.

The CEO of OneTen, Maurice Jones, spoke with DW about what OneTen is doing nationally and locally to achieve the bold goal of hiring or promoting one million Black individuals who do not have four-year college degrees into family-sustaining careers over the next 10 years.

You cannot address the wealth disparity in this country without quality jobs being a strategy that you pursue aggressively, Jones said. Were not trying to pit skills against degrees. What were saying is that there are multiple pathways to getting the skills that youre looking for in the workforce.

Jones laid out the example of the growing need for capable computer coders. Instead of focusing on credentials, a company would focus on the skills needed to do the job. We would work to match them with coding boot camps and other organizations who can help them find Black talent. And that prospective talent might need childcare, so we can help them with that as well.

In 2021, OneTen measured 17,000 hires and 4,000 promotions toward their goal of one million Black individuals with a family-sustaining career. As their coalition of employers grows so will the employment numbers. Its a likely scenario. Many companies have taken more aggressive steps to promote a diverse and inclusive workforce in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, and many other Black lives. And many employers are trying to hire as fast as they can.

Weve got 10 million jobs open around the country. Not only do we have unfinished business, but we are leaving so much talent on the sidelines because of self-inflicted wounds, Jones said. I think we have a unique moment where theres a recognition of the need for the private sector to do more to make their workplaces more inclusive and diverse and to do more to help the country to become a more perfect union.

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OneTen Network Aims To Close Racial Wealth Gap With Skills-Focused Hiring - Dallasweekly

Illustration by Ryan Inzana.

The United States is the product of an accountability movement that was never fully realized. Thomas Paine called the country into being with Common Sense, a pamphlet that invited the beleaguered residents of 13 British colonies on the eastern shore of North America to indulge their fury at the imperial abuses of King George III. He ridiculed the men of passive tempers who look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, Come, come, we shall be friends again for all this. Rejecting the prospect of reconciliation with the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land, Paine encouraged Americans to ask themselves pointed questions:

Adapted from John Nicholss new book, Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis (Verso).

Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

This was about more than refusing to shake hands with the murderers, however. It was, Paine recognized, about forging a new mentality that would see beyond the lie of reconciliation with those who abused positions of authority to the detriment of the people.

No excuses. No forgiveness. The stakes were too high for that. The American people needed to make a clean break with their imperial overlords, and with the foolishness that would suggest that a relationship so broken as that of Great Britain and the United States could be mended. A failure to do so would squander the power to begin the world over again. When that revolution prevailed, Paine entertained the hope the new nation might form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth.

Unfortunately, that never happened. George III and the petty royalists of Great Britain were repudiated. But then the petty royalists of the United States took over. Men in wigs, enslavers from the South and slave traders from the North, wrote a constitution that embraced the sin of human bondage, denied the franchise to the vast majority of Americans, and saddled the new republic with an economic system so crudely rapacious that it instantaneously made a lie of the founding premise that all men are created equal. As Gore Vidal observed, Long before Darwin the American ethos was Darwinian. The drafters of the Constitution, who excluded Paine and the truest revolutionaries from the process, set the United States on a course that would see genocide, civil war, systemic racism and sexism, economic inequality on a feudal scale, and social divisions so stark that they would be exploited, decade after decade, century after century, by charlatans who capitalized on a system that invited their villainy. The worst of their kind, a royalist who worshipped the queen of England, came to power in 2017 after losing the popular vote. Taking advantage of an Electoral College that permitted losers to become winners, Donald John Trump claimed a presidency for which he was wholly unfit, and proceeded on a ruinous course that would eventually see the country ravaged by disease, mass unemployment, and seemingly irreconcilable division.

Trumps presidency was the ugliest manifestation of a system where the rot had grown so severe, so overwhelming, that after Covid-19 hit, when hundreds of thousands were dying, when millions were sickened, and when tens of millions were left jobless, the stock markets soared to new highs. While nurses risked their lives with inadequate personal protective equipment against a pandemic, while bus drivers fell ill because they were required to work as the disease spread, while immigrant workers in meat processing plants died because their employers failed to put adequate protections in place, billionaires retreated to second and third homes and monitored the steady increase in their fortunes from federal emergency relief packages that literally redistributed wealth upward. Trumps malfeasance was jarring, as Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington noted in the midst of the crisis. States have been sort of left to play out The Hunger Games on procuring swabs, she said. I mean, literally, we have governors, my governor included, calling random people in China to try to get swabs off the back of a truck somewhere and get them here, only to find out then that perhaps theyre not validated; theyre not good for use. Same thing with PPE. I just think that the president has sort of come to this place where hes willing to sacrifice peoples lives.

But it wasnt just the president; it was cabinet members, senators, governors, media personalities, and CEOs. The whole corrupt system was exposed. Yet it did not fall; it ran according to plan. In a moment of crisis, the rich and the powerful peddled the fantasy that no one was immune to the threateven as they boosted their own immunity with fresh infusions of the wealth and privilege that had always protected them from the misery they imposed upon others. As the pandemic was being declared, Naomi Klein predicted how things would play out. The Feds first move was to pump $1.5 trillion into the financial markets, with more undoubtedly on the way, she explained. But if youre a worker, especially a gig worker, theres a very good chance youre out of luck. And without comprehensive bailouts for workers, we can expect more bankruptcies and more homelessness down the road. Current Issue

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Klein knew what to look for because she wrote the book on how economic and political elites exploit crises to implement their cruelest agendas. Look, we know this script, she explained in March 2020. In 2008, the last time we had a global financial meltdown, the same kinds of bad ideas for no-strings-attached corporate bailouts carried the day, and regular people around the world paid the price. And even that was entirely predictable. Thirteen years ago, I wrote a book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, [which] described a brutal and recurring tactic by right-wing governments. After a shocking eventa war, coup, terrorist attack, market crash, or natural disasterthey exploit the publics disorientation, suspend democracy, push through radical free-market policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.

Because Klein had sparked an understanding of how disaster capitalists and their neoliberal allies in positions of power employ the shock doctrine in times of crisis, and because Americans who remembered the exploitation of the 2008 meltdown were speaking up, there was a hope that 2020 would be different. But it was not to be. Despite the jarring circumstances of the first months of 2020, the only change was that those who had robbed us before upped the ante. The public largesse was again grabbed up by the elites. More misery was imposed on the working class. More lies were told. More of the feeble systems for maintaining health and security in capitalist countries were undermined. More people got sick. More people died.

How does that happen in the richest country in the history of the world? Bernie Sanders asked when we first spoke about the pandemic in April 2020.

Why does it always go this way?

Essential workers: Nurses in Wuhan assemble plastic face shields at a hospital for Covid-19 patients. (Chinatopix via AP)

The answer is summed up in a word: impunity. The United Nations defines impunity as the impossibility, de jure or de facto, of bringing the perpetrators of violations to accountwhether in criminal, civil, administrative, or disciplinary proceedingssince they are not subject to any inquiry that might lead to their being accused, arrested, tried and, if found guilty, sentenced to appropriate penalties, and to making reparations to their victims.

With only the rarest and most insufficient exceptions, economic and political elites in the United States have enjoyed a regal level of impunity for more than 230 years. The founders exempted themselves from their own promise that all men are created equal and reaped the benefits of an economic system built on slavery, child labor, wage theft, and corruption. It took a civil war to undo the cruelest of their establishments: the institution of human bondage. When the war was over, former enslavers would, after a brief period of moral reconstruction, renew their fortunes by establishing a brutal system of Jim Crow segregation that was enforced by the night raids of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and chain-gang incarceration. So confident were they in their impunity that they erected statues honoring traitors, which only now are being torn down by the brave champions of a new American revolution that begins with the basic premise that Black Lives Matter.

The cruelest compromises of our founding were written so deeply into the official record that well into the nations third century, schoolchildren were taught that the delegates who forged the three-fifths compromise and counted African Americans as less than human were simply practical men who did what they had to do to get a country up and running. Those same children were taught that there was something great about the 19th-century compromises negotiated by Henry Clay, which doomed millions of men, women, and children to continue in a condition of chained and whipped servitude.

There has been no real accountability for sins against humanity in American history. What accountability did the slave sellers and slave buyers face in a postCivil War era when the United States failed even to deliver on the promise of 40 acres and a mule? They undid democracy, claimed statehouses and congressional seats through rigged white primary elections, and ushered in a new age of American apartheid that enforced separate-but-equal racism, exploitation of sharecroppers, and right-to-work profiteering.

What accountability did Strom Thurmond of South Carolina face for filibustering in favor of racism as a young legislator? He served in the US Senate until he was 100 years old and was honored at the end of his tenure with a celebration during which the minority leader of the chamber warmly recalled a 1948 presidential campaign in which Thurmond declared, All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches. Not in 1952, or 1962 or 1972, but in 2002 did the top Republican in the Senate, Trent Lott of Mississippi, gleefully announce, I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. Were proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldnt have had all these problems over all these years, either.

Thats impunity, andwhile Lott was ultimately eased out of his positionour political leaders continue to practice it with abandon. If you want to know how the United States ended up in the middle of a pandemic with a swindler president who could not be bothered to take the basic steps that were required to save lives, dont start with Trump. Start, perhaps, with Richard Nixon, the Republican president who skipped town before the House of Representatives could impeach him for the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Watergate scandal. Nixon collected a presidential pardon and a pension and lived the rest of his life in luxury, writing books, commenting on foreign affairs, and trying to buff his reputation as an elder statesman. He could have been held to account with the completion of the House impeachment trial and conviction by the Senate. Instead, the Democrats who controlled those chambers conspired with the unelected Republican who succeeded Tricky Dick, Gerald Ford, to let Nixon off the hook with the cruelest lie of all: the promise of healing.

No one was healed. No lessons were learned. Barely six years after Nixon flew off to his beachside mansion at San Clemente, another charlatan from California assumed the presidency and began steering the country into a scandal that made Watergate look like filching a pack of gum from the grocery store. The Iran-Contra Affair was a secret U.S. arms deal that traded missiles and other arms to free some Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, but also used funds from the arms deal to support armed conflict in Nicaragua, the History Channel tells us. The controversial dealand the ensuing political scandalthreatened to bring down the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But, of course, it didnt. Even with clear evidence of explicit and extended lawbreaking by Reagan and those around him, the Democrats who controlled the House and the Senate again let a Republican president off the hook. No impeachment, no trial, no constitutional consequences.

Well, yes, of course Reagan broke laws. He violated his oath of office. He admitted as much: Reagan himself acknowledged that selling arms to Iran was a mistake during his testimony before Congress, we are told at history.com. However, his legacy, at least among his supporters, remains intactand the Iran-Contra Affair has been relegated to an often-overlooked chapter in U.S. history. Intact, indeed.

When even the authors of presidential legacies stop trying to set things right, impunity locks in. The misdemeanors are neglected, unless they are salacious enough to stir the imaginations of Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich. High crimes are charged, sometimes, but they are invariably dismissed by senators who embrace a political code of silence every bit as rigidly as characters in a Godfather movie. The Constitution is a shredded document. The courts are packed with partisan judicial activists who protect their benefactors in the legislative and executive branches. The media can rarely be bothered with anything more than gossip.

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The dumbing down of political morality in the United States didnt begin with Donald Trump; it ended with him. Not because the process was complete (rest assured that things can get worse) but because it seemed to have passed the point of no return. When a president presides over mass death and mass unemployment and remains politically viable enough to claim the nomination of a major party and to mount a reelection bid with even vaguely credible numbers, the rot in the system runs so deep that those who maintain it cannot be rehabilitated.

Thats what makes this moment so haunting. We know that without accountability for the coronavirus criminals, the past will repeat itself, with a more despicable president mishandling a more daunting pandemic, with more reckless jurists striking down more necessary health orders, with greedier CEOs cashing in on starker misery.

This is the point when we have to break the pattern. The guilty men and women have to be removed. Where appropriateand necessarythey can be punished.

The harder they fall: Only now are statues honoring traitors being torn down, thanks to the brave protesters who declare that Black Lives Matter. (Ryan M. Kelly / AFP via Getty Images)

Nothing should be off the table in this countrys response to coronavirus criminals and pandemic profiteers: electoral humiliations, impeachments, investigations, indictments, seizures of assets, jail terms. But we should recognize in seeking all of these legitimate remedies that there is a point to the accountability process that has only a little to do with the present and quite a bit more to do with posterity. Winston Churchill was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that the use of recriminating about the pastis to enforce effective action at the present. And it is effective action in the present that can transform the future.

People whose loved ones died in nursing homes ravaged by preventable outbreaks of the coronavirus can be forgiven for wanting to see officials penalized for their failure to place health and safety above politics and profits. Families who buried parents and grandparents who died because irresponsible leaders failed to lead in imposing mask mandates and social distancing, or because political hacks in judicial robes blocked responsible leaders from imposing those mandates, may well be inclined to demand specific punishments for the reprobates who rejected science and human decency. And workers who have been exposed to illness and death by billionaireswho built their fortunes during a pandemic will be excused for entertaining vengeful sentiments.

But that cant be the end game. There is temporary satisfaction that comes when a powerful figure is subjected to transitory chastisement, and we need not apologize for seeking it. But we must also keep our eye on the prize of transformational justice.

The achievement of that justice requires us to stand at the intersection of punishment and policy. What we recognize when we are in this position is that accountability, done right, drives change.

Trump and his Republican associates should face all the legal and constitutional penalties that their crimes demand. So, too, should the Democrats who transgressed. And so, too, should the reckless billionaires and pharmaceutical extortionists. But we dare not stop there. The pandemic profiteers must be banishedforever ejected from the political and economic future of the nation they have so crudely used and abused.

There are constitutional provisions and statutes that bar political wrongdoers from future service, and that can even bar corporate wrongdoers from future gain-taking. But far more vital is the social shaming that recognizes these evildoers must never again appear on our ballots, occupy positions of public trust, or be accepted as purveyors of sage wisdom on how best to govern. They cant be rehabilitated, as Nixon almost was. Or remembered fondly, as Reagan was. They cant be allowed to evolve into the elder statesmen that the miserable presidents of the turn of the last centuryBill Clinton and George W. Bushaspire to become. They must carry the albatross of shame from this time forth and forevermore.

More:

The Making of a Coronavirus-Criminal Presidency - The Nation

by Gary Kennedy

The views of the author in this column are not necessarily those of The Town Line newspaper, its staff and board of directors.

The past couple of years have been hard for us. Our veterans have found it to be extremely so. I have lost many friends and more are preparing to meet their maker. Its a time when we pray and hope that for the most part we got it right. Its a heart breaker to say good bye and rely on what comes next. Its a time to make amends and seek forgiveness for those things we know shouldnt have occurred or we should have not been part of or allowed. I had someone I have loved for a very long time ask me, Gary do you think that I have been a good enough person to be allowed to have another chance to prove myself? What would your answer be? Mine was, you have always had a good heart and never went out of your way to hurt anyone. You gave when others were in need. Im sure those things are taken into account and used in the ultimate assessment.

I find myself staring up at the night sky often now with extreme imagination and wonder. I am amazed at the beauty and perfect harmony the celestial bodies display when the sky is clear and my heart is wide open with questions.

I try my best to make sure they are represented in a now political way and that promises that are made are promises that are kept; whether youre a Democrat or Republican. I believe after God and family should come those that have given their all so that we may live. There is so much we can and should do for each other but it seems we are still doing battle with those who want things to change in illogical ways. We have our politicians choosing causes to wrap their political position around. For the most part we agree on most things but we cant look at each other and agree. To each his or her own seems to be the way of things.

Think about all the negatives we are living through and see how many of those things we actually agree with. We want our children educated properly; we want food and clean air and water. We all want work and opportunity and the chance to accomplish our dreams. Every country has its venue and has to transcend the growing pains that walk hand in hand with accomplishment. We are aware that some countries live under extreme and severe conditions. No one knows this any better than our veterans who have lived and died in some of these sad depraved places and conditions. Soldiers see it all and for the most part wish they could really make a change. We can influence but the people have to be the ones who see change through. We are undergoing some of those ourselves currently.

Recently, Covid has brought us together as well as torn us apart. We are a nation of freedom living under a constitution that some brilliant men with hindsight and foresight put together to salvage almost any situation for their people and their need for guidance and direction in future events. There are those who would toy with that which has been proven to be an honorable document built on principle and the love of God and our fellow man. Unfortunately, it is being put to the test currently by some who hate America and would love to see us fail. It saddens me and all the veterans that I know who have given their best to eradicate the worst, thus allowing the future to have the chance at the best and to prosper.

War in the world creates Veterans Administrations and those V.A.s need the support of honest men and women to carry on and show the future that what has been promised will come to pass. If you have no fear of the Russians sitting on the Ukraine border or Chinas threats on a great place such as Taiwan, then you had better learn another language because that is the only way you will possibly survive. Along with our government, our Veterans Administration has been allowed to become weak and undependable. We hear all the time that our veterans are really receiving the best care possible. If you are involved and look more carefully you will see the sad state of affairs we are going through.

Our southern border is open with millions of aliens coming through with drugs, child abuse, prostitution and crime of all sorts. Many of these are criminals who have been convicted and released by our courts. At last count there were people from 150 plus different countries coming through the Texas Wall. The local law enforcement has fought day and night to stop this but they keep on coming. At the cost of our arm forces and veterans these aliens are being supported. Inflation is the highest it has ever been. Look at our grocery stores, and ours are nowhere near as bad as other states. The drugs are killing our children and we are at an educational stand still. I have been to Southeast Asia and seen the poverty, slavery implemented to build an empire; and an empire they are successfully building. In China, they have built future cities with no one living there yet. The normal Asian people are wonderful people but the governing principal is that of evils.

We need skilled craftsmen badly. They are paid at a higher scale than the men and women in suits, if you can find one to help you out. The future is in the trades. I am a father of middle income children and they work days and night to do it. They were taught respect and work ethic. They live a good family Christian life. My heart breaks at this worlds possible outcome. Test missiles are being tossed around and a race to space has begun. Also Covid was no accident. Millions have died and multi millions of hearts have been broken.

The V.A. has put security on its doors and send a very large percentage of their patients (veterans) outside for help. The VA is paying the outside doctors approximately 35-51 percent of the billing of those doctors and state, that is the maximum and to not bill the veteran. So what does that say to you? Well I have experienced this first hand and have been very fortunate. Some doctors, as V.A. knows, are now refusing to take veteran patients. V.A. knows this but they are pushing this as far as they can. Top of the line doctors will not be dictated to regarding their fees. I have researched this and have been told, We are professionals and so is our staff, so we must pay them a professional wage. Long story short, they cant take anymore veterans at VAs dictated rates. If you think about it you will see the rational of their situation. Its not that they dont want to help veterans but they are being asked to foot the bill.

VA is building lots of structures but they arent paying a fair wage to their doctors and they arent staying current with the need for new and modern equipment. If its a specialty procedure you need you have to be sent outside of the V.A. system. Many doctors have left the VA to work for some of our coastal hospitals. It would not be unusual for a veteran to be sent to a doctor that use to work for the VA. I dont know who they think theyre kidding with this game that they are playing. VA is using a middle man called OPTUM, a Community Care Network at 3237 Airport Road, La Crosse, Wisconsin 54603. If you dont have an approved prior consult they wont authorize the payment of your bill. The good part is for the most part you dont have to pay if it was authorized on this end. If not, you may later see the hospital or doctors office billing you, claiming the authorization rested with you. They could have a strong case if they relied upon previous on-going procedures. I have been a victim of this in the past myself. It took a lot to save my credit. I am working on some of this currently to help protect veterans that I have stood for, in the past.

It should be obvious that the problem rests with upper level management for going this route and allowing the V.A. system to run at only a small percentage of its capability. You have heard me in the past couple of years complaining about the VAs partial shutdown while all other hospitals and rehab centers are running. We have one of the greatest rehab centers in New England that is mostly shutdown. The example I have given in the past is the VA gym and swimming pool which serviced many rehab sessions. They will pay you to go to the YMCA but that doesnt work for most disabled vets especially with PTSD. All is open but VA is shutdown. They blame it on Covid. The gym and pool are in a separate section of VA with a private entrance in the rear. (No excuse). They have a plan of their own and not one to benefit the veterans. Management and the plan need to be looked at. It is for veterans they exist at what they do and the plan should be shared with veterans.

I always appreciate your input. It helps all veterans. We need audience with those who allow this to continue. To be a veteran is a proud thing. If we are disabled because of service we should wear that also with pride and dignity. Maybe its time for VA to take a different course. We dont need more non-experienced advocates we need to search for the answers to the problems. Please share your experience with us. We really want to help. Communication is a two way street, lets use it. Stay safe and God bless.

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VETERANS CORNER: Last couple of years have been hard on veterans - Town Line

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In the extraordinary Recitatif, Morrison withholds crucial details of racial identity, making the reader the subject of her experiment.

January 23, 2022

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, Recitatif. The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her uvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. Its hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, The Source of Self-Regard, was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certainpage by page, line by linethat nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With Recitatif she was explicit. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.1

The characters in question are Twyla and Roberta, two poor girls, eight years old and wards of the state, who spend four months together in St. Bonaventure shelter. The very first thing we learn about them, from Twyla, is this: My mother danced all night and Robertas was sick. A little later, they were placed together, in Room 406, stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race. What we never learn definitivelyno matter how closely we readis which of these girls is black and which white. We will assume, we can insist, but we cant be sure. And this despite the fact that we get to see them grow up, becoming adults who occasionally run into each other. We eavesdrop when they speak, examine their clothes, hear of their husbands, their jobs, their children, their lives. . . . The crucial detail is withheld. A puzzle of a story, thena game. Only, Toni Morrison does not play. When she called Recitatif an experiment, she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.

But before we go any further into the ingenious design of this philosophical2 brainteaser, the title itself is worth a good, long look:

Recitatif, recitative | rsttiv | noun [mass noun]

1. Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note: singing in recitative.

2. The tone or rhythm peculiar to any language. Obs.

The music of Morrison begins in ordinary speech. Her ear was acute, and rescuing African American speech patterns from the debasements of the American mainstream is a defining feature of her early work. In this story, though, the challenge of capturing ordinary speech has been deliberately complicated. For many words are here to be sung... on the same note. That is, we will hear the words of Twyla and the words of Roberta, and, although they are perfectly differentiated the one from the other, we will not be able to differentiate them in the one way we really want to. An experiment easy to imagine but difficult to execute. In order to make it work, youd need to write in such a way that every phrase precisely straddled the line between characteristically black and white American speech, and thats a high-wire act in an eagle-eyed country, ever alert to racial codes, adept at categorization, in which most people feel they can spot a black or white speaker with their eyes closed, precisely because of the tone and rhythm peculiar to their language....

And, beyond language, in a racialized system, all manner of things will read as peculiar to one kind of person or another. The food a character eats, the music they like, where they live, how they work. Black things, white things. Things that are peculiar to our people and peculiar to theirs. But one of the questions of Recitatif is precisely what that phrase peculiar to really signifies. For we tend to use it variously, not realizing that we do. It can mean:

That which characterizesThat which belongs exclusively toThat which is an essential quality of

These three are not the same. The first suggests a tendency; the second implies some form of ownership; the third speaks of essences and therefore of immutable natural laws. In Recitatif these differences prove crucial, as we will see.

Much of the mesmerizing power of Recitatif lies in that first definition of peculiar to: that which characterizes. As readers, we urgently want to characterize the various characteristics on display. But how? My mother danced all night and Robertas was sick. Well, now, what kind of mother tends to dance all night? A black one or a white one? And whose mother is more likely to be sick? Is Roberta a blacker name than Twyla? Or vice versa? And what about voice? Twyla narrates the story in the first person, and so we may have the commonsense feeling that she must be the black girl, for her author is black. But it doesnt take much interrogating of this must to realize that it rests on rather shallow, autobiographical ideas of authorship that would seem wholly unworthy of the complex experiment that has been set before us. Besides, Morrison was never a poor child in a state institutionshe grew up solidly working class in integrated Lorain, Ohioand autobiography was never a very strong element of her work. Her imagination was capacious. No, autobiography will not get us very far here. So, we listen a little more closely to Twyla:

And Mary, thats my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean. So when the Big Bozo (nobody ever called her Mrs. Itkin, just like nobody ever said St. Bonaventure)when she said, Twyla, this is Roberta. Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome, I said, My mother wont like you putting me in here.

The game is afoot. Morrison bypasses any detail that might imply an essential quality of, slyly evades whatever would belong exclusively to one girl or the other, and makes us sit instead in this uncomfortable, double-dealing world of that which characterizes, in which Twyla seems to move in a moment from black to white to black again, depending on the nature of your perception. Like that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of...

When reading Recitatif with students, there is a moment when the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.3

For example: Twyla loves the food at St. Bonaventure, and Roberta hates it. (The food is Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it.) Is Twyla black? Twylas mothers idea of supper is popcorn and a can of Yoo-hoo. Is Twyla white?

Twylas mother looks like this:

She had on those green slacks I hated.... And that fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them.... [But] she looked so beautiful even in those ugly green slacks that made her behind stick out.

Robertas mother looks like this:

She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross Id ever seen. I swear it was six inches long each way. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made.

Does that help? We might think the puzzle is solved when both mothers come to visit their daughters one Sunday and Robertas mother refuses to shake Twylas mothers hand. But a moment later, upon reflection, it will strike us that a pious, upstanding, sickly black mother might be just as unlikely to shake the hand of an immoral, fast-living, trashy, dancing white mother as vice versa.... Complicating matters further, Twyla and Robertadespite their crucial differencesseem to share the same low status within the confines of St. Bonaventure. Or at least thats how Twyla sees it:

We didnt like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we werent real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians ignored us.

At this point, many readers will start getting a little desperate to put back in precisely what Morrison has deliberately removed. You start combing the fine print:

We were eight years old and got Fs all the time. Me because I couldnt remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldnt read at all and didnt even listen to the teacher.

Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorlyor are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both?

As a reader you know theres something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries, but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle. You get granular.

Meanwhile, Robertas mother brings plenty of foodwhich Roberta refusesbut says not a word to anyone, although she does read aloud to Roberta from the Bible. Theres a lot of readable difference there, and Twyla certainly notices it all:

Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe thats why I got into waitress work laterto match up the right people with the right food.

She seems jealous. But can vectors of longing, resentment, or desire tell us whos who? Is Twyla a black girl jealous of a white mother who brought more food? Or a white girl resentful of a black mother who thinks shes too godly to shake hands?

Children are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite. They say to themselves: Things are not right. But children also experiment with injustice, with cruelty. To stress-test the structure of the adult world. To find out exactly what its rules are. (The fact that questions of justice seem an inconvenient line of speculation for so many adults cannot go unnoticed by children.) And it is when reflecting upon a moment of childish cruelty that Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the systemwhatever their position may be within itand those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody. Because there is a person in St. Bonaventure whose position is lower than either Twylas or Robertasfar lower. Her name is Maggie:

The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses.... Maggie couldnt talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I dont know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked.

Maggie has no characteristic language. She has no language at all. Once she fell over in the school orchard and the older girls laughed and Twyla and Roberta did nothing. She is not a person you can do things for: she is only an object of ridicule. She wore this really stupid little hata kids hat with earflapsand she wasnt much taller than we were. In the social system of St. Bonaventure, Maggie stands outside all hierarchies. Shes one to whom anything can be said. One to whom anything might be done. Like a slave. Which is what it means to be nobody. Twyla and Roberta, noticing this, take a childish interest in what it means to be nobody:

But what about if somebody tries to kill her? I used to wonder about that. Or what if she wants to cry. Can she cry?

Sure, Roberta said. But just tears. No sounds come out.

She cant scream?

Nope. Nothing.

Can she hear?

I guess.

Lets call her, I said. And we did.

Dummy! Dummy! She never turned her head.

Bow legs! Bow legs! Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didnt let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldnt tell on us.

Time leaps forward. Roberta leaves St. Bonnys first, and a few months after so does Twyla. The girls grow into women. Years later, Twyla is waitressing at an upstate Howard Johnsons, when who should walk in but Roberta, just in time to give us some more racial cues to debate.4

These days Robertas hair is so big and wild that Twyla can barely see her face. Shes wearing a halter and hot pants and sitting between two hirsute guys with big hair and beards. She seems to be on drugs. Now, Roberta and friends are going to see Hendrix, and would any other artist have worked quite so well for Morrisons purpose? Hendrixs hair is big and wild. Is his music black or white? Your call. Either way, Twylaher own hair shapeless in a nethas never heard of him, and, when she says she lives in Newburgh, Roberta laughs.

Geography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes, and Newburghsixty miles north of Manhattanis an archetypal racialized American city. Founded in 1709, it is where Washington announced the cessation of hostilities with Britain and therefore the beginning of America as a nation, and in the nineteenth century was a grand and booming town, with a growing black middle class. The Second World War manufacturing boom brought waves of African American migrants to Newburgh, eager to escape the racial terrorism of the South, looking for low-wage work, but with the end of the war the work dried up; factory jobs were relocated south or abroad, and, by the time Morrison wrote Recitatif, Newburgh was a depressed town, hit by white flight, riven with poverty and the violence that attends poverty, and with large sections of its once beautiful waterfront bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. Twyla is married to a Newburgh man from an old Newburgh family, whose race the reader is invited to decipher (James and his father talk about fishing and baseball and I can see them all together on the Hudson in a raggedy skiff) but who is certainly one of the millions of twentieth-century Americans who watched once thriving towns mismanaged and abandoned by the federal government: Half the population of Newburgh is on welfare now, but to my husbands family it was still some upstate paradise of a time long past. And then, when the town is on its knees, and the great houses empty and abandoned, and downtown a wasteland of empty shop fronts and aimless kids on the cornerthe new money moves in. The old houses get done up. A Food Emporium opens. And its in this Emporiumtwelve years after their last run-inthat the women meet again, but this time all is transformation. Robertas cleaned up her act and married a rich man:

Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.

For the reader determined to solve the puzzlethe reader who believes the puzzle can be solved, or must be solvedthis is surely Exhibit No. 1. Everything hangs on that word they. To whom is it pointing? Uppity black people? Entitled white people? Rich people, whatever their color? Gentrifiers? You choose.

Not too long ago, I happened to be in Annandale myself, standing in the post-office line, staring absently at the list of national holidays fixed to the wall, and reflecting that the only uncontested date on the American calendar is New Years Day. With Twyla and Roberta, its the sameevery element of their shared past is contested:

Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.

But I didnt know. I thought it was just the opposite.... You got to see everything at Howard Johnsons and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.

Their most contested site is Maggie. Maggie is their Columbus Day, their Thanksgiving. What the hell happened to Maggie? At the beginning of Recitatif, we are informed that sandy-colored Maggie fell down. Later, Roberta insists she was knocked down, by the older girlsan event Twyla does not remember. Later still, Roberta claims that Maggie was black and that Twyla pushed her down, which sparks an epistemological crisis in Twyla, who does not remember Maggie being black, never mind pushing her. (I wouldnt forget a thing like that. Would I?) Then Roberta claims they both pushed and kicked a black lady who couldnt even scream. Its interesting to note that this escalation of claims happens at a moment of national racial strife, in the form of school busing. Both Robertas and Twylas children are being sent far across town. And as blackor whitemothers, the two find themselves in rigid positions, on either side of a literal boundary: a protest line. Their shared past starts to fray and then morph under the weight of a mutual anger; even the tiniest things are reinterpreted. They used to like doing each others hair, as kids. Now Twyla rejects this commonality (I hated your hands in my hair) and Roberta rejects any possibility of alliance with Twyla, in favor of the group identity of the other mothers who feel about busing as she does.5

The personal connection they once made can hardly be expected to withstand a situation in which once again race proves socially determinant, and in one of the most vulnerable sites any of us have: the education of our children. Mutual suspicion blooms. Why should I trust this person? What are they trying to take from me? My culture? My community? My schools? My neighborhood? My life? Positions get entrenched. Nothing can be shared. Twyla and Roberta start carrying increasingly extreme signs at competing protests. (Twyla: My signs got crazier each day.) A hundred and forty characters or fewer: thats about as much as you can fit on a homemade sign. Both women find that ad hominem attacks work best. You could say the two are never as far apart as at this moment of racial strife. You could also say they are in lockstep, for without the self-definition offered by the binary they appear meaningless, even to themselves. (Actually my sign didnt make sense without Robertas.)

As Twyla and Roberta discover, its hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to rexamine a shared history. Such rexaminations I sometimes hear described as resentment politics, as if telling a history in full could only be the product of a personal resentment, rather than a necessary act performed in the service of curiosity, interest, understanding (of both self and community), and justice itself. But some people sure do take it personal. I couldnt help but smile to read of an ex-newspaper editor from my country, who, when speaking of his discomfort at recent efforts to reveal the slave history behind many of our great country houses, complained, I think comfort does matter. I know people say, Oh, we must be uncomfortable.... Why should I pay a hundred quid a year, or whatever, to be told what a shit I am? Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you. As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?

The long, bloody, tangled encounter between the European peoples and the African continent is our history. Our shared history. Its what happened. Its not the moral equivalent of a football game where your side wins or loses. To give an account of an old English country house that includes not only the provenance of the beautiful paintings but also the provenance of the money that bought themwho suffered and died making that money, how, and whyis history told in full and should surely be of interest to everybody, black or white or neither. And I admit I do begin to feel resentmentactually, something closer to furywhen I realize that merely speaking such facts aloud is so discomfiting to some that theyd rather deny the facts themselves. For the sake of peaceful relations. To better forget about it. To better move on. Many people have this instinct. Twyla and Roberta also want to forget and move on. They want to blame it on the gar girls (a pun on gargoyles, gar girls is Twyla and Robertas nickname for the older residents of St. Bonaventure), or on each other, or on faulty memory itself. Maggie was black. Maggie was white. They hurt Maggie. You did. But, by the end of Recitatif, they are both ready to at least try to discuss what the hell happened to Maggie. Not for the shallow motive of transhistorical blame, much less to induce personal comfort or discomfort, but rather in the service of truth. We know that their exploration of the question will be painful, messy, and very likely never perfectly settled. But we also know that a good-faith attempt is better than its opposite. Which would be to go on pretending, as Twyla puts it, that everything was hunky-dory.

Difficult to move on from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed. Citizens from Belfast and Belgrade know this, and Berlin and Banjul. (And thats just the Bs.) In the privacy of our domestic arguments we know this. We must be heard. Its human to want to be heard. We are nobody if not heard. I suffered. They suffered. My people suffered! My people continue to suffer! Some take the narrowest possible view of this category of my people: they mean only their immediate family. For others, the cry widens out to encompass a city, a nation, a faith group, a perceived racial category, a diaspora. But, whatever your personal allegiances, when you deliberately turn from any human suffering you make what should be a porous border between your people and the rest of humanity into something rigid and deadly. You ask not to be bothered by the history of nobodies, the suffering of nobodies. (Or the suffering of somebodies, if hierarchical reversal is your jam.) But surely the very least we can do is listen to what was done to a personor is still being done. It is the very least we owe the dead, and the suffering. People suffered to build this house, to found that bank, or your country. Maggie suffered at St. Bonaventure. And all we have to do is hear about that? How can we resent it?6

It takes Twyla some time to see past her resentment at being offered a new version of a past she thought she knew. (Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldnt forget a thing like that. Would I?) But, in her forced reconsideration of a shared history, she comes to a deeper realization about her own motives:

I didnt kick her; I didnt join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night.... And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldnt scream, couldntjust like me and I was glad about that.

A few pages later, Roberta spontaneously comes to a similar conclusion (although she is now unsure as to whether or not Maggie was, indeed, black). I find the above one of the most stunning paragraphs in all of Morrisons work. The psychological subtlety of it. The mix of projection, vicarious action, self-justification, sadistic pleasure, and personal trauma that she identifies as a motivating force within Twyla, and that, by extrapolation, she prompts us to recognize in ourselves.

Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of Recitatif is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identitiesthe fact that they are both somebodythey simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies. The fags who wanted company in the chapel are nobodies to them, and they are so repelled by and fixated upon Maggies disability that they see nothing else about her. But there is somebody in all these people, after all. There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human. Which acknowledgment is often misused or only half used, employed as a form of sentimental or aesthetic contemplation, i.e., Oh, though we seem so unalike, how alike we all are under our skins.... But, historically, this acknowledgment of the humanour inescapable shared categoryhas also played a role in the work of freedom riders, abolitionists, anticolonialists, trade unionists, queer activists, suffragettes, and in the thoughts of the likes of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Morrison herself. If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference. When applied to racial matters, it recognizes that, although the category of race is both experientially and structurally real, it yet has no ultimate or essential reality in and of itself.7

But, of course, ultimate reality is not where any of us live. For hundreds of years, we have lived in deliberately racialized human structuresthat is to say, socially pervasive and sometimes legally binding fictionsthat prove incapable of stating difference and equality simultaneously. And it is extremely galling to hear that you have suffered for a fiction, or indeed profited from one. It has been fascinating to watch the recent panicked response to the interrogation of whiteness, the terror at the dismantling of a false racial category that for centuries united the rich man born and raised in Belarus, say, with the poor woman born and raised in Wales, under the shared banner of racial superiority. But panic is not entirely absent on the other side of the binary. If race is a construct, what will happen to blackness? Can the categories of black music and black literature survive? What would the phrase black joy signify? How can we throw out this dirty bathwater of racism when for centuries we have pressed the baby of race so close to our hearts, and madeeven accounting for all the horrorso many beautiful things with it?

Toni Morrison loved the culture and community of the African diaspora in America, evenespeciallythose elements that were forged as response and defense against the dehumanizing violence of slavery, the political humiliations of Reconstruction, the brutal segregation and state terrorism of Jim Crow, and the many civil-rights successes and neoliberal disappointments that have followed. Out of this history she made a literature, a shelf of books thatfor as long as they are readwill serve to remind America that its story about itself was always partial and self-deceiving. And here, for many people, we reach an impasse: a dead end. If race is a construct, whither blackness? If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself? I think a lot of peoples brains actually break at this point. But Morrison had a bigger brain. She could parse the difference between the deadness of a determining category and the richness of a lived experience. And there are some clues in this story, I think. Some hints at alternative ways of conceptualizing difference without either erasing or codifying it. Surprising civic values, fresh philosophical principles. Not only categorization and visibility but also privacy and kindness:

Now we were behaving like sisters separated for much too long. Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knewhow not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Ohand an understanding nod.

That people live and die within a specific historywithin deeply embedded cultural, racial, and class codesis a reality that cannot be denied, and often a beautiful one. Its what creates difference. But there are ways to deal with that difference that are expansive and comprehending, rather than narrow and diagnostic. Instead of only ticking boxes on doctors formspathologizing differencewe might also take a compassionate and discreet interest in it. We dont always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We dont have to take it personally. We can also just let it be. Or we can, like Morrison, be profoundly interested in it:

The struggle was for writing that was indisputably black. I dont yet know quite what that is, but neither that nor the attempts to disqualify an effort to find out keeps me from trying to pursue it.

My choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture.8

Visibility and privacy, communication and silence, intimacy and encounter are all expressed here. Readers who see only their own exclusion in this paragraph may need to mentally perform, in their own minds, the experiment that Recitatif performs in fiction: the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial. To perform this experiment in a literary space, I will choose, for my other character, another Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. I am looking at his poems. I am looking in. To fully comprehend Heaneys uvre, I would have to be wholly embedded in the codes of Northern Irish culture; I am not. No more than I am wholly embedded in the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison writes. I am not a perfect co-conspirator of either writer. I had to Google to find out what Lady Esther dusting powder is, in Recitatif, and, when Heaney mentions hoarding fresh berries in the byre, no image comes to my mind.9

As a reader of these two embedded writers, both profoundly interested in their own communities, I can only be a thrilled observer, always partially included, by that great shared category, the human, but also simultaneously on the outside looking in, enriched by that which is new or alien to me, especially when it has not been diluted or falsely presented to flatter my ignorancethat dreaded explanatory fabric. Instead, they both keep me rigorous company on the page, not begging for my comprehension but always open to the possibility of it, for no writer would break a silence if they did not want someonesome always unknowable someoneto overhear. I am describing a model reader-writer relationship. But, as Recitatif suggests, the same values expressed here might also prove useful to us in our roles as citizens, allies, friends.

Race, for many, is a determining brand, simply one side of a rigid binary. Blackness, as Morrison conceived of it, was a shared history, an experience, a culture, a language. A complexity, a wealth. To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimists right but an activists indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done. And what is the purpose of all this work if our positions within prejudicial, racialized structures are permanent, essential, unchangeableas rigid as the rules of gravity?

The forces of capital, meanwhile, are pragmatic: capital does not bother itself with essentialisms. It transforms nobodies into somebodiesand vice versadepending on where labor is needed and profit can be made. The Irish became somebodies when indentured labor had to be formally differentiated from slavery, to justify the latter category. In Britain, we only decided that there was something inside womenor enough of a something to be able to vote within the early twentieth century. British women went from being essentially angels of the housewhose essential nature was considered to be domesticto nodes in a system whose essential nature was to work, just like men, although we were welcome to pump milk in the office basement if we really had to.... Yes, capital is adaptive, pragmatic. It is always looking for new markets, new sites of economic vulnerability, of potential exploitationnew Maggies. New human beings whose essential nature is to be nobody. We claim to know this even as we simultaneously misremember or elide the many Maggies in our own lives. These days, Robertaor Twylamight march for womens rights, all the while wearing a four-dollar T-shirt, a product of the enforced labor of Uyghur women on the other side of the world. Twylaor Robertacould go door to door, registering voters, while sporting long nails freshly painted by a trafficked young girl. Robertaor Twylamay practice self-care by going to the hairdresser to get extensions shorn from another, poorer womans head. Far beneath the black-white racial strife of America, there persists a global underclass of Maggies, unseen and unconsidered within the parochial American conversation, the wretched of the earth....

Our racial codes are peculiar to us, but what do we really mean by that? In Recitatif, that which would characterize Twyla and Roberta as black or white is the consequence of history, of shared experience, and what shared histories inevitably produce: culture, community, identity. What belongs exclusively to them is their subjective experience of these same categories in which they have lived. Some of these experiences will have been nourishing, joyful, and beautiful, many others prejudicial, exploitative, and punitive. No one can take a persons subjective experiences from them. No one should try. Whether Twyla or Roberta is the somebody who has lived within the category of white we cannot be sure, but Morrison constructs the story in such a way that we are forced to admit the fact that other categories, aside from the racial, also produce shared experiences. Categories like being poor, being female, like being at the mercy of the state or the police, like living in a certain Zip Code, having children, hating your mother, wanting the best for your family. We are like and not like a lot of people a lot of the time. White may be the most powerful category in the racial hierarchy, but, if youre an eight-year-old girl in a state institution with a delinquent mother and no money, it sure doesnt feel that way. Black may be the lower caste, but, if you marry an I.B.M. guy and have two servants and a driver, you areat the very leastin a new position in relation to the least powerful people in your society. And vice versa. Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them. Morrison is the great master of American complexity, and Recitatif, in my view, sits alongside Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Lottery as a perfectand perfectly Americantale, one every American child should read.

Finally, what is essentially black or white about Twyla and Roberta I believe we bring to Recitatif ourselves, within a system of signs over which too many humans have collectively labored for hundreds of years now. It began in the racialized system of capitalism we call slavery; it was preserved in law long after slavery ended, and continues to assert itself, to sometimes lethal effect, in social, economic, educational, and judicial systems all over the world. But as a category the fact remains that it has no objective reality: it is not, like gravity, a principle of the earth. By removing it from the story, Morrison reveals both the speciousness of black-white as our primary human categorization and its dehumanizing effect on human life. But she also lovingly demonstrates how much meaning we were able to findand continue to findin our beloved categories. The peculiar way our people make this or that dish, the peculiar music we play at a cookout or a funeral, the peculiar way we use nouns or adjectives, the peculiar way we walk or dance or paint or writethese things are dear to us. Especially if they are denigrated by others, we will tend to hold them close. We feel they define us. And this form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the humanthe insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as nobody. A direct descendant of slaves, Morrison writes in a way that recognizes firstand primarilythe somebody within black people, the black human having been, historically, the ultimate example of the dehumanized subject: the one transformed, by capital, from subject to object. But in this lifelong project, as the critic Jesse McCarthy has pointed out, we are invited to see a foundation for all social-justice movements: The battle over the meaning of black humanity has always been central to both [Toni Morrisons] fiction and essaysand not just for the sake of black people but to further what we hope all of humanity can become.10

We hope all of humanity will reject the project of dehumanization. We hope for a literatureand a society!that recognizes the somebody in everybody. This despite the fact that, in Americas zero-sum game of racialized capitalism, this form of humanism has been abandoned as an apolitical quantity, toothless, an inanity to repeat, perhaps, on Sesame Street (Everybodys somebody!) but considered too nave and insufficient a basis for radical change.11

I have written a lot in this essay about prejudicial structures. But Ive spoken vaguely of them, metaphorically, as a lot of people do these days. In an address to Howard University, in 1995, Morrison got specific. She broke it down, in her scientific way. It is a very useful summary, to be cut out and kept for future reference, for if we hope to dismantle oppressive structures it will surely help to examine how they are built:

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

Elements of this fascist playbook can be seen in the European encounter with Africa, between the West and the East, between the rich and the poor, between the Germans and the Jews, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the British and the Irish, the Serbs and the Croats. It is one of our continual human possibilities. Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting. But it is still a man-made structure. The capacity for fascisms of one kind or another is something else we all shareyou might call it our most depressing collective identity. (And, if we are currently engaged in trying to effect change, it could be worthwhileas an act of ethical spring-cleaningto check through Tonis list and insure that we are not employing any of the playbook of fascism in our own work.) Fascism labors to create the category of the nobody, the scapegoat, the sufferer. Morrison repudiated that category as it has applied to black people over centuries, and in doing so strengthened the category of the somebody for all of us, whether black or white or neither. Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberationas cathartic as it may feel.13

Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.14

Still, like most readers of Recitatif, I found it impossible not to hunger to know who the other was, Twyla or Roberta. Oh, I urgently wanted to have it straightened out. Wanted to sympathize warmly in one sure place, turn cold in the other. To feel for the somebody and dismiss the nobody. But this is precisely what Morrison deliberately and methodically will not allow me to do. Its worth asking ourselves why. Recitatif reminds me that it is not essentially black or white to be poor, oppressed, lesser than, exploited, ignored. The answer to What the hell happened to Maggie? is not written in the stars, or in the blood, or in the genes, or forever predetermined by history. Whatever was done to Maggie was done by people. People like Twyla and Roberta. People like you and me.

This essay is drawn from the introduction to Recitatif: A Story, by Toni Morrison, out this February from Knopf.

Go here to read the rest:

The Genius of Toni Morrison's Only Short Story - The New Yorker