A Liberal Dose, Feb. 24, 2022 "Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court"

 

A Liberal Dose

February 24, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court”

 

People who are terrified by critical race theory almost always prove unaware of what it actually is: a legal studies framework that examines how race has been affected (and, in part, created) by law. It is patently inaccurate to claim that race and the law have not gone hand-in-hand in American history, or that the effects of that relationship are not felt in the present.

This is demonstrated in a recent history book that I have mentioned in these pages before –Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court by Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner. In roughly 350 pages, it traces the intertwined story of race and law, from the colonial period to the 2020s. (Full disclosure- Vernon Burton was my grad school co-adviser and mentor.) The authors make a sobering point early in the work: for three hundred years, the law was used to justify racial oppression and maintain white supremacy, and then for four decades (the 1930s to the 1970s) it was used to fight against, and try to turn the tide of, that oppression. This was followed by another half-century (the 1970s until now) of largely walking back the gains made in that forty-year period. For the vast majority of American history, the law -as ultimately interpreted by the Supreme Court -has, in fact, served to buttress racism rather than to dispel it.

Slavery, after all, was legal for most of that time -and protected by law. The infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 said that even free black people “had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” Even when slavery was ended after the Union victory in the Civil War, Southern states had repressive slave codes and, starting after Reconstruction, legally enforced segregation which the Supreme Court upheld in Plessy v Ferguson (1896). SCOTUS ruled in the 1820s and 1830s that Native Americans had never had the right to own their own land, and that they were “domestic dependent nations” whose relationship to the United States “resembles that of a ward to his guardian.” In 1889 SCOTUS upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese people from immigrating to the U.S., saying the country had a right to prevent “vast hordes of its people from crowding in on us.” In 1922 the Court ruled in Ozawa v. United States that immigrants must be, not only white so far as skin tone, but specifically Caucasian. The following year, when Indian immigrant Baghat Singh Thind’s counsel pointed out that people from India are technically Caucasian, the Court ruled that they weren’t white enough to be U.S. citizens, Caucasian or not.

Many advances toward racial equality were then made over the following decades, especially during the Civil Rights era. However, the authors point out that, after 1970, the question became “Are discriminatory results of a law enough for the Court to strike it down, or is proof also required that the people who wrote and passed the law intended it to discriminate?” Conservative justices in recent decades have almost always taken a very narrow view of that question, with the least latitude possible, even when they give extremely broad latitude to questions of religion or the second amendment. In other words, they have been strict constructionists only when it suits them, and not on a consistent basis -the inconsistency coming on questions of race.

The book ends by observing that American democracy is not a thing that is broken, but rather a thing that is unfinished. That simple statement, whose truth seems so obvious to some, is somehow threatening to others. So threatening that, despite the historical accuracy of everything I have cited from this book, it is a discussion that would currently be illegal for high school teachers to have in Tennessee, and, if some have their way, might even be illegal in college history classes.

On second thought, maybe things are becoming broken.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, Feb. 17, 2022 "History Is Still the Key to Everything- Don't Lose It"

 

A Liberal Dose

February 17, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“History Is Still the Key to Everything -Don’t Lose It”

 

Next week will mark one year that I have been writing this column. The first one appeared on Feb. 25, 2021, and was entitled “History is the key to everything.” That is the template I have tried -and, I think, mostly succeeded -to follow: bringing a perspective from the left that is rooted in history. My political outlook is informed by two things: what I feel in my heart to be moral and right, and beneficial and fair to the largest number of people, and what I have learned from studying history. A clear, well-informed knowledge of history is an invaluable aid in understanding the world around you in the here and now. On the other hand, an unclear and misinformed understanding of history, or a lack or knowledge about it, is very dangerous. It can run an individual, and a society, off the rails.

A deep concern about many people’s lack of historical context is part of what led me to agree to write this left-of-center column. I saw a lot of Americans repeating the mistakes, and sometimes intentional cruelties, of the past, and not recognizing patterns that should be objectively clear. A few years of politicians and their enablers re-working the very meaning of what “facts” and “science” are, in a sort of Orwellian doublespeak, had taken their toll. Six weeks before that first column, thousands of people (some from our little neck of the woods), convinced without any proof whatsoever that the election had been “fake,” stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent the constitutional process of certifying a legal and fair election, injuring 140 police officers and actively seeking to murder the vice-president and several others. Most of us watched on TV with jaws dropped, because we had never expected to see such a thing in America- yet now some are claiming it never happened or was blown out of proportion.

If anything, things have gotten worse. Laws have been passed that are designed to make it harder for minorities to vote, because they might vote for Democrats. Books are being burned, books about the Holocaust are being banned, violent physical attacks on minorities have escalated. While some of my conservative friends ask why I am always complaining instead of trying harder to bring both sides together, I am seeing conservative columnists claiming that all Democrats are Satan-worshiping Marxists who hate America and must be stopped. I have to wonder if some former friend might attack or kill me because I said something they didn’t like, or if some student’s parents might try to take away my job because I teach actual history. Politicians in our own state legislature want to tell educators what they can and can’t say about the things those educators have studied intensely for years -to muzzle people who are trying to teach our children the truth about history in order to avoid the dangerous consequences of ignorance. They are the same politicians who sing about small government and individual freedom, and decry “cancel culture.” 

My wife and I often read the Bible together (I’m working on my sixth time through). Recently we read Jeremiah, with whom I have felt a close affinity since I was a teenager. God would give him messages to take to the people, then warn him that no one would listen -in fact, they would beat him and try to kill him. Jeremiah was not a fan of this plan -but “His message becomes a fire burning in my heart” and he is unable to hold it in even if he wanted to. I identify more than ever.

I will not teach lies, and I will not refrain from teaching the truth. Once upon a time, that was considered an American virtue, even by people who disagreed with the message. Now, they seek only to silence any message they do not like.

How American is that.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, Feb. 10, 2022 "Why Taking Maus out of Middle School Does Matter"

 

A Liberal Dose

February 10, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Why Taking Maus Out of Middle School Matters”

 

Last week I talked about the controversial removal of Maus from the middle school curriculum in McMinn County, a decision made by the school board and not by the teachers (the book is approved for 8^th grade by the state of Tennessee, by the way). Ostensibly, the board’s concern was a handful of swear words (despite it being brought to their attention that some other books they teach, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, have far more) and a picture of a naked female mouse. I looked through my copy of the graphic novel twice and couldn’t find this image; I learned that it was actually a tiny image in the background of a panel portraying Jews being herded into the showers to be gassed. Several board members also complained that the story was too disturbing for 13-year-olds.

My uncle (by marriage), Edgar Lebenhart, was a Jewish Czech immigrant and a Holocaust refugee. He and two of his brothers escaped their homeland when the Nazis took over, and virtually the entirety of their immediate and extended family died in concentration camps. Although he died back in 1978, some of you may remember him -he owned the shirt factories Path and EL Apparel. As a child I met both his brothers and their wives, one of whom was an Auschwitz survivor. I was curious about the number tattooed on her wrist, and my uncle explained the Holocaust to me -I was 8 -and I sought out books to learn more about it. I remember, at age 11, reading a Captain America comic book about an elderly woman who was an Auschwitz survivor, and thinking how much she looked like the woman I had met. My point is, I was certainly able to handle this kind of information by the time I was 13. Where language is concerned, there is nothing in Maus that I did not hear every day within five minutes of getting on the school bus. It is imperative that kids learn about this stuff -and 13 is not too young -and in the context of just how terrible it really was, or else it will be forgotten (as it already is by many young people, as I pointed out last time).

But there’s more going on than that. Word of the Maus banning came scarcely more then a week after news that a state-sponsored Tennessee adoption agency, under Governor Lee’s “religious freedom” law, had denied a family a child because they were Jewish. It came at the same time as news of hostages being taken in a synagogue in Texas… just three years after the horrible synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh… which was only one year after white nationalists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia (where they killed one counter-protester), chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us” and “Blood and Soil” (which was a Nazi catchphrase.) In-between there have been countless incidents of synagogue vandalism and assaults on Jewish people. Heck, just the other day a dozen protesting Nazis in Florida beat up a Jewish bystander whose grandfather had survived the Holocaust. After decades of being done mostly in subtle ways, suddenly anti-Semitic prejudice is becoming open and violent. Similarly, violence or antagonism toward other minorities have increased dramatically.

All this would seem to indicate that education about the Holocaust, slavery, Jim Crow, and other such topics is becoming more vital than ever for young people. Yet, at the same time, more and more conservative politicians -egged on by their base, who in turn are egged on by reactionaries in the conservative media -are passing laws making it harder to teach such topics because it might make white people feel uncomfortable or guilty. It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential results. Maybe that McMinn board was influenced by such thinking and maybe it wasn’t, but considering all the books they didn’t ban it certainly doesn’t make them -or Tennessee -look good.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, Feb. 3, 2022 "A Graphic Novel, A School Board, and Confronting History"

 

A Liberal Dose

February 3, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“A Graphic Novel, A School Board, and Confronting History”

 

30 years after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Art Speigelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is back in the news (and back on the bestseller list). Spiegelman, who got his start as an underground comics artist and publisher in the 1970s, spoke at Tennessee Tech a few years ago about his work and about the history of comics, and is a wealth of information. His award-winning Maus was autobiographical. The framing story was about Spiegelman, the artist, trying to get his elderly father to tell him his story -while also trying to understand what caused the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother and the emotional and personality issues of his father, with whom he had a very tempestuous relationship.

The heart of the book was the story his father told him, detailing the experiences he and his wife had as Jews during the Holocaust who ultimately ended up in a concentration camp. Spiegelman depicted Jewish people as mice, playing on the fact that Nazis referred to them as “vermin,” and Germans as cats (with other nationalities being represented by other animals). He has stated that his reason for taking such an approach was to show how absurd it was, and by extension how absurd it is to divide people by race and ethnicity. Another effect is that seeing the intense suffering of such “cute” animals makes it easier for the (presumably human) reader to sympathize with them and be shocked by their treatment.

Obviously, the book has some extremely mature themes. On the other hand, you can’t talk about the Holocaust WITHOUT having extremely mature themes. Many teachers of middle school, high school, and college (myself included) have used it as a medium to delve into those themes, which are extremely important for our young people to learn about. The Holocaust, like slavery, segregation, the Trail of Tears, and many other things, is something that all citizens should know about and think about, and it needs to start when they are young. If that doesn’t happen, you wind up with the situation we have now.

A poll of Millennials and Gen Z people (so folks from their late teens to their late 30s) two years ago showed a “worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge.” 10% had never even heard of it. 63% did not know how severe it was (that 6 million Jews were killed), and more than half of those estimated the number at less than 2 million. More than half could not name one concentration camp. 11% (higher in some states) believed that the Jews caused it. That was two years ago -imagine how it’s going to be now, with state legislatures in red states passing laws banning “critical race theory” or anything that could cause anyone to feel guilty or be uncomfortable. This has led to, among other things, a school principal insisting to teachers that they now have to give equal and fair consideration to the Nazis, and a superintendent advising students they need to ask their parents whether the Holocaust really happened, not their teacher. Principals and teachers who continue to try teaching the truth about history, meanwhile, are getting fired.

The school board in McMinn County voted to remove the book from their 8^th grade curriculum, despite the fact teachers supported the use of it, ostensibly over a couple of swear words and a crude representation of a naked mouse (Remember, this is the Holocaust, where people were stripped naked and sent to their deaths). One board member thought that people being hanged or committing suicide should not be discussed in public education. 13-year-olds can handle a lot more than 5-year-olds, and they shouldn’t be treated the same. It was very unfortunate (for the reputation of Tennessee, such as it is nowadays) that this vote took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

That is the situation. Next week I will explain why it matters so much.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, January 20, 2022 "'Seditious Insurrectionists' Need to Understand What Treason Is"

 

A Liberal Dose

January 20, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“’Seditious Insurrectionists’ Need to Understand What Treason Is”

 

Back in 2003, at the beginning of the war with Iraq, I was a student at Tech (I was late getting started) and a member of the College Democrats. We were opposed to the war -anyone paying attention could tell there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we were being fed a line as an excuse to invade. But that didn’t mean we were opposed to the men and women who were going to have to go do it. We started a drive to collect toiletries and phone cards to send to the troops overseas, and volunteered at a table in the university center to take donations. I will never forget the large number of fellow students who made a special effort to yell at us, swear at us, and deride us as traitors to America -because we were Democrats. That same year, Ann Coulter wrote a book (very popular in some circles) called Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

That was not really the beginning, but it was certainly an early high (or low) point in the progression of conservatives not just disagreeing with liberals/progressives, but of viewing them as traitors who want to destroy America. And it has only intensified in the last decade. It is everywhere you look in a red state such as ours; television pundits, newspaper columns, and the guy you vaguely know on Facebook, all saying that you should arm yourself and be prepared to shoot your neighbors because they are “enemies of the Constitution.”

Here’s what I haven’t noticed much, though -specific allegations of specific “crimes” with any credible evidence to back them up. It mostly seems to be, “you’re a traitor because I say so” or “you’re a traitor because you don’t share my opinions” or “you’re a traitor because I saw something on Youtube.”

And yet. Here we are. In the midst of an investigation into an unruly mob (that was very intentionally stoked up) storming the Capitol, smearing their own feces on the wall, and making a very plausible attempt to assassinate the vice-president -all in effort to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral votes in an election that their candidate handily lost. Think about that -they were trying to prevent Congress from doing its constitutionally mandated job, while claiming they were doing so in order to defend the Constitution. You will find no promotion or defense of angry mobs violating the Constitution in the Constitution. An effort to change the outcome of a decided election, and therefore in effect overthrow the Constitutional government, is rightly defined as an insurrection.

In their case, there were clear laws being broken -and not just misdemeanors, or even serious assault, but treason against the Constitution. A lot of Trump voters who were embarrassed or dismayed on that day quickly changed their tunes, and started claiming that horrible scene was not a very big deal and was just tourists being excited.

The Justice Department has charged several individuals with “seditious conspiracy.” Seditious, if you didn’t know, means treasonous. The charge is that they “did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree, with other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, by force to prevent, hinder, and delay the execution of any law of the United States.”

Every day, investigators are learning more about those “other persons” and the means by which they purposely laid the groundwork for insurrection. More arrests will come. And the perpetrators will continue to be people who think anyone who disagrees with them is a traitor -while they have supported or participated in literal sedition.

Maybe you think I’m harping on this topic too much. Well, it can’t be ignored or forgotten. We can’t just sweep it away. And everyone who supports the actions of that day needs to take a step back from the abyss and understand just what they encourage stepping into.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, Jan. 13, 2022 "The Return of the Paxton Boys"

 

A Liberal Dose

January 13, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“The Return of the Paxton Boys”

 

On my first day back to work after the holidays, I ran into a student in the hallway who had taken one of my Native American history classes a couple of years ago. He said, “Who’d have thought the Paxton Boys would come back on January 6?” “Wow,” I said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right.”

The Paxton in question, also called Paxtang, was a small settlement in colonial Pennsylvania which is now a suburb of Harrisburg. To understand the movement that started there in 1763 we have to -you guessed it -have context.

1763 was a pretty important year. In February, a treaty had been signed in Paris that ended the French and Indian War, and a large part of France’s territory in North America was transferred to the victorious English. English colonists in the back-country of Pennsylvania, many of whom were of Scots-Irish descent, had very harsh feelings toward indigenous peoples after this war. Friction was increased by the fact that settlers were pouring into areas that technically were reserved for the local tribes, most of whom had not sided with the French and who had been living peacefully with their white neighbors for decades.

When the English took over “possession” of the lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River -the northern part of which, the Great Lakes region, was known collectively as the Ohio Country -the tribes there did not like the heavy hand that the English took with them (compared to the French, with whom they had gotten along). The result -within months -was the start of a new war in that territory. Several tribes united and attacked English forts and settlements. One of their principal leaders was an Ottawa chief named Pontiac (yes, the town is named after him, and therefore the car), so the conflict was known as “Pontiac’s Rebellion” or “Pontiac’s War.” It was a very bloody war, but it did not extend into Central Pennsylvania. However, the settlers there were unnerved by the knowledge of it, and that it was relatively close to them, after having just spent years fighting Indians. This was heightened by the fact that many settlers wanted the peaceful Indians in their area removed so they could have their land.

An angry mob formed in Paxton. There were no hostile Native Americans anywhere nearby, but one Native was the same as another to them. They attacked a small group of Conestoga Indians, most of whom were Christian converts and had never taken up arms against colonists. They killed several. Local authorities put the remaining Conestogas -numbering sixteen -in jail for their own protection, but the mob broke into the jail and killed all the adults, scalping and mutilating them. They then started roaming the countryside, looking for more Natives to vent their wrath on, gathering more and more followers from other towns as they went. They eventually numbered about 250, calling themselves “the Paxton Boys.”

The colonial government condemned their actions- so they marched on Philadelphia to vent their wrath on the government. They were met outside the city by a group of city leaders who tried to calm them down. One of those leaders was Benjamin Franklin, who gave a stirring speech that did, in fact, calm them. The city leaders agreed to read the rioters’ pamphlets and consider their complaints, and the mob dispersed and went home.

When I learned about this in school, and when I have taught about it afterwards, it has always been presented as a dark point in our history and a lesson in the dangers of mob rule. As a national embarrassment.

The insurrectionists of January 6 apparently never learned this lesson, and there was no Ben Franklin there to calm them down. If there had been, they would doubtless have beaten him with flagpoles and perhaps brained him with a fire extinguisher, because “freedom.”

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

 

A Liberal Dose, January 6 2022 "The Biggest Attack on Elections in American History"

 

Note: this is the culmination of a ten-part series on voting. To read the entire series in one document, click HERE

A Liberal Dose

January 6, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“The Biggest Attack on Elections in American History”

 

For years, the Republican party had been eroding their base’s confidence in the election system in order to justify passing state laws to restrict the opportunities of minorities to vote -primarily because they usually voted Democratic. Then Trump came along and magnified all that a hundredfold. He started by intensifying rhetoric demeaning minorities and immigrants, famously calling Haiti and African nations “s—t hole countries” and invoking Apocalyptic imagery in his inauguration to describe black and immigrant communities (“American carnage”, he called it).

He also, from the outset, made clear he would never concede any election he lost, because the only way he could lose an election is if there was fraud on the other side. This primed his followers, whom he stirred up with violent speech, to rebel if he did lose. As I described last week, at least two people in this county threatened me with violence if Trump lost in 2016. This does not even take into account the fact that Russia tried to intervene in our elections to Trump’s benefit, something which would have chilled most Americans to the bone in an earlier era.

All this combined to erode the public’s faith in democratic elections -which was Russia’s goal. Trump did not concede. Instead, he claimed fraud in practically every swing state, and brought countless lawsuits to throw out the votes of American citizens. However, there has been absolutely no evidence of widespread fraud presented, and some of Trump’s lawyers are now in danger of disbarment for making claims they knew were false, in order to erode faith in the election. Trump’s hardcore base -about 30% of America -were enraged at, and refused to accept, his loss. Trump’s slogan, “stop the steal,” was on the lips of millions.

We now know that Trump’s inner circle devised an elaborate plan to keep him in office despite losing the election. Alternate Trump electors illegally and secretly met in swing states he had lost, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, and filled out fraudulent slates. Trump and his cronies were convinced that VP Mike Pence had the authority to toss out electors from states that Trump claimed were fraudulent, and either toss the election decision to the legislature or perhaps approve the fraudulent electors instead. Pence was advised by former VP Dan Quayle that this was illegal, and he reported to his boss that he couldn’t do it. Trump inflamed the supporters at his DC rally, calling Biden an “illegitimate president” and saying “if you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country anymore.”

We know what happened. A violent mob, trying to stop the official count of the electoral votes, attacked the Capitol. A makeshift scaffold was erected and people shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” Death threats were made against various Democratic legislators. Policemen were mercilessly beaten. People died. The Capitol was ransacked, with feces smeared on the wall. Legislators and police desperately called for national guard reinforcements, but they did not come for hours -because they were not given orders to come. Trump watched it all on TV, cheering the mob.

It certainly seems Trump wanted the insurrection to intensify, with more bloodshed. We know that he and his advisers discussed declaring martial law, using the violence as an excuse, and putting the army in charge of recounting votes.

This was a clear-cut attempt to overturn a legitimate election, and to overthrow the legitimate new government. It was the biggest attack on democracy and the Constitution in American history.

In its wake, using Trump supporters’ mistrust of the election as a reason (despite there being no evidence they are right), red states have passed even more restrictive voting laws (aimed at potential Democratic voters). Conservative politicians and media continue to repeat The Big Lie, further eroding their base’s trust in voting… and thereby setting up, potentially, even more violence at the next election. Which might work this time.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE