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THE SHAPE OF FEAR

BY W. E. B. DU BOIS

The North American Review, Vol. 223, No. 831 (Jun. - Aug., 1926), pp. 291-304 (14 pages)

Faced by the fact of the Ku Klux Klan, the United States has tried to get rid of it by laughing it off. We have talked of masquerading “in sheets and pillow cases”; we have caricatured the Klan upon the stage; we have exposed its silly methods, the dishonesty of some of its leaders, and the like. But we have not succeeded in scaring it away by ridicule. It is there. It is a fact, and those who do not wish to believe the sinister meaning of its existence should go to the nearest movie and see that Washington parade, that tremendous outpouring of hosts, white-gowned and hooded if not masked.

It is quite beside the point to compare the present Ku Klux Klan with the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days. They have nothing in common except their birthplace and their methods. The present Klan is a different movement from the older Klan. It has simply made the older movement’s name its present starting point.

Until last year I was of those mildly amused at the K. K. K. It seemed to me incredible that in 1925 such a movement could attract any number of people or become really serious. And then at first hand and at second I saw the Klan and its workings in widely different places. I was lecturing in Akron, Ohio. Now Ohio is one of those States upon whose essential Americanism and devotion to the finer ideals of democracy I have long banked. There in the Middle West that finer flower of democracy, born in New England, and later choked by the industrialism of the East, had, to my mind, gone for replanting and renewal. I looked for sanity in the United States to come from a democratic appeal to the Middle West. And yet, there in Akron, in the land of Joshua R. Giddings, in the Western Reserve, I found the Klan calmly and openly in the saddle. The leader of the local Klan was president of the Board of Education and had just been tremendously busied in driving a Jew out of the public schools. The Mayor, the secretary of the Y. M. C. A., prominent men in many walks of life, were either open Klansmen or secret sympathizers. I was too astonished to talk. Throughout parts of Ohio, Illinois and Indiana I found a similar state of affairs.

I am not saying that the Klan was triumphant everywhere, but it was there; it was influential; it was recognized; it was important. Again, and further west, the work of the Klan has been manifest. Today there are under arrest at Detroit, Michigan, a young colored physician, well-trained and successful; his wife, torn from her infant child, and nine of his friends; and they are on trial for murder in the first degree because they shot at the mob that tried to drive them out of their own homes and that had a few months before driven out another Negro physician and destroyed his furniture; and that mob was there because the Ku Klux Klan aroused it and sent it; and the Ku Klux Klan is so tremendous a power in that city which is, in some ways the most significant of American cities, that the Mayor is openly appealing against its activities.

Or again: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held its annual meeting in May, 1925, in Denver and there appeared before it two speakers: one, a little man, nervous with energy and shrill of speech. He was, without a doubt, one of the dozen notable figures which America has given to the world, Ben Lindsay, the maker of the Children’s Court. The other had been one of the most successful and enlightened Governors in America. And yet they stood speaking in self-defense; defending themselves against this city and this State; and the great, dark, menacing thing that turned them from social uplift and political reform was the Ku Klux Klan.

In the East, New England and New Jersey, the Klan has been mobilized; and need one mention the South?

What is the cause of all this? There can be little doubt but that the Klan in its present form is a legacy of the World War. Whatever there was of it before that great catastrophe was negligible and of little moment. The wages of War is Hate; and the End, and indeed the Beginning, of Hate is Fear. The civilized world today and the world half-civilized and uncivilized are desperately afraid. The Shape of Fear looms over them. Germany fears the Jew, England fears the Indian; America fears the Negro, the Christian fears the Moslem, Europe fears Asia, Protestant fears Catholic, Religion fears Science. Above all, Wealth fears Democracy. These fears and others are ancient or at least long-standing fears. But they are renewed and revivified today because the world has at present a severe case of nerves; it feels it necessary to be nervous because the Unexpected has happened.

For years we talked of the possibility of European War with bated breath; then we talked of it jauntily; and then we almost joked about it. While here was a Fear, it was one so far away that it did not seem possible for it ever to materialize, at least not in our day. And then suddenly it became a terrible fact, horrible beyond the dream of men. So that all our other fears today have become portentous. Abd-el Krim may be the vanguard of the launching of Asia against Europe; Ghandi and Das may be at the point of destroying the British Empire; the American Negro despite all precautions, may force himself into a place where he will enter Congress, storm Wall Street and marry white women.

Now against such fears as these there are three possible attitudes. One is the attitude of reason and examination. What does the ferment in the colored world mean and how far is our fear of it but a reflex of its fear of us? What do colored folk really want, and do their wants interfere with and oppose the just desires of the white world ? How far is free, scientific inquiry going to undermine religious sanction? What is there in the objects of the Bolsheviki which should not appear in the objects of American social reformers? These questions indicate one attitude, mental, moral and practical, toward great pending questions; but it is not the attitude which we are disposed to take today in the world.

On the contrary so imminent does our danger seem to some people that they turn to one of two other methods. They are both forms of Force; one an open appeal to force: Fascismo, either in its bold, physical form as it is appearing in Italy and Spain or in its more spiritual form as it appears in American Fundamentalism; in the determination to drive out of the Church every person who will not honestly or by perjury subscribe to a certain, narrow, outworn and partially false creed.

The other method is the method of Force which hides itself in secrecy, and that is the method of the Ku Klux Klan. It is a method as old as humanity. The kind of thing which men are afraid or ashamed to do openly and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked and at night. The method has certain advantages. It uses Fear to cast out Fear; it dares things at which open methods hesitate; it may with a certain impunity attack the high and the low; it need hesitate at no outrage of maiming or murder; it shields itself in the mob mind and then throws over all a veil of darkness which becomes glamor. It attracts people who otherwise could not be reached. It harnesses the mob.

How is it that men who want certain things done by brute force can so often depend upon the mob? Total depravity, human hate and schadenfreude, do not explain fully the mob spirit in this land. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? of many things but usually of losing their jobs, of being declassed, degraded or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger; of dirt, of crime. And of all this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment.

It is this nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus. Around this nucleus, to be sure, gather snowball-wise all manner of flotsam, filth and human garbage and every inhibition of alcohol and current fashion. But all this is the horrible covering of this inner nucleus of Fear.

How then is the mob to be met and quelled? If it represents public opinion, even passing, passionate public opinion, it cannot permanently be put down by the police which public opinion appoints and pays. Three methods of quelling the mob are at hand, analogous to the three attitudes noted above: the first, by proving to its human, honest nucleus that the Fear is false, ill-grounded, unnecessary; or secondly, if its Fear is true or apparently or partially true, by attacking the fearful thing openly either by the organized police power or by frank civil war as did Mussolini and George Washington; or thirdly, by secret, hidden and underground ways, the method of the Ku Klux Klan.

Why do we not take the first way? Because this is a world that believes in War and Ignorance and has no hope in our day of realizing an intelligent majority of men and Peace on Earth. There are many, many exceptions but in general it is true that there is scarcely a Bishop in Christendom, a priest in New York, a President, Governor, mayor or legislator in the United States, a college professor or public school teacher who does not in the end stand by War and Ignorance as the main method for the settlement of our pressing human problems. And this despite the fact that they may deny it with their mouths every day.

But here again open civil war like Italy’s is difficult, costly and hard to guide. The Right toward which it aims must be made obvious even if it is Wrong. In 1918 in order to win the war we had to make Germans into Huns and rapists. Today we have to make Negroes into rapists and idiots. Tomorrow we must make Latins, South-Eastern Europeans, Turks and other Asiatics into actual “lesser breeds without the law”. Some seem to see today anti-Christ in Catholicism, and in Jews, international plotters of the Protocol. Even if these things be true it is difficult to bring the truth clearly before the ignorant mob and guide it toward the

overthrow of evil. But if these be half true or wholly false, the mob can only be stirred by wholesale lying, and this is costly; or by secret underground whispering, the methods of night and mask, the psychology of vague and unknown ill, the innuendo that cannot be answered.

Now there are two things that stand out in this explanation of the mob and the Klan. First, the double tongues of our leaders in religion and social uplift; and secondly, this fear of losing jobs. Dayton, Tennessee brought the first vividly to our minds. We heard of a sudden, people talking a religious patois which educated folk had well nigh forgotten: Biblical Truth; the Plan of Salvation; the Blood of Christ. And suddenly we began to see what results widespread ignorance of modern science not only had brought but could bring under the leadership of the demagogue. It sent a thrill of amazement through us.

But whom had we to blame? Manifestly, not the farmers and shopkeepers of Tennessee, but those intellectual leaders of the United States who have been willing to subscribe to a religious dogma that they did not honestly believe and yet which they were willing that the mass of people should think they were believing. Was there any surer way of destroying the ability of the Man of the Street to think straight and argue logically? And to stop even his endeavor to think, comes the Fundamentalist; and his answer to Science is Dogma; and his reason for bringing it forward is again, not perverse hatred of the Truth, but the Shape of Fear. The religionist of today sees the sanctions of moral conduct being swept and battered away, laughed at and caricatured. How shall he meet this wicked thing? He can do it by intelligence and argument and persuasion or he can do it by dogma which is spiritual mob-violence; today he is choosing the mob.

Or again; why is it that in a rich country like the United States, in many respects the richest and most prosperous organization of men in the world, we continually have mobs fighting and doing unutterable things because at bottom men are afraid of being unable to earn a respectable living? The answer is that our post war prosperity is built more on gambling than on honest productive industry. Gambling was the result of war, born in war time and coming from the sudden demand for technique machinery and goods, which paid those who happened to hold them enormous marginal rents. The chance to the gambler, the promoter and the manipulator of industry has come during the reconstruction since the war, in the monopoly of land and homes, in the manipulation of industrial power, in the use of new inventions and discoveries, in the reorganization of corporate ownership.

We have today in the United States, cheek by jowl, Prosperity and Depression. Depression among those who are selling their services, raising raw material and manufacturing goods; prosperity among those who are manipulating prices, monopolizing land and mortgaging ability and output.

How shall we meet this situation? Again we revert to the three paths : first and foremost by the spread of wider and deeper understanding among the masses of men of the modern industrial process and the method of distributing income, so that intelligently we may attack Production and Distribution and re-make industrial society. Or, a second method, by hue and cry and propaganda to stop all criticism and desire for change by dubbing every reformer “Bolshevik” and by frightening the wage earner with loss of the very foundation of his wage. And this is the kind of attack that again easily sinks to the whispering courses underground and attempts to save modern industry through mobs engineered by the secret Ku Klux Klan.

I can no better illustrate my meaning than by an actual case. The world has forgotten Mer Rouge—the Red Sea of Louisiana where a few years ago a terrible series of murders was laid at the doors of the Ku Klux Klan. It was so horrible a tale that we hastened to forget it before we really understood it. But it deserved thought and intelligent comprehension.

The cotton and sugar soil of the Mississippi and Red River valleys form a junction in Louisiana. It is a section bounded on the south by the scene of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the north by the Helena riots, and on the east by that bit of hell which is sometimes called the Mississippi Delta. In the center of this district, in northeastern Louisiana, is Morehouse Parish and in the midst of Morehouse Parish is Mer Rouge. Mer Rouge has the peculiar problems of a little town in the Black Belt. It is ruled by the whites, and since the whites must stand united as rulers there is among them a rather extreme sense of social equality which even wealth and education cannot wholly break down. They go to the same churches and there their social life centers. They send their children to the same schools except the few that go away to boarding school. All this works out fairly well as long as the character of the ruling class of whites is essentially homologous. But today a change is taking place in Morehouse Parish. There are about 20,000 inhabitants there. The white population has increased from five to six thousand in the last ten years while the Negro population has decreased from fourteen to thirteen thousand. This is because of the migration of Negro laborers to the city and north; so that instead of being a county three-fourths black it is today about two-thirds black. To replace these migrating Negroes the poor whites from the neighborhood have been pressing in. They stream in especially from one poor county directly toward the east where there is a majority of poor whites and these new comers bring problems, problems of unrest, drink, of gambling, of wayward women.

Now Mer Rouge has traditions of the time when its white folk were great landowners protecting their women in elaborate homes and having a pretentious social code. These newer and poorer whites coming in not only brought a lower moral tone but a new economic condition. They have become tenant farmers, so that between 1900 and 1920 there was an increase of nearly one-third in the number of tenants. But the great landowners are still in the ascendancy, two hundred and fifty of them with farms of one hundred to more than a thousand acres, with crops valued at two and one half million dollars a year, chiefly cotton, corn and sugar cane. In addition to this the value of the land is rapidly increasing. It has doubled every ten years since 1900. Then too, to complicate the situation further there are a number of small Negro farmers who own their own land, some two hundred and thirty-one in all as compared with the two hundred and fifty large white landowners and one hundred and nineteen small white owners. One can easily scent here tremendous and bitter rivalry between the rich and poor white owners, between the owners and tenants, between the white and black owners, and crushed under all of it lie the mass of black tenants. These tenants are ignorant, forty per cent of them acknowledge that they cannot read or write, and in truth this number should probably be sixty or seventy per cent. There is no modern wage system, but nearly all is

barter and debt peonage. The county reported only one hundred dollars a year in wages for each worker, and this included the white workers as well as the colored.

Here then we have the setting. Here is the little town of Mer Rouge, which proposes to stop the growing lawlessness among the whites and the breaking down of social conventions. Shall it openly appeal to the ballot? Certainly not. There are 6,524 Negroes of voting age and only 3,000 whites; but of course there is no question in Mer Rouge of the black man’s voting. A thousand or more Negroes are landowners able to read and write, but they cannot vote. The white women, too, are disfranchised despite the law, so that the voting population consists of about 1,500 white men, and among these the new white tenants, shop keepers, artisans and small landowners, or in other words the lawless and easy-going new comers, could outvote the whole aristocracy.

Mer Rouge, therefore, turned to the Ku Klux Klan, and when afterward the matter came out it defended itself and claimed with undoubted truth that the Ku Klux Klan was an organization of the best elements in the community and that they were trying to put down the worst, believing that they could do by secrecy and force what they could not do openly at the polls. It was natural for them to come to this conclusion. Secrecy, force and murder have been part of the Black Belt social economy for fifty years. The landlords lived with their hands on the trigger. Formerly this was because of the fear of servile revolt or the hint of it. That fear is still there; but in addition to that there is another fear and these men did not hesitate. They were used to taking the law in their hands. They face baffling social problems. A white face is no longer a badge of aristocracy. A white woman may be rival to a black concubine. Formerly the relations of white men and colored women were open and complacent. The sheriff’s son recently was killed in a colored woman’s cabin. Then too the sex distribution is illuminating: More colored women than colored men and eleven per cent, more white men than white women. To this are added the bootleggers and the loose white women. There is no place, no treatment for them. Colored women, however decent, can always be treated like prostitutes; but unless white prostitutes are treated like ladies the whole scheme of white supremacy fails.

All this led logically, as Mer Rouge thought, to one solution: bootleggers, gamblers and bad women were to be driven out by the Ku Klux Klan. But they miscalculated. The new whites fought back. They were not scared by hoods and nightgowns. The result was appalling. Kidnapping, whipping, murder almost wholesale, torture that would shame the Middle Ages, an atmosphere of terror, hatred and feud that attracted the attention of the world. And in the midst of it all the black, driven cattle who form sixty-eight per cent, of the population were dumb.

Here were white men afraid of degradation; here were white men afraid of hunger; here were black men afraid of hunger and black men afraid of death. And here were secret midnight oath and murder seeking to right it all.

Such were the elements that make for secret mob law: economic rivalry, race hatred, class hatred, sex rivalry, religious dogmatism and before all the Shape of Fear. For years and centuries this method of organized secrecy, sworn to unlimited and ruthless action, has been used to accomplish certain things. Strong arguments have been brought to defend it and it may be admitted that one can easily see circumstances when the only way to make the survival of certain ideas and ideals certain, would be to force them through by secrecy and stealth.

But are we ready to say that this is the case in the first half of the twentieth century? Can we for a moment admit this? Is not the very thought a monstrous attack upon all that civilization and religion have accomplished?

What is there after all, of truth back of what the Klan attacks? And perhaps first, what does the Klan attack? I will not stop to argue this. I simply quote from their own blank application for membership seven of their twenty questions: “7.—Were your parents born in the United States of America?” “8.—Are you a Gentile or Jew?” “ 9.—Are you of the white race or of a colored race?” “13.—Do you believe in White Supremacy?” “15.—What is your religious faith? “ “ 17.—Of what religious faith are your parents?” “20.—Do you owe ANY KIND of allegiance to any foreign nation, government, institution, sect, people, ruler or person?”

Here then is clearly the groundwork for opposition to the foreign-born, the Jew, the colored races and the Catholic Church. I am not the one to defend Catholic or Jew. The Catholic

Church and modern European civilization are largely synonymous and to attack the one is to accuse the other. For the alleged followers of Jesus Christ and worshipers of the Old Testament to revile Hebrew culture is too impudent for words. But in this crazy combination of hates fathered by the Ku Klux Klan (and so illogical that in any intelligent country it would be laughed out of court), is included the American Negro. What is the indictment against him? He was a slave. He is ignorant. He is poor. He has the stigmata of poverty and ignorance—that is crime. He laughs and sings and dances. He is black. He isn’t all black. The very statement of such a bill of indictment is like accusing ashes of fire. The real arraignment of the Negro is the fear that white America with its present machinery is not going to be able to keep black folk down. They are achieving equality with startling swiftness. Neither caricature nor contempt, rape of women or insult of children, murder or burning at the stake, have succeeded in daunting this extraordinary group.

Against it open reasoning and argument has been employed but it has failed to convince even those who employed it. This was followed by propaganda; and the propaganda of emphasizing “race”, “racial” characteristics, “racial” inferiority, is a propaganda which according to all modern scientific dicta is unreliable and untrue. Yet these terms flourish and these things are taught in school and college; they appear in books and lectures and they are used because of what men want them to accomplish, namely, the continual fear and hate of black folk instead of that natural rebound of sympathy and admiration which their work in a half century deserves.

But as I have said, even this propaganda has not been successful. What next then? Next comes the Ku Klux Klan. Next comes the leadership of mob and perpetration of outrage by forces, secret, hidden and underground. And the danger and shame not in the movement itself, so much as in the wide tolerance a sympathy which its methods evoke among educated and decent Americans. These people see in the Ku Klux Klan a way of doing and saying that which they themselves are ashamed to do and say. Go into any western town from Pittsburgh to Kansas City: “The Klan—Silly—but!—You see these Catholics, rich, powerful, silent, organized. Got all the foreigners corralled—I don’t know. And Jews—the Jews own the country. They are trying to rule the world. They are too smart, pushing, impudent. And niggers! And that isn’t all. Dagoes, Japs ; and then Russia! I tell you we gotta do something. The Klan?—silly, of course—but—.”

Thus the Ku Klux Klan is doing a job which the American people, or certainly a considerable portion of them, want done and they want it done because as a nation they have fear of the Jew, the immigrant, the Negro. They realize that the American of English descent is not holding his own physically or spiritually in this country; that America survives and flourishes because of the alien immigrant with his strong arm, his simple life, his faith and hope, his song, his art, his religion. They realize that no group in the United States is working harder to push themselves forward and upward than the Negroes; and over all this rises the Shape of Fear.

The worst aspect of all this is that when we resort to the underground method it involves a conscious surrender of Truth. It must base itself upon lies. One of the greatest difficulties in estimating the power and spread of the Ku Klux Klan is that its members are evidently sworn to lie. They are ordered to deny their membership in the Klan; they are ordered to deny their participation in certain of its deeds; they are ordered above all to keep at least partially secret its real objects and desires. Now the lie has often been used to advance human culture, but it is an extremely dangerous weapon, and surely we have lived beyond the

need of it today.

Consequently the greatest thing that we have to fear in any such underground movement as the Ku Klux Klan, a thing that makes it much more fearful than anything that has been alleged of Bolshevism or Fascism, is the danger and ease of its being used for exactly the opposite of the things for which it is established or which the thoughts or ideals which its leaders profess. If it is possible to establish a widespread underground movement against Jews, Negroes and Catholics, why isn’t it just as easy to establish similar movements against millionaires, machinery and foreign commerce, or against “Anglo-Saxons,” Protestants and Germans, or against any set of people or set of ideas which any particular group of people dislike, hate or fear? It may be said that at present it is possible to mobilize larger numbers of people in a common hatred against the Hebrew race, the black race, and the Catholic Church than against any similar things; but this is not necessarily true and it certainly is not true in all places and will not be true at all times.

Without doubt, of all the dangerous weapons that civilized man has attempted to use in order to advance human culture the secret mass lie is the most dangerous and the most apt to prove boomerang. This is the real thing that we are to fear in the Ku Klux Klan. We need not fear its logic. It has no logic. Whatever there is of truth in its hatred of three groups of Americans can be discussed openly and fearlessly by civilized men. If Negroes are ignorant underbidders of labor, unhealthy and lazy aspirants to undeserved equality there are plain and well-known social restraints and remedies. First, to improve the condition of Negroes so far as it is improvable; secondly, to teach them the reason behind the objections to their rise so far as there are reasons; and above all to examine thoroughly and honestly what the real questions at issue are. If the hierarchy of the Catholic church is in any way threatening democracy in America there is a chance for perfectly open and honest investigation and conference between this young democracy and that old and honorable government of the spirit of men. If the Jew in self-defense against age-long persecution has closed his fist against the world there is more than a chance to clasp that human hand. In fine, unless we are willing to give up human civilization in order to preserve civilization we cannot for a moment contemplate turning to secret, underground methods as a cure for anything; and the appearance of such a movement is not a case where we stop to ask whether the movement in itself has at present laudable objects or not. It does not make any difference what the Ku Klux Klan is fighting for or against. Its method is wrong and dangerous and uncivilized, and those who oppose it, whether they be its victim like the Jews, Catholics and Negroes, or those who are lauded as its moral sponsors like the white Southerners, the American Legion and the “Anglo-Saxons,” it is the duty of all these people to join together in solemn phalanx against the method which is an eternal menace to human culture.

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie tentatively welcomes reports of a Hamas disarmament agreement but warns of a rapidly escalating quagmire in Iran that has cost 18 American lives and driven domestic grocery prices to a 50-year high. Shifting his focus homeward, Eddie condemns the administration’s sweeping delegalization of 1.8 million immigrants and the cruel, racially motivated ICE crackdowns expanding across airports and the Dilley Detention Center. To combat these systemic assaults and ongoing voting rights rollbacks, he echoes Rev. William Barber’s call for 1,000 grassroots marches over the next 100 days leading up to the midterms, urging his listeners to mobilize and fight for the nation’s democratic soul.

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His aim, I suppose, was to invoke the bogeyman of the Red Scare of the 1950s or the threat of communism that motivated the Reagan years. Whatever his intention, his words had the feel of shag carpet or sitcoms like “Leave it to Beaver” watched on black and white televisions with antennas and remote clickers. It’s the rhetoric of a bygone era.

But Scalise, like most Republicans these days, was following the lead of Donald Trump. With the recent electoral victories and challenges by Democratic Socialists (DSA), Trump has warned that the nation is imperiled by those hell-bent on destroying “the traditional American way of life.” “Communism,” Trump declared at the Mount Rushmore sesquicentennial event on July 3^rd, “is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

Well, what should we expect from an eighty-year-old President, who believes he is the smartest man who has ever walked the earth? He traffics in a politics of fear and, I guess, the threat of “commies” lingers in his addled head as the most effective way, outside of explicit racist appeals, to motivate voters who are struggling economically.

But Trump and his ilk aren’t the only ones playing at this game. DSA has rattled the Democratic Party, and some within the party’s ranks seem to be in full panic mode as they fight on the terrain set by Republicans and their accusations of a communist/socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

These Democrats, like Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, insist on a kind of pragmatism inherent in centrist politics, echo the language of the political consultant class about “electability” (a shorthand for troublesome concessions), and declare their commitments to the power of markets even as crony capitalism erode the basic pillars of American democracy.

Ironically, theirs is an echo of a bygone era, too.

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger published, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. To put it crudely, he understood the destabilizing effects of unbridled capitalism and technological advances on traditional forms of life. People felt unmoored. They experienced a breakdown in the social bonds of society. Communism offered an alternative, new forms of solidarity. But that alternative ended up being a more secure prison.

Schlesinger commended something between the free hand of markets and the dictatorship of the proletariat: he argued for a form of liberalism that would be both practical and affirming of the “balance between the individual and community.” But this approach, practically, would go hand and hand with American Cold War nationalism.

The “vital center” had to hold between the equal threats from the left and the right.

In short, the extremism of fascists and leftists, broadly understood, presented an existential threat to the Republic. What results is a political orientation that sets out to contain any politics that might fall under the category of socialism or the left or radical left.

And what do we hear today from some Democrats about the “far left extremism” of those who embrace democratic socialism? Van Jones, former advisor to President Obama and CNN commentator, recently warned that the extremists in DSA were “hijacking” the party. “I am tired of a set of people on the very far left, telling us that in order for us to be progressive that we have to believe and support ideas that are completely nuts”, Jones declared on his Substack.

He laid out his progressive bona fides and the positions that he fully endorses (e.g., criminal justice reform, the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, free education). But the extremists, he claims, push an agenda far outside of those commitments. They want “no police, no prisons, and no borders.” They “support Hamas” and celebrate “the murder of Israeli civilians.”

But this carries the stench of the bogeyman.

One wonders who these people are who demand that all progressives should hold such views. The slogan, “no police, no prisons, and no borders,” feels like it came straight out of a Republican war room. And criticisms of genocide in Gaza ought not be conflated with support of Hamas or celebrating the murder of Israeli civilians. One can hold the former without embracing the evil of the latter. Think of the positions of AOC or Mamdani here. Just to name two popular politicians. Jones knows these positions among progressives are much more nuanced and the debate more vigorous than his caricature.

But caricature is the point.

Today’s version of vital center politics must work to hold off Trumpists AND the so-called left. Both represent an existential danger, on its view, to the Republic. The old rhetoric of the threat of socialism and communism to freedom seeks to occupy the imagination and cut short any attempt to think outside of the box of its version of liberalism.

***

A while back, one of my former teachers, Jeffrey Stout, wrote a short piece entitled “Ism-mongering.” It involved a rather technical philosophical debate about his book, Ethics After Babel. Stout took issue with the reviewers’ description of the book as “an attempt to refute foundationalism, realism, or any other ism.” In fact, he resisted the shorthand of slogans that stand as substitutes for his own thinking. The reviewers’ attention to “isms,” he claimed, got in the way of what he was trying to argue in the book.

I think we need to resist the allure of “ism-mongering” in our politics, too. Invocations of socialism and communism can gum up the imagination. The slogans stand in for serious thinking. And, in some ways, that is the point.

Our politics presuppose imagination capture. Both parties don’t want us to think outside of set boxes or frames. Our fears and ambitions must be familiar, rote, and contained. And every single time we stick our heads outside of a box, speak words about the possibility of a different way of living (claim that markets are not the answer to all social and moral ills), and demand a responsive politics to our troubles, familiar language interrupts and we are forced, once again, to draw within the lines.

I am not interested in fighting over “isms.” I could care less whether I am thought of as progressive or not. The values animating the fight for a better world draw my attention and heart not ideological fealty. The bogeyman isn’t as effective when we are more concerned about what and who we care about than about what we fear and labels that signal our virtue.

Both parties and established interests want us fighting on old terrain. Debating about socialism, communism, and freedom. The Cold War, vital center politics, Reaganism, the triangulation of the Democratic Leadership Council and its various offsprings, and MAGA are all in a fight for how we imagine the past, present, and the future. Easy slogans will secure our chains.

Let’s break free, allow our imaginations to do the work this moment demands, and draw outside these damn lines.

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reviews the growing global and domestic crises, beginning with warnings that over 1.2 million Gazans face severe food insecurity alongside the loss of 18 American soldiers in an escalating war with Iran. He slams newly announced tariffs on 60 trading partners for deepening the domestic affordability crisis while politicians dismiss relief for working families as “socialism”. Eddie further condemns political attacks on the Smithsonian as an attempt to whitewash history and embrace white supremacy without judgment, before highlighting ongoing voting rights rollbacks across the South and the deep institutional mistrust surrounding the death of Mississippi teenager Nolan Wells.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & Humanitarian Crisis

• Common Dreams: Gaza Still in Hunger Crisis

• The New York Times: Opinion on Israel, Gaza, and Genocide Allegations

U.S.-Iran War Escalations & Global Impacts

• The New York Times: Live Updates on Iran War Strikes, Oil, and Trump

• Axios: Trump Axios Iran Interview Details Massive Escalations

• The Guardian: Iran War and U.S. Troops

• CBS News: Live Updates on Iran War, Trump, Strait of Hormuz, and Oil Prices

International Relations: Cuba

• AP News: U.S.-Cuba Humanitarian Flights

Trade Policy & The Economy

• Common Dreams: Trump’s Section 301 Tariffs

• NBC News: Trump Announces Tariffs on 60 Countries Over Forced Labor

• The Washington Post: Trump Announces New Tariffs on Nations Over Forced Labor Products

Disappearance of Nolan Wells

• Mississippi Today: Nolan Wells Autopsy and Ben Crump’s Involvement

• PBS NewsHour: Family of Nolan Wells Announces Results of Independent Autopsy

• WLOX: Nolan Wells Autopsy Report Withheld Until Grand Jury Review, DA Says

Cultural Politics & The Smithsonian

• TheGrio: Jasmine Crockett Responds to Smithsonian Museum Hearings

• The Washington Post: Democrats Defend Smithsonian Museum Leader Amid GOP-Led Hearings

• The New York Times: Smithsonian Faces Scrutiny Over Trump, Activism, and American History

On a hot and humid Monday in June, a young Dan Patrick stopped and asked Miss Bessie Ireland for a glass of water. The Pascagoula Democrat-Star reported that Miss Ireland “acceded to his request and as she was in the act of handing it to him he caught her arm and struggled with her.” She tried to resist, the paper recounted, but eventually succumbed to “his hellish deed.” Patrick, who was well known in Pascagoula, was captured in Scranton near the Scranton Hotel bar the next day by the local Sheriff, taken to jail where he confessed his crime and, according to the reporting, admitted that “he was ready to face any punishment that would be meted out.”

Crowds began to gather. Rumors swirled. The local sheriff got word that a mob was planning to take Patrick by force. He decided to put Patrick on the freight train arriving from Mobile on Wednesday morning. The idea was to take the prisoner to New Orleans “until the public cooled off.” But the white residents of Scranton and Pascagoula had other ideas. The sheriff brought Patrick to a secluded spot near the depot where the train pulled up around 1:30am only to be overwhelmed by a mob of about 300 people hell-bent on a lynching. According to the Pascagoula Democrat-Star, the sheriff “made a brave stand and did all in his power to hold his man from the infuriated crowd, but after several shots had been fired and [the sheriff] shot in the leg he was compelled to give in.”

Patrick was taken to the Hangman’s Tree, which stood at the intersection of Krebs Avenue and Magnolia Street in Scranton, about a hundred yards from the depot. As they placed the rope around his neck and swung him up, it was reported, Patrick “proclaimed his guilt and cried out to the mob, ‘shoot me, shoot me, get rid of me quick.’ Several hundred shots rang out as his body dangled from the old Oak tree. The Coroner’s jury concluded that “We, the jury, find that the deceased came to his death by climbing a tree, venturing too far out on a limb and broke his neck.”

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie dissects a brutal week of escalating crises, from the collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire and ongoing strikes in Gaza pushing the death toll past 73,000, to the brazen West Bank detention of Congressman Ro Khanna. Domestically, he condemns a terrifying surge in ICE violence—including the fatal shooting of Colombian national Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine—and warns that the confirmation hearings of Jay Clayton and Todd Blanche signal a dangerous threat to independent justice. Finally, Eddie honors the grieving families of Nolan Wells and Daniel Erving who are forced to fight local authorities just to get basic transparency in the deaths of their children.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & Israeli Settlements

• PBS NewsHour: Israel’s Latest Strikes Kill at Least a Dozen People in Gaza, Including Police Officers

• The Guardian: Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ Drops Full Gaza Recovery Plan for Tiny Pilot Scheme

• NPR: U.S. Congressman Detained by Israeli Settlers in the West Bank

• Reuters: Israel Allocates $434 Million for 34 New West Bank Settlements

• AP News: Democrats Confront Aid to Israel Amid Trump and Netanyahu Alignments

U.S.-Iran Conflict Escalations

• The Wall Street Journal: Trump Leans Toward Expanding U.S. Military Operations in Iran

• CNBC: Regional Impacts of U.S.-Iran War Rippling Through Syria and Bahrain

• The New York Times: The Resurgence of the ‘Forever War’ Under Trump in Iran

Immigration Enforcement & ICE Violence

• CNN Live News: ICE Shootings in Maine and Houston Spark Outrage

• CNN Video: Fatal ICE Shooting of Colombian Man in Maine

• Common Dreams: Tom Homan’s Rhetoric and the Reality of ICE Bloodshed

• NPR: ICE Agent Who Fatally Shot a Man in Maine Has a History of Violence, Ex-Wife Says

Cabinet Confirmations & Election Integrity

• The New York Times: Jay Clayton Confirmation Hearing for Director of National Intelligence

• CBS News: Sen. Jon Ossoff Presses DNI Nominee Jay Clayton Who Refuses to Say Biden Won 2020

• CNN: Todd Blanche Faces Senate Hearing Witnesses

• The Washington Post: 5 Things We Learned From Todd Blanche’s AG Confirmation Hearing

• Yahoo News: Todd Blanche Confirmation Hearing Highlights

• Common Dreams: Assessing Trump’s Primetime Address

• AP News: Trump Centers Election Integrity in Primetime Address

• CNN: Takeaways From Trump’s Primetime Election Speech

• The New York Times: Key Takeaways From Trump’s Elections Speech

• The Hill: The Push for the ‘Save America Act’

• AL.com: Sen. Tuberville Claims Several Senators Didn’t Legally Win, Offers No Evidence

Local Investigations & Demands for Justice

• CNN: The Death of Daniel Erving Sparks Demands for Answers

• ABC News: Family Calls for Justice After Evidence Tampering Charges Filed

• Sun Herald: Latest Developments in Jackson County Investigations

• YouTube: Broadcast Coverage of Local Demands for Justice and Accountability

Nations are held together by their history, and through the telling of that history, they forge an identity or believe they have discovered one. At this very moment, we are in the business of telling such stories with special urgency. The celebrations will be grand. But the question that should occupy us is not how to celebrate what we were, but how to reckon honestly with what we are.

Three stories compete for our national soul at this anniversary. All three, I want to suggest, fail us. They all emerge from a similar form, but they are not troubling in equal degrees.

Refusal and Withdrawal

Reflecting on the horror of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, abolitionist Martin Delany was beside himself with disappointment. That same year, he was dismissed from Harvard’s Massachusetts Medical College because he was Black. The dismissal and the law mingled in his mind as two expressions of the same animus. And in his extraordinary text of 1852, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, he insisted that Black people must seek emigration. It became clear to Delany that whatever else Black people might be in the United States, they were certainly, as he put it, “politically, not of [their white counterparts], but aliens to the laws and political privileges of the country.”1

Delany did not stay with this position, but it became powerful all the same. The first story is the story of refusal. It tells us that the nation’s foundational commitment was not to freedom but to anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and native dispossession. We hear echoes of it today. In this story, the horror exacted on Black and indigenous bodies has ironically propelled liberal democracy toward an improvement that never arrives, leaving Black and indigenous people as modern-day Sisyphean characters. The system, we are told, is working as intended when it harms non-whites. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution is our inheritance. It is our deception. In its extremes, this leads either to withdrawal from democratic life or visions of revolutionary overthrow, both of which share the belief that the United States offers only unfulfillable promises, and that complicity in pursuing them is itself wrong.

It would be inaccurate to say that such a view is without merit. From wealth to employment opportunity, from police contact to incarceration rates, we see sustained examples of inequity that point to structurally enforced patterns of discrimination. To this we can add the recent Supreme Court decisions that erode the Voting Rights Act. So, there is truth here. That is not the point. The real issue is whether it merits the characterization attached to it; whether it ought to function as an irrevocable origin story that forever stains the nation and denies efforts to realize a multi-racial and ethnic democracy.

The Story of Recovery

The second story is one of recovery. It is, perhaps, our most dominant national story. Abraham Lincoln told it when he insisted the Founders set up “a standard maxim for a free society” to be “constantly approximated,” if never perfectly attained. He was responding to the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision of 1857.2 The case itself was enormously influential. At bottom, the question was whether a Black man (Dred Scott) had legal standing to bring suit in a federal court in favor of his status as a free citizen. The answer to that question, the Court maintained, depended on whether those of African ancestry were included in the category of the people as specified in “We the people” of the Constitution. The Court was clear that the people referred to a limited class of persons as understood by the Founders. The “question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not.”3

Lincoln argued that the Supreme Court was mistaken in its decision. The Court should have noticed, he insisted, the moral vision fueling and shaping the Constitution. They should have recognized the prophetic power of the Declaration of Independence. For Lincoln, the Founders defined “with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.”4

Frederick Douglass shared this sentiment. In his famous July 5, 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” he called the Declaration of Independence the “RINGBOLT to the chain” of the “nation’s destiny.”5 The nation’s direction can remain true, if it remains fastened to its moral foundation. And more than a century later in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. insisted that when we lose our way, those words can carry “the whole nation back to the great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.”6

King could be very critical of the United States, but it is his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, however cliché, that captures this vision of recovery: “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation [of the Declaration of Independence], America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”7 Why? King never doubted the moral and political funds were there, waiting to be honored. As Eric Sundquist later asked of King’s speech: “What did it mean for the nation to return to itself, to return to its true home?”8

They were all great rhetoricians, but these were not flatteries. They asked us to be political archeologists, removing the political dirt to recover the path that was once properly laid. Throughout American history, this narrative of seeing the Declaration as the foundation of our civic religion, a sacred text, has remained powerful. It has sustained democratic struggle under conditions of exclusion, from abolitionism, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, etc. You pick your American struggle against exclusion, and you will find people seeking to recover what they believe they were wrongfully denied.

However powerful, there is an unfortunate tendency in such appeals. When we locate moral authority in a buried origin, even our most critical appeals to the founding can unwittingly displace political judgment from the present onto the past, forcing us to measure our success by how well we are aligned with our civic ancestors. In this we miss something important about our past. History may well enable us in the present, but it can never function to redeem the wrongs committed in the nation’s name. If the story of recovery encourages democratic advancement, it often does so by pretending that the answer was always there and that proper deployment of it can heal us in some final way.

Ethno-Nationalism and Sovereignty

On the evening of July 5, 2025, Vice-President J. D. Vance addressed the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Awards Dinner. His topic was the future of American citizenship. “America in 2025,” he said, “is more diverse than it has ever been. And yet the institutions that form culture are weaker.”

He did not stop there:

“[I]f you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, very few of our leaders would have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? That definition is overinclusive and underinclusive. It would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners. Must we admit them tomorrow? But, at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”9

The logic of the argument is striking. Citizenship is no longer tied to creed or principles. Increasingly, in this view, it is tied to descent and historical lineage. Because the nation’s recognized political ancestry has historically been tied to white lineages, the Vice-President’s appeal to descent invariably privileges those over others. All this can be said without ever invoking race. Once political belonging is tied to blood rather than creed, the nation becomes something closer to an inherited possession rather than a shared political project by those who inhabit it.

Here, we have the origin story of white ethno-nationalism, and it sits at the center of the presidency. The importance of ancestry thus justifies a philosophy of sovereign ownership. This philosophy has a long tradition in American law and political culture. You can find it in the Naturalization Act of 1790 that sought to limit citizenship to “free white persons.”10 The belief in sovereign ownership fueled the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in response to the Civil War and its subsequent rebirth and expansion in 1915. And it led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 that put in place quotas to preserve the ideological power of white Americans.

In its current form, white ethno-nationalism explains what might otherwise appear to be a series of disconnected policy positions from the executive branch, from its rejection of immigration to its attack on voting rights to its denial of birthright citizenship. Consider, for a moment, the last of these. The Fourteenth Amendment is unambiguous: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

Although the President was recently unsuccessful in overturning birthright citizenship, the slim majority of the Supreme Court in favor of the Fourteenth Amendment should give us pause. So it remains worth noting that to challenge birthright citizenship is not a constitutional argument in any recognizable sense. It is an origin story attempting to assert itself against the law. It says, in effect, that the sovereign people—understood as white people—retain authority that no amendment can finally extinguish. Birthright citizenship offends this philosophy. It treats membership as a fact of nativity rather than a privilege dispensed by those who imagine themselves the nation’s original and rightful owners.

The first two origin stories are troubling because they deform our civic motivation. In the first, our civic powers turn away from the nation, while in the second those same powers are at once diminished and exaggerated. Diminished because we think about our agency only in relation to how well we can channel the Founders. Exaggerated because in channeling the Founders we believe we can settle the gravest of mistakes. The third is of a different and far more dangerous kind. It wields state power to make its fiction legally real. It aims to suppress the civic energies that would challenge it and demand its accountability. It is anti-democratic in form and scope.

On Trust and the Declaration

For all their differences, they share something. They each ask us to stop trusting one another. This will be difficult to accept, especially regarding the second redemptive story that has so often led to what we rightly see as moral and political advancements. But consider the matter with care. The first counsels permanent suspicion. The second mistakenly displaces trust onto generations long dead, hoping that through their words, rather than our shared labor and understanding, we will form a more perfect union. The third decides in advance who is worthy of it at all. Do these origin stories not find themselves in the news, on social media, or in the classroom, shaping how we see one another?

What is lost in all this? Trust. It is the invisible institution of democratic life.

James Baldwin understood this with an urgency that still unsettles. When he insisted that we must tell the truth about our racist past, he did not mean it merely for truth’s sake. Honesty, he understood, is the precondition for believing that we can rely on people to act on our behalf. In other words, that we can trust them. This is why he argued that national storytelling is about more than historical accuracy. It is about who matters and why. If you are not truthful about your past, you cannot be honest about your present, and the result will be more pain and suffering visited upon those you otherwise claim to protect. To honestly accept one’s past, Baldwin thought, “is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”11 The white nationalist origin story cannot afford this honesty. It requires, as a condition of its existence, a systematic dishonesty about what the Fourteenth Amendment means, what the history of citizenship in this country has been, and who has always been here, always been working, always been building what others have claimed as exclusively their own.

Here is what the Declaration, at its best, can still teach us about trust and citizenship. Before we get to the word “liberty” in its second paragraph—“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—the word “equal” has already appeared twice. It appears at the very outset where the colonists say that they must assume “among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…”. It arrives once again with the more important words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”.

Liberty, in this document, gains its direction from the equality it must affirm. And a form of freedom that treats equal standing as optional, rather than the very ground of its own security, will not remain free for long. .

This view of equality is not something that was necessarily known at the founding; it is something we have come to earn through our history. The word was there, but the fullness of its meaning slowly accrued to it through shared work. The abolitionists, the suffragists, the civil rights actors, all of them, authored equality’s meaning. But how? Because they placed their trust in one another. Trust is not merely a feeling; it is a practice in which we decide, struggle, and imagine together what equality must mean for us. To trust each other is also to trust that we can care for one another through the values that we give to ourselves and that will direct our political society. To trust each other is also to believe that we can be better than our civic ancestors by creating for ourselves forms of living they could never imagine.

When you approach the nation from this angle, it is no longer a possession to be inherited by some and withheld by others. The United States is not merely land and inheritance. It is a choice. Will we enrich its meaning far beyond what was imagined, or will we leave its words small, narrow, and tied only to a few?

~

Melvin L. Rogers is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he co-directs the Democracy Project. He is a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the author of the The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Everything about this story is heartbreaking. The death of a promising young Black man, the questionable circumstances surrounding that death (a group of white friends left him on Horn Island), the ongoing demand for answers from law enforcement, and the spiraling conspiracies on social media about it all make it difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle passions from evidence, relevant detail from spectacle.

The hard fact remains. A mother and father must bury their child. And the weight of history, particularly the history of Mississippi, and the reality of our current troubles bear down on those trying to make sense of this tragedy.

Think about it. Racial distrust has deepened over the last decade or so. Trump and his MAGA followers have stoked divisions and hatreds in pursuit of their political agendas. We have kept track of what this might mean for the workings of government in Washington, D.C., but little attention has been given to the impact of this sinister shift downstream – the permission structure for the expression of hatreds in the daily lives of people close to the ground.

Today, in addition to the assault on Affirmative Action, DEI, and American history, Black people hang from trees and people doubt the investigations of police that describe the deaths as suicide. Questions are left unanswered as to why all this is happening now. (Jillian Colleen Jefferson has compiled a record, an echo of Ida B. Wells’s Red Record, of what she describes as modern day lynchings. And Mississippi leads the way. See A Crimson Record https://drive.google.com/file/d/1twIekbOTlto0wEtY0uAL_0IW__VV1Ity/view?pli= )

Nolan’s death happened in this environment. No wonder skepticism shadows this case. That skepticism bears the markings of history’s lessons.

I am not old enough to have experienced the Mississippi that John Silver called “a closed society.” But I have heard stories of its brutality, of all the bodies that lined the rivers of this state and soaked the soil of this place. These stories function like a Greek chorus in my imagination. They remind me that Mississippi’s brutality was unrivaled and that the reality of our present days is resonant with an ugly past.

The general outline of that history takes the form of a kind of common sense about race matters. Not so much a hatred of others, but an earned skepticism about the moral capacities of those hell-bent on keeping this Republic white. We know what white people can do. The examples are too many to gloss over.

The distrust has enabled us to navigate a world where the madness of racism can do unimaginable harm. We teach our children to be skeptical, too. Don’t trust that a cop will recognize you as a human being today, we tell them. Do whatever he or she tells you to do. Answer their questions respectively, we say, because we want our babies to come home to us. And above all, no matter who you are with, listen, listen for the crackling sounds of danger.

Earned skepticism is rooted in an informed distrust cultivated in separate worlds. We must admit that our intimate lives are profoundly segregated. According to one study, the core social network of the average white American is almost 90% white. (https://prri.org/press-release/prri-survey-friendship-networks-of-white-americans-continue-to-be-90-white/). We are walking mysteries to one another. Even when there are friendships that run deep, that are loving and enduring, those friendships are exceptions that prove the rule.

I understand completely the disbelief around the circumstances of Nolan’s death, because I have felt it myself. Friends would not have left that young man on the island. True friendship carries with it a tenderness expressed in an abiding concern for the well-being of another. Ralph Waldon Emerson was right: “the only way to have a friend is to be one.” Leaving the young man on the island without his phone, to my mind, was not an expression of friendship.

But, if I am honest, that judgment is separate from the facts of the case. All of what I have said doesn’t prove anything about the death of Nolan Wells. It does not confirm the guilt of his white “friends.” It only shows how his death carries the burden of these dark days.

Passions and facts comingle here. Death and distrust are coiled together like a breeding ball.

Earned skepticism does, however, force the hand of those who claim that we should trust law enforcement and give these white people the benefit of the doubt. It demands transparency and accountability. Nolan’s mother and father must grieve and fight. They must plan the funeral of their baby and challenge the story around their son’s death.

Earned skepticism may generate wild conspiracy theories on social media, but here, on the coast of Mississippi in a place where beautiful Magnolia trees and grand white oaks make for an idyllic scene, a mother and father MUST be skeptical if they are to discover what really happened to their baby in a state haunted by ghosts.

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie navigates a bruising week defined by the collapse of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, the reclosure of the Strait of Hormuz, and Israel’s push to 70% territorial control over Gaza amid a massive generational shift in American public opinion. Domestically, he warns that the immediate fallout of the Supreme Court’s Slaughter decision has allowed the executive branch to purge federal election commissioners and aggressively target the integrity of upcoming midterm elections. Eddie chronicles a dark surge in domestic military enforcement—highlighting fatal encounters involving the National Guard in Memphis and ICE in Houston—before validating the deep, historically earned community skepticism surrounding the disappearance of Mississippi teenager Nolan Wells.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & U.S.-Iran Escalations

• NPR: Trump Ceasefire Collapses as Israel Reaches 70% Gaza Control

• The New York Times: Beloved Aid Worker Killed in Israeli Airstrike

• The Washington Post: Rahm Emanuel Warns Israeli Leadership Has Reached a Dead End

• AP News: Public Opinion Shifts as Polls Detail Fracturing Support for Israel

• The New York Times: Trump Ramps Up Rhetoric as Iran Conflict Deepens

• Politico: Internal Republican Rifts Widen Over U.S.-Iran War Strategy

• CNN: Intelligence Briefings Detail Iranian Plot Targeting Trump

• PBS NewsHour: Ceasefire Declared Over as U.S. Launches Renewed Strikes on Iran

Domestic Policy & Democratic Erosion

• Common Dreams: Civil Rights Groups Sound Alarm Over Election Assistance Commission Changes

• The Guardian: Trump Purges Independent Election Commissioners

• The New York Times: Wholesome Dismissal of Independent Election Board Overhaul

• The Washington Post: Trump Guts Independent Elections Oversight Ahead of Midterms

Maine Senate Race Controversy

• Politico: Graham Platner Faces Sexual Assault Allegations in Maine Race

• Axios: Platner Exits Maine Senate Race as Deadlines Loom

• YouTube: Broadcast News Coverage on Maine Campaign Disruptions

State Enforcement Overreach & Fatal Shootings

• YouTube: Local Media Inundated by Federal Task Force Shootings

• Tennessee Lookout: National Guard Troops on Patrol in Memphis Fatally Shoot 20-Year-Old

• The New York Times: Military Presence Escalates on City Streets Following Memphis Shootings

• Common Dreams: Outcry Over Lorenzo Salgado Case Renews Calls to Abolish ICE

• The New York Times: Witnesses Challenge Official Narrative in Houston ICE Shooting

• The Washington Post: Eye-Witnesses State Houston Man Did Not Ram Officers Prior to Fatal ICE Shooting

Disappearance of Nolan Wells

• NPR: Family of Missing Mississippi Teen Nolan Wells Retains Ben Crump

• CNN: What We Know About the Disappearance of Nolan Xavier Wells

• ABC News: Video Analysis of Jackson County Investigation Into Missing Youth

• Sun Herald: Coastal Mississippi Communities Demanding Transparency in Nolan Wells Case

The Color Question: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on July 5, 1875

(The Frederick Douglass Papers, https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/18187 )

FELLOW CITIZENS: I am not here to glorify the heroes of the American revolution. I simply avail myself of the occasion to say a few plain words of matters suggested by the facts of the present hour, and which immediately concern the colored people of our whole country.

The Revolution, of 1776, which resulted in the separation of this country from Great Britain, and its final independence, was a time that tried men’s souls. How grandly and gloriously that trial was borne we all know. The great men and the great events of that period are familiar to every schoolboy, white and black, in the land, and will ever so remain. They have been declaimed a thousand times at every fireside, upon every
hilltop and in every valley, and will be so declaimed again to-day.

If, however, any man should ask me what colored people have to do with the Fourth of July, my answer is ready. Colored people have had something to do with almost everything of vital importance in the life and progress of this great country. We have never forsaken the white man in any great emergency and never expect to forsake him. We have been with him in times of peace and in times of war, and at all times. We were with him in the darkest hours of the Revolution of 1776. We were with him in the war
for free trade and sailors’ rights in 1812. We were with him in 1861. We were with him at Bunker Hill and at Red Bank. We were with him on the land and with him on the water, and with him everywhere. A black man was in front of the first resistance made in State street, Boston, to British power and fell with his face toward the foe. But I will not dwell upon this topic. The late Wm. C. Nell, of Boston, the best historian the colored people have yet produced, has done ample justice to the black man in the Revolution. His book should be in the hands of every colored boy in the country.

THE RACE ON TRIAL.

The fathers of this Republic, as I have said, had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic are about to have their trial now. How we shall stand that trial, how we shall pass through it, how we shall come out of it, is to me a matter of great solemnity. The men of the Revolution went through the furnace and came out pure gold. Shall we, the colored people, present a similar example?

Let us look at the situation, and thoroughly understand all of its features, relations and bearings. As a people we have gained much during the last ten years. Fortune favored us with a liberal hand. It gave us a fair wind, if not a smooth sea, and by it we were driven on at a rate of speed that we had not known before and carried to a height of which we had never dreamed as possible to us. But the fact is—and it is one of which we should never lose sight—our progress and present position are due to causes
almost wholly outside of our own will and our own exertions. We did not make or control the issues of our destiny. We are the creatures of a conflict of social elements which we did but little to create. The white people of this country quarreled and came to blows, and it was our lot to be on the side of the victorious party.

THE CHANGE IN OUR CONDITION is mainly due to this fact.

Had the Union gone down in that mighty struggle, we should have gone down with it, and our condition to-day would have been even worse than before the quarrel began.

Now the thing to be considered to-day is this: Men cannot, ought not and will not quarrel and fight forever, even though outside parties may be benefited by such quarreling and fighting. This is true even of contentions among men of different races, and much more true where men are of the same race. The American people are essentially of the same race. They are of the same color. United by blood, by a common origin, by a common language, by a common literature, by a common glory, and by the same grand historic associations and achievements. So sure as the stars shine in the heavens, and the rivers run to the sea, so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrel and become friends. The whole American horizon is already fringed with the portents of this coming union. Boston, Lexington and Bunker Hill have already sent forth their silvery notes of peace and unity to the whole nation, and next year Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, will lift to the sky its million voices in one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country—from gulf to lakes and from sea to sea.

THE COMING PEACE.

Now when this mighty quarrel has ceased, when all the asperities and resentments have gone as they are sure to go, when all the clouds that a few years ago lowered about our national house, shall be in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, when this great white race has renewed its vows of patriotism and flowed back into its accustomed channels, the question for us is: in what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people? What tendencies will spring out of it, and how will they affect us? If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring? Has justice so deep a hold upon the nation,
has reconstruction of the basis of liberty and equality become so strong that the rushing together of these mighty waves will not disturb its foundations? These questions, my friends, make me thoughtful. The signs of the times are not all in our favor. There are, even in the Republican party, indications of a disposition to get rid of us. Men are seeking new allies, and smiling in faces upon which they never smiled before since the war.

A disposition is seen to shake off the negro and accept the old master’s class. Out of the eight hundred thousand black voters of the country we have only had about twenty black clerks here in Washington, and these in the last few days have been thinned out and reduced. We have had a few representatives abroad and a few in Congress; the indications are that we shall have fewer by and bye. Ambitious candidates for the Presidency are already casting about to see if they cannot be elected in some way without the aid of the black vote. Well, they have the right to do all this, but the thing looks bad, and we at least are called upon to look the matter full in the face.

OUR SHELTER in the storms of the past has been Ulysses S. Grant. The question is as to who will shield us in the future. Well indeed it will be for us if one as true, just and able shall come after him.

One of the most unpleasant features of this situation for us is in our selves. We are a divided people, and have no men among us, I fear, whose counsel will be headed in the right direction. It has been our misfortune to be educated by two hundred years of slavery to respect white men and despise ourselves.

Now, just this is the thing we are to outgrow. We have got to find out that a people to be respected and powerful must have men among themselves and of themselves whom they must trust and respect. White men have their great men, and are respected in the scale of being because they have them. Ireland loves O’Connell, America loves Washington, Kentucky loves Clay, and Massachusetts loves Webster and Sumner, and our whole country believes in U. S. Grant. Now I believe that we, the colored
people, have men of our own color in whom we may well believe; and woe to us, woe to any people, who has no great men among its own people and of its own people.

AN ORGAN NEEDED.

Another bad feature of our situation is the fact that we have no grand organ which is peculiarly and distinctively our own. We are disparaged, vilified, slandered as a people, but as a people we are dumb, and have no press to answer and expose the injustice. The press of this city is marvelously magnanimous toward us, but we ought to have a press of our own, for we have a cause of our own. My soul creeps within me for a great spirit to rise up among us like that which animated William Lloyd Garrison forty years ago, which would consent to live upon a crust of bread and cup of water in a garret in Boston that he might send our wrongs on the wings of the press to the world. Never until we have and sustain such a press will the reproach of our people be wiped out. Oh, for a man, I say again, who will boldly climb high enough to hang our banner on the outer wall, so that it may be seen and read of all men, than the colored race is capable of living more than a life of absolute dependence, and can think and speak for itself.

There is another evil to be looked at and removed, and that is the swarm of white beggars that sweep the country in the name of the colored race. We must hereafter do our own begging, if any begging is done at all, on our own name. This day is a good day to send forth a declaration of independence on this point, repudiating all such beggars now and forever. I have prepared one such for the occasion, and in part it reads very much like THE GREAT DECLARATION which makes this day memorable.

Here it is: When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among their fellow men the independent and equal position to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [un]alienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights various organizations are instituted among men, deriving their power from the consent of those in whose interests they have been professedly created; that whenever any such organization becomes destructive of these ends it is the right and the duty of such people to alter or
abolish it, and to institute new organizations, laying their foundations in such principles as to them shall seem most likely to promote their safety and welfare.

While we were the victims of slavery and had no voice or vote in shaping our destiny, we had good reason to appeal to THE BENEVOLENCE OF MANKIND.

To ask for help in that condition involved no disgrace. But all is changed now. We are no longer slaves, but freemen; no longer subjects, but citizens, and have a voice and vote with all other citizens. A new condition has brought new duties. A character which might pass without censure as a slave cannot so pass as a freeman. We must not beg men to do for us what we ought to do for ourselves. The prostrate form, the uncovered head, the cringing attitude, the bated breath, the suppliant, outstretched hand of beggary does not become an American freeman, and does not become us as a class, and we will not consent to be any longer represented in that position. No people can make desirable progress or have permanent welfare outside of their own independent and earnest efforts.

The burden of our demand upon the American people shall simply be justice and fair play. We utterly repudiate all invidious distinctions, whether in our favor or against us, and ask only for a fair field and no favor.

In our judgment we have been injured more than benefited by the efforts of so-called benevolent societies. While they may have helped a few, they have injured the many. They originate with and are organized by some good men, but they invariably fall into the hands of a peculiar class of men—men who combine shrewdness with religious zeal, and who, whether they sing, pray or preach, always “mean business.” They are ever on the look-out for just such associations as special colonization societies.

African civilization societies, African educational societies, Lincoln and Howard universities, and freedmen’s banks. They follow these with a scent as keen as the shark’s, which in old times followed the slave ship to eat the flesh of DEAD AND DYING NEGROES.

They are heels over head in love with the negro and want to do him ever so much good. These sharply pious men usually manage to slip into the money-boxes of these associations.

There is no keeping them out of the offices of honor and profit. A negro among them stands no chance. Money must be solicited in his name, but it will not do for him to know exactly what becomes of it. These holy men have studied the science of begging all their lives and they have attained the highest perfection. They manufacture circulars by the bushel and load down the mails with their appeals. They have got the names and addresses of all the giving men of the country. This begging class is mainly composed of broken-down preachers without pulpits, lawyers without clients, professors without chairs, editors without journals and the like men, who fail in everything but managing money given for the benefit of the negro.

In order to obtain revenue to carry on what they call their work (including, of course, the salaries which they piously vote themselves by the thousand) they draw the most distressing pictures of the black man’s character and condition. They keep the public mind constantly upon the poor, wretched negro, and thus damn the whole race to a large measure of contempt with a small degree of pity which is akin to contempt. Hence, we now and here denounce and repudiate all such shams and call upon the American people to do the same.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reflects on America’s "divided soul," marking 1,000 days of conflict in Gaza amid unresolved global and economic crises. He highlights staggering reports of executive-level crypto grift alongside Supreme Court rulings that enshrine a unitary executive theory and narrowly preserve birthright citizenship. Connecting modern nativism to the exclusionary immigration battles of the 1920s, Eddie urges a total rejection of whitewashed national mythmaking, calling on listeners to find power and resilience in family, joy, and community this holiday weekend.

Continue Reading…

Global Conflicts & Shifting Diplomacy

• AP News: Gaza and Israel Face 1,000 Days of War

• Reuters: Netanyahu Visits Occupied Southern Lebanon, Vows Israel Won’t Leave Yet

• Reuters: U.S. and Iran Enter Technical Talks to Restart Shipping and Secure Peace

• The New York Times: U.S.-Iran Negotiations Open Path to Economic Repercussions

Executive Disclosures & Crypto Grift

• AP News: Financial Disclosures Highlight Trump’s Portfolios from Bibles to Real Estate

• ABC News: Financial Disclosure Shows Trump Made Massive Gains in Crypto

Supreme Court Battles: Culture Wars & Immigration

• NBC News: Supreme Court Upholds State Transgender Sports Bans

• The New York Times: Supreme Court Decides Landmark Case on Transgender Athletes

• CBS News: Minnesota Politicians React to Transgender Athlete Ruling

• CNN Analysis: Trump Celebrates Supreme Court Birthright Citizenship Outcome

• Politico: White House Targets Crackdown on Pregnant Foreigners After Birthright Ruling

• Rolling Stone: Right-Wing Meltdown Follows Birthright Citizenship Preservation

• Fox News Video: Legal Breakdown of Landmark 14th Amendment Rulings

The Semiquincentennial (America 250) & Public Reception

• USA Today: Crowds Remain Sparse at Trump’s Great American State Fair

• CNN: Low Turnout Plagues America 250 Trump Crowd Events

• AP News: Controversy and Patriotism Intersect at July 4th Openers

• The 1A: Exploring ‘America 250: One Nation Under God’

I have never supported the USMNT. Never during the CONCACAF Cup, exhibitions, friendlies or qualifying matches. I support the MLS, the USL and the USL 2, enthusiastically. I proudly serve as the faculty liaison to my institution’s Men’s soccer squad. I love these leagues, despite my critiques of the business of soccer in the US, and roar with pride and weep with grief at each win and loss of my institution’s men and womens teams. But when it comes to supporting kits draped in the stars and stripes or joining chants of “USA, USA”, like an iconic scrivener, “I prefer not to.”

The source of the hesitation is ironically what largely attracts me to football. It is a sport that is marbled with historical memory, political meaning and national consciousness. England’s fans cry God for Harry (Kane), England and St. George. Haitian fans puff out their chests for the team representing the world’s first Black republic. The Black Stars of Ghana carry the weight of DuBois, Garvey and Nkrumah’s dream of a free Africa. Yet, similarly to Frederick Douglass on July 4^th, 1852, I ask, “What is your [the USMNT’s] advancement to the knockout round to a descendant of the enslaved?” Supporting the national team feels like the thick patriotism and overbearing national pride of American exceptionalism. Soccer fans waving US flags and wearing the powdered wigs of the colonial era, to me carry the same baggage of the military jet displays at NFL games and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf punished by the NBA for refusing to stand for the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner”.

Don’t get me wrong, during the Olympics I cheer for the accomplishments of the African American track and field athletes. In the summer of 1984, I watched every episode of the “Michael Jordan Show” and in 1992, I tuned in for its sequel “The Dream Team”. In the last summer Olympics, the power of Steph Currie’s dominance at key moments elicited the deepest admiration from my childhood love of sports. I only watched Gymnastics when Simone Biles was competing and Tennis when the Williams sisters were playing doubles. I cheer the displays of Black excellence these athletes demonstrate. As a supporter I meditate on the struggles against segregation and marginalization that Black athletes have historically embodied. I cheer for these athletes putting paid to the lie that “Black people can’t ________”. Every sprinter is the child of the abused Jessie Owens, John Carlos and Tommy Smith. Each heavyweight knockout is for Cassius Clay throwing his gold medal into the Ohio River after having been refused service in a Kentucky diner and later Muhammed Ali stripped of his titles for refusing to enlist in service to an illegal and immoral war. Each US basketball victory salutes Bill Russell’s ability to rise above the ignorance and abuse of his time in Boston. The cheers of the supporters of the USMNT remind me of the cheers of the Boston fans that claimed Red Auerbach’s Celtics and s*** in Bill Russell’s bed when he and his family were out of town and later fought against integrating the Boston public school system. To be clear, I cheer for the Black American athletes who happen to be in a USA uniform.

My son counters that this USMNT represents the country that, is, not the country MAGA demands return. He argues, many of these players come from the Midwest, the Northeast and have international upbringings where the love of the game and respect for it transcends the solipsistic braying common to US chauvinism. He, unlike me, was raised playing soccer and identifies with these players as he intimately understands and celebrates what they have accomplished by diversifying the team and what they politically and culturally bring to it. He recognizes and respects that the team looks like football teams the world over. Yet, “I prefer not to” even as I understand these players’ specific backgrounds, recognize their skills and their struggles to raise the standard of US football on the global stage. I cannot escape or ignore anything that smacks of swelling national pride. As symbolically brilliant as it is that Black player Alex Freeman scored a goal on Juneteenth, and Nigerian-British-African American player Folarin Balogun scored two goals against Paraguay in the first game of the group stage, I realize I will not be watching any USMNT matches with many of my friends.

I acknowledge this is unfair to the national team, but it is difficult for me to separate these players from a certain type of fan or the national hubris that attends this. In the year of somebody’s Lord, 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the bourgeois colonial rebellion against the monarchical tyranny of the United Kingdom, there sits in the Oval Office, a criminal president supported by a financial, political, cultural, commercial, media and technological cabal, who actively works to roll back every gain made by marginalized communities over the past century. This at its start was not an unpopular plan. The majority of white voters (men and women) have thrice voted for Trump and this program. Statistically speaking there are substantial numbers of Trump voters among the USMNT supporters. I prefer not to separate the USMNT and its supporters from that odious intention. I hear fans who roar approval for Alex Freeman’s goals but will not fight for his or Malik Tillman’s, Antonee Robinson’s, Haji Wright’s, Tyler Adams, Wes McKennie’s, et al’s communities right to elect their chosen political representatives if they lived in the former confederate states. I see fans that celebrate Falorin Balogun’s goals but will not support his or Tim Tarpeah’s Weah’s 14^th Amendment affirmed right to citizenship.

If the enthusiasm for the USMNT among majority Americans equaled or even rivaled an enthusiasm for a truly inclusive multi-racial democracy, or economic fairness or justice, I could see the block of ice riven disappointment around the heart of my national identity begin to thaw. I could begin to build a base upon which a reasonable hope for a more perfect union could stand. But a recent article in the New York Times has exposed how cosplaying Macho Ken doll, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has been quietly and unilaterally denying high level promotions to experienced and qualified African American and women military officers, often forcing them out of the military. Trump, Hegseth and their ilk, represent the nation. This is who governs the nation. They are not outliers in the national consciousness. These are the people elected and appointed to impose the national will. These people of course do not absolutely represent or reflect every citizen in the United States. There are millions who believe in what Bruce Springsteen refers to as “that land of hopes and dreams,” that have voted, donated, marched and protested in support of the US of their highest aspirations. Trump and his incompetent junta probably do not reflect who the members of the USMNT see themselves as or who they see themselves as representing, despite Christian Pulisic’s celebratory imitation of Trump’s Giraffe Dance. I am willing to believe that the members of the USNMT see themselves as symbols of a hopeful, inclusive, and optimistic nation, like the team itself. Yet Trump, Hegseth and the other aspiring sons and daughters of Gilead, are also symbols of the nation, its majority’s intentions and the revival of its most desolate heart. They do not necessarily reflect what many people believe. But that is the problem with symbols, once established, they have no say in who they represent, how they are seen or what purpose they serve.

~

Charles F. Peterson is Professor of Africana Studies at Oberlin College.

Eddie Glaude believes that, “if we’re not angry about our current moment, something’s wrong.” Bonded by their experiences covering some of the nation’s most haunting modern stories, the author and Princeton professor joins Nicolle to speak candidly about America as it approaches its 250th anniversary — its complicated history and the sweeping wave of white nationalism surging across it. He touches on his new book, “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” whose first sentence is an assertion of his position: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” Glaude tells Nicolle that, unlike James Baldwin — who insisted on the right to criticize America because he loved her — he does not “begin with love” when thinking about the nation, and asks a poignant question rooted in his experience as a Black man in America: “Why would you think I would love the country, given my formation?” And yet, however disillusioned, he has hope. “The power of America has always been in its people,” he says. “We just need to get clear on who those people are.”

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But what struck me was the way a certain segment of the country corroborated that view. Megyn Kelly went on a racist rant about the presence of Haitians in the country.

I reposted this video and described it as racist and morally reprehensible. The responses speak volumes about the hellscape that is X, its algorithm that spews racist hatreds like a broken sewage pipe, and the permission structure that Trump and Stephen Miller have given so many in this country to voice openly their white nationalist views.

I was called a nigger for calling out Kelly’s hatred, told to leave the country, labeled a racist, accused of playing the race card (which they declared no longer works) alongside a host of other vile things.

This is the nature of X. Musk has platformed hatred. That much is clear. But I can’t help but read Kelly’s response and the bile she unleashed against the backdrop of the 250th anniversary. She traffics in an old paranoia. Wrapped in the garment of patriotism is a maddening sense of panic, a fear that the white race of this country will be overrun by Black and Brown folk.

In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. He stoked the fears that the so-called inferior races threatened the extinction of the white race. Stoddard made the stakes clear:

Finally perish! That is the exact alternative which confronts the white race. For white civilization is to-day conterminous with the white race…. If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe, and America. Not to-day, nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.

These fears had led to the rebirth of the KKK in 1915. They gave voice to a sense of American identity threatened by “internal enemies” who were Black, Catholic, Jewish, immigrant, communist, and in their eyes, morally corrupt. The slogan “100 Percent Americanism”—a country made up of white, native-born men and women dedicated to preserving the institutions, principles, and traditions of America—became a clarion call for many who felt the country slipping away from their fingers.

Kelly and her ilk stand in that tradition, and they should be treated as such. So do the immigration policies of Trump and the legal reasoning of the Court. We can’t sugarcoat this. As I have written before, we have to name the devil that has us by the throat.

We must now contend with what this court decision has unleashed and justified. Lives ripped apart. Hatreds ablaze. And for what? For the likes of Megyn Kelly to declare their possession of this country as theirs and theirs alone and to justify the cruelty that comes with this insidious need to be white and superior.

A haunting repetition in the 250th year of this country.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie critically examines compounding global crises, highlighting a recent UN inquiry commission report on the targeting of Palestinian children in Gaza alongside the humanitarian fallout of back-to-back earthquakes in Venezuela. Domestically, he condemns the Supreme Court’s decisions dismantling Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and asylum protections, characterizing the current bench as a modern iteration of the Taney Court working to systematically roll back the civil rights pillars of 1965. Rather than succumbing to state coercion or establishment political paralysis, Eddie points to recent progressive electoral victories in New York as evidence of a growing civic demand for systemic transformation over corporate shields and a defensive status quo.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & Regional Shifts

• BBC News: UN Inquiry Details Shocking Impact of Conflict on Palestinian Children

• Israel Withdraws Part of Southern Lebanon Buffer Zone, US State Department Official Reports

Natural Disaster & Humanitarian Crisis in Venezuela

• Live Updates: Devastating Earthquakes Strike Venezuela

• Thousands Feared Dead After Two Major Earthquakes Strike Venezuela

• Humanitarian Groups Demand Lift of U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela Following Earthquake Catastrophe

Supreme Court Rulings on Immigration & Cultural Backlash

• Supreme Court Upholds Trump Administration’s Restrictions on Immigration Protections

• Nursing Homes and Factory Owners Brace for Economic Fallout Following Supreme Court Immigration Ruling

• What the Supreme Court’s Landmark Rulings Mean for Immigrants and the Nation

• Supreme Court Decision Involving Trump Administration and Haitian Migrants Stokes Racial Tensions

• Megyn Kelly Sparks Controversy with Passionate Rant Over Supreme Court Immigration Ruling

• Prof. Eddie Glaude’s Reflections on Judicial Injustice and Immigration

Domestic Politics & The Democratic Party Divide

• Progressives and Moderates Clash as Democratic Primary Battlegrounds Intensify

• James Carville Expresses Deep Frustration Following Progressive Victories in Democratic Primaries

Baldwin struggled with the wounds deposited in him by his father: the fights, the cruelty, the broken mind and heart, the man who told him he was too ugly to be loved. In doing so, he detailed the primal wound that moved him about: a father who failed to love him because the world—a world organized without him in mind—defeated him daily. The defeat and rage that inevitably followed spilled over, drowning some, but touching all within its reach. Baldwin wrote,

“Between his merciless children, who were terrified of him, the pregnancies, the births, the rats, the murders on Lenox Avenue, the whores who lived downstairs, his job on Long Island—to which he went every morning wearing a Derby or a Homburg, in a black suit, white shirt, dark tie, looking like the preacher he was, and with his lunchbox in his hand—and his unreciprocated love for the Great God almighty, it is no wonder our father went mad.”

No matter what Baldwin wrote about race or democracy, this constant picking at the scab of his relationship with his father frightened me. I had to contend with my own nightmares—with the father, who with a simple glance, could make me cry, with the man who unknowingly deposited fear in my gut.

I smiled when I typed the word, unknowingly. The word carries with it a journey from wound to understanding, with love as its throughline. Time, as indifferent as it is, has softened my judgments. The man who raised me, who wounded me, who wanted the world for me, who loved me the only way he knew how, is my father. And on this Father’s Day that possessive pronoun means everything: he is my dad, the man who made me who I am today.

I have written about my father, telling and retelling the story in order to possess the wounds (and, perhaps, to be released from their vice grip) and to engage in that daunting task of self-creation. I have spent so much of my life running from him, literally and figuratively. But in these last few decades I have come to understand him, to witness his own vulnerability, to see the shyness that hides behind his bravado, and his unwavering love for his family.

He was barely twenty-one years of age when he married my mom and took on the responsibility of a family. My oldest sister is severely disabled. My mother, a young teenager at the time, contracted rubella during her pregnancy. My sister cannot walk, talk, or see. She wasn’t supposed to live past the age of twelve. She is now sixty-two years old. My dad sacrificed his dreams to take care of her and us. Plotted and planned. He was the second African American hired at the Pascagoula Post Office. Worked in the Mississippi heat, left belts rotten with sweat on hooks. Ate the same lunch for over thirty years, rotating between a bologna and ham sandwich with cheese. He never took a vacation (spread out his days to take one day off a week) and endured the insult of the office (when his natural instinct was to beat the hell out of somebody) because he had four mouths to feed.

Bills had to be paid. When he came home from work, he didn’t say much, and we avoided him. I can understand that now. Responsibility isn’t an easy burden, especially when you are growing up with the children you’re raising. He spent many nights counting the bubbles on the popcorn ceiling. Figuring out how to rob Peter to pay Paul. And we knew nothing of his thoughts. Only distance and quiet, unless a storm raged.

Today I watch my dad with his daily routine and habits. You can hear him coming as he shuffles his feet, making his way to the kitchen, opening the blinds, setting up his coffee, going outside to feed the feral cats and raccoons, taking care of his fish (I call him Mr. Green Jeans). It is his ritual to begin every day, a morning prayer of sorts.

Like clockwork, he wakes up at 2am every day to change my sister’s diaper. Mom isn’t as strong as she used to be: her battle with cancer left her a bit weaker. So, she cannot tend to my sister like she did all these years. Dad helps. He changes my sister, I think, four times a day. There is a rhythm to how they care for her, how they have shouldered, together, the responsibility for their baby from the moment she took her first breath.

My father loves me deeply. I know that now and, if I am honest, I knew it then, too. He could’ve walked away from us all. He never did. No matter what happened or how difficult life became. I have a sense of what he had to overcome (his wounds and heartbreak) to love us the way he did. He dreamed that we would escape the confines of Moss Point and soar. He told us that he wasn’t our friend: that his task was to prepare us for a world that wasn’t friendly—that if we could survive him nothing could shake us. He did not want us to make his mistakes. He didn’t do this with hugs or affirmations. Stern discipline and unyielding expectations were his means.

On this Father’s Day, I write about you not because of some concern about wounds and self-creation (Baldwin’s concern is not my own here) or out of an effort to confront my own fears, but simply because, without you, I would not be here. I have always wanted you to be proud of me, daddy. I’ve tried to live up to what you poured in us. You have been a shining example of what it means to be responsible for the ones you love and the sacrifice that love demands of each of us.

On this day, I celebrate you. I lift you up to the heavens for being an example of a beautiful, powerful, loving, vulnerable, ever-evolving Black man. My father. My daddy. I love you.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie defends the new U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding as a crucial victory for ending war and saving lives, despite regional escalations by Israel designed to stall peace talks. Turning inward, he views the opening of the Obama Presidential Center as a happy reprieve from today’s political vitriol, though he notes that the era’s centrist policies inadvertently fueled the rise of modern white nationalism. Finally, tying the episode to Juneteenth, Eddie uses the framework of “delayed freedom” to historicize a contemporary “second redemption” of voter suppression, urging grassroots civic resilience over national mythmaking.

Continue Reading…

U.S.-Iran Agreement & Public Opinion

• Trump Signals Breakthrough in U.S.-Iran Negotiations

• Trump Claims Impending Iran Deal Amounts to ‘Unconditional Surrender’

• AP Poll: Public Sentiment Shifts on Trump, the Economy, and the Iran Conflict

Suspended Talks & Regional Escalations

• U.S.-Iran Talks Delayed Following Renewed Israeli Aggression in Lebanon

• Gaza Death Toll Surpasses 1,000 Since Initial Ceasefire Announcement

• Interactive: Mapping the Expansion of Israeli Military Positions

• Live Updates: U.S.-Iran War Talks Suspended Amid Intensified Israel-Lebanon Fighting

• Diplomatic Fallout Continues as Regional Violations Disrupt Oil Markets

The Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening

• Live Coverage: The Opening of the Obama Presidential Center

• Chicago Neighborhoods Confront Gentrification Risks Surrounding Obama Center

• The Architectural and Political Contrast: The Obama Library and the Trump Era

• News Wrap: Local Impact of the Obama Presidential Center and National Briefs

• Official Livestream: Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening Ceremony

But joy is something deeper. Joy is rooted in love; in the deep relation we have with others. It isn’t ephemeral. Instead, joy emanates from the depth of one’s soul, and though it may seem fleeting, it grooves pathways in the spirit that endure long after the moment that occasions the experience. In this sense, joy can be subversive.

Imagine the joy in holding your child in your arms for the first time. The feeling that settles in the heart, the sense of grace and gratitude that engulfs the spirit, and the responsibility that reorients you to the world and to the life that you claim as your own. That joy can hold off the ugliness of one’s circumstances and ignite a fierceness in defense of that love that can challenge anyone or anything that endangers it.

To put it another way, joy can be a reservoir of hope that sustains us in dark days.

I was thinking a lot about subversive joy this weekend. My son married the love of his life. I watched her watch him. Smiling as wide as the universe. I heard them declare their love for each other in front of family and friends who love them dearly. Tears accompanied the sacrament. I noticed his friends from different phases of his life—friends from college, law school, and the young men he has known since the fifth grade. Communities of love.

Happiness cannot bear the weight of what I felt. This was joy. In my son’s face I saw the baby who laughed fully belly laughs when I pulled his bouncy to my face and made funny noises, chuckled at the young toddler in his Tiger Halloween costume saying “cheese” as he put his hands on his hips to take a photograph, felt regret as I saw the adolescent who cried tears because of me, and overwhelmed by the young man who brought the love of his life to our home for the first time. Smiling shyly but clearly smitten.

At the wedding, we danced. We cried. We shouted with joy with grandparents who ranged in age from 96 and 93 years to 83 and 78 years old. Survivors of cancer. Steps a bit slower and uneasy, but whose love blossomed in another generation. They were witnesses, still.

And no matter the absurdity of the world, and the ugliness of our days, joy broke through. Cage fights and war didn’t matter. Trump didn’t matter. My son and new daughter embarked on a life together. So, we tended to our hearts, because that remains the prize.

Joyful. (I suppose some Knicks fans are feeling this, too). Resilient. This feeling won’t change the world, but it helps us survive so that we might keep on fighting the good fight.

Psalms 30:5 comes to mind: “Weeping may stay for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie critiques the escalating conflicts in the Middle East and U.S. political leadership, highlighting tensions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran, as well as rising inflation and economic anxiety at home. He also reflects on increased Black voter turnout as a hopeful sign while raising concerns about racial bias in the justice system, citing a controversial sentencing in Texas. Despite these heavy issues, he centers the episode on a personal note—his son’s wedding—emphasizing the importance of embracing joy and cherishing loved ones even amid global and national turmoil.

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