When the suffrage movement sold out to white supremacy

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members.

…I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.

….Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.

I’m disheartened by the defensiveness of the NYT reader comments; there is value in the type of introspection these challenges evoke. Critically revisiting our shortcomings and identifying our blind spots are the purposes of events like Black History Month (this month in the States) or LGBT month (this month here in the UK). Addressing ongoing struggles should be uncomfortable; let’s not sterilize and misremember the details for palatability and peace of mind. Sorry if this paragraph reads as trite, but I’ve been feeling this a lot lately and wouldn’t mind erring on the side of trite enunciation.

I hold with Wordsonfire from Minneapolis who wrote:

I’m struck by all the defensiveness and whataboutism in the responses to this column. Cloaking responses in “what was possible at that time,” and “black men did it too only worse,” suggests that it’s harder to just accept history and those flawed individuals who came before us as they were.

Few are willing to say what needs to be said: “That was wrong. Let’s strive to do better.”

So little was required of the readers of this column and yet they were unable to demonstrate even the smallest bit of remorse or solidarity with black women.

America, an empire in decline

It’s only mentioned as a supporting example in the article, but the American occupation of the Philippines tends to be mischaracterized, especially by younger Filipinos, as one of a benevolent variety despite itsbrutality and hyper-racialization . This occupation was the origin of the “white man’s burden.” Something on the order of 250,000 Filipinos died, the Philippines' culture and institutions were Americanized , and a very prevalent internalization of American ‘superiority’ persists.

So to relate this back to the thrust of the article, I’d just say I find its depiction of America as a contradictory nonterritorial empire pretty convincing. Foreign Policy had a complementary reframing of the postwar world order, though I only skimmed it.

(Photo taken from this Filipino-American morning-show panel discussion on the legacy of American colonization)

Against ’new optimism ’

Who does the most to make people richer, healthier, happier, and less likely to be killed by lightning? Is it those who accentuate the positive or those who accentuate the negative? Rosling notes that progress in human rights, women’s education, catastrophe relief, and many other matters is often largely thanks to activists who believe things are getting worse, though he speculates that they might achieve even more if they were readier to recognize improvements. Bill Gates, in his call to optimism, acknowledges that to improve the world, “you need something to be mad about.” Focusing on bad cases is indeed no mere cognitive malfunction. Voltaire would hardly have waged his campaign against clerical abuses of power if he had been struck by the fact that, statistically speaking, most priests were perfectly decent chaps.

When he coined “the new optimism,” George Patrick argued that dissatisfaction with the state of the world was not a defect. It was instead “the voice of progress proclaiming its discontent with the present and demanding improvement.” Perhaps new optimists should not forget to thank old pessimists for the fruits of their discontent.

I find these optimists usually don’t define a meaningful counterfactual and that when they are convincing, the change in perspective is usually that things were worse before not that things seem better now. In that framing, new optimism would seem an argument for complacency and usually a validation of the (neoliberal ) status quo. We don’t evaluate, say, civil rights movements this way by asking oppressed people to be grateful for the gains they’ve made; we ask why they couldn’t be afforded them sooner and why injustices persist today:

I wonder what a new-optimist response might be to the finding in Alesina, Stantcheva, and Teso (2017) that *“pessimists [about social mobility] are far more supportive of redistributive welfare policies”* because to me, new optimism comes from a place of privilege. New optimism feels like an extension of the reactionary denial of the effectiveness of protest, of labor militancy, of the necessary and productive violence of anticolonial and antiracist movements around the world. It’s also a paternalistic denunciation of the right of the disadvantaged to react to their reality, which may indeed be grim. As Amia Srinivasan has written, sometimes anger is apt and is self-justifying independent of a condescending consequentialist frame evaluating how ‘productive’ it is.

I also haven’t seen one meaningfully approach the topic of the coming climate refugee crisis that could imperil billions . But do let me know if you come across a new optimist from a developing country. Here’s The Nation on Steven Pinker’s perspective on climate change :

But even if we grant that in many domains human life has indeed improved enormously over the past two centuries, there remains a simple question: Can we count on the progress continuing? What, for instance, about climate change? Pinker is no climate-change denier, and admits that “the challenge is daunting.” But then he quickly pivots from his position that things are getting better and better to say that we can avoid the looming doom if only we start taxing carbon emissions, increase the use of nuclear power, and engage in deliberate climate engineering to lower global temperatures.

He largely disregards the fact that the political will to move in any of these directions is wholly lacking and will remain so as long as the party that controls the White House and Congress refuses to admit that a problem even exists. When it comes to his favored technological solution, nuclear power, Pinker also seems determined to ignore the problem that the people who manage plants do not always follow their own safety procedures and cannot plan for every possible natural disaster (as Fukushima showed all too dramatically). The industry, he insists, has learned from its mistakes.

The 2020 Democratic candidates are sorry

A review of Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

I added “Bad Blood,” John Carreyrou’s book on Theranos to my to-read list. This review made it a quick sell. Its title “A chemistry is performed” comes from this:

Until they were ready to go public, Holmes ruled that Theranos was to operate in ‘stealth mode’: no published papers open to peer review, no demonstrations to anyone who hadn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement. All visitors had to be accompanied at all times, even to the loo. Holmes’s corner office – modelled on the Oval Office, and with the same arrangement of desks, sofas and armchairs – had windows made from bulletproof glass… To reporters, to investors, Holmes would say that her technological breakthroughs were a ’trade secret’, like the recipe for Coca-Cola.

…But as for how it all worked, Holmes would only say that ‘a chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.’

So good. There is also a brutal invokation of Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” at the end. An Adam McKay adaptation of the book is already in development.

The music of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018),

I was finally able to catch Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight. I’m still processing my thoughts, but the music:

``` ### [Tony Romo's sensational color-commentary genius](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jan/24/tony-romo-cbs-nfl-analyst-dallas-cowboys)

I don’t think an NBA player could replicate Romo’s intuition for basketball broadcasts—the pace of a football game and the breaks between plays allowe these types of pre-action analyses and I think it’s an analytical skill quarterbacks need to develop much better than do point guards.