This story is, painfully, much more timely than when we first assigned it. But it’s a must-read on several levels. Tomorrow is Juneteenth – a predominantly African-American holiday commemorating the end of slavery – and the 150th anniversary of the event it celebrates, the arrival of the US Army at Galveston Island on June 19th 1865. Read this piece and it will change your understanding of just how slavery really ended and why.
Jon Stewart: “I honestly have nothing, other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident though that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us.”
In their on-going effort to fight racism, Kansas Republicans are debating expelling a black female member of the state legislature for calling one of their bills “racist.”
You might be surprised to learn that same sex marriage bans have nothing to do with hating on gays, but that’s the audacious argument gay marriage opponents are making to the Supreme Court. Tierney Sneed with a reminder — as if one were needed — on the origin of gay marriage bans and why it matters so much to the outcome of the Supreme Court case, where a decision is expected any day now.
Jeb Bush showing open reluctance to calling the Charleston church shooting racially motivated.
Gayle Lemmon, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a New York Times bestselling author, will be chatting in The Hive (sub req) at 3 PM EST Tuesday, June 23rd. She has written two books about women in the Middle East. Her most recent, Ashley’s War, tells the story of female soldiers who ran special ops missions in Afghanistan.
Gayle will be answering questions about Middle East policy and national security, as well as her books, in a live chat with Prime subscribers. Drop questions here at or before 3 PM EST on Tuesday 6/23!
When the news broke Wednesday night of the horrific massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, from the start people asked why this crime, which would have been labeled “terrorism” if the killer had been a Muslim, is merely a “hate crime” or the work of a deranged madman since the murderer is white. It’s a very good question and people are right to ask it. I think the word “terrorism”, as we’ve come to use it, is so clumsy that it might be better to retire the word altogether. But as long as we do use it, it definitely makes sense to apply the label to this crime. But there’s another meaning of the term, or another history, that I think helps us understand much more of the past and the present of what happened Wednesday night in Charleston.
You’ve probably heard of The Citadel, one of the most storied military academies in the United States, which is located in Charleston. As Benjamin Parks explains in this piece from yesterday, the origins of The Citadel are directly linked to the reaction to the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy that rocked the city in 1822. As you’ve probably also seen in the news coverage over the last two days, Vesey was one of the founders of the Emanuel AME Church. Nor is this connection between The Citadel and the attempted Vesey uprising some coincidence or oddity. It is a particular connection that illustrates a greater and sobering truth: the Southern military tradition, whatever it has evolved into in more recent history, has its roots in the institution of and particularly the preservation of slavery. Whether it is slave patrols, militias focused on putting down slave revolts or musters intended to overawe subject populations – while no institution has a single origin, this basic fact about the history of the American South is unquestionably true. It is particularly so about South Carolina.
A few days ago I mentioned this surprising turn of events with the about-to-be-released memoir of former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. Now there’s some more information. And Good Lord it does not put Oren in a good light. Not at all.
Over the weekend, what appears to be a manifesto writen by alleged Charleston massacre perpetrator Dylann Roof emerged. And in addition to a fairly typical list of white supremacist ideas and storylines, several key things jumped out at me. First was that Roof said that he had been radicalized by the Trayvon Martin shooting. And first shaken into “racial awareness” by media reactions to the Martin/Zimmerman saga, he then found a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) online, which revealed to him a purported epidemic of black on white violent crime which, at least in his own accounting, led him on the path which ended at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last Wednesday.
I’m starting to think Michael Oren may end up soon as an official Fox News contributor. This new piece in Foreign Policy is basically an edges sanded down version of something you might read on NRO or Newsmax.
This is the guy who said it is critical for Israel to mend ties with the White House.