Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

The US Supreme Court has ended race-based affirmative action in universities. I know, unless you've been living in a cave that's not exactly news anymore. The Supremes handed down their somewhat predictably 6-3 decision (with its super-majority of conservative and ultra-conservative justices) just over two weeks ago, on Thursday, June 29. Example coverage: NPR News article, 29 Jun 2023.

Most things I could say about this decision have probably already been said elsewhere— especially because I am late to the party by about two weeks. But one thing I heard in the hours following the decision I've not heard or seen repeated anywhere, so I'll share it here.

A college admissions officer at a highly selective liberal arts university was being interviewed (quote slightly paraphrased):

"We've accepted as an assumption in our national discussion on the issue that college admissions is an objective assessment of a student's educational qualifications, and that anything else is discrimination."

The admissions officer went on to explain that college admissions is, in her view, really about what kind of community the school wishes to build. But it's the statement highlighted above that has stuck with me— because of the absurdity it contains.

How can there be an objective assessment of educational qualifications? It's a myth that there can be such a thing. Numbers like SAT scores, ACT scores, and even AP test scores have been shown for years to have limited correlation— reasonable correlation, just not strong correlation— with academic achievement post-high school. Heck, that was established long enough ago that I read the studies in textbooks published in the 1980s when I was in college in the 1990s. And just about everything else about an admissions decision is less numerical, less standardized than that, and therefore requires way more subjective evaluation.

A week ago I wrote What is "Woke"? Ask an Idiot! about a conservative author/speaker who, in moment that went viral, completely choked when a streaming interviewer asked her to define the term, woke. My use of the label "idiot" was ironic. The woman interviewed, Bethany Mandel, is coauthor of a 2022 book all about woke-ism and its supposed perils. She is also a frequent guest speaker on conservative programs and at conservative events, where she is invited specifically to talk about the subject. It would seem that far from being a (literal) idiot she should be among the world's experts on what "woke" is, right?

Here's the rub: She didn't stumble defining "woke" because she doesn't know. She stumbled defining "woke" because she does know... and she also knows that actually defining would make a lot of people go, "Wait, what's so wrong with that? Being woke sounds like a good idea!"

Indeed conservative media figures all united on a common message by the second day after Mandel's viral choke. Defining "woke" is not possible, they argued. It's a feeling, a mindset, they continued. ...Ooookay, well feelings and mindsets can actually be described. For example, I can define "white nationalism" is and how it describes them.... and I'm not even a book author and frequent public speaker on the topic!

Asking us to define "woke" is a trap, cooked up by the Left, the conservatives contended.

You know what? They're damn right it's a trap. It's a trap to expose their hatred, lies, and misrepresentation.

The truth is conservatives just want buzzwords they can repeat to keep their audiences angry. Angry about what? It almost doesn't matter. In fact, they're deliberately vague. Psychology shows that it's easier for people to stay riled up when they use their imaginations to fill in the specifics of what they're so angry about. Basically everyone's got their own personal boogeymen. Keeping it vague also makes it hard to for opponents to respond. Make a specific counterargument, and the conservatives dodge and say, "It's not about that, you clearly don't understand it!" Yes, that bullshit is bad-faith arguing. Welcome to modern conservative politics.

Last weekend hundreds of newspapers across the country dropped the comic strip Dilbert because of a racist rant by its author, Scott Adams. In a racist tirade on YouTube— which I will not link to because I will not give it more airings than it deserves— Adams called Black Americans a "hate group" and suggesting that White people should "get the hell away" from them. The company that syndicates Dilbert, Andrews McMeel Universal, severed ties with him over the matter. Book publisher Penguin Random House has dropped plans to publish a non-Dilbert related book by Adams (it has previously published two), and apparently his agent dropped him, too.

In what has sadly become far too common of a story, police officers pulled over Black motorist Tyre Nichols for an alleged traffic violation, beat him heavily in a confrontation that turned violent, and Nichols subsequently died of his injuries.



Nichols, 29, was pulled over by Memphis, TN police on January 7 allegedly for reckless driving. I take care to say allegedly because in evidence that's come out since then, there's no evidence that Nichols was driving badly. That's also part of the sad pattern— police making questionable claims of wrongdoing as pretext to detain a Black or brown driver.

Nichols was beaten repeatedly by several officers in a confrontation that lasted for several minutes. He was prone and crying for mercy most of the time. He was taken to a hospital and died of his injuries 3 days later.

So far so sadly familiar. Then the story took an uncommon turn.

A week after Nichols's death, the Memphis police chief announced 5 officers who participated in the beating would be fired. Even that level of accountability is uncommon. So often officers are protected by their departments, put on paid administrative leave as internal investigations wind on for months, then returned to duty or hired by other jurisdictions.

But just getting fired wasn't all. Yesterday the Memphis district attorney announced the 5 former officers would be charged with 2nd degree murder.



Finally! Swift action by the authorities against bad cops! I thought. No more 'open season' on Black men!

Then I saw the picture of the 5 men charged with murder. They're all Black men, too.

That gave me pause for a moment. Does this mean this isn't part of the pattern of police violence? After a moment I decided no because the scourge of violence against Black men isn't limited to just some white people in positions of authority. The scourge is, more broadly, violent abuse of authority. The mentality, the training, and the groupthink that create that can infect police officers of all colors.

The photo of the 5 Black officers triggers another concern, though. Why are consequences so slow & unlikely to come when White officers are the alleged perpetrators, but swift & hard when they're 5 Black men?

Note, I am absolutely not saying these officers are innocent or even that they're being prosecuted inappropriately. There's a video being released this afternoon of their actions that's downright horrifying. The problem is how often such evidence is seemingly swept under the rug when the cops are White.

Three White men who chased and murdered 25-year-old Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in south Georgia were sentenced to life in prison today. Two have no chance of parole. The third, a 52-year-old, will be eligible for parole under Georgia law only after serving a minimum of 30 years. Example news coverage: CNN.com article 7 Jan 2022, Yahoo! News article 7 Jan 2022, New York Times article 7 Jan 2022.

Ahmaud Arbery was killed on the afternoon of February 20, 2020. The convicted men spotted Arbery jogging in a residential neighborhood near his home, determined— with zero evidence— that he was a suspect in recent area robberies, and chased him for 5 minutes with their pickup trucks. Once they proceeded to block him in, the three men closed on him, at least one leveling a shotgun at him while another recorded cellphone video. A fight ensued, and the man with the shotgun shot Arbery 3 times at close range.

Swept Under the Rug

This murder was originally swept under the rug. Police arrived at the scene and quickly made a determination that the men who chased Arbery and pointed a gun at him were acting in self defense. Nobody was arrested. Two district attorneys chose not to prosecute. Justice might never have been served... until 73 days later one of the perpetrators posted his cellphone video of the murder on social media, boasting about it. This caused an outrage among members of the community— and across the state and nationwide. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Georgia's Attorney General, and the FBI were called upon to investigate.

As an aside, this is one of the critical ways that racial injustice is perpetrated. Not only are Black people convicted more often when brought to trial than Whites, and not only are they given harsher sentences when convicted, but they are also charged more often in circumstances where police and prosecutors use their discretion not to arrest or prosecute White suspects.

Aside #2: In case it's not obvious, this was a modern day lynching. White men decided a Black man in their neighborhood was a crime suspect. Even though they called 911 to report him, and even though he had committed no actual crime they witnessed, they decided to chase him down and threaten him with guns. When he acted to defend his life, they killed him. Then, of course, the chummy local authorities let them go.

Justice Delayed but not Denied (So Far...)

This is a case where justice may have been delayed but has ultimately not been denied.... so far. The judge who sentenced the men today made the courtroom sit in silence for one minute before reading their sentencing to put "into context" how long they chased Arbery.

Judge Timothy Walmsley told the courtroom on Friday that he was going to "sit quietly for one minute and that one minute represents a fraction of the [5 minutes] that Ahmaud Arbery was running" away. Example news coverage: Yahoo! News article, 7 Jan 2022.

Note how I do add the caution "so far" to justice having been delivered here. That's because the convicted men have avenues of appeal. Though there's no visible mistake in their trial, they are of course able to challenge it from multiple directions, and quite possibly the same racism embedded in the system that shrugged off their actions as "Seems legit" the first time will support them again on appeal. But it's also possible that they'll be convicted of more charges, as federal civil rights cases are pending against them.

A few other positive changes have come out of this case. The first district attorney who passed on charging the men, and who allegedly told the police not even to arrest them, has been charged with one felony count of violating the oath of a public officer. Days after the shooting the police chief was indicted on charges of coverup for unrelated incidents. Voters subsequently voted out the district attorney and elected new county commissioners who replaced the police chief. Finally, the Georgia legislature passed a bill, which was signed by the governor, repealing the law allowing Citizen's Arrest— a holdover law from the Civil War era used as a common pretext for lynchings, which these murderers asserted, falsely, in their defense.

Maine Week Travelog #26
Bethel, ME - Saturday, 19 Jun 2021, 9pm.

After getting rained out of our last hike or two today (previous blog) we made our way on to Bethel, where we checked into our motel for the next two nights and went out to find some dinner. Maybe it's good we didn't go on another hike or two more because the drive to Bethel took a while, going through lots of small towns in Maine along the way, and we were hungry when we arrived. We'd only had trail snacks since breakfast.

Passing through lots of small towns on our road trip was interesting. Counting in those we drove though yesterday as well, we've seen at least a dozen already, with populations ranging from around 8,000 down to 200 or even fewer.

Many of the towns were centered around a mill— a lumber or paper mill, on the river, often near at least a small falls that helped provide power. In the larger small towns these mills appeared still to be operating. With industrial automation over the past several decades, though, it's an easy estimate that these mills employ nowhere near as many people as they once did. Indeed, practically nothing in these towns looks like it's been built since 1950— except the standalone dollar stores on the outskirts.

When in Doubt, Worship the Flag

Continuing with the theme of nothing new since 1950, there were so many World War II memorials in these towns. Not just memorial parks, but actually recently signs, banners, and parade routes lined with flags honoring WWII veterans. I respect WWII veterans 💯 but *checks watch* the war ended 76 years ago. Spending so much effort honoring something that long ago, at the expense of recognizing anything that's happened in the past 76 years, is unseemly.

Consider a few figures. The youngest WWII vets would be 94 today, and most would be older. Very few survive. Multiple sources I checked estimate that approximately 300,000 out of 16 million WWII service members are still alive in 2021. That's less than 2%. The National WWII Museum, Veteran Statistics counts 1,797 WWII veterans living in Maine. With a statewide population of approximately 1,365,000 million people, that's 1.3 vets per 1,000 people. So if a small town of 3,000 people has a proportional distribution of WWII vets, they have 4. Four people is hardly a parade.

Maine so White

Another thing you notice traveling around Maine is that the state is very white. Maine is the whitest state in the country. According to US Census, QuickFacts, Maine the state is 94.4% White alone (not White/multiracial). Coming from very diverse California the state's ethnic homogeneity is striking even in larger towns and cities where there are more immigrants and tourists, but especially in these smaller towns where it's like, literally everybody here is White.

When we went out for dinner this evening, Hawk was the only not-White person in the restaurant. Out of about 50 patrons in the restaurants, plus all the staff, she was the only not-White person. And... there seemed to be problems because of that. 😨

Racist Treatment?

When we walked into the restaurant the trio of staff at the front counter immediately informed us they couldn't seat us right away. Nevermind that the people right in front of us were taken to a table right away. Suddenly there was a wait of "At least 10 minutes" for a table.

"How about we sit at the bar?" we asked. There were lots of empty seats at the bar.

"No, you can't sit at the bar," the said. "We can't accommodate anybody else right now."

A man— a White man— standing behind us grumbled, "This is stupid," and walked around us.

A minute later a fourth staff member joined the trio at the front counter, and together they decided they could seat us. A hostess led us to a table... where we were ignored for several minutes.

Actually, we were worse than ignored. We were gawked at. Multiple staff members stared at us and spoke to coworkers while pointing at us.

After several staff had pointed at us from across the room, the manager came over and apologized for the delay. She promised she'd find someone to serve us. Then she went off to shmooze with other customers and take their orders... without deigning to take ours or even find someone else to take ours.

Just as we were both about done with being the hapless stars of this seemingly racist circus show— oh, I forgot to mention, at the front counter they were selling t-shirts with a racist, anti-government flag from the Confederacy stenciled on them, on the weekend of Juneteenth— a waitress came over to take our orders. She was genuinely polite! She spent a good amount of time with us answering our questions about things on the menu, gave us helpful suggestions, and then brought our drinks quickly. She was so good we held our skepticism in check (besides, would any other restaurant be better? Plus at peak dinner now going anywhere else would probably cost us at least 45 minutes) and stayed for dinner.

Ultimately the food was good and service— from one person— was fine. It's such a shame we were treated like a circus freak show.