The Candidate of Their Choice

Before it was butchered by the Roberts Court, a key purpose of the Voting Rights Act was to ensure that, where cohesive minority communities exist, they would have a reasonable opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice.

For Black communities, this often understandably meant electing a Black representative. But not necessarily.

For example, the Tennessee congressional district that until recently was anchored around Memphis is a majority-Black district represented by a White man, Steve Cohen. Why does Cohen represent that district? The same reason anyone represents any district: the majority of voters in his district like him, he's earned their trust, so they keep reelecting him. Periodically during his tenure he would draw an African-American challenger, often to much fretting and teeth-gnashing from the national media, and each time he would absolutely flatten them, because again, Steve Cohen was well-liked and trusted by the voters in his district. That he kept winning, and winning handily, in a majority-Black district was not a failing of the Voting Rights Act. Neither would it have been a failure of the Voting Rights Act if Memphis decided to vote differently. The purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to give cohesive minority communities, like that which exists in Memphis, the ability to elect the candidate of their choice. If they choose someone like Steve Cohen, that's their prerogative.

All of this is introduction to the fussing that's surrounding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's decision, in the wake of Florida's latest round of partisan gerrymandering wrecking her current district, to run for re-election in the safely-blue and majority-Black 20th district (just north of, but not encompassing, her current turf). The complaint is that, with the evisceration of the VRA already signaling a cataclysmic drop in Black representation (particularly in the South), Wasserman-Schultz's bid will necessarily come at the expense of one of the few districts where a Black Democratic representative might have shot at winning.

But again: the point of the VRA is to permit minority communities to elect the candidate of their choice. And either they'll choose to elect DWS or they won't. If they do, that's their prerogative. If they don't, that's also their prerogative. It's not a foul for Wasserman-Schultz (or any other politician) to try to win the support and backing of another political community, any more than she is entitled to the support of a community. Again, either she wins or she doesn't, but that's a decision that can and should be made by the voters of the district.

I'll give this Mo Tkacik column an inch of credit for at least gesturing at a more viable basis for complaining at DWS' choice: that she should have run in the 22nd district (where she lives) because with a strong candidate it represents an at least outside chance at a Democratic victory and Democrats need to expand the playing field as far as possible. Sure, she'll probably lose in the 22nd. But she might not, and she'll give team Blue a better chance than any other candidate. Meanwhile, a Democrat will represent the 20th district no matter what. So DWS is placing her own self-interest in trying to occupy a safe seat over the party's interest in winning as many seats as possible.

Maybe. It's not exactly clear to me why DWS is the only strong candidate Democrats could possibly run in the 22nd district -- a depressing thought, if true. And this being Mo Tkacik, by the end of the column it dissolves into rambling about AIPAC and some real old-school classics about how DWS rigged the primary for Hillary Clinton against Bernie. Aside from its nostalgic value, though, that last part again speaks to this very frustrating tendency in some segments of the Democratic Party (and, to be sure, all segments of the Republican Party) that losing an election under via normal political contestation must be cheating.

On that note, there's chatter that some of the Black candidates running in the 20th District have held a meeting to see if any will drop out, in the hopes that this will consolidate the Black vote and make it more likely one of them will win. Under "Bernie was robbed" logic, non-viable candidates dropping out and endorsing a remaining candidate is, of course, the most abusive act of rigging imaginable. Under actual, normal politics, there's no problem here and such a decision is their prerogative as well. Once again, DWS is not entitled to this seat, and she is not entitled to have the political factions which oppose her just roll over and clear a path for her. If at the end of it all she wins, good for her. If she doesn't, good for whoever does. Either way, the most we can hope for is that the voters in one of the apparently few remaining majority-Black districts are able to elect the candidate of their choice.

The Tomb of the Unknown Slur

 

There is a Yiddish word, "shvartze", that literally translates to "black" but is generally understood as a derogatory slur for Black people. In terms of offensiveness, it's not the n-word, but it's definitely completely inappropriate. Fun fact: if you encounter a person who tries to argue "but it just means 'black'!", congratulations! You've found a racist!

Anyway, I was thinking about this word earlier today, and particularly was thinking about the degree to which it is known and by whom. My sense is that even among Jews, it is fading outside of Orthodox communities that speak Yiddish.  Beyond that, it's something your racist grandpa might say, but for my generation, to say nothing of the next, it isn't part of our lexicon (even our racists have assimilated in their use of derogatory language). Given that, it wouldn't surprise me (though I don't know this) if it is not an especially well-known term among American Blacks, particularly those who live in locations where there are not many Jews.

And assuming that's true (and again, I might be off-base even on the premise here), it made me wonder if there are other examples of slurring language that is not widely known among the targeted population. Is there a derogatory term Black people have for Jews that most Jews don't know about? I can imagine this sort of situation being either incredibly common or incredibly rare, and I'm honestly not sure which I'd find more likely.

The Anti-Anti-Racism Conspiracy in Oregon

This is an infuriating story on many levels:

The principal at The Madeleine School, a private Catholic school in Northeast Portland, summoned Portland police to the campus in late March when the parents of a Black student demanded to know her plan of action after their fourth grade son reported being called a racist slur on the playground.

Just 72 hours later, the school expelled the boy, effective immediately, saying his parents — Moda Health executive Karis Stoudamire-Phillips and renowned jazz musician Mike Phillips, both prominent Black Portlanders with long histories of volunteering both citywide and in Portland’s tight-knit Catholic school community — had violated the school’s code of conduct for parents.

The students accused of hurling the slur denied it, but the boy's account was corroborated by at least one other witness.

There are a couple of different layers here. One is that the Archbishop of Portland has had a tense relationship with the Catholic school community here, stemming from his effort to enforce conservative gender orthodoxy over the objections of many students, parents, and lay leaders. This appears to be part of a broader intrusion of right-wing culture war shibboleths, which helps make more sense of this part of the story:

According to that child’s father, who did not want to be named to protect his child’s privacy, Principal Tresa Rast told him and his wife that she suspected that their son had made up the entire incident and recommended that the child see a therapist so he could be “deprogrammed” from the anti-racist training he’d received while previously attending public school in Portland.

From what I can tell in the article, the child had been attending the Madeleine school since Kindergarten, so it's unclear when he would have been "programmed" by Portland Public Schools at all.

But of course, searching for logic misses the point. Rast appears to have an understanding where "racism" is something entirely made up -- so made up that Black children need to be "programmed" into believing its existence so they can foist false charges upon innocent White children. It isn't hard to draw a line here to the MAGA demand to suppress any and all American history tellings that accurately recount our nation's racial past (and present) -- the entire theory is that all such stories simply are lies concocted to assert control. It is a classic conspiracy theory (which is why Rast could jump to the absurdist notion that the child needed "deprogramming" -- an outrageous claim even if the child had been a regular PPS attendee).

And we also shouldn't lose sight of the fundamental cruelty this politics inevitably inflicts. Here is how the school handled the expulsion of the child:

“It has become clear that the relationship of trust and confidence that is necessary for a collaborative partnership between parent and school officials for the good of your child no longer exists,” Rummell wrote. “Our partnership is hereby immediately terminated as of the end of the day, April 3. This decision is final and from our perspective this matter is now concluded.”

Their son was allowed to return to campus one more time, Stoudamire-Phillips said, to say goodbye to his teachers.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom,” she said. “Teachers from all over the school were coming in to say bye to him. He knows that he is loved by that community. He just doesn’t understand why these two leaders keep making decisions that have hurt him.”

"He doesn't understand why these two leaders keep making decisions that have hurt him" Juxtapose that against the brusqueness of his dismissal, of the ripping of this child from a community he had been enmeshed in and valued. It's heart-wrenching. And it emerges from people who prioritize of national kulturkampf demands over the interests and humanity of the children in their care. This, above else, is what characterizes the current MAGA orientation towards so many children -- they pour out hatred and disdain and scorn, because hurting the kids matters less to them than cleaving to their own fantastical tales of resistance to "wokeness".

The Uncommitted Story

Last night, Joe Biden won the Michigan primary with approximately 81% of the vote. Donald Trump also won with 68% of the vote (you wouldn't necessarily clock that Trump did comparatively worse than Biden given the coverage, but that's hardly a surprise anymore). But while the foregone conclusion outcome isn't super interesting, many people have been keeping an eye on the relative performance of "uncommitted" in the Democratic column. 

For those of you who don't know, a campaign largely emanating from Michigan's substantial Arab and Muslim community urged Democratic primary voters to cast a ballot for "uncommitted" as a means of signaling discontent with President Biden's support for Israel in the war in Gaza. A few days ago, I registered my genuine curiosity regarding how "uncommitted" would play out in the Michigan Democratic primary. On the one hand, I said, I absolutely could see it "capturing genuine frustration amongst [Democratic] partisans (so getting substantial support)." On the other, I also could see it "mostly an online/activisty thing (so being a nothing burger come the actual vote tallies)." Since both hypotheses seemed plausible, I was genuinely interested to see what the reality would be.

Towards the start of the evening (with, as I recall, approximately 20% of the votes tallied), I wrote the following:

If “uncommitted” typically gets 10% and it holds at 16% (which it may not, in either direction), I’d say that’s not a huge performance (6% over baseline) but still meaningful given how tight MI will be. It’s not something that should be ignored; but neither is it “popular groundswell of rebellion”.

The "10%" baseline is based on the last analogous election where an incumbent Democrat was running -- Barack Obama in 2012. Ten percent (10.7%, to be precise) of Democratic voters then voted "uncommitted" despite there not being (to my knowledge) any significant organized campaign pushing for the vote, suggesting that this is baseline level of support for "uncommitted" that isn't attributable to anything more than inchoate background status quo discontent. Given that, my assessment was that getting an additional six percentage points of support is not trivial, but also isn't proof of some broad-based sentiments of frustration and opposition.

As I said, though, the tally was early and things might change in either direction over the course of the evening. I saw some people suggest that they expected the number to rise as the night went on, on the theory that "bluer" jurisdictions like cities were going to report later and the assumption that "uncommitted" voters would be more prevalent in those areas. But what ended up happening is that "uncommitted" faded over the course of the evening, finally settling at 13.2% -- about 2.5% over the baseline expectation (it's also below the 15% threshold necessary to pick up statewide delegates at the DNC, though it did get two delegates due to strong local performances).

From my vantage point, this really can't be said to be that impressive of a performance. It still matters in the sense that Michigan will likely be close and so every little bit counts. But ultimately, a well-organized campaign, with the support of some significant local Democratic figures (albeit opposition from many others) managing to overperform doing nothing by 2.5% really doesn't demonstrate much in the way of serious political muscle. I don't want to say the frustration that the "uncommitted" campaign is tapping into isn't real. But objectively speaking, it doesn't seem to be translating into significant alterations in Democratic voter behavior -- to that extent, it may be a largely cloistered thing. If I'm the Biden campaign, I'm certainly not ignoring this issue (for a variety of reasons, not the least being that its salience to activist, elite, and media cadres clearly punches above its weight, and then also because one wants to do the right thing and have a good policy that takes into account the views of all relevant stakeholders). But I think we've dispensed with the need for incipient panic.

That said, the "uncommitted" campaign did a wonderful job of setting expectations. The nice thing about a symbolic play like this is that since an objective win is obviously off the table (and not the realistic goal) pretty much anything can be sold as a victory. If you lose an actual election, you have to (well, I guess we've learned you don't have to) concede defeat. If you're not actually running to win but instead are just trying to trumpet your existence as a voting bloc, however, there's essentially no outcome where one has to "concede defeat". You will never see organizers release a statement to the effect of:

Our goal was to demonstrate that the people of Michigan care about X issue and that our values cannot be ignored. But given our anemic performance, the voters today have made clear that Michigan voters don't care about X at all and that we completely overestimated our influence. Thanks to everyone for taking part in this civic experiment, and we'll adjust our priors accordingly.

Here, the uncommitted organizers really basically set their bar on the floor -- they said their goal was to get 10,000 votes for "uncommitted", and they are celebrating for blowing past that tally. On the one hand, 10,000 is not a completely made-up figure -- it was roughly Donald Trump's margin of victory in 2016. On the other hand, in this primary 10,000 votes would have been barely over 1% of the total tally -- less than half of Dean Phillips' tally and a tenth of the Obama 2012 baseline. It is true that turnout is up considerably since 2012 (10.7% then was a little less than 21,000 votes; 13.2% in 2024 is over 100,000 votes) -- but it's hard to view that as bad news for Democrats.

The other observation I want to make relates to that prediction I saw that the "uncommitted" tally would rise as bluer, urban jurisdictions came in, when the reality was that "uncommitted" faded over the course of the evening. I wasn't following the returns closely enough to confirm whether the bluer areas were in fact reporting later. Assuming that they did, though, I think this is a good time to correct another common and understandable misapprehension: that the most partisan Democratic areas of a state are also necessarily the most progressive.

It's an understandable inference. In a two-party system, we might imagine that a voter who is only slightly left-of-center would regularly be at least tempted to vote GOP (given the "right" candidates), a voter who is more decisively liberal would be less likely to crossover, and the most liberal voter would also be the least likely to be tempted away to the other party. From that, we would infer that the most partisan Democratic voters (those least likely to ever vote Republican) are also the most progressive voters (there preferences are furthest away from those of Republicans).

But it isn't necessarily true. At one level, it's falsified by the presence of "both parties are the same" uber-leftists -- such persons may or may not be tempted to vote GOP, but they're obviously not Democratic partisans. The most partisan Democratic clusters are persons who are probably progressive enough not to be tempted by the GOP, but also not so left-wing that they find arguments like that appealing. But beyond that, there's more that goes into committed Democratic Party loyalty than ideological alignment. We know, for instance, that African-American voters are the most committed Democrats and that African-American Democrats are more likely to identify as moderate or conservative compared to White Democrats. There are other factors beyond ideology that are significantly responsible for why Black voters are Democratic loyalists. Likewise, the post 9/11 trend whereby Muslim voters overwhelmingly voted Democratic also was not primarily a feature of deep-seated ideological leftism -- it stemmed from "other factors" (i.e., rampant GOP Islamophobia) which superseded still-extant ideological moderation or even conservatism.

All of this is to say that the assumption that Black voters, because they are steadfast Democratic voters, also must sit on the left edge of the party on an ideological level, is a mistaken apprehension, and consequently the sorts of issues that are motivating the ideological left-edge of the party are not necessarily the same ones that motivate the base of the party. This isn't to say that the Democratic base is actually conservative; it's still probably true that it is relatively to the left of the average person who votes Democrat in any given November. It's just not all the way at the left-most edge of the party. That mistake, I suspect, is a large part of what generated the wrong assumption that "uncommitted" would perform substantially better in those locales.

For what it's worth, on a very quick gaze there doesn't seem to be much correlation between the Black vote and "uncommitted"; if anything, it seems to have underperformed. The overall Black population of Michigan is approximately 14%, and there are four counties which have proportionally larger Black populations than that: Wayne County (Detroit and Dearborn), Genesee County (Flint), Saginaw County (Saginaw), and Berrien County (St. Joseph) (Oakland County, north of Detroit, is exactly 14% Black).

Wayne County saw "uncommitted" get 16% -- but that's almost certainly more a product of Dearborn than Detroit (disaggregating those figures would be very interesting, but the fact that "uncommitted" outright won in Dearborn and Hamtramck, both of which are approximately half Arab-American, mathematically suggests it did much weaker numbers elsewhere in the county). By contrast, Genesee County, which contains Flint, saw "uncommitted" have one of its worst performances -- 9.5%. Saginaw County saw "uncommitted" get 10.2%, Berrien County 9.6%, and Oakland County 12.5%.

Plot "uncommitted" based on the most Democratic parts of the state (based on 2020 Democratic vote share), and things similarly look blurry at best. Joe Biden only won 11 counties in Michigan last time around. He won all of the above-mentioned counties except Berrien, plus Washtenaw (Ann Arbor), Ingham (Lansing), Kalamazoo (Kalamazoo), Kent (Grand Rapids), Muskegon (Muskegon), Leelanau (Traverse Bay), and Marquette (Marquette, on the upper peninsula). "Uncommitted" had possibly its best performance in the entire state in Washtenaw County, at 17.2% -- certainly a product of the University of Michigan community. And it did slightly better than its statewide average in Kent County (13.8%). But in every other county Joe Biden won, "uncommitted" underperformed its statewide average -- from 13.1% in Ingham to 9.1% in Saginaw. That said, the two counties "uncommitted" performed best in (Wayne and Washtenaw) are two of the heaviest Democratic hitters (along with Oakland) in terms of raw Democratic vote margins; the other counties listed, while won by Democrats, tend to be either smaller or closer (or both). 

So I'd say these results are mixed, and again, my advice to Biden isn't to just ignore this issue outright. Rather, it's to observe that the coalitional politics that drove the "uncommitted" movement are distinct from "the base" (and, in particular, Black voters). That's an important thing -- democracy is about appealing to diverse constituencies who have an array of distinct and differentiated interests, and this issue certainly had strong salience amongst Michigan's Arab and Muslim community, plus a fair amount of weight in the collegiate environs of Ann Arbor -- but it's not necessarily the same thing as it's been presented.

White Republicans To Black Republicans: Stop Whining About Slavery

The fallout from Ron DeSantis' new "slavery: it wasn't all bad" educational standards continues, as most elected Black Republicans have now spoken out to condemn the framework and urge it be revised. Faced with this criticism from Black members of his own parties -- people who time and again have shown their commitment to conservative causes but nonetheless believe that here the state of Florida made a grave historical error -- DeSantis has responded exactly how you'd expect a White Republican to respond to challenges from Black people (whether in his party or not):

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed the board members responsible for the standards, did not take the measured disapproval well. On the contrary, the governor and his political operation seemed to go after [Florida GOP Rep. Byron] Donalds with a vengeance, accusing the GOP lawmaker of aligning himself with Vice President Kamala Harris and referring to Donalds — a member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus — as “a supposedly conservative congressman.”

[....]

Speaking with reporters in Albia, Iowa, on Friday, DeSantis responded to [South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim] Scott’s comments by criticizing “D.C. Republicans” for promoting a similar argument as Harris. “I think part of the reason our country has struggled is because D.C. Republicans all too often accept false narratives, accept lies that are perpetrated by the left and accept the lie that Kamala Harris has been perpetrating, even when that has been debunked,” he said. 

DeSantis was joined by, among others, Ben Shapiro ("Tim Scott ... promptly sided with Kamala Harris and he sided with the Congressional Black Caucus.... that's Scott being disingenuous") and Matt Walsh ("You are dead to us.... [B]ecome a Democrat. That's what you are."). The general response to Black Republicans expressing offense over a GOP politician soft-pedaling the wrong of slavery was not to think "huh, maybe there is something here," but to fulminate about how they're traitors to the cause.

I talked about these dynamics in "The Distinctive Political Status of Dissident Minorities". Dissident minorities such as Black Republicans are often "tokenized" -- held out as a means of discharging an obligation to consider the views of diverse communities but not valued beyond that transactional function. Hence, where Black Republicans cease, even temporarily, to offer this "value" to the broader GOP community (because in a specific case they do not agree with the particular goals or interests of the conservative movement), it won't be taken as a valid critique from insiders but rather proof that the Black Republicans are actually a fifth column reverting to their leftist roots.

Indeed, in that paper I actually specifically referenced a different instance where Senator Scott tried to diverge from his GOP colleagues on the matter of racism as a core illustration of the phenomenon. It is striking how everything I wrote there applies here as well with barely any need for revision:

[E]ven though tokenization might in some circumstances result in dissident minorities attaining political successes, the relationship forged through tokenization likely is not sufficiently robust so as to persevere in cases where the dissident minority does publicly diverge from the opinions of their majority allies. To the contrary, when they are tokenized, dissident minorities may find that their opinions are only valued transactionally—useful to the extent that they advance the goals of their non-group-member patrons and no further. Where the perspective isn’t what’s valued, dissident minorities will typically find that their “enhanced standing” falls apart the moment they express a view that diverges from their nominal allies.

Dissident minorities might contest this point. Specifically, they might suggest that their enhanced standing is not purely instrumental but rather reflects genuine respect by majority-group members regarding their substantive contributions—respect that will carry over to cases where they do find themselves forced to challenge the dominant group. By showing themselves to be “independent” or “exceptional,” the argument goes, dissident minorities earn credit with the majority that they then can redeem in cases where they do find it necessary to contest majority viewpoints....

Unfortunately, in a great many cases the cynical prediction wins out, and the dissident minority finds that the chips they thought they had amassed are unable to be cashed.... 

[....] 

The “enhanced standing” Scott normally enjoyed by aligning with the Republican Party was a product of him being (per Arendt) an “exceptional” member of his minority group. But once he adopted (even temporarily) a critical posture towards his conservative allies, he ceased to be exceptional, and reverted to being just a regular member of the Black community. If the “earned credit” hypothesis held true, that shouldn’t have mattered—he should have been able to draw upon the well of credibility to attain a favorable reception upon raising a challenge. Yet this is not what happened: once Scott stopped being exceptional, he was treated the same as any other minority group member, and the way the GOP treats minority group members who challenge them is to dismiss them. While Scott’s patrons in the Republican Party had been happy to hold him up as proof that the GOP had Black supporters, they did not actually have any particular commitment to engaging with the Black community—even nominal “allies” in those communities—in any circumstance where it might generate challenge or change.

If Tim Scott keeps on wanting to hand me examples for my published work, who am I to argue? But this goes to show just how steady this practice of tokenization is. I'm not going to say that Tim Scott should "become a Democrat" (at least, any more than I think every person should!) -- his politics are his business. But surely he must realize that this will be the reality of his treatment as a Republican in perpetuity -- if he challenges the GOP on race, he will be slapped down and hard.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXIV: Al Sharpton

Among the more prominent fusions of antisemitism and racism is the idea that Black political leaders are really just mouthpieces of the Jews. It combines a belief in Black inferiority (obviously, they can't think for themselves) with a belief in Jewish conspiracy (they're pulling the strings behind the scene).

I pulled this tweet -- a beneficiary of Elon's "blue check" destruction -- not just because it's a sterling example of the genre, but because its choice of example is positively baffling:

The Black Community is in dire need of strong black voices to represent them. Al Sharpton is a pissant sycophant working for the Jews who made him into the charlatan he is today.
All Black voices in DC were created & given their positions by the Jews ...who tell them what to…

— The White Lady (@NephilimWatcher) May 19, 2023

(I don't even know what to make about concluding with the motto for "Survivor". So we'll just move along....)

Again, the core allegation here is not unique. But specifically citing Al Sharpton as the template -- that's a decision. To be sure, I don't think in the year 2023 it's useful to reduce Rev. Sharpton just to his role in the Crown Heights riot. But certainly that rather specific history Sharpton has with the Jews makes him an odd choice to hold out as your paradigm case of a Black voice under Jewish control.

What I'm saying is that racists need to learn better history. Among other things they need to learn.

(Hat tip)

Woke Freeze

The internet is cackling about prominent "anti-woke" conservative Bethany Mandel drawing a complete blank when asked the simple question "what is woke".

Jon Chait objects to the pile on of someone who just "froze" on TV.

At one level, he's probably right that Mandel froze, and freezing could happen to anyone. But that doesn't mean it isn't something she should take her lumps for. The context matters here, given that Mandel holds herself out as a subject-matter expert on this exact issue. If I forget the capital of Ukraine, that's embarrassing. If a guy who just spent 30 minutes engaging in Putin-apologism for Russia's invasion then can't recall the capital of Ukraine, that's, well that's a lot more embarrassing.

But the deeper problem is that while at one level sure, Mandel obviously has an idea of what she means by woke and just froze up in articulating it, at another level Mandel has no idea what she means by woke because her definition is utterly unsuited for the political hackwork she's trying to do.

Anyway, Mandel is in fact able to provide a definition of the term "woke." Are progressives going to like this definition? No. I'd suggest arguing with her ideas instead of pretending she's a complete moron who doesn't know what the word means. pic.twitter.com/K6KAeW99Us

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) March 15, 2023

"Woke" is when a radical belief in absolute endpoint equality, deviations from which can only be the product of discrimination, is violently enforced at mobpoint. Okay, but if that's the definition it doesn't actually capture any meaningful behavior. There's no universe in which Silicon Valley Bank was committed to absolute endpoint equality which it sought to enforce by a violent mob; hence, Silicon Valley Bank cannot possibly be woke. Which is why the argument for SVB being woke doesn't rely on anything like that definition, but rather skips to things like "woke is giving to a charity" or "woke is when any Black person is in the room". Seriously -- has there ever been a more naked motte-and-bailey play than this?

The problem is that when you put the right-wing definition of "woke" (crazed radicals fomenting an angry mob to impose absolute economic equality!) next to the right-wing examples of "woke" (Silicon Valley Bank had a single Black guy on its board!), the mismatch is too evident. And that, I suspect, is the real reason why Mandel froze up -- giving the definition would have ultimately shown how ridiculous her arguments were; and she couldn't hack together a new definition on the fly which would have resolved the dissonance.

UPDATE: Great example of the bait-and-switch. What does Victoria's Secret switching its brand ambassadors from the supermodel "angels" to female "icons" like Megan Rapinoe have to do with Mandel's definition of "woke"?

A clearer definition of "wokeness," and it usefully highlights the bait and switch.
This definition is coherent, and does sound like something I don't want taking over society, but few believe it.
When Mandel denounces specific cases of "wokeness" she's not using that definition. pic.twitter.com/coO1wR91o1

— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) March 15, 2023

The Judeo-Christian's Junior Partner

It's hardly a revelation at this point to observe how the "anti-CRT" style bills have quickly become tools to censor Jewish and Holocaust education. A recent story out of Florida, where a school district cited Florida's "don't say gay" bill to block a parent from giving an educational (but non-theological) presentation to teach students what Channukah is, wouldn't even be especially noteworthy (the district did eventually reverse itself). But there were some details in the story that I thought were illustrative about the location Jews are perceived to occupy in religious pluralism discourse versus the position we actually occupy.

The first thing to note about this district is that it is not some sentinel of secularism. The schools reportedly are replete with "holiday" decorations that are very much tied to Christmas. Nonetheless, when the parent tried to schedule her yearly Channukah presentation, the district demurred on the grounds that if the school allowed such an event, "“they would have to teach Kwanza and Diwali."

To which the Jewish parent replied: "I think that would be awesome!"

What we see here is how "Judeo-Christian" renders Judaism the (very, very) junior partner. Christians won't actually give Jews equal standing with Christians in terms of holiday exposure; as the "junior" they're not entitled to such largesse. But Christians assume nonetheless that Jews remain partners in the desire to maintain "Judeo-Christian" hegemony against upstart interlopers like Hindus or African-Americans. The idea that Jews would not be horrified by, but would in fact welcome, greater inclusion for other minority faiths and creeds -- that Jews actually identify more with other minority faiths and creeds than they do with hegemonic Christianity -- is incomprehensible.

The reality is that this unequal partnership is a creature of the Christian, not Jewish, imagination. Even if "Judeo-Christian" ever actually were a relationship of equals -- and I can scarcely imagine it -- the fact is Jews do not see ourselves as part of this "Judeo-Christian" collective with a shared interest in standing against other minorities. That religious outsiders might be included is for us a feature, not a bug.

Why the GOP Can't Quite Quit Kanye and Co.

It's been a month and this tweet is still up:

Kanye. Elon. Trump.

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) October 7, 2022

Why? Why, after spending countless hours railing against "Black antisemitism", is the GOP not interested in repudiating Kanye West?

At one level, the answer is obvious: As I talk about in my latest Haaretz column, the GOP has gone full Jeremy Corbyn this cycle, up to and including the antisemitism. The GOP won't condemn Kanye because the GOP is antisemitic.

At another level, the answer is still obvious: fair weather opposition to antisemitism is hardly a rare phenomenon, and the GOP has hardly shown much in the way of moral fortitude when it comes to denouncing hatred from their "side". The aforementioned "countless" hours attacking "Black antisemitism" were, as any half-awake political observer could tell you, not about genuine solidarity with Jews but a cynical way of living out the GOP's favorite hobby (trashing Black people).

But at still another level, there is something at least a little less obvious, and perhaps more provocative, that can be said. Namely: antisemitism may be a quick and easy way for the GOP to make inroads among Black voters. More than any other issue, antisemitism is a growth opportunity for the Republican Party.

Now I want to be absolutely clear: antisemitism is not a way to actually win a majority of Black voters, or anything close to it. Most Black voters are not antisemitic, most are not interested in antisemitism and are actively turned off by it.

However, the Republican Party doesn't need to win Black voters. It just needs to increase its margins from the currently abysmal levels to the merely horrible. Going from a 10% share to, say, a 25% share still objectively means they're getting absolutely crushed among Black voters -- but it also would make a huge difference in swing-y states like Georgia or Virginia.

So the operative question is not whether antisemitism is popular amongst Black voters, generally. The question is whether it is appealing to the particular tranche of Black voters who are most amenable to being picked off by GOP appeals. And there's good reason to believe the answer is yes. Or put differently: If you're a political strategist trying to flip even a few Black voters to the GOP, the small but not utterly trivial number of Black antisemites represent the lowest hanging fruit.

Kanye himself is evidence of this, of course, as is Candace Owens, recently spotted boosting far-left antisemite extraordinaire Max Blumenthal on their shared hatred of the ADL allegedly inventing contemporary antisemitism. Indeed, the dirty secret of contemporary data on antisemitism in the US is that there is a spike in minority communities -- but that spike is clustered along the most conservative tranche of the community. So it is entirely plausible that this subclass of Black voters -- likely the most natural target of conservative political appeals generally -- could be particularly attuned to emergent GOP rhetoric relying on antisemitic dogwhistles about Soros, about "globalists", about the ADL, and so on.

When one thinks about it, this isn't really anything unique to African-Americans. Similar dynamics are also playing out in Latino communities, for similar reasons. And if it weren't for the fact that White antisemites already vote overwhelmingly GOP, this strategy would work on them too (indeed, such appeals probably are part of what makes the antisemitic alt-left -- including folks like Max Blumenthal or Jimmy Dore -- at least MAGA-curious). Antisemitism appeals to conservatives, and that includes conservatives who -- for either idiosyncratic personal or communal historical reasons -- haven't voted Republican in the past. It so happens that in the Black community that there are more conservative individuals who haven't voted Republican, but the underlying dynamic is little more complex than "conservatives are attracted to antisemitism."

So this perhaps completes the answer of why the GOP can't quite quit Kanye and company. It's not just or exactly that they agree with him, or even pure partisan tribalism. Kanye is symbolic of a particular political opportunity conservatives have to win over, not the majority of Black voters or even a sizeable minority, but a large enough cohort of the most conservative group members.  Kanye represents an incredibly tempting future where the GOP again does not "win the Black vote" or come anywhere close to doing so, but does grab an additional 10% or so that might make all the difference in some crucial races. But the point is that, in terms of that opportunity's content, antisemitism is not just an unfortunate hanger-on. It is central to the appeal.

The (Hopefully More Symmetrical) Future of Congress' Black-Jewish Caucus

Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-MI) was one of the key forces behind the founding of Congress' Black-Jewish caucus. The caucus is nominally bipartisan, though with regard to both "Black" and "Jewish" Congress offers slim pickings amongst Republicans. The only Black GOP member, Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), has already left Congress, and the only GOP Jewish member, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) will depart at the end of this term. All other members are Democrats.

But now Rep. Lawrence is retiring (redistricting scrambled her district -- Lawrence endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens in the district that's the closest to being its successor), and the JTA has an interesting article about the vitality of the caucus in the future.

One unfortunate fact about the caucus, Lawrence suggested, is that it has been almost entirely silent on matters of racism. Despite the fact that its existence is nominally about providing a vector where both Black and Jewish members can learn about and be responsive to the sensitivities of the other, in practice the caucus has almost exclusively tackled matters of antisemitism and made little progress in addressing issues of racism.

In addition to the antisemitism she has confronted throughout her tenure, another disappointment, she said, has been the reluctance of her Republican colleagues to call out anti-Black racism. 

“They just put their head down because they’re so committed to a Republican agenda,” she said. “They are not willing to stand up and call a colleague out if their rhetoric is one that promotes racism or antisemitic behavior.”

A review of statements from the caucus suggests that it has only substantially addressed antisemitism, and its most egregious expressions — the hostage-taking at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas this year; the stabbing attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York, in 2019; and the anniversary of the 2018 massacre of Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh. 

When the group has made references to anti-Black racism, the caucus talks about it as if it were a thing of the past — in commemoration of the 1960s civil rights cooperation between Jews and Blacks at an opening session in 2019, or in a celebration of Juneteenth, the holiday marking the end of slavery.

Lawrence described with frustration her attempts to get Republicans to talk more about anti-Black racism. She recalled that one Black Republican she would not name said “Look at me, I’m a Black and I made it,” and how conversations with other Republicans devolved into calls on Democrats to condemn Antifa, the loose-knit network of far-left protesters, or the Black Lives Matter movement.

This was always going to be a point of concern.  And it is tremendously disappointing, and a discredit to the hard work persons like Rep. Lawrence have put into this initiative, that the caucus thus far has been so overtly asymmetrical in its focus.

A Black-Jewish caucus is unabashedly a good thing. But it has to be a relationship of equals, not one of Jewish tutors and Black pupils. Ilhan Omar should learn from her Jewish colleagues some things about antisemitism she perhaps hadn't thought of before. But also and equally, Lee Zeldin should learn some things about racism from his Black colleagues that he perhaps was insufficiently attuned to (like why it's offensive for the Capitol Building to honor men who committed treason in defense of slavery). It's absolutely good to come together to denounce contemporary instances of antisemitism such the attacks at Colleyville and Monsey. But it is troublesome that this is not paired with denunciations of contemporary instances of anti-Black racism. In a Black-Jewish caucus neither component should be the junior partner. If the caucus is going to carry forward and do justice to Rep. Lawrence's vision, things need to change.

Antisemitism is a GOP Growth Opportunity in Minority Communities

When Marjorie Taylor Greene found herself approvingly quoting Nation of Islam conspiracy theories and noting the "common ground" between the GOP and the NoI, many laughed. Others pointed out that the synergy should not surprise: there really is a lot of common ground between the two. Conspiratorial antisemites should flock together. It is hardly a surprise that Louis Farrakhan has had his share of praise for Donald Trump; nor should it shock that one of Trump's most prominent Black advisors, Omarosa Manigault, tried to do outreach connected the Trump administration to Farrakhan. When one looks at the younger generation of "Blexit" style Black conservative leaders who are exciting the contemporary Republican Party, antisemitism is often part and parcel of their appeal. Omarosa was one example. Candace Owens -- she of the infamous apologia for Hitler -- is another. Mark Robinson, the new Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina and a rising star in the state GOP, has the Jewish community in a near-panic after a bevy of antisemitic (and otherwise bigoted remarks) which he has not retracted -- the most blatant being the claim that the movie Black Panther was the project of an "agnostic Jew" whose sole agenda was "to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets." Similar trends have been observed among Latinos in Miami -- a crucial "battleground" community whose unexpectedly shift back to the right in 2016 and 2020 has kept that state in the Republican column.

An underappreciated reality is this: antisemitism is one of the most obvious avenues for the GOP to make inroads in communities of color. To be sure, this is all relative -- we're talking about how to move from 10% of the Black vote to 15% of the vote; the vast majority of Black Americans are not antisemitic and are not going to be swayed over to the GOP side of the ledger by antisemitic appeals. Still, the Hirsh/Royden paper measuring antisemitic attitudes in the American population specifically found a massive spike among young conservatives, and specifically young conservatives of color (Latinos and African-American). I've joked that this finding has "something for everyone" partaking in the debates over where antisemitism is most threatening (the left is happy it can blame the right, and the right is happy it can blame Black people). But their finding really does have significant implications for where the "low hanging fruit" is for Republicans trying to bolster their vote share in minority communities, and it is very likely the GOP will start explicitly chasing that vote sooner rather than later.  

The obvious truth about someone like Louis Farrakhan is that he is a conservative figure and his ideology is far more harmonious with the right than the left. The same is true for others in the Black community who share Farrakhan's broader outlook. This obvious truth has been obscured, partially by the idiosyncratic reasons that Farrakhan and his NoI have connections to some on the progressive left, partially because the brand of conservatism he represents (deep mistrust of public institutions, xenophobic fear of contamination by "outsiders", conspiratorial ravings about the true powers governing society), when racialized through a Black perspective, often present White people and America as the "institutions" or "outsiders" or "powers" that are indicted. But on the latter, particularly, as the GOP has gotten increasingly comfortable with overt and often violent anti-government rhetoric, there are more and more opportunities for overlap here. Railing against "the CIA" or "the FBI" or "the banks" or the "globalists" -- those words will sound very similar coming out of either camp, and will likewise resonate similarly no matter who is speaking them. Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing nothing more than recognizing what was already before her eyes. And to the extent that attacks on "Whites" seems to be an insurmountable hurdle, well, redirecting those attacks onto the Jews is a prime opportunity for "compromise" that can satisfy both parties (Eric Ward's seminal "skin in the game" article expressly identified this in exploring how he, as a Black man, could enter far-right spaces -- the presumed common ground and foundation for alliance that could unify Black Americans and the far-right was explicitly that of antisemitism).

Again, Farrakhan is not representative here -- this post is not about how the GOP will win majorities of the Black community. I'm just saying that, however large this sector is in the Black community, it is a sector that is ripe for  As the GOP gets more explicitly captured by folks like Marjorie Taylor Green, these commonalities are going to become more apparent and become more tempting to leverage. And anyone who thinks that genuine concern or fair-feeling for Jews is going to stop Republican strategists from pushing that button is out to lunch. It is, simply put, too tempting a target. The overlap is already present, the votes are there to be had, and the Republican Party has no scruples to speak of when it comes to converting hateful rabble-rousing into electoral success.

The Original Understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment is Not Just the Original Understanding of White People

Earlier today, I was having an internet discussion about a tweet from Ibram X. Kendi where he said that one element of racism "is to see books by White authors on White people as pertaining to *people* not race." This was in response to efforts in Texas to investigate and potentially ban a huge list of books that are on the subject of race (and/or sexuality).

Kendi's point, clearly, was not to say that books about White people are actually about aliens (I thought this was obvious, but some apparently need persuasion). Rather, his point was that books about White people are about White people, not "people" simpliciter. They are exactly as "raced" as books by Black authors about Black people. But the latter are pigeon-holed into being "Black" literature, while the former are thought just to be books about "people". And this is a very bad thing, that yields predictable distortions. 

Think of all the times that articles about "working class Americans" only talk to White working class Americans. The conflation gives a sharply skewed account of "working class Americans" -- for example, it makes them out to be far more conservative than they are. To be clear, a poll that sampled only Black Americans' political attitudes also would give us skewed picture of "Americans'" political attitudes (it would tell us, for example, that 90% of "Americans" vote Democrat, which is ... not correct). But it is not an accident that nobody makes that mistake -- there are plenty of good reasons to poll Black Americans as to their views, but nobody thinks that a poll which sampled only Black respondents is giving a comprehensive picture of American political attitudes.

By coincidence, I was having this discussion at approximately the same time I came across a new article by James W. Fox on how Black Americans originally understood the 13th Amendment. This is an important contribution because very often "originalist" investigations of the Constitution -- those which look to see how people of the framing era understood the meaning of giving constitutional clause -- look almost-exclusively at the understandings of White Americans at that time. That isn't self-conscious or intentional -- to the contrary, it is almost entirely unthinking. But nonetheless, investigations that sample near-exclusively White Americans are used to generate inferences about the original understandings held by Americans, as a whole. And this feels very natural, just the way of doing "neutral" originalist thinking, such that we don't even notice until it's pointed out just how skewed our sample is.

In reality, it is not remotely surprising that Black Americans and White Americans in the 1860s may have had different understandings of what the 13th Amendment was supposed to do. There are absolutely important historical reasons to look specifically at what White people thought; there are certainly are good historical reasons to look specifically at what Black people thought. From an originalist perspective, there may be a good reason to try and synthesize these thoughts into a cohesive whole that does capture a unified "American" understanding of the document, if that is indeed possible. But you have to be self-conscious about it -- if you're only looking at what White people thought, you're not looking at what "Americans", as an undifferentiated whole, thought. The racism that Kendi is articulating is the racism that assumes that proper taxonomy is one where an investigation of Black perspectives on the 13th Amendment is categorized as specifically "Black", while an investigation of White perspectives on the 13th Amendment is categorized as just "people's" perspectives or "American's" perspectives.

Hardcore Democratic Partisan Voters =/= Hardcore Progressive Voters

Imagine a legislative district that which was 100% comprised of Democratic voters -- and more specifically, partisan Democratic voters who are guaranteed to vote Democratic in the general election. There is no chance any of them would ever vote for a Republican -- they are committed Democratic partisans. In an open seat primary race, what intra-Democratic ideological position on a scale from left to center (i.e., from AOC to Kyrsten Sinema) would be most likely to win?

One might think that this is exactly the sort of district an AOC-type is most likely to win. Voters who are committed Democratic partisans would prefer the left-most candidate who is still within the broader spectrum of Democratic positions. The more firmly Democratic you are on the axis of partisanship, the more firmly progressive you are on the axis of ideology. Put differently, Democratic partisanship can be recast as "unwillingness to vote GOP". The further away you are from the GOP ideologically, the less likely you are to vote for them; so if we encounter a population that would never contemplate voting GOP, it stands to reason that the explanation why is that they are ideologically most distant from the GOP -- i.e., the most progressive voters. It's possible that such Democrats might vote strategically in races where electability is a concern -- choosing a more moderate option than they'd prefer in order to ensure they prevail in the general. But where electability is no barrier (as in our hypothetical 100% Democratic partisan district), their ideal-world preference would be the candidate representing the Democratic Party's left flank.

But there is actually a lot of evidence that this isn't necessarily true. Consider Chryl Laird and Ismail White's book Steadfast Democrats, seeking to explain why the African-American community so overwhelmingly affiliates with the Democratic Party -- circa 90% support for Democratic candidates in national elections. One answer would be "because they have overwhelmingly progressive political views". But, while it is likely the case that the Black American community nets out towards being more progressive than the White American community, there still are plenty of moderate and conservative African-American voters -- many if not most of whom also consistently vote Democratic. They are steadfast Democrats for reasons that don't map on perfectly to ideology.

For these voters, partisanship does not necessarily translate into preferring the most progressive available option even in a Democratic primary (so one is choosing among Democrats) where the winner is effectively guaranteed to win the general (so one's choice isn't an electability trade-off). Such voters are both consistent Democrats and might prefer a Joe Biden sort to a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren sort (or a Shontel Brown sort to a Nina Turner sort) on the basis of ideological preference. And (as committed partisans), such voters are especially likely to recoil from campaigns that appear to be antagonistic to the Democratic Party -- there's a reason why this was far and away the most powerful vector of attack for Brown against Turner, or Biden against Sanders for that matter.

To take a striking example: while Black voters in general are more likely to identify as "liberal" than White voters, Black Democrats are considerably less likely to identify as "liberal" than White Democrats are. 55% of White Democrats describe themselves as liberal, compared to just 29% of Black Democrats (almost identical to the 25% of Black Democrats who characterized themselves as conservative). How can this be? One way of thinking about it as follows: If you're a White liberal, you're almost certainly a Democrat, if you're a White conservative you're almost certainly a Republican, and if you're a White moderate you could be either (or a swing voter). By contrast, if you're a Black liberal, you're almost certainly a Democrat, if you're a Black moderate, you're still almost certainly a Democrat, and if you're a Black conservative, it's still pretty darn likely you're a Democrat. So if you're trying to appeal to the "steadfast Democratic" constituency of African-American voters, that means appealing to a cadre that is probably quite diverse in ideological orientation -- including liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

I think this analysis also tracks onto Jewish votes, though I'm less familiar with scholarship on the topic. Jews are famously also one of the most steadfast Democratic demographics behind African-Americans, regularly voting Democrat at rates around ~70%. And, while on net Jews again are certainly more liberal than the average American, Jewish Democrats don't necessarily cluster onto the left-edge of the Democratic Party. For Jews, too, the fact that we're an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc does not necessarily mean that the best way to appeal to us as a candidate is to be as progressive as possible  within the broad spectrum of Democratic Party opinion -- even in circumstances where "electability" is a non-issue.

It is notable to me how groups which seek to crack Jewish communal attachment to the Democratic Party often sound very similar in rhetoric to "Blexit" type organizations on the right. They'll typically speak of how they were "raised Democrat", how it was part of their "mother's milk", how for a long time it was "unthinkable" to even contemplate voting Republican -- all lines which speak to a connection between Jews and Democrats which is as much cultural as ideological. To be sure, such appeals will only have limited success given that there are only so many Jewish conservatives and because the "cultural" reasons which bind Jews and Democrats together remain quite solid. But it is notable nonetheless.

Why does this matter? Well, it suggests that the Democratic Party's base -- defined as its most loyal, committed supporters (of whom both African-American and Jewish voters certainly qualify) -- is more ideologically heterodox than one might think at first glance. They're certainly considerably more liberal than the country writ large, but it's not necessarily the case that they're thirsting for the most progressive possible option only to be thwarted by a party apparatus that takes them for granted. It's entirely possible, and I'd say likely, that their preferred Democrats are liberal Democrats who still maintain some distance from edge of the Democratic Party spectrum -- so not a Kyrsten Sinema, but not an AOC either. More like a nice, comfortable Chris Van Hollen.

Cursed Words in the Brandeis University Press

The end of 2020 brought on a burgeoning academic controversy involving the reprint of Marc Dollinger's book Black Power, Jewish Politics (which I happen to have on my desk). The gist is this: in preparation for a new edition, Dolligner authored a new preface which included language about how Jews have begun to reckon with the  "elements of white supremacy in their own lived experience." Dollinger's editors at the Brandeis University Press didn't like the linkage of Jews and White Supremacy. So they refused to print his preface, and allegedly sent the book to the presses without consulting him on their decision. This generated an outraged letter by a good number of eminent Jewish Studies scholars in Dollinger's field, and the BUP's newly installed editors wrote a rather vague reply suggesting potentially that they may revisit the decision.

Like others, I recognize that the linkage of Jews with my background and White Supremacy is a fraught endeavor. I wrote a lengthy two-part blog series trying to tease through this very topic. I haven't read Dollinger's preface (since, you know, it was never published), and it's possible I'd disagree with what he had to say about "White supremacy". But discussing the topic is well within the purview of academic inquiry into the relationship of American Jewry and the Black community, and it is not a healthy thing if the very phrase is treated as cursed words. The people who are praising the editors' censorial cowardice regarding a book that already passed muster in peer-review are doing a disservice to the project of open academic inquiry (not that I think they care). Give them 30 minutes, and they'll be back to complaining about "cancel culture" soon enough, but for the time being they're gleeful as all get-out that an academic press was afraid to even allow the phrase "White supremacy" to be uttered in a preface.

The Harris Pick versus White Fragility

California Senator Kamala Harris has been selected as Joe Biden's running mate.

This is, I think, the chalk pick, and one I'm quite content with. I like Harris -- she was my off-the-blocks favorite before I switched my support to Warren -- and I think she'd make a fine President in the event that Biden's health fails him. It's momentous that a Black woman is filling this role, and that shouldn't be undersold just because many predicted it in advance (as Yair Rosenberg notes, part of what makes it historic is precisely that it feels conventional). I also am excited for the prospect of the first Second Man being the first Jewish Second Man.

There is one other thing that rose to my mind that I haven't seen fully emphasized. Harris' biggest moment on the campaign trail this primary season was, of course, when she hit Joe Biden on his failure to support busing as a racial integration measure. Given that, it is I think notable that Biden picked her as his VP anyway. The standard "White Fragility" narrative* is that such a challenge, from a Black woman, to a White man, will be taken as the gravest and most unforgivable of insults -- a shattering offense from which there can be no recovery. Biden is modeling an alternative -- he did not respond to a very public, very pointed anti-racism challenge by treating the challenger as cherem. He stayed in relationship with her and elevated her as his political partner. It's not the largest thing, but it is a thing that matters.

* I know "White Fragility" is passe now among the cool kids, but for what it's worth I read it back when it was a random academic article published in an obscure journal in 2011.

Why Are Romanians Running Fake "Black Trump Supporter" Accounts?

Facebook announced it had suspended a legion of accounts that purported to be Black Trump supporters but were actually Romanian in origin. Which raises the question: Why are Romanians pretending to be Black Trump supporters on Facebook?

To be clear -- there's no "good" answer to this. All the possible motivations are terrible. But they can be differently terrible. For example, while the most likely explanations are political, there are some apolitical rationales I can imagine, namely:

• It's a grift. Scammers have discovered that gullible White people are thirsting for Black Trump supporters to exist, and this is an easy way to exploit that hunger for cash.

Someone could be interested in running this con with no particular interest or concern with the political ramifications. 

But there are quite a few different political motivations I can imagine as well (and these might all occur in conjunction):

• The purpose is to support Trump by galvanizing Black Trump supporters -- showing them that they're not alone, there's a community, and they should be out and proud.
• The purpose is to support Trump by galvanizing White Trump supporters -- showing them that "not all Blacks" oppose him and that therefore claims that he's racist are just ginned up by the liberal media/BLM Marxist/Soros network.
• The purpose is to sow chaos. It's not really about supporting Trump per se, but about generating dissension, fraying bonds of trust, and inculcating a sense that everything one sees is a lie or at least a potential lie -- sentiments which, if strong enough, are toxic to functioning democratic societies.

Again, all of these "motives" are terrible things, and do real damage to the vitality of the American democratic system. Which is why, while I give Facebook some belated credit for expunging the accounts, it is absolutely essential that they take a firmer hand on this sort of problem.

Zioness Has Another Manifesto

Zioness, the progressive Zionist group, has released a new "activist's guide" on the issue of racial justice. It consists of:

1. One page on the need to overcome implicit bias;
2. One page on the need to "show up" for racial justice, even when one encounters antisemitism; and
3. Six pages on how to respond to antisemitic tropes (many, though not all, Israel- or Zionism-related) one might encounter while engaging in racial justice work.

This distribution of attention -- centering antisemitism in a pamphlet supposedly focused on racial justice -- has caused Zioness to be the target of numerous social media dunks. I think many of them are deserved, albeit with a few minor reservations. Here are my quick thoughts:

• From its inception, my primary critique of Zioness -- and I've expressed this personally to their leadership -- is that they resolutely refuse to declare what progressive values demand with respect to Israel. Their justification for their reticence is that they are a domestic policy organization -- a response that is never going to sit well for a group called "Zioness". And documents like this only emphasize why this stance is untenable: Zioness can't forward opinions about Israel and then say "we don't take a position on that" when people ask them to register opinions on Israel. It's a circle they're never going to be able to square, and until they steel themselves and have the guts to forthrightly say "progressivism demands X, Y and Z out of Israel", people are going to going to be justified in looking at them with a skeptical eye.

• It may be that a guidebook offering suggestions on how to respond to antisemitic tropes a progressive Jew may encounter while engaging in racial justice activism would be useful. But if you're going to make such a resource, don't title it "Racial Justice: An Activist's Guide". An activist's guide to racial justice should center questions of racial justice -- period. This is the locus of the criticisms Zioness is getting over this document, and it is absolutely correct. Creating a document on "racial justice" that has barely any direct discussion of racial justice is almost impossibly cringe-worthy.

• Of course, the possibility that it might be useful to have a guidebook on how to respond to antisemitism while engaging in racial justice work also poses the question of whether now is the right moment to center that conversation. There is, shall we say, good reason to be skeptical on this front.

• What little substance there is on racial justice is, to be generous, perfunctory. I'm probably more attached to implicit bias as a useful framing device for understanding contemporary racism than many of my colleagues in the progressive world (it's falling out of vogue), and even I'd say that talking about that alone is woefully incomplete. This is a case where something is worse than nothing -- if they hadn't made the limp gesture towards talking about racial justice qua racial justice, maybe it would have been clear that this document was meant to serve a different purpose (namely, "Responding to Antisemitic Tropes in Racial Justice Activism"). Of course, if that purpose had been made evident it would have more clearly posed the question of whether now was the right time to center that conversation. See the previous bullet point.

• I've seen for awhile now the allegation that Zioness is an "astroturf" organization. There's virtually no evidence this is true. Moreover, anyone who knows anything about the constitution of American Jewish community politics should very well know it isn't true. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the politics of the American Jewish community -- and Zioness' critics certainly are included -- knows that there are a great many American Jews who (a) have relatively conventional "pro-Israel" politics, (b) have relatively conventional progressive domestic politics, and (c) feel aggrieved when they see these two commitments treated as antithetical to one another. Even if one hates that particular political cocktail, surely there's no dispute about its prevalence. Given that, there's no grounding to the idea that Zioness, which centers its appeal to just that political intersection, could only have sprung up via artificial seeding.* Since I'm confident that Zioness' critics are not ignorant about the political composition of the American Jewish community, I'm equally confident that their use of "astroturf" is entirely as a slur (meaning something like "activist group with more conventional and less radical politics than mine"), not an analytical category.

• Many of the document's critics have cast it as specifically focused on "defending Israel" rather than addressing antisemitism more broadly. Much of the "antisemitic tropes" they address are Israel-related, but not several are not (ex: "Jews were behind the Atlantic Slave Trade" or "White nationalism isn’t about Jews"). There's something interesting about this, because formally speaking the elision isn't necessary: the locus of the critique -- that, especially right now, the centerpiece of a document on "racial justice" should be "racial justice" -- would I think carry equal punch if Zioness' document were accurately described as talking about antisemitism. So why fudge the description? The answer is that the criticizing "Israel talk" is more comfortable terrain for many compared to criticizing "Jewish talk", and so we see activists instinctively slide into the former even in cases where analytically they're just as much talking about the latter.

The tl;dr is that Zioness is a regular grassroots organization with a pretty obvious base of support, pairing conventional pro-Israel views with conventional mainstream Democratic domestic views. That, on its own, isn't too remarkable. But the document they've produced on "racial justice" is (a) justly being mocked for having a barely even perfunctory focus on racial justice; (b) bad on its own terms; (c) poorly timed with regard to its actual-albeit-understated purpose, and (d) inadvertently demonstrative of how Zioness' ostensible commitment to being a purely "domestic policy organization" that can't be expected to take positions on what progressive values mean for Israel is untenable.

* The closest evidence one has for Zioness being "astroturf" comes from its early funding from the right-wing Lawfare Project and Brooke Goldstein. That would raise legitimate flags, except that Goldstein has been extremely vocal about how much she hates Zioness precisely because they refused to take the pseudo-left concern-troll line that she had expected out of them (which is to say, they've actually been independent). The fallout has gotten so intense that Zioness has outright blocked Goldstein on Twitter. Whatever Goldstein's initial intentions, she'd be the first to agree that Zioness has charted its own path.

Are Americans Grasping the Reality of Police Violence?

As the nation continues to be gripped by protests against police brutality, I've been struck by the near-constant footage of excessive police force against journalists and civilians who seem to be doing nothing more than exercising their constitutional rights. For me, it powerfully communicates the reality of a central theme of the protests: that the police are out of control and are acting as a tool of repression and violence against the Americans they nominally are there to protect.

But my vantage is only a partial one, and I've been waiting to see evidence about how the American people as a whole are reacting. We all still are living in the shadow of 1968, and there is the constant fear that the narrative that emerges will be one where the police are the victims and "law and order" must be restored. Is that what's happening?

Today, Kevin Drum links to new polling that gives cause for optimism: Asked over the weekend whether "police violence against the public" or "violence against the police" was a more serious problem, Americans picked the former by a 55/30 margin. Independents answered at roughly the same margin -- 54/27. Even White Americans agreed by a 50/35 margin (for Black Americans, the gap was a whopping 85/8).

It's just one poll, and just one question. But it does seem to point to a potential sea change (also on that note: a Minneapolis city councilor talking seriously about trying to disband the Minneapolis Police Department outright).

Meanwhile, it's primary night in several states across America -- off-hand, none of the marquee races seem like they'd be particularly impacted by the protests (maybe the effort to take out White Supremacist GOP Rep. Steve King), but I suppose we'll see.

Are We Back To This Again?

Tablet Magazine has a new 2,500 word essay comparing the antisemitic dangers of Black Nationalism to that of White Supremacy.

Is it novel? No. It's the same basic set of arguments about Black antisemitism everyone in the Jewish community has heard (and heard, and heard) approximately infinity times since 2015. It contributes absolutely nothing new to the topic. Misty-eyed reminiscence on (now more than a half-century old) Jewish contributions to the Civil Rights movement? Check. Cherry-picked anecdotes of a few hateful college lectures decades in the past? Check. Earnest equivalence between these lectures and Tiki Marchers in Charlottesville? Check. The only thing surprising about it is that Liel Leibovitz wasn't the author.

Is it timely? No. There's no effort to provide any serious topical hook; there's nothing in the news cycle that appears to have prompted it. It comes effectively out of nowhere. At least when I wrote about Tony Martin (a) it was prompted by a personal experience and (b) he hadn't been dead for seven years. This feels like someone just really missed the good old days where one could publish a "Black antisemitism -- the new threat to the Jews!" column every week. Some people miss the normalcy of going to the gym; some miss the normalcy of obsessing over Black antisemitism. To-may-to to-mah-to.

Is it good? No. It is absolutely possible to write a good piece about Black antisemitism. Adam Serwer had a great one in The Atlantic. And I'd be fascinated to hear Michael Twitty more fully speak on the dynamic he encountered here, if he were so inclined. But the hallmark of a bad piece on Black antisemitism is when it acts as if Black antisemitism drives the broader antisemitic environment Jews face on a global level. The shoals to avoid are very similar to those if one writes on "Jewish Racism" (and indeed, on my desk I have a book titled Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism). Are there important things to say on the subject? Yes, absolutely. But there's a huge difference between noting that there are Jews who are racist and writing as if Jewish racism drives contemporary racism (in the U.S. or globally) on a level that is at par with or exceeds White supremacy. The latter is what crosses into antisemitic territory.

And indeed, ironically this is often exactly the sin that exemplifies how some Black nationalists cross into antisemitic territory -- they present Jews as at the center of or guiding the practice of racism in America. The problem isn't that there aren't Jews who are racist, the problem is presenting that iteration of racism in a fashion wholly out of proportion to its actually tangible impact. Yet that lesson somehow is lost when running yet another "Black antisemitism is just as central as White supremacy" column.

How does an essay like this get published? It's not that it's the worst thing Tablet has ever run (my podium for that event would probably include Anna Breslaw's "Nazis were right: Some of us are Jewshit", Alexander Zubatov's defense of the "Cultural Marxism" slur, and this Leibovitz classic), but it is one of the more pointless. It's not original, it's not timely, it's not prompted by anything, it's just -- there. Gratuitously stirring up trouble for no reason other than it can.

Why Winning Alabama Matters

Chris Koski makes an important point regarding one talking point aimed at dismissing Biden's Super Tuesday performance: that it's meaningless because he was only winning "red states" that will play no role in the general election anyway.

To begin, it's not really true: of all the states which have had primary elections so far, the state most likely to be "pivotal" in November is North Carolina, and Biden won there by almost 20 points. And in terms of Sanders' victories, it's not like Utah or (in the other direction) Vermont are going to play decisive roles in the general either.

But also, Koski notes, between voter suppression and high rates of racial polarization in voting, the presidential primary is one of the few opportunities for African-American voters in deep south states like Alabama to influence national and Democratic politics at all. Given that they are a core Democratic constituency, it is a good thing that they get the opportunity to make their mark in the primary process precisely because in the general the Democratic candidate won't really have the opportunity to invest any time there.

This is changing a little bit as some shallow south states become more competitive (see North Carolina again). But if the raw bloodless political calculus is that a Democratic presidential candidate really should ignore African-American voters in Alabama during the general election campaign, that makes it more important that they have the opportunity to exert meaningful influence in the primary.