"The cause of justice demands proprietariness about the meaning of 'reparations,' and we object to these kinds of piecemeal and misleading labels."

"True reparations only can come from a full-scale program of acknowledgment, redress and closure for a grievous injustice."

Write A. Kirsten Mullen and William A. Darity Jr. in "Evanston, Ill., approved ‘reparations.’ Except it isn’t reparations" (WaPo). The Evanston program only offers $25,000 grants for repairs or down payments on real estate.

The authors demonstrate their "proprietariness about the meaning of 'reparations'" by spelling out 4 necessary elements: 

1. Careful delineation of eligibility — including, necessarily, a requirement of an ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S., and self-identification as black on an official document for at least 12 years before the program starts.

2. Erasure of the black/white wealth gap. The authors think $14 trillion is needed.

3. Direct payments to individuals. Not programs like Evanston's, which centers on home ownership.

4. Paid by the federal government. Only the federal government has the kind of money that is demanded, so state and local government should be excluded from using the word "reparations."

Here's a good comment over there: "By describing 'true' reparations as only something that is both politically and practically unachievable, the authors reveal that they are more interested in maintaining the 'systemic racism' grievance industry then helping the country move past its issues with race."

By the way, I don't think I'd ever seen the word "proprietariness" before. It doesn't mean "propriety." The word is not in the OED, but I can see that the "-ness" ending is making a noun out of the adjective "proprietary," which means property-owning or relating to property. It's an unusual word. A google search on it is dominated by references to "male sexual proprietariness" (a man's sense of owning his wife's sexual and reproductive functions). I couldn't find 1 use of the word in the NYT archive, but I did find 6 uses in The Washington Post archive, including a piece from last October about reparations in California:

William Darity Jr., a Duke University economics professor and reparations expert, told the website Cal Matters that no single state could launch an action large enough to be called “reparations.” 

 “I have a sense of proprietariness about the use of the term reparations, because I think people should not be given the impression that the kinds of steps that are taken at the state or local level actually constitute a comprehensive or true reparations plan,” Darity said in Cal Matters. “Whatever California does perhaps could be called atonement, or it could be called a correction for past actions.”

"Reparations" is a brand. There is a claim of ownership over the word itself, and politicians attempting to use the brand for their programs will be pushed back by those who have this sense of proprietariness. 

"This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean, this is gigantic..."

Said Joe Biden at his press conference yesterday. Transcript. He was talking about new legislation in some GOP-led state legislatures tightening up voting requirements.

Context: 

What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick. Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote, deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work, deciding that there will be no absentee ballots under the most rigid circumstances, it’s all designed, and I’m going to spend my time doing three things. One, trying to figure out how to pass the legislation passed by the House, number one, number two, educating the American public. The Republican voters I know find this despicable, Republican voters, the folks outside this White House. I’m not talking about the elected officials. I’m talking about voters. Voters. And so I’m convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean, this is gigantic what they’re trying to do and it cannot be sustained. I’m going to do everything in my power, along with my friends in the House and the Senate, to keep that from becoming the law.

By the way, he said he's "going to spend my time doing three things," then he ticked off "number one" and "number two," but he never listed the third thing. But he just kept rambling on, and he didn't have his fingers in the air to remind us that he was doing a list, so there was no Rick Perry "oops" moment. 

 

And, of course, the reporter (Yamiche Alcindor [formerly] of the NYT) did nothing to re-focus him on completing the list. But back to "Jim Eagle." I've seen some defense of this weird new character, upstaging the old Jim Crow. It's not hard to get what he was going for. If Jim Crow was bad, then Jim Eagle would be even worse. A crow is a bird, and an eagle is a bigger, more dangerous bird. But...

1. Is the new legislation even worse than Jim Crow laws? How could that be?

2. The eagle is the national bird, and Biden was standing in front of an image of an eagle, which we saw right behind his head as he was using the eagle as a symbol of evil:

3. The expression "Jim Crow" is not a reference to a bird, but a particular character: 

The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow",* a song-and-dance caricature of black people performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1828 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against black people at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws.

Click on the link to see how a black man was depicted on the sheet music to that song. "Jim Crow" is not a bird, but a man, depicted as inferior and contemptible, in what is overt racism. If a man were depicted in a way that called to mind an eagle, he would be a more powerful man — an admired man. Thus, to go from crow to eagle in this context is to put black people in a better position, not worse. Biden's word play is based on historical ignorance.

4. To do word play, you need to know what the thing you are playing on means. For example, earlier this morning, I blogged about the Washington Post Fact Checker, and we got to talking about the time last month when I fact-checked the Fact Checker. I wisecracked: "He's the Fact Checker, I'm the Fact Chess!" See? I'm proposing a new kind of word play where you deliberately misunderstand the word that you're playing upon. 

5. Voting rights are important and maybe humor isn't such a good idea here. I know I've just made a joke, and perhaps I should delete it, but if jokes here are to be self-censored, Biden ought to have resisted saying "Jim Eagle." In any case, it was a joke that was hard for some people to understand, and understanding it required us to come within his misunderstanding, with "Jim Crow" as a bird.

6. Since I blogged about Cliff Edwards yesterday, I want to end by saying that he — a white man — did the voice of the lead crow in the Disney movie "Dumbo," and here's the sequence "When I See an Elephant Fly," which you can watch for yourself to think about whether it's so racist it should be suppressed. Here's a Reddit discussion from a year ago, begun by somebody who thinks it's not so bad.

__________________________

*If you click on the "Jump Jim Crow" link in #3, you get to this additional material: 

The origin of the name "Jim Crow" is obscure but may have evolved from the use of the pejorative "crow" to refer to black people in the 1730s. Jim may be derived from "Jimmy", an old cant term for a crow, which is based on a pun for the tool "crow" (crowbar). Before 1900, crowbars were called "crows" and a short crowbar was and still is called a "jimmy" ("jemmy" in British English), a typical burglar's tool. The folk concept of a dancing crow predates the Jump Jim Crow minstrelsy and has its origins in the old farmer's practice of soaking corn in whiskey and leaving it out for the crows. The crows eat the corn and become so drunk that they cannot fly, but wheel and jump helplessly near the ground, where the farmer can kill them with a club.

"Writing about gender differences within the Latino vote is inherently thorny terrain. There’s a long-standing, racist stereotype..."

"... that associates Latino men with machismo — and, as we all saw for the past six years, Trump’s political brand was built partly on an exaggerated macho sensibility. Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told me that there is a risk of reducing Latino men’s support of Trump to being about machismo — which takes 'a pervasive social dynamic' and makes it into 'an attribute of Latino culture.' 'Patriarchy is a problem across racial groups,' he says, though he adds: 'It’s also fair to say if you’re a man in a low-status group, masculinity may become more important to claiming high status.' A better place to start might be jobs.... Trump’s image as a straight-talking businessman was definitely part of what appealed to my dad. He liked that Trump was a graduate of the Wharton School and that the former president grew up with men similar to those who worked with my grandfather...."

From "Trump, My Dad and the Rightward Shift of Latino Men/Why are Latino men moving away from Democrats? And how can liberals win them back? For me, it’s a topic that hits close to home" (WaPo).

"Asian-Americans are AMERICANS/They have nothing to do with a repressive Communist Party or with a virus that originated 7000 miles away on the other side of the world/Anyone without enough common sense to understand that is an idiot."

Tweeted Marco Rubio yesterday. I'm reading that quoted in a WaPo article: "Democrats link Atlanta massacre to anti-Asian rhetoric during pandemic." 

From the article: 

Authorities investigating the spasm of violence in Georgia say early signs pointed to a disturbed suspect who claimed he was a sex addict and who saw the spas as “a source of temptation that needed to be eliminated.” Authorities said it was too early to know whether the killings were also racially motivated. 

But many advocates and Democratic lawmakers said it was hard to separate Tuesday’s killings from the recent increase in anti-Asian animus, including rhetoric from President Donald Trump.... While many Democrats were quick to condemn the shooting and link it to Trump’s rhetoric, Republicans remained mostly quiet....

Trump repeatedly blamed China for unleashing the virus on the world — and tanking the United States’ economy. During the tirades, Trump repeatedly used racially insensitive names like “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” and “kung flu.”...

An Asian American schoolteacher and her husband found a slur spray-painted on the side of their Nissan Altima after leaving a movie theater. An Asian American man on his way to a boba tea shop was told, “Thanks for covid.” Across the nation, authorities have investigated roughly 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian abuse, advocates say....

Rubio's tweet is important. Imagine a new rule against criticizing China! But how many of us Americans are the "idiots" Rubio is talking about? These "idiots" are on both sides, politically. Trump, criticizing China, didn't highlight the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry. And Trump's antagonists enthusiastically blurred the distinction. 

I put "idiots" in quotes for 2 reasons:

1. I don't use that word, because it risks collateral damage to people who have lesser intellectual gifts.

2. Many of the people blurring the distinction between China, the country, and people with Chinese ancestry are intelligent and devious. To call these people "idiots" is to let them off the hook.

From the Online Etymology entry for "idiot": 

early 14c., "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning;" also in Middle English "simple man, uneducated person, layman" (late 14c.), from Old French idiote "uneducated or ignorant person" (12c.), from Latin idiota "ordinary person, layman; outsider," in Late Latin "uneducated or ignorant person," from Greek idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill" (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman), literally "private person" (as opposed to one taking part in public affairs), used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own" (see idiom).

In plural, the Greek word could mean "one's own countrymen."... 

Ha ha. That took a funny turn. 

ADDED: I read this post out loud to Meade, and he said: "We’re idiots, babe/It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And: "From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol."

Source material:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull 

From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol... 

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats 

Blowing through the letters that we wrote 

Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves

We’re idiots, babe

It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

Here's a NYT column headline I took the wrong way: "Democrats Repent for Bill Clinton."

I thought finally — probably because of the desire to oust Andrew Cuomo — there is a demand that Democrats denounce Bill Clinton for his mistreatment of women in the workplace.

But no. The column (by Charles Blow) isn't about that at all. It's not even mentioned. Blow's focus is on "Black and brown Americans and the poor":

Two major pieces of Clinton-signed legislation stand out: The crime bill of 1994 and the welfare reform bill of 1996.

I view the crime bill as disastrous. It flooded the streets with police officers and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black men and their families. It helped to drain Black communities of fathers, uncles, husbands, partners and sons.... Part of the goal of the bill was to blunt Republican criticisms that Democrats were soft on crime....

Then there was the welfare reform bill, which Clinton promised would “end welfare as we know it.”...

Nothing against Blow for highlighting these issues. I just wanted to record my reaction to the headline to underscore, once again, that the gender politics of the Democrats has been incoherent for a quarter of a century, and I have been forced to disapprove of them the entire time. 

And by the way, Bill Clinton is the first presidential candidate I voted for who actually won. I was 41 years old, so I waited a long time.