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A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. 7 Join the Nation's Conversation To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs Patriotism not thoughtless nationalism: Column James S. Robbins 4:53 p.m. EDT July 2, 2013 This Fourth of July, Americans should focus on what we have in common and reflect on our future. Fourth of July fireworks Fireworks over the Capitol and the Washington Monument on July 4.(Photo: Alex Brandon, AP) Story Highlights * Public confidence in national institutions is at a historic low. * For some, the word patriot has become a rallying cry. For others, it is a dirty word. * Patriotism is not a thoughtless glorification of all things American, whether good or ill. 119 CONNECT 8 TWEET 1 LINKEDIN 7 COMMENTEMAILMORE America's 237th birthday arrives with the country deeply divided. Whether over politics, policies or lifestyles, Americans seem to be gravitating into distinct and irreconcilable camps. In Washington, partisanship in the halls of Congress has grown to levels not seen since the decades following the Civil War. Public confidence in national institutions such as the government, the news media, big business and big labor is at a historic low. Common ground is vanishing. Civility is in short supply. The country is hanging together, but who knows for how long. However, divisiveness is not destiny. A core set of American values remains, rooted in freedom and the experience of generations of self-government. They encompass the American dream of a better life for our children. They are an expression of life and liberty of a free people. July 4 should be a time to join together and focus on the commonalities of life in this country. It is a day to celebrate freedom and reflect on the future of the American experiment. 90% 'very patriotic' Independence Day is our patriotic holiday. For some, the word patriot has become a rallying cry. For others it is a dirty word, implying thoughtless nationalism. But most Americans believe it accurately describes them. The American values poll taken annually by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press shows that the percentage of people who agree with the statement "I am very patriotic" has been right around 90% in every poll since the center began asking the question in 1987. Granted, patriot can mean different things to different people, but that has always been the case. The word is far older than the United States. Today, we associate the word patriot with the American revolutionaries, but various parties in the British Parliament also referred to themselves as patriots. And King George III had long been known as "the patriot king," a title he inherited from his father. Thus, every side in the American Revolution claimed to be patriotic, except the Hessian mercenaries hired by Britain. In finding a way to unite around the patriotic feeling that is common across that 90% of Americans, it is tempting to look to political leaders, but they might be more the cause of division than its cure. Campaign pledges of post-partisanship and bridge-building have foundered on the hard rocks of power politics. This is a bipartisan problem and has grown more severe in the 21st century. According to Gallup surveys, nine of the 10 most polarized years took place during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, even as both men ran on the idea of uniting a divided nation. Reaching out, not preaching But reaching out to the other side, not just preaching, entails risk. Contemporary politicians have found it easier not to lead. They would rather press wedge issues than forge solutions. The Constitution put compromise at the center of every aspect of government. And the inability to establish meaningful ties across the aisle is the principle reason for the dysfunction in government today. If that is to change, the people, not politicians, must be the ones to do the work. They can recapture the American spirit, consciously embrace the American identity and seek common ground. Accept a shared history and common vision for the future based on American principles. Tone down the disputes that ravage the body politic. Heat up the melting pot and stop drawing lines that divide people. End the fighting over the supposed moral high ground that has left it a burned over hill. Rediscover the positive virtues and harness the natural optimism of a free people. Patriotism is not a thoughtless glorification of all things American, whether good or ill. It is the recognition of American ideals, and a belief in seeking the best for the country as a whole. It is a reaffirmation of the aspects of Americanism that speak to the best in everyone. Patriotism is a commendable sentiment. It is only through nurturing this sense of goodness and recognizing it in each other, even those with whom we disagree, that the country can survive, if it is meant to. There is nothing wrong with the USA that couldn't be fixed if the country had more American patriots. James S. Robbins, author of Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism and the New American Identity, is deputy editor of Rare.us. In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. 119 CONNECT 8 TWEET 1 LINKEDIN 7 COMMENTEMAILMORE Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/16368as Log in with your social account: __________________________________________________________________ Or, you can log in or sign up using Forbes. * Forbes Forbes * New Posts +6 posts this hour * Most Popular America's Youngest Billionaires * Lists The 2015 30 Under 30 * Video 30 Under 30 * ____________________ submit 15 Stocks to BUY for 2015 Help | Connect | Sign up | Log in Karlyn Bowman Karlyn Bowman, None Follow Following Unfollow 7/01/2010 @ 11:15AM American Patriotism In 2010 comments, called-out How patriotic are Americans? The answer is simple and straightforward. Americans love their country and aren’t afraid to say so. Americans would rather live in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world, and they still believe the fundamental structure of our democratic system is sound. But American patriotism is not of the knee-jerk or blind variety. They are vocal in their criticisms, and right now, are deeply dissatisfied and frustrated with the way things are going in the country. Patriotic attitudes are generally very stable. In a question Gallup asked in January 2001, 87% said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. When Pew repeated the identical question last year, 86% gave that response. In 2001 and 2009, only 1% said they were “not at all proud.” The 9/11 tragedy produced more overt displays of patriotism and heightened sentiment, but responses soon returned to the norm. When the Pew Research Center asked people last year to agree or disagree with the statement “I am very patriotic,” 54% “completely” agreed with it and another 34% did so “moderately,” for 88% overall agreement In 1987, when Pew asked this question for the first time, 89% agreed. Pew notes that there has been little variation in responses in more than a dozen iterations of the question. There are some interesting differences among subgroups the population. Young people are less likely than older ones to express strong patriotic sentiment. Patriotism, in other words, may come with age. Black Americans’ attitudes have become more positive about many aspects of society since Barack Obama became president, but there has been little change in the willingness of blacks to express strong patriotism. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they are very patriotic. Pollsters also ask people about the patriotism of their countrymen. In a Pew question from 2010, one-third said they were more patriotic than their fellow citizens, but a clear majority, 59%, said they were about as patriotic. Only 6% considered themselves less so. Americans’ patriotism is steadfast in part because they believe they have the best system of government in the world. In 2007, during the divisive Iraq war, a pollster asked people about the statement, “Whatever its faults, the United States still has the best system of government in the world.” Eighty-one percent agreed. That response is very similar to the one ABC got when it first asked this question in 1992 (85%). Americans are very critical today of the performance of many of our central institutions. Two new polls this week show that around two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, and many other surveys reveal deep anxiety. But the fundamental structure seems sound to most people. In his travels in the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville described America as exceptional, or qualitatively different; the surveys bear this out. In World Values Surveys, Americans are more likely than people in most other countries to say that they are very patriotic, and more people in the U.S. than elsewhere say they prefer to live in their home country. In 1948 Gallup asked people whether they would live in another country if they were free to do so, and only 3% said they would. In a 2009 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics question, 7% said another country would be a better place to live than the U.S. Ninety percent said the U.S. was the best place to live. Not a bad run. A 1983 question from The New York Times that hasn’t been repeated since asked people whether you actually have to do something to be patriotic or whether it is enough to love one’s country. One-third said a person had to do something, but two-thirds said it was enough to love one’s country. When asked what kind of acts would be demonstrations of patriotism, large majorities answered voting, joining in the singing of The Star Spangled Banner and serving in the military or on a jury. After 9/11 around 80% of Americans told pollsters that they flew the flag. A few years later around 60% gave that response. A shock like 9/11 can produce more intense patriotism, but the ordinary everyday variety of American patriotism appears very durable indeed. Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, writes a weekly column for Forbes. 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Blow * David Brooks * Frank Bruni * Roger Cohen * Gail Collins * Ross Douthat * Maureen Dowd * Thomas L. Friedman * Nicholas Kristof * Paul Krugman * Joe Nocera [kicker-opinionpages.png] Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web ____________________ (Submit) Search The Stone Is Our Patriotism Moral? By Gary Gutting July 3, 2012 7:05 pm July 3, 2012 7:05 pm (Submit) The Stone The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. To my mind, the Fourth of July has a lot going for it compared with other holidays: great food without a lot of work, warm weather, no presents, and fireworks. And, in our house, at least, there’s the special moment when we read out loud the Declaration of Independence and follow with a toast (American sparkling wine, of course), “To the United States of America!” And I have to force back tears of pride at being an American. Patriotism need not conflict with a universal moral outlook. This is my own distinctive experience of what we call “patriotism,” and I suspect that many Americans experience something similar, and acknowledge it in their own ways. Amid the frequent confusion, frustration and anger of our political disagreements, patriotism — a deep-seated love of our country — remains something that has the potential to bring us together, particularly at times of national crisis or triumph. But within my own particular intellectual tribe of philosophers, patriotism is often regarded as a “problem,” an emotion that many find hard to defend as morally appropriate. Of course, many Americans are uneasy with, even repelled by, certain expressions of patriotism — perhaps the obligatory flag-pins of politicians, the inanity of “freedom fries,” the suggestion in the revised Pledge of Allegiance that atheists aren’t patriotic, or even readings of the Declaration of Independence. But the philosophical problem of patriotism is not about whether or not certain expressions of patriotism are appropriate; it is about the moral defensibility of the attitude as such. (For a good survey of the philosophical issues see Igor Primoriz’s Stanford Encyclopedia article.) At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates asks what justice (doing the morally right thing) is, and Polemarchus replies that it’s helping your friends and harming your enemies. That was the answer among the ancient Greeks as well as many other traditional societies. Moral behavior was the way you treated those in your “in-group,” as opposed to outsiders. Socrates questioned this ethical exclusivism, thus beginning a centuries-long argument that, by modern times, led most major moral philosophers (for example, Mill and Kant) to conclude that morality required an impartial, universal viewpoint that treated all human beings as equals. In other words, the “in-group” for morality is not any particular social group (family, city, nation) but humankind as a whole. This universal moral viewpoint seems to reject patriotism for “cosmopolitanism” —the view perhaps first formulated by Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, replied that he was a citizen of the world. Certainly, patriotism can take an explicitly amoral form: “My country, right or wrong.” But even strong traditional patriots can accept moral limits on the means we use to advance the cause of our country. They may agree, for example, that it’s wrong to threaten Canada with nuclear annihilation to obtain a more favorable trade agreement. But the moral problem for patriotism arises at a deeper level. Suppose the question is not about blatantly immoral means but simply about whether our country should flourish at the expense of another? Suppose, for example, that at some point Saudi Arabia, now allied with China, threatened to curtail our access to its oil, thereby significantly reducing our productivity and tipping the balance of world economic power to China. Imagine an American president who declined to oppose this action because he had concluded that, from a disinterested moral viewpoint, it was better for mankind as a whole. Even if we admired such a response, it’s hard to think that it would express patriotic regard for the United States. Should we therefore conclude that patriotism is ultimately at odds with a moral viewpoint? There remains the option of denying that morality has the universal, all-inclusive nature modern philosophers think it has. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, argues that morality is rooted in the life of a specific real community — a village, a city, a nation, with its idiosyncratic customs and history — and that, therefore, adherence to morality requires loyalty to such a community. Patriotism, on this view, is essential for living a morally good life. MacIntyre’s argument (in his Lindley Lecture, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”) has provided the most powerful contemporary defense of a full-blooded patriotism. It may seem, then, that we must either accept modern universalist ethics and reject patriotism as a basic moral virtue or accept patriotism along with MacIntyre’s traditional localist morality. But perhaps, at least in the American context, there is a way of avoiding the dilemma. For what is the animating ideal of American patriotism if not the freedom of all persons, not just its own citizens? This is apparent in our Declaration, which bases its case for independence on the principle that governments exist to “secure the rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to which all persons are equally entitled. This principle is the avowed purpose of all our actions as a nation, and we may read our history as the story of our successes and failures in carrying out this principle. America, then, is the paradox of a local historical project that aims at universal liberation. Through this project, we have a way of combining traditional patriotism with universal morality. Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series. This project has had many failures, most often when we forget that the freedom of a nation must always grow from its own historical roots. We cannot simply wage a war that rips up those roots and then transplant shoots from our own stock (American-style capitalism, political parties, our popular culture). We have also often forgotten that the liberation of our own citizens is by no means complete. But none of this alters the fact that our governments have often worked and our soldiers died not just for our own freedom but for the freedom of all nations. We are a MacIntyrean community that is still trying to live out a modern morality that seeks the freedom of everyone. I love America because I still believe that this sublime project is possible. __________________________________________________________________ Gary Gutting Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone. Correction: July 4, 2012 An earlier version of this article misidentified the speaker in Plato's Republic who declares that justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies. It was Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, not Cephalus himself. (Submit) The Stone, Patriotism, Philosophy More on nytimes.com * Previous Post Stone Links: The Rise of Café Philosophy * Next Post In Rwanda, Health Care Coverage That Eludes the U.S. The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. 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Reports from local media confirmed that hundreds of students from Dakota Ridge, Chatfield, Arvada West, Pomona, Ralston Valley, Evergreen, Wheat Ridge, and Golden high schools participated in the walkouts and demonstrations which included the blocking of a main intersection in suburban Denver on Wednesday morning. The proposal, submitted by a three-member majority of the school board calling itself the "Board Committee for Curriculum Review," stated: "Theories should be distinguished from fact. Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage. Content pertaining to political and social movements in history should present balanced and factual treatment of the positions." The walkouts came on the heels of a "sick-out" involving some 50 teachers on Friday, which was planned in response to the US history curriculum proposal and to new teacher evaluation measures. A statement issued Monday by Conifer High School teachers participating in the sick-out denounced "the Board's insistence on censoring the college preparatory AP US History curriculum," saying it would "require teachers to completely ignore certain aspects of American history." The statement further condemned the imposition of "an arbitrary, nontransparent evaluation system that vests absolute authority in administrators." Students organized their own protests for the following week via Facebook after learning of the teacher sick-out. The students were strongly warned against participating in the demonstrations by school administrators but proceeded to walk out anyway, local parents said. Jefferson County, the second largest school district in Colorado, is among several districts that have become focal points for controversy surrounding efforts to revise the AP US History curriculum (APUSH) nationwide. Opponents of the revised history curriculum, described by Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams as unduly emphasizing "race, gender, class, ethnicity, grievance and American-bashing," have sought to alter local education statutes to favor a more "conservative" approach to US history. Such efforts have already met with some success in Texas, where operating rules drawn up by the State Board of Education (SBOE) in 2013 contain language almost identical to that of the Jefferson County proposal: "The materials should not include selections or works that encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the law. Violence, if it appears, should be treated in the context of its cause and consequence. It should not appear for reasons of unwholesome excitement or sensationalism." The Texas SBOE rules state openly that historical curricula should be designed to promote "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods; investments that are determined by private decision rather than by state control; and prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined in a free market." No serious history of the United States could be written without giving extensive treatment of “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of law,” including such epochal advances as the American Revolution, the Civil War, the struggles of the labor movement over a century, and the civil rights movement. Presumably the defenders of private ownership are outraged by positive treatment of the greatest state attack on “private” property in world history up to that point, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves throughout the Confederacy, without compensation to the slave-owners. While media coverage presents the issue as a struggle between "conservatives" and "liberals," in reality the assault on historical knowledge by the ultra-right is bound up with the broader education "reform" agenda being implemented nationwide by the Obama administration, which has continued and deepened the reactionary education policies of the George W. Bush administration. In its education policies, as in everything else, the Obama administration stands shoulder to shoulder with the most rabidly pro-corporate elements in American society, advancing a program of merit pay, teacher evaluations based on standardized testing, and privatization of education through promotion of charter schools. In a commentary published in the Colorado Observer commending the newly elected Jefferson County school board, Dustin Zvonek of the ultra-right Americans for Prosperity, part of the Koch brothers lobbying empire, called for "common sense reforms" such as "funding fairness for charter schools" and "a merit pay system which links better documented performance to higher pay for teachers." Zvonek's recommendations have the full support of the Democratic Party leadership and the Obama administration, not just the Republican right. No struggle against the destruction of public education and the associated process of historical falsification can succeed without a complete break from the Democrats and the entire "liberal" establishment. This has to be the starting point for the Jefferson County students and all who support their efforts. The Jefferson County student protests appear set to continue, in one form or another. The JeffCo Students Defending History Facebook page announced Wednesday that students and teachers should come to school on Friday dressed as historical figures or movements responsible for "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law." Commenting Discussion Rules » Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. 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President Barack Obama speaks on the economy in Georgetown Waterfront Park on July 1, 2014, in Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama speaks on the economy in Georgetown Waterfront Park on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. By Katherine Peralta July 1, 2014 | 4:21 p.m. EDT + More * * * * * * * President Barack Obama called for “economic patriotism” – bipartisan action to boost American growth – in remarks on the economy at the Georgetown Waterfront Tuesday. Obama used the Key Bridge as the literal background to push for congressional action to replenish the quickly depleting Highway Trust Fund. The account provides funding for highway, bridge and road repair and is slated to run out of money by the end of August. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx sent letters Tuesday to state departments of transportation warning of the urgency of the situation and noted that without congressional action, the Federal Highway Administration soon might not be able to make same-day payments to reimburse states for infrastructure projects. [READ: The U.S. Workforce Is Going Gray] This puts nearly 700,000 jobs at risk, Obama said. “It’d be like Congress threatening to lay off entire population of Denver, Seattle or Boston,” he said. Through business tax reform, the Obama administration has proposed a four-year, $302 billion transportation reauthorization plan called the GROW AMERICA Act to help address the fund's shortfall. “It’s not crazy, it’s not socialism, it’s not the imperial presidency,” Obama said. “We’re just building roads and bridges the way we’ve been doing for 50, 100 years.” Obama called Republican inaction on economic issues like the Highway Trust Fund and raising the minimum wage “not just a political stunt” and that it has tangible effects on the American middle class. [ALSO: Census Shows White Deaths Outpace Birth] “The economy doesn’t grow from the top-down, it grows from the middle-up. We could be doing so much more if Republicans in Congress were doing more,” he said, adding that he’ll continue to forge ahead without the support of Congress to implement economic proposals. “I’d rather do things with [Congress] – pass some laws, make sure the Highway Trust Fund is funded so we don’t lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. Middle-class families can’t wait for members of Congress to do stuff. So sue me,” he said, referencing Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s recent announcement that he’s suing Obama. “As long as they do nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something,” he added. TAGS: Obama, Barack Obama administration infrastructure Congress Boehner, John minimum wage economy * * * * * * + More * Katherine Peralta Katherine Peralta is an economy reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow her on Twitter or reach her at kperalta@usnews.com. 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By Scott O., University Place, WA More by this author Modern Patriotism Image Credit: Pooja B., Naperville, IL What makes a patriot? People through the ages have carried out both horrible and wonderful acts under the banner of patriotism. How then are we to define it? The concept of patriotism is just as debated and relevant today as it was during the Civil War. If our nation is to survive its current challenges, the definition of a true patriot must be clear. So, what is true patriotism? Only 57 percent of U.S. citizens over 18 described themselves as either “extremelyâ€� or “veryâ€� patriotic in a study by AARP. Can our nation really survive on 57 percent? I believe these shoddy Âratings are the result of widespread misuse of the term “patriot.â€� Many believe patriotism to be blind obedience to one's nation. Samuel Johnson, one of the most quoted European writers in history, said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.â€� Are patriots really just a bunch of yes-men who bow to the president's every whim? If so, one wonders how we have managed to remain a democracy all these years. I have to disagree with Johnson. I prefer to quote Carl Schurz, the German revolutionary and, later, American political scientist who said, “My country … if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.â€� Schurz's idea of patriotism is often referred to today as “loyal opposition.â€� This means seeking to change the social behavior of your country out of feelings of national love and patriotic duty. Loyal Âopposition is not the blind obedience of the uninformed and ignorant but rather active and sensible Âreconstruction of a system that one believes to be Âessentially good but critically flawed. As a student at a somewhat liberal school in an Âexceedingly liberal state, I constantly find myself Âannoyed when my peers talk about “moving to Canadaâ€� or some other nonsense. My response? “Go ahead. Please move to Canada. It'll be much easier for the rest of us to fix things without your constant whining.â€� While some may consider this harsh, I invite anyone who can't see the good in America, despite her blemishes, to leave. We must love our country enough to stay and work to change it for the better. We must follow the example of civil rights Âactivist James Baldwin, who said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, Âexactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.â€� He and other members of the then-loyal opposition understood that the desire to change America is itself a demonstration of one's love for the nation. Some say that there is little reason to love America. I don't believe any rational person would accept this. Sure, our country has made mistakes throughout history, but while the ethics behind some of these Âdecisions were admittedly murky, it is not right to blame the entire nation for a few morally ambiguous politicians. After all, think of the many wonderful contributions America has made to the world. The the cotton gin, steamboat, cylinder printing press, telephone, light bulb, gasoline-powered car, and even air conditioning were American inventions. The first slave to patent an invention did so in America, and the modern rocket was developed here. The first flight across the Atlantic took off from America. Think of where the world would be now were it not for this country. Despite our achievements, it is important that we not lose sight of the big picture. Part of loyal opposition in modern America is a long-term world view. We must look into the future and decide what role we will play in it. As Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana said, “A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.â€� Many third-world nations receive regular and Âcrucial support from America. Our relationship with China will become more significant as that country's wealth and power grow. It will take the practical Âinvestment of time and resources by loyal activists to ensure America's continued prosperity. In the words of Norman Thomas, “If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.â€� F This work has been published in the Teen Ink monthly print magazine. This piece has been published in Teen Ink’s monthly print magazine. 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Report abuse [162984.jpg] KelliB said... May 9, 2012 at 12:04 pm Very interesting perspective. I don't have that problem with living in a liberal area like you do because my state and city are extremely democratic, but there are some of them. I find that close mindedness is common this subject. It is kosher to believe, specifically in TX, that patriotism means that you are in the military. I do not agree there. I believe what you said. That patriotism is believing in your country even when its in a dark place. I believe America is akin to a phoenix. We've had... (more ») [162984.jpg] KelliB replied... May 9, 2012 at 12:06 pm oh--sorry i forgot-- Bravo Scott!! Wonderful job! Applause to you. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] AthenaBook said... Dec. 29, 2011 at 7:38 pm Nicely done; engaging, yet informative. I was drawn in to this interesting topic and I was glad it was so well written because I really enjoy the topic you've chosen. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [157844.jpg] Pumpkinscout said... Oct. 24, 2011 at 1:11 pm This is excellently written, and Scott makes a great point. The U.S.A. is indeed flawed, in many ways, it has bad politicians, and bum laws, and all the rest, just like every country, but the thing about America is that because of the way our constitution is laid out, laws can be made fair, bad politicians can be removed from office by the people, and ammends can be made to things that are not fair or morally right. Here in the U.S. we have far more freedom than people in some other countries, y... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [153903.jpg] WishfulDoer said... Jul. 6, 2011 at 2:59 am I don't hate America in the least. But I'm one of those restless people who just wants to get out of here already, you know? Not because it's America, but because I'm tired of being in the same place. I want to travel and explore other countries and nations. At the same time, I want to see how everything here at home plays out from the front lines. I guess I'm just a bystander...a restless bystander, for that matter. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] MrNathanXD said... Jul. 6, 2011 at 2:02 am "The difference between a patriot and a rebel is who is in power at he time." Patriot, i believe, is one of those words that vary between connotations immensely, and i just lost my train of thought x) Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] Clopsey said... Jan. 10, 2011 at 3:00 pm I think people just get confused between nationalism and patriotism. The difference in the two is huge, but they don't actually ever teach that in schools... Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] TheBirdman1014 said... Nov. 28, 2010 at 10:53 pm There is no reason to love America over any other nation. Countries are nothing more than boundries fought over by the powerful through the blood of the innocent. Political boundries are nothing more than barriers that stop people, in this nation and in others, from focusing on the global problems and instead only trying to make theirown nation achieve prosperity. Why do we want to ensure American prosperity, yet not the prosperity of other nations (meaning their citizens)? It should b... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] K.T.S. said... Nov. 18, 2010 at 5:24 pm Your article was very innovative. Very interesting to read. I believe America is just a piece of land, with people on it that live their lives without monarchy. Free of tierney and free to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want. Just to pu that out there. And patriotism is a hard word to define these days. We don't have too much of it, as you have clearly supported. America is just so involved with every other country that has stayed interested in us for 100's of years. We ... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse Don Draper said... Oct. 15, 2010 at 2:17 pm I have pride in my country because of it's many accompishments. We put a man on the moon, we gained our independence when it looked like we weren't going to win, we stopped the spread of Nazis and Imperialists, and even though we committed crimes in the past. We acknowledge those mistakes and we're learning from it. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. [103157.jpg] BlueRain replied... Jul. 24, 2012 at 5:36 pm Out of those 4 examples, in at least the last three we had help involved. The French helped us in the Revolution, a whole bunch of other countries joined in the war with the Nazis, and at one point, American itself was Imperialist in policy. Like someone above said, it's just about national boundaries. And about the people who say they'd rather move to Canada, most aren't serious. It's their way of saying "I'm so sick and tired of this place", their way of expressing their distaste at ... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [112889.jpg] NihilTico said... Sept. 23, 2010 at 9:46 pm Nationalism, Patriotism, Jingoism. Of those, I would declare most of America to be Jingoist. There is a dividing line between patriotism and nationalism. No one can choose where to be born. I commend your attention, it reminds me of a Kingsolver essay we read once in class. It goes by the name "Jabberwocky" Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] Thinker said... Apr. 22, 2010 at 7:06 am I agree with the loyal opposition piece, but there are a few things that are a bit off. When your in a society of libertarians, the messages are often misconstrued, for one moving to another country is a sarcastic act, experssing the anger one has for the lack of expediance in changes in our country. Lastly, AARP is a group that protetects the rights and opinions of the elderly, so any statisitcs on the young are most likely also misconstrued. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] elfiewrites said... Mar. 31, 2010 at 2:17 pm Excellent work! If you get the chance, may you please please please comment on my work too? Thanks so much Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [90720.jpg] Montherieth said... Mar. 13, 2010 at 4:42 pm I personally find Mark Twain's definition of a patriot to be the most accurate (and amusing): "Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about." However, your article provided an interesting perspective on patriotism I have not thought of before. Loyal opposition is much better than the bigotry expressed by today's 'patriots'. Still, there are plenty of reasons to despise the U.S. There is little reason inde... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse rightbehindyou61 said... Nov. 20, 2009 at 8:05 pm good job, i found myself nodding my head throughout the writing Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse Roberto_from_Dallas said... Sept. 30, 2009 at 10:56 pm A nice view of patriotism; well said. Let's hope for the renewal of loyal opposition, and for the decline of intolerance. "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." -- Abraham Lincoln Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse John said... Sept. 30, 2009 at 12:44 pm This is an excellent article if it were written by anyone but from a teenager it's exceptional. I only wish more 'adults' were able to think as clearly about their patriotism as Scott. I trust he will only grow to live out his convictions and be the kind of leader for his generation that we need. Sorry our generation hasn't done a very good job of standing up for America by holding the standards high. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse mimi said... Sept. 28, 2009 at 8:38 pm Well written, insightful, and deeply profound! Much truth to be found in this! 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Share on Reddit Share on StumbleUpon Tell A Friend 3 (3 Shares) IFRAME: http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=157889207614942&href=ht tp://www.opednews.com/articles/Our-Declining-Patriotism-by-Sam-Amer-130 327-616.html&send=false&layout=button_count&width=85&show_faces=false&a ction=like&colorscheme=light&font=verdana&height=21 Printer Friendly Page Save As Favorite View Favorites View Stats 3 comments Exclusive to OpEdNews: OpEdNews Op Eds 3/27/2013 at 16:11:05 Our Declining Patriotism By Sam Amer (about the author) Permalink (Page 1 of 1 pages) Related Topic(s): American Dream; American Exceptionalism; American Friends Service Committee; American Withdrawal Of Combat Troops From Iraq; Americans; Americans Killed; Great_American_Depression; PNAC Neocon Project For A New American C; Race African American Black Negro; Saving The American Republic; (more...) The_American_War_Against_Afghanistan, Add Tags (less...) Add to My Group(s) View Ratings | Rate It opednews.com Translate Page In reading the comments of some Iraq war veterans on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, you cannot escape the conclusion that American patriotism is in clear decline. The word "patriotism" comes from the Latin "patria," meaning "native land," which is in turn related to the Latin "pater," meaning "father." "Patriotism" thus invokes a paternal relationship. It embodies love and respect for your country, and the willingness to protect it, just as a father loves, respects and seeks to protect his children. Feelings of patriotism are therefore most intense when your country faces a common enemy. When we need to protect it from the invaders, along with our family, home, and possessions that are a part of it, we band together as one and fight to the death. In contrast, it is hard to feel patriotism and risk dying for your country when the cause for doing so is not clear or defensible, and your country is not directly threatened. Since World War II, too many wars for too many causes, and for unclear and ill-defined purposes, have eroded feelings of patriotism in everyday Americans. This was the case when we attacked Iraq on the suspicion that it had weapons of mass destruction. The same would hold true if we attacked Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. And, today, even after nearly twelves years of war in Afghanistan, many Americans are still questioning why we got into that war in the first place. Nowadays, Americans are not conscripted to serve in the military, nor do they volunteer to serve out of an abundance of patriotism. They join the armed forces mostly to get a job. Most of those fighting in Afghanistan right now would prefer to be at home, if only they could find a job and a better income there. The decline in patriotism in America has grown more pronounced as many Americans have come to feel that their country has abandoned them. This is especially true of the lower classes, who are increasingly aware of the unfairness of the country's growing wealth inequality. As those who return from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to poverty and joblessness in America frequently ask: What did we fight for? How can you love your country as you do your father, if it does nothing to help you find a job, secure a good life for your family, or enroll your kids in a good school? Still, it is not only the poor or the disintegrating middle class in America that feels less patriotic; the top one percent feels the same. They think that the country is taxing their income unfairly and giving their money to those who have not worked for it or don't deserve it in the first place. In response, they are stashing their money in other countries to avoid paying taxes. This is not necessarily surprising. For many of the rich, all countries, including the United States, are only places to do business. Not much patriotism there. The diminished patriotism in most developed countries can also be seen as an expression of modernity. In the modern world, tradition, religion, family and country are now defining us less. We are expected to be scientific, broad-minded and individualistic. Applying ancient rules of religion, family and country is now considered backward and underdeveloped. Our world is moving toward a more secular and universal liberal democracy. One consequence of this trend is that it is now becoming less and less acceptable for a civilized country to declare war against another, no matter what the reason. As a result, even our historical military heroes are falling out of favor. Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier of WWI said, "War is organized murder, and nothing else. There is nothing heroic about killing for your country. When you come right down to it, enemy combatants are defending their country from the foreign American attackers." Today, many Americans feel the same way. As they see it, American soldiers are invading foreign countries primarily for the benefit of the oil companies and other multinational corporations. They do so because they are getting paid for it. They are, in fact, just mercenaries. Most of the wars that America was, or is, involved in, do not generate national enthusiasm. Those in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all failed to stir nationalistic emotions in the American public. Because no important American national interest was really at stake, no one cared about these wars, except when the body bags came back. All the wars were like financial transactions, which involve little emotion. Moreover, unlike World War II, the end of hostilities did not engender feelings of pride and victory. It turned out that U.S. forces were better at initiating these wars than at winning them. America's Global War on Terror has also proved irrelevant to most Americans. While the U.S. was expending trillions of dollars in a futile effort to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Awakening turned the Middle East upside down without organized warfare. In hindsight, the War on Terror now appears pointless. It is probably still true that America is by far the greatest country on earth, partly because it projects ideals of freedom, liberty and human dignity. To remain great, however, we must hold on to those ideals and continue to promote them. In recent decades, America's inconsistency in pursuing its foundational ideals has diminished its citizens' feelings of loyalty and patriotism. America always talks about human rights and often bullies small countries over their human rights performance, especially when it is politically expedient. But when human rights concerns conflict with our interests, our ethical beliefs take a back seat nearly every time. The United States has plenty of allies whose human rights performance ranges from questionable to awful. Saudi Arabia and China are not-so-shining examples. America's moral failings were especially brought to light with the events of 9/11. After three thousand Americans were killed, the government felt it had to take some action that proved it was still the toughest guy on the block. The trouble was, there was no country to blame or retaliate against, so we attacked Iraq, which had almost no connection to our loss. As a result, the war failed to stimulate our feelings of patriotism. Worse yet, those who instigated that disastrous war were never disciplined or indicted. Nor were any of the senior officials in the Bush administration who authorized torture and renditions in either Iraq or Afghanistan ever faced with indictment or even serious investigation. And now, with the increased use of drones under Obama, and the frequent collateral killing of innocents, America may be coming close to losing totally both the dwindling patriotism of its citizens and its claim on moral authority in the world. What does all this mean for the future? The United States better think long and hard about any future wars in which it chooses to be engaged. If our national interests are not directly threatened and our cause not clearly justified, the government may find it very hard to recruit young Americans who are patriotic enough to be willing to give their lives for their country, no matter what the salary. It may also find that the world at large, which is rapidly adopting its own values of liberal democracy, may well be far less tolerant of an America that seeks to dominate weaker nations for no other reason than its own self-interest. Retired Pharmacologist with two masters and a Ph.D. Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! 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Comments: (_) Expand (_) Shrink (_) Hide 3 people are discussing this page, with 3 comments To view all comments: Expand Comments (Or you can set your preferences to show all comments, always) Refresh We must continue to support our ideals irrespectiv... by Sam Amer on Wednesday, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:11:05 PM The decline in patriotism coincides with the rise ... by Bill Johnson on Wednesday, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:18:20 PM are what political entities are; lines drawn in th... by molly cruz on Thursday, Mar 28, 2013 at 1:30:07 PM __________________________________________________________________ [lwc_oen.jpg] The Last War Crime movie What if there was only one chance for justice? 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Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere Craig Calhoun Globalization and the coming of postnational and transnational society are often presented as matters of necessity. Globalization appears as an inexorable force—perhaps of progress, perhaps simply of a capitalist juggernaut, but in any case irresistible. European integration, for example, is often sold to voters as a necessary response to the global integration of capital. In Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, a similar economistic imaginary is deployed to suggest that globalization moves of itself, and governments and citizens have only the option of adapting. Even where the globalist imaginary is not overwhelmingly economistic, it commonly shares in the image of a progressive and imperative modernization. Many accounts of the impact and implications of information technology exemplify this. Alternatives to globalization, on the other hand, are generally presented in terms of inherited identities and solidarities in need of defense. Usually this means nations and cultural identities imagined on the model of nations; sometimes it means religions, civilizations, or other structures of identity presented by their advocates as received rather than created. The social imaginary of inherited cultural tradition and social identity is prominent in ideologies like Hindutva and essential Ethiopianness, for example, as well as widespread notions of “cultural survival.” These are denigrated by proponents of transnational society, who see national and many other local solidarities as backward or outmoded, impositions of the past on the present. Both nationalist economic protectionism and Islamist movements, thus, are seen as being simply the regressive opposite of globalization. In each case, such a perspective leaves obscure the transnational organization of the resistance movement. In many settings, the economistic, or technologistic, imaginary of globalization is embraced by the very political leaders who advocate nationalist, religious, or other imaginaries that emphasize inherited cultural identity. The contradiction is avoided by assigning these to separate spheres. The Chinese phrase ti-yong has long signaled this, a condensation of “Western learning for material advancement, Eastern learning for spiritual essence.” Similarly divided imaginaries inform many Asian, Middle Eastern, and other societies. Even in Canada, a recent Financial Times article reported, “the country wants to become a lean global competitor while maintaining traditional local values.”1 In this essay, I take up two aspects of this discourse of globalization. First, I want to call attention to the dominance it grants social imaginaries that emphasize necessity and obscure options for political choice. Second, I want to address the inadequacy of most approaches to social solidarity in this literature. I will focus especially on the work of advocates of “cosmopolitan” approaches to transnational politics, including Jürgen Habermas with his notion of “constitutional patriotism.” I don’t mean to denigrate cosmopolitanism—in which I hope I share—but to problematize its acceptance of economistic, modernizing imaginaries without giving adequate attention to the formation of solidarity and the conditions that enable collective choices about the nature of society. In addition to questioning whether “thin identities” are adequate underpinnings for democracy, I will suggest that the public sphere be conceptualized not simply as a setting for rational debate and decision making—thus largely disregarding or transcending issues of identity—but as a setting for the development of social solidarity as a matter of choice, rather than necessity. Such choice may be partly rational and explicit, but is also a matter of “world-making” in Hannah Arendt’s sense. The production of new culture is as important as inheritance (and distinctions between the two are less clear than common usage implies). We should accordingly broaden the sense of constitutional patriotism to include culture-forming and institution-shaping senses of constitution, as well as narrowly legal-political ones. New ways of imagining identity, interests, and solidarity make possible new material forms of social relations. These in turn underwrite mutual commitments. The moment of choice can never be fully separated from that of creativity or construction. Cosmopolitanism and Constitutional Patriotism Contemplating simultaneously the questions of German integration and European integration, Habermas has called for grounding political identity in constitutional patriotism.2 This is an important concretization of a more general and increasingly widespread but not uncontested cosmopolitanism. The concept suggests both constitutional limits to political loyalty and loyalty to the legally enacted constitution as such. In the latter dimension, which Habermas emphasizes, the constitution provides both a referent for public discussion and a set of procedural norms to organize it and orient it to justifiable ends. The specific contents of any conception of the good life may vary, then, and modern societies will always admit of multiple such conceptions. Constitutional patriotism underwrites no single one of these, but rather a commitment to the justification of collective decisions and the exercise of power in terms of fairness. It is thus compatible with a wide range of specific constitutional arrangements, and with a variable balance between direct reference to universal rights and procedural norms on the one hand and a more specific political culture on the other. Similarly, ideas of rights and justice underpin a new movement of calls for cosmopolitan democracy, democracy not limited by nation-states.3 Though this is not a uniquely European development, there is a notable link between the cosmopolitan message and a certain sense of “movement” in European intellectual life. It harks back directly to the Enlightenment (complete with residual echoes of eighteenth-century aristocratic culture). It also commonly expresses a sense of what Europeans have learned about living together in a multinational region and of how Europeans may take on a civilized (if not precisely civilizing) mission in a conflict-ridden larger world. Cosmopolitanism is potentially consonant with a vision of a Europe of the nations—preserving not only cultural difference but also political autonomy—so long as nationalism is not ethnically communitarian and is subordinated to human and civil rights. But it has a stronger affinity with visions of confederation or of an even greater degree of integration, although it emphasizes the outward obligations of Europeans. What it eschews most is nationalism—especially in its separatist forms, but also any application of the nationalist vision of cultural community to supranational polities. What it claims most, in the spirit of Kant, is that people should see themselves as citizens of the world, not just of their countries. End of Excerpt | access full version Notes Earlier versions of parts of this text were presented as a Benjamin Meaker Lecture at the University of Bristol in June 2000 and to the Center for Transcultural Studies in July 2000. I am grateful for discussion from both audiences and especially to colleagues in the Center for their sustained challenges to and shaping of my ideas over many years. 1. Scott Morrison and Ken Warn, “Liberals Strive to Sharpen Competitive Edge,” in “Canada Survey,” Financial Times, 11 June 2001, 1–2. 2. Habermas’s abstract theoretical formulations are not altogether separate from his contributions to German public debate—notably, in this case, in relation to the incorporation of the East into a united but West-dominated Germany; to the “historians’ debate” over the legacy of the Third Reich; and to the debate over changes in the citizenship law, enacted in watered-down form to grant the children of immigrants naturalization rights. See, among many others, the essays collected in Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 3. For thoughtful examples, see essays in Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1995); and Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler, eds., Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); and the more sustained exposition in David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). Habermas issues a similar call in Inclusion of the Other. See also the essays connecting the present to Kant’s cosmopolitan project in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Details Version Excerpt ( access full version ) Published in Volume 14, Number 1 Download Citation Info EndNote, Reference Manager, ProCite, BibTex, RefWorks Share This * Tweet this * Share on Facebook * Share on LinkedIn Also in Volume 14, Number 1 * Modern Social Imaginaries Charles Taylor * Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality Elizabeth A. Povinelli * Editor's Note Benjamin Lee and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar * Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner About the Journal Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year in Fall, Winter, and Spring for the Institute for Public Knowledge by Duke University Press. The journal's full archives are available online at Dukejournals.org. © Copyright 2006–2009 Public Culture and Duke University Press. All Rights Reserved. Contact Info Public Culture 20 Cooper Square, Suite 517 New York, NY 10003 212-998-7866 212-998-8468 Fax info@publicculture.org Download vCard Site Tools * Subscribe to the journal * Subscribe to web feeds * Join our mailing list * Submit your work * Get permissions * Contact us * View Sitemap [spacer.png] ____________________ (Submit) Search * Home * Events * News * Columns * Arts * Music * Nightlife * Eat * Photos * Classifieds * Us * Membership * Win Articles ____________________ (Submit) Search Duty to Warn Thursday Jul. 10th, 2014 Articles Thoughts on Patriotism, Real Democracy, Corrupt Crony Capitalism, Elections and Politics in America Add a Comment » by Gary G. Kohls, MD This week I am devoting most of my column to the writings of several progressive, anti-imperialist (economic or military), anti-racist, anti-fascist (that is, anti-corporatist and anti-militarist), pro-democracy, pro-environment, pro-sustainability writers with whom I resonate. These writers have been saying for years exactly what many of us have been thinking about for a long time—and they are saying it far better than I ever could. The excerpts below are from BlackAgendaReport.com and Fubarandgrill.org. Before the last presidential election (in 2012), Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon wrote the following criticism of America’s two-party system, which still rings true. Dixon wrote: “Your vote really is your voice, and in the modern era, every government on earth claims to rule with the consent of the people. This bestows upon the vote a unique kind of legal and symbolic power. The gap, however, between this legal, this symbolic power of the vote and any real ability to change things for the better is a vast one. The authorities rightly fear the people’s voice, and so have contrived law and custom to ensure that we are seldom heard and almost never heeded. “They would never dream of allowing us to vote on the price of gas, food, housing, credit or college tuition. But they don’t mind at all letting us choose between corporate-funded Republicans and corporate-funded Democrats. The powers that rule our economy, our media and our politics won’t let us vote on whether to bring the troops home from 140 countries and the seven seas, or whether to continue spending more on weapons of death and destruction than the other 95% of humanity combined. But they will let us choose between an ignorant, crazy or racist Republican who promises to give banksters, polluters and corporate criminals a free pass, and a sane, smart, level-headed free market liberal Democrat who does exactly the same thing, no matter what he promised. “The authorities won’t let us vote on whether the broadcast spectrum should be privatized, whether we should have the right to start and join unions, whether to create millions of good-paying green jobs. They won’t allow voters to decide whether corporations deserve more rights than flesh and blood people, or whether the president should be able to kidnap, torture, imprison and murder people without trials or even charges. But they will let us choose between a white guy and a black guy. As long as it’s their white guy, and their black one as well.” Why We Need a Viable Third Party That Does Not Bow Down to Corporations and Other War-Profiteers Dixon expands his thoughts on patriotism, democracy, corrupt crony capitalism, elections, and politics in America in his Fourth of July 2014 edition. The entire essay can be accessed at http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/why-elections-still-matter-exc ept-when-they-dont. Democrats and Republicans Have Created Ballot Access Hurdles “In states like Georgia where I live, third party candidates face incredible obstacles to even getting a candidate on the ballot. A Green Party congressional candidate, for example, has to get 20-25,000 signatures on a nominating petition to appear on the ballot, and a statewide candidate needs more than 60,000, distributed in a complicated formula among several core counties, while Republicans and Democrats simply pay a nominal fee. These are laws passed on the state level by Democrats and Republicans working together. Access to media is limited by private owners of print, broadcast, cable networks “Cable networks are laid and maintained beneath public streets and roads, with massive public subsidies and gobs of corporate welfare, but are privately owned by a handful of greedy corporations. Broadcast spectrum wasn’t invented by any clever engineer working for a corporation, it’s a property of the physical universe, like sunlight. But the same handful of greedy telecoms own that too, along with most of the print newspapers. “The private owners of these public resources have decreed that the only candidates and causes who can afford campaign commercials are those bankrolled by wealthy individuals and greedy corporations, often with legally anonymous cash. With no interest in an informed public, the billionaires who own print, cable and broadcast outlets have, for several decades, been firing reporters and spending less every year on journalism. Reporters refuse to cover third party candidates in partisan elections, lest their careers end prematurely. In nominally “nonpartisan” races like mayor in most medium and large cities, the owners of media all but refuse to cover the existence of candidacies not endorsed by local elites.” In a response to Dixon’s piece, a blogger wrote, “The first thing we need is a massive coalition of leftists of all stripes, even left-liberals and anti-imperialist, populist, right-wing libertarians. We need a true movement of the 99% and that means bringing into the coalition libertarian types who decry so-called ‘crony capitalism’ and not capitalism per se. If in the short-term we can just take some small pockets of space and power for ‘regular folks’ then that will be very helpful toward our final end goal of completely transforming society. Local and (possibly) state elections MIGHT, depending on a variety of factors including our strengths, weaknesses, resources (money, human, etc.) and those of the enemy arrayed against us in that particular space or arena, be helpful in growing a populist movement.” In another, more lengthy response to Dixon’s piece, Mark E. Smith of Fubarandgrill.org commented. (Note: Smith’s website’s name references the U.S. military grunt’s derogatory appraisal of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic inefficiencies. FUBAR is short for “f----- up beyond all recognition,” as in SNAFU, which is U.S. military lingo for “situation normal: all f----- up.” His thoughtful essays can be found at http://fubarandgrill.org.) Smith writes, “I think we are all agreed that there are times and places when voting can be useful and that there are times and places when it is not. Where we differ is when and where such places may be and how to determine which is which. “I’m often accused of being opposed to voting and this is my usual response: “A democratic system of government is one in which power is vested in the hands of the people. That’s the dictionary definition and most people will agree to it. Is America Actually a Pseudodemocracy “An undemocratic system of government is one in which power is vested in the hands of the government [Author’s note: or in the hands of corporations or their wealthy elites]. That government could be a dictatorship, a monarchy, a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or even a pseudo-democracy, but if power is vested in the hands of the government [Author’s note: or corporate elites] rather than in the hands of the people, the system does not meet the definition of a democratic form of government. “In a democratic form of government, where power is vested in the hands of the people, voting is the most precious right of all, as it is the way that the people exercise the power vested in them, either directly by voting on issues, budgets, and policies, or indirectly by voting for representatives who are obligated to represent their constituents and can be directly recalled by the people at any time that they fail to represent the people who elected them. “In an undemocratic form of government, where power is vested in the hands of the government rather than in the hands of the people, voting is totally worthless and a waste of time, as the people do not have power and the government doesn’t have to count their votes, can miscount and/or ignore their votes, can overrule the popular vote, and elected representatives are not obligated to represent their constituents but can represent their personal beliefs or philosophies, their big donors, or whatever they wish, and cannot be held accountable as long as they continue in office, which is the only time that people need them to represent the interests of the people. “In an undemocratic form of government, voters can hope that their votes might be counted, can hope that their elected officials might represent them, but have no power to ensure that their votes are counted or that their elected officials actually represent them. “Which system we have—democratic or undemocratic (i.e. pseudo-democratic)—makes all the difference. “In a democratic system, voting is precious and essential. In an undemocratic system, it can be fatal, as it can allow the destruction of the economy, military adventurism, obstacles to basic human rights such as jobs, education, food, clothing, shelter, and health care, and other tragic consequences of allowing government to exercise uncontrolled power rather than vesting power in the hands of the people. “Most people in the U.S. today are opposed to our government’s ongoing wars of aggression. Even those who are uninformed and uneducated, who aren’t aware that historically, the way that most empires fell was because they became militarily overextended, sense that there is something wrong with spending trillions of dollars on foreign wars while basic domestic needs go unmet. “But because we do not have a democratic system of government, we have no power to end the wars. The best we can do is vote for candidates we hope might end the wars, but… there is nothing we can do about it because our government has the power to start or end wars, and we do not. If wars were on the ballot, it could only be as a nonbinding referendum, as there is no Constitutional way to force the government to obey the will of the people. The Constitution vested power in the government rather than in the hands of the people. “I do not oppose voting any more than I oppose breathing. I oppose voting only when it occurs within an undemocratic form of government, thus legitimizing an undemocratic form of government and consenting to be governed undemocratically, just as I oppose breathing only when in a toxic or anaerobic environment where breathing can be fatal. “Just as I would want to try to help anyone trapped in a toxic or anaerobic environment to hold their breath until they could escape, I want to try to help people trapped in an undemocratic form of government withhold their votes until they can escape. If I tell a drowning person to hold his breath until he can get his head above water, I am not condemning breathing. If I tell people not to vote until they have a democratic form of government, I am not condemning voting. “…my thesis is that the way to decide if voting is useful or not is to determine whether or not it is taking place within a democratic form of government where the votes are the voice of the people and are the final say in deciding policy. If the votes are not the final say, they are no say at all, just a trick and a trap to get people to relinquish their power and vote for their own oppression.” I conclude this column by paraphrasing a useful item from an anonymous blogger that I also found on the Fubarandgrill.com website: “The U.S. government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big multinational private corporations that fund it, and no matter who is in office, it will continue to do the bidding of the wealthy global elites intent on continuing to murder millions of innocents and pollute the entire planet for profit. Those profits all go to the wealthy elites and their puppets, with ordinary people never seeing any benefit. Ordinary people in the U.S. are being taxed to pay for the troops and mercenaries that are committing these genocides on behalf of private corporations.” Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug mental health care for the last decade of his career. He is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and writes about mental ill health, fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism and other violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements. Tweet Share « Previous [3689_10_584_Forrest_Johnson.jpg] Next » [3693_1558_188_John_Laforge2014.png] More Articles Like This Duty to Warn Articles Call Us: 218.722.0173 We’re likely on the beat, but will get back to you. Email Us: info@duluthreader.com(info (at) duluthreader [d0t] com,) Photos, original cartoons, & articles are welcome. Advertise: advertise@duluthreader.com(advertise (at) duluthreader [d0t] com,) Robert Boone Publisher • Editor Paul Whyte Staff Writer Address: Reader Weekly, Inc. P.O. Box 16122 Duluth, Minnesota 55816 #Politics Skip to Main Content subnav toggle NPR Search ____________________ Toggle search * Stations * Donate * Shop * Sign In/Register * + + Logout * News * Arts & Life * Music * Topics + News + U.S. + World + Politics + Business + Technology + Science + Health + Race & Culture + Education + Arts & Life + Books + Movies + Pop Culture + Food + Art & Design + Performing Arts + Photography + Music + First Listen + Songs We Love + Music Articles + Tiny Desk Concerts + Videos * Programs + News and Conversations + Morning Edition + All Things Considered + Fresh Air + Here & Now + The Diane Rehm Show + Latino USA + On The Media + On Point + Weekend Edition Saturday + Weekend Edition Sunday + Storytelling & Humor + Ask Me Another + The Best Of Car Talk + Bullseye + Invisibilia + Radiolab + Snap Judgment + StoryCorps + TED Radio Hour + Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! + Music + All Songs Considered + Alt.Latino + First Listen + From The Top + Jazz Night In America + Metropolis + Microphone Check + Mountain Stage + Piano Jazz + Song Travels + The Thistle & Shamrock + World Cafe * Listen NPR logo NPR * News > * Politics America's Love Affair With Nationalism September 28, 201112:40 PM ET Linton Weeks 2010 Linton Weeks Twitter Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays celebrate during the singing of "God Bless America" during the game against the Boston Red Sox at Tropicana Field on Sept. 11 in St. Petersburg, Fla. Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays celebrate during the singing of "God Bless America" during the game against the Boston Red Sox at Tropicana Field on Sept. 11 in St. Petersburg, Fla. J. Meric/Getty Images hide caption itoggle caption J. Meric/Getty Images Picture this: An alternate-reality, suspended-in-space American metropolis where steampunk contraptions — like propeller-driven dirigibles, squeaky trolley wires and clunky robotic creatures — operate against a backdrop of clanging liberty bells; red, white and blue powder kegs; and jingoistic posters warning: "Patriots! Arm Thyself Against the Foreigners and Anarchists!" OK. So you can't quite picture it. No sweat. It's the surrealistic setting of Bioshock: Infinite, a video game — sequel to the critically acclaimed Bioshock — scheduled for release from Irrational Games in 2012. The storyline is imaginative, assimilating eclectic influences. But one salient characteristic is unmistakable: The pro-Uncle Sam, protectionist feel of the game reflects the mood of many present-day American nationalists. "The nationalism thrown throughout this is so overt," says video game critic Hilary Goldstein in a preview trailer. “ Nationalism can contribute to human progress and freedom and education and economic vitality, or it can contribute to violence, fear, and international conflicts. - Lloyd Kramer You don't need to fire up the Xbox 360 to know that there has been among many Americans a swell of nationalism in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. • Go to a baseball game where fans often croon "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch. • Check out the American flag pins on the lapels or collars of nearly every politician. • Listen to Toby Keith's current hit Made in America and read how it inspired a Michigan kindergarten class to create an "American-made show-and-tell." Call it what you will — American nationalism or patriotism — it is covering the country like a Wi-Fi cloud — above the fruited plain from sea to shining sea. Where does this rising nationalism spring from? And is it a positive or a negative trait for a country? That all depends ... A Sense of Selfhood Nationalism flows through our lives every day, observes Lloyd Kramer, author of the recent book Nationalism in Europe and America. And, like most "isms," Kramer says, nationalism carries with it both good and bad characteristics. "When people feel committed to larger communities or interests or to ideas of human rights and political progress, for example, nationalism can contribute to a sense of hope about the future. It can build positive personal and collective identities and a sense of selfhood in the modern world " Festival-goer Josh Bleeker waits for the first act on the main stage at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival, April 30 in Indio, Calif. Festival-goer Josh Bleeker waits for the first act on the main stage at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival, April 30 in Indio, Calif. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images hide caption itoggle caption Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images On the other hand, he says, "nationalism often encourages fears of all kinds of other people: fears of other religions or races or cultures or ethnic groups or homosexuals. This fear can be mobilized for violence and scapegoating. It can lead people to feel aggrieved and constantly at risk." In various ways, he adds, "nationalism can contribute to human progress and freedom and education and economic vitality, or it can contribute to violence, fear and international conflicts." Nationalism, according to Kramer, is often in full flower on national holidays, during major sports events and at public memorials for deceased military troops. And nationalistic symbols, rituals and rhetoric are especially ramped up as the country moves toward a presidential election. A Political Tool? He's not kidding. Patriotism permeates contemporary American politics. As do accusations of unpatriotic behavior. Of course, the word "patriot" is a subjective characterization, and most politicians use it as code for someone who shares their beliefs. Americans "are a patriotic people," said Mitt Romney at the recent Republican presidential debate in Orlando. "We place our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem. No other people on Earth do that." So does that mean that people who don't place their hands over their hearts while the anthem is played are not patriots? Speaking to a Tea Party gathering in New Hampshire on Labor Day weekend, possible presidential candidate Sarah Palin said, "We patriots should not focus on petty political squabbles and media game sound bites. The Tea Party has got to be focused on the broader, much more important goals of this movement — replace Obama." Does that mean that someone who supports the president of the United States is not a patriot? From the Democratic angle, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, speaking recently on the Tavis Smiley Show, suggested that members of the Tea Party should "stop being Tea Party people instead of patriots and Americans." Does that mean a Tea Partier cannot also be a patriot and an American? And Rick Perry in a new Web ad intones, "We don't need a president who apologizes for America. I believe in America. I believe in her purpose and her promise. ... God bless the United States of America." International Nationalism Though the United States may have its own brand of nationalism, most countries have a strong streak of patriotic pride. There are times when nationalism becomes more prominent on a global scale and other periods when it is displaced by other issues, says Peter Rutland, who writes the NationalismWatch blog. The last big wave was the post-Communist 1990s, when Yugoslavia became a handful of republics. Now we are experiencing another wave, Rutland says. "The economic rise of the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India and China] and other middle-income countries is often accompanied by nationalist assertion, China being the obvious case, also Turkey and many others." Increased globalization, he adds, "produces a countereffect of increased national assertion, worries about the loss of identity. Then we see a new wave of democratization — starting with the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union and now the Arab spring." He cites the book From Voting to Violence by Jack Snyder, which shows that democratization often leads "to an uptick on nationalist politics as media and political parties use nationalism as an organizing principle for the new political situation." The Arab spring, for example, is leading to more nationalist rhetoric and possibly policy changes to follow in places like Egypt, he says. And "Turkey shows that Islamism and nationalism can go together." — Linton Weeks After watching that ad, CNN's Carol Costello asked: "Should patriotism be a political tool?" She then pointed out that "patriotism has worked for Democrats, too, during the 2008 campaign. Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said wealthy Americans should pay more taxes because it's time to be patriotic." The Patriotic Center Patriotism, nationalism. Is there a difference? Peter Rutland, a professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., says that in the U.S., the word "nationalism" often has negative connotations. "So we talk instead about patriotism." He says, "Other people are nationalists; we are patriots." But for the sake of argument, the terms "nationalism" and "patriotism" are pretty much interchangeable, Rutland says. He studies this instinct on a global level and posts observations on his NationalismWatch blog. Rutland, Kramer and others who track nationalism point out that U.S. nationalism has swelled since 2001. Countrywide concerns about a faltering economy and a flood of immigration only intensify the notion of nationalism. Both liberal and conservative politicians have been adapting their language, Rutland says, "to try to appeal to the patriotic median voter." Rutland says that in light of that quest for the patriotic center, Obama's language has been particularly striking. "If you read his speech announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., or his inaugural address, you see a heavy emphasis on the common national narrative — the sacrifices of Gettysburg, the legacy of past generations, etc. — classic nationalist/patriotic imagery." Shovels To Snowshoes That nod toward nationalism served Obama well in the 2008 election. It has also worked for a number of business people, such as Todd Lipscomb. Not too long ago, Lipscomb was an executive in a California tech company. He lived in and traveled through Asia and the Pacific Rim for seven years. As his American company's global business increased, Lipscomb began to worry about the folks — their jobs and financial futures — back in the U.S. Four years ago, he resigned from his company, moved home to California and launched the website Made in USA Forever. He sells products — everything from shovels to snowshoes — that are domestically manufactured. "Stand with us to protect America's ability to produce, create jobs, and remain a world leader," the website intones. From his home in San Clemente, Lipscomb says "sales are surging. Conversely to the economic trends, the bad news has energized my customer base." Customers know "they are doing something real for our economy," Lipscomb says. "Every item is made here from U.S.A. components, so from the farmer that grows the cotton through every step of the way it helps our economy and creates jobs in a virtuous circle." There are many similar sites for domestically manufactured products, including Made in USA and the Made in America store. Lipscomb's website offers more than 2,800 products from over 480 "mostly small, family-owned business," Lipscomb says. But he adds, "Where we are weak is in electronics." Lipscomb has written a couple of books about his experience, including Re-Made in America: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing and Compete with the World. The issue of nationalism or patriotism is not a partisan concern, he says. He has been asked to appear on Ed Shultz's progressive radio show as well as the conservative Fox & Friends national TV program. He says his website attracts people of all stripes. "Conservatives, progressives, outdoorsmen, union members, immigrants, and many, many other groups come together on the website as Americans." In the end, he says, "this is not a red state or blue state issue, but truly a red, white and blue one." * Share + Facebook + Twitter + Google+ + Email * Comment More From Politics Politics Republicans In Congress Need Strong Ideas, Ohio Governor Says Politics House Approves Measure That Would Bar Federal Funding For Abortions Politics Obama Takes His State Of The Union Messages To YouTube Politics House Republican Leaders Drop Effort To Ban Some Abortions More Comments You must be signed in to leave a comment. Sign In / Register Please keep your community civil. All comments must follow the NPR.org Community rules and terms of use, and will be moderated prior to posting. NPR reserves the right to use the comments we receive, in whole or in part, and to use the commenter's name and location, in any medium. 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Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. __________________________________________________________________ Ta-Nehisi Coates June 2014 Presented by Chapters 1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses” 2. II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree” 3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony” 4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From” 5. V. The Quiet Plunder 6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto 7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way” 8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty” 9. IX. Toward A New Country 10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany” * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Email And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15 Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation. — John Locke, “Second Treatise” By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. — Anonymous, 1861 I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses” Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law. Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz) In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.” The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system. Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.” “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported. When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping. This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.” Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education. Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17. “I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.” Sharecropper boys in 1936 (Carly Mydans/Library of Congress) The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program. reporter’s notebook Elegant Racism “If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination.” Read more It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.” Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service. Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law. Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years. In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market. Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself. The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.” Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage. Explore Redlining in Chicago IFRAME: /media/interactives/2014/06/chicago/holc.html?v=15 A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FHA-backed mortgages. (Map development by Frankie Dintino) “A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.” The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth: Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable. In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.” reporter’s notebook The American Case Against a Black Middle Class “When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots.” Read more The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.” Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto. Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy. “We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was. “When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.” Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme. The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.” The story of Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.” Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations. II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree” According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind, not degree.” Interactive Census Map IFRAME: /media/interactives/2014/06/chicago/index.html?v=15 Explore race, unemployment, and vacancy rates over seven decades in Chicago. (Map design and development by Frankie Dintino) In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.” The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them. This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous. And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.” A national real-estate association advised not to sell to “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education.” The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back. Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country. With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating. One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance. The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.” An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country, with no particular bias toward skin color. The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative. The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality. IFRAME: //www.theatlantic.com/galleries/reparations/1/?layout=features III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony” In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature: The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude. WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives. Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous. Click the image above to view the full document. “A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.” As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ” Click the image above to view the full document. Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one.” In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job: Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.” Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?” In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court. But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.” Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us. Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.” A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested. reporter’s notebook What We Should Be Asking About Reparations “Any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.” Read more “It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.” That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy? One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge. Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look. There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810. We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From” America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.” Slaves in South Carolina prepare cotton for the gin in 1862. (Timothy H. O’sullivan/Library of Congress) When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676. One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves. This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance. For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.” In this artistic rendering by Henry Louis Stephens, a well-known illustrator of the era, a family is in the process of being separated at a slave auction. (Library of Congress) The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country. Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.” Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family. When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed: The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence. In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.” V. The Quiet Plunder The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent. Click the image above to view the full document. “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.” Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished. A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy. The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. “The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.” But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.” The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline. In August 1957, state police pull teenagers out of a car during a demonstration against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsyvlania. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham) Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.” That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.” The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. One man said his black neighbor was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.” “For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued. The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals. VI. Making The Second Ghetto Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means. Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks. It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans. In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods. Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away. In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out. The September 1966 Cicero protest against housing discrimination was one of the first nonviolent civil-rights campaigns launched near a major city. (Associated Press) When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way” Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract. To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators. “The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.” Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972. Click the image above to download a PDF version of The Atlantic’s April 1972 profile of the Contract Buyers League. Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks.” Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ” In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’ “The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.” White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social engineering. Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ” I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments. “You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.” “You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected. Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos Javier Ortiz) “You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.” Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone. Deputy sheriffs patrol a Chicago street in 1970 after a dozen Contract Buyers League families were evicted. (Courtesy of Sun-Times Media) “A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ” VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty” On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.” Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.” Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.” Visit North Lawndale today with Billy Brooks We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys. “That’s their corner,” he said. We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.” Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.” From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast. Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people. Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference. After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.” reporter’s notebook White Racism vs. White Resentment “The idea that Affirmative Action justifies white resentment may be the greatest argument made for reparations—like ever.” Read more The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries. This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.” Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this. Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject. The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured. Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence. (Carlos Javier Ortiz) “All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records. Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them. The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ” IX. Toward A New Country When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region. “He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.” Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body. And this was just one of their losses. Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races. To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte. Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. On some level, we have always grasped this. “Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany” We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge. In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people. reporter’s notebook The Auschwitz All Around Us “It’s very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary bout of insanity.” Read more “The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ” Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.” Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition. “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns,” said David Ben-Gurion, “I would do that.” Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!” Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted. Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.” Nahum Goldman, the president of the Jewish Claims Commission (center), signs 1952 reparations agreements between Germany and Israel. The two delegations entered the room by different doors, and the ceremony was carried out in silence. (Associated Press) Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia. Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.” The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.” Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes. Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name. Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said: For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses. Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ” In the spring of 1921, a white mob leveled “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, wounded prisoners ride in an Army truck during the martial law imposed by the Oklahoma governor in response to the race riot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis) A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them. John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches.” “High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.” Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.” “We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.” In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods. *** If you wish to comment, you may do so here. * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Email * [author-headshot.jpg?502c0990] Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. 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Instead, since founding the nation, we have more explicitly championed the idea that patriotism means loyalty to a set of principles; ideal principles that not only ask, but demand for dissent, criticism, and an actively inquisitive body to challenge those in power who may violate those standards. Today we technically celebrate the American Revolution, and more specifically, the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4^th. Yet our citizens still declare their patriotism even today through the same demands of social and political progress. During the Civil Rights movement within America, Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, "the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right." When a group of conscientious citizens activate this patriotic (and human) right to voice an opinion, they embody that nation and can live and breathe the true definition of patriotism, regardless of any individual person's political or social affiliations. President Barack Obama said: "I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it ... Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger." It does not matter how patriotism is celebrated, with salutes or beer or barbecue or visiting memorials, as long as it is recognized and profoundly appreciated for the value and power it holds as a vehicle for social progress rather than a dogmatic commandment for blind nationalism. The time-honored symbol of the American people, history and ideals — the American flag — is not owned by the administration in power, but by the people; and these people use that symbol to stand for basic democratic values including economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, and as a welcome mat for the world's oppressed people. Even with the dark realities that come with extreme corporate power, far-right xenophobia, and social injustice, the nation has called upon patriotism time and time again to overcome and achieve those fundamental moral principles we have so dearly held on to throughout history. American movements — the abolition of slavery, farmers' populism, women's suffrage, workers' rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and countless others — all hold very similar core human values of fairness, equality, freedom, and justice. All of these values have been adopted and championed as American ideals. While we may battle over the standards by which we achieve these values, every American, whether they vote red or white or blue, has an equal right and duty to claim their ideas and actions in search of these ends as their own. Ultimately, it is these values that define patriotism. Not just American patriotism, but human patriotism. As long as we continue to challenge the betterment of our nation through our association with these philosophies, then together as a nation we can consider ourselves patriotic. Happy July 4th. Like us on Facebook: SHARE TWEET Alexandra Cardinale's avatar image Alexandra Cardinale Alexandra Cardinale curious, quirky, and vivacious student currently researching Communications, Business and Law at New York University. Her extensive study in 16 countries have given her a unique perspective on both domestic U.S. policy and current international policy outside. She works to apply this inquisitive point of view to her writings here at PolicyMic and to any and all of her political discussions. 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CORE THEMES: * Gratitude * Altruism * Compassion * Empathy * Forgiveness * Happiness * Mindfulness Mind & Body Can Patriotism Be Compassionate? By Jeremy Adam Smith | July 2, 2013 | 0 comments Feeling ambivalent about the Fourth of July? New psychological research points to how we can feel authentic pride for our country—and still be citizens of the world. * Decrease Font Size Text Increase Font Size * Comment * Share * Email * Print * IFRAME: http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://greatergood.be rkeley.edu/article/item/can_patriotism_be_compassionate&layout=butt on_count&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light&he ight=21 “I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her classic 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. “I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.” In some corners, patriotism has a bad name. “Patriot” is mildly defined in my desktop dictionary as a “supporter of one’s own country”—and yet my thesaurus suggests the word “patriotism” can be synonymous with jingoism, chauvinism, nativism, and xenophobia. Particularly during times of war, patriotism does indeed seem to go hand-in-hand with dehumanization of outsiders, as well as intolerance of internal dissent. LIFE magazine But that’s not the whole story. Patriotism also drives people to extremes of altruism and self-sacrifice on behalf of the homeland—as the cliché has it, war brings out the best and worst in human beings. Shared support for a country strengthens social bonds among its citizens and provides an incubator in which trust and compassion can grow among them. Thus patriotism helps tie us together within national borders, but there’s a catch: It seems to diminish our ability to see the humanity in citizens of other nations. That’s why national holidays like the Fourth of July always present me—and many windmill-tilting idealists who’d like to foster peace and cross-group understanding—with a Gordian knot: We feel forced to choose between country and humanity. But does that have to be the case? Can one celebrate the Fourth of July without hating and fearing other countries? The short answer to the second question is yes… probably. In fact, when the Greater Good Science Center analyzed the results of its “connection to humanity” quiz, we found plenty of people who identified with both country and humanity. They are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, so far the research literature suggests that the problem is not with patriotism itself. Human beings are built to be part of groups, but groups do not have to be self-focused and belligerent. New psychological research points to how we can feel authentic pride for our country—and still be citizens of the world. Why does patriotism exist? In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that morality arises from intuitions, not reasoning, and that our intuitions rest upon six foundations, which he defines as a series of binary opposites like Care/Harm; Fairness/Cheating; Loyalty/Betrayal; and Authority/Subversion. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind The values of the political Left, he says, derive mainly from the foundations of Care and Fairness—while conservatives tend to more highly value Loyalty. This makes “patriotism” a special property of the Right. To define the Loyalty foundation, Haidt describes a classic 1954 experiment by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif, who pitted two groups of 12-year-old boys against each other in an effort to understand how collective identities are formed. The boys quickly forged tribal micro-cultures and “destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons….” When morality rests upon the Loyalty foundation, says Haidt, right is anything that builds and defends the tribe; wrong is anything that undermines it. Thus violence against members of the other tribe is moral, and betrayal of one’s own tribe is the worst crime of all. That sounds terrible to people whose morality rests upon Care and Fairness—and the reason why, for example, conservatives vilify whistleblower Edward Snowden while many liberals hail him as a hero. But Haidt argues the Loyalty foundation has deep evolutionary roots and cannot be wished away by those who prefer Care as a basis for morality. Humans have always had to band together to survive and thrive, and bonding with some seems to naturally involve excluding others. This is true down to a neurochemical level. Oxytocin, for example, has been nicknamed the “love hormone” for its role in bonding people with each other. But what’s less well known is that oxytocin plays a role in excluding others from that bond. One 2011 study found that Dutch students dosed with oxytocin were “more likely to favor Dutch people or things associated with the Dutch than when they had taken a placebo.” Furthermore, they were more likely to say “they would sacrifice the life of a non-Dutch person over a Dutch person in order to save five other people of unknown nationality.” We can just as well call oxytocin the “patriotism hormone”! This is only one example of how our bodies are seemingly built for group cohesion and loyalty—which makes traits like patriotism an intractable part of human psychology. Even liberals and radicals who imagine themselves to be above tribal squabbling can be easily observed exhibiting the same behaviors as the 12-year-old boys in Muzafer Sherif’s experiment. When I was an undergraduate student activist, I thought nothing of defacing the posters and banners of the campus “White Student Union.” I still think the agenda of that group was repulsive—and it’s worth noting that Haidt’s research into political difference grew out of research into feelings of disgust—but I now realize that my actions followed an unconscious, evolutionary script. I wasn’t promoting a higher ideal; I was just trashing the other team, largely because I enjoyed the self-satisfied shot of dopamine I got when I spray-painted “RASCISM SUX” on one of their banners. My friends cheered me on; I was strengthening bonds within my tribe by committing an anti-social act of vandalism against another tribe. Four paths to a more compassionate patriotism So is there a solution? Or are we simply doomed to follow these scripts? In her 2011 essay, “Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom,” the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum argues that while there are many dangers inherent in teaching patriotism, we still “need patriotic emotion to motivate projects that require transcending self-interest.” Just as strong attachment to parents can serve as a template for healthy relationships throughout life, so secure attachment to one’s nation can give us the confidence to respect other people’s countries. Nussbaum searches American history for leaders who were able to build a more compassionate, cosmopolitan patriotism, as when Martin Luther King, Jr., argued in 1967 that opposing war is the “privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions.” Nussbaum draws on history and philosophy to make her case for a new brand of patriotism, but does her argument cut against human nature, as some allege? The answer is no—recent psychological research points to many steps we can take to extend the legacy of King. As we celebrate this Fourth of July, here are four for us to consider. 1. Make love of humanity an explicit goal. Evolution bequeathed to us a brain that is wired for connection to the group, which is what makes patriotism such a two-edged sword, cleaving “us” from “them.” And the brain is very, very good at spotting differences in its environment, including racial differences. As the essays in the Greater Good anthology Are We Born Racist? reveal, we cannot stop ourselves to going into high alert when we encounter something out of the ordinary or someone different from ourselves. Does this mean that prejudice and xenophobia are inevitable? No, because the human brain is also adept at overcoming fear and adapting itself to change. Study after study finds that repeated exposure to other peoples and cultures erodes prejudice. The brain has one other advantage in the effort to transcend xenophobic nationalism: It is goal oriented. If we tell ourselves—and tell our kids—that extending compassion and forgiveness to people of other countries is a worthwhile goal, “the brain can do that, though it may take a bit of effort and practice,” as neuroscientist David Amodio writes in his Greater Good essay about overcoming racism, “The Egalitarian Brain” . Group formation and loyalty are indeed natural and supported by our bodies, but we are also very well equipped to overcome our kneejerk fears or prejudices. We just need to give ourselves opportunities for reflection on our biases—and dedicate ourselves to overcoming them. 2. Teach that compassion and empathy are unlimited resources. The argument for a narrow, self-interested patriotism starts with the idea that there is only so much good feeling to go around—and that therefore we need to ration fellow-feeling for those closest to us. But more and more studies reveal that this premise is false. “In my research, I have found that the limits of empathy are actually quite malleable,” writes psychologist C. Daryl Cameron in “Can You Run Out of Empathy?” His studies find that people will ration their empathy and compassion for the in-group when they worry help for the out-group will be too costly or ineffective. But, he explains: People’s expectations about empathy can have powerful effects on how much empathy they feel, and for whom. Identification with all humanity is an empirically documented individual difference that predicts more empathic emotion and behavior. And research with mindfulness interventions suggests that training people to approach, rather than avoid, their emotional experiences can decrease fear of empathy and increase pro-social behavior. In short, “The research so far says empathy isn’t a non-renewable resource like oil. Empathy is more like wind or solar power, renewable and sustainable.” Knowing this to be true is one of the steps that allows people to extend their fellow feeling beyond their immediate circles, to encompass a broader swath of humanity. 3. Extend self-compassion to America. Both liberals and conservatives would benefit from applying some self-compassion to themselves as Americans. IFRAME: //www.youtube.com/embed/eBw_aEOT2Dk As a group, American liberals, progressives, and radicals tend to be harsh with our own country—I say “our” because I count myself among them. We decry our history of slavery and racism, the genocide of Native Americans, wartime atrocities committed in our name, illegal actions by intelligence agencies, and more. The most thoughtful and self-conscious critics are aware that we are harsh in part because we blame ourselves: we identify with our nation, take responsibility for its worst actions, and are ashamed. That’s a valid manifestation of patriotism, in my view—but one that can interfere with taking positive action to make things better. Meanwhile, many rock-ribbed conservatives treat any criticism of America as a personal blow to their self-esteem. “People who invest their self-worth in feeling superior and infallible tend to get angry and defensive when their status is threatened,” writes University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff, who could be describing the Bush administration. Neff’s solution to both these psychological dilemmas is self-compassion: “People who compassionately accept their imperfection, however, no longer need to engage in such unhealthy behaviors to protect their egos.” IFRAME: //www.youtube.com/embed/Uf6FJbc2vss As she writes in “Why Self-Compassion Trumps Self-Esteem”: As I’ve defined it, self-compassion entails three core components. First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental. Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering. Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it. For the Right, these are all qualities that could help build a kinder, gentler, less defensive patriotism. For the Left, feelings of shame can make us come down harshly on ourselves and our countrymen without also recognizing our nation’s positive qualities—the values and accomplishments that motivate us to connect with other Americans and celebrate our shared identity. For both groups, research by Neff and her colleagues finds that self-compassion actually leads to greater compassion for others. If you know how to identify and address suffering in yourself, you are better able to do the same for other people. But will self-compassion reduce our will to change and challenge injustice? Here, the research says absolutely not. “We think we need to beat ourselves up if we make mistakes so that we won’t do it again,” says Neff. “But that’s completely counterproductive. Self-criticism is very strongly linked to depression. And depression is antithetical to motivation: You’re unable to be motivated to change if you’re depressed. It causes us to lose faith in ourselves, and that’s going to make us less likely to try to change and conditions us for failure.” When we are compassionate with ourselves, however, we can admit that we made a mistake—and then simply try to do better next time. That’s a citizenship skill worth cultivating. 4. Embrace authentic, not hubristic, pride. More on Compassionate Patriotism Take our quiz to measure how much you love humanity. Learn how to increase your compassion bandwidth. Listen to this interview with Jonathan Haidt, and subscribe to Greater Good's podcast series. Learn what your own moral foundations are at Jonathan Haidt's website, www.yourmorals.org. Discover more Greater Good articles and videos about the science of compassion and altruism. Pride is a natural emotional response to success and high social status, but some forms of pride are healthier than others. Many recent studies have revealed the downside of what psychologists call “hubristic pride,” which is associated with arrogance and self-aggrandizement. As Claire E. Ashton-James and Jessica L. Tracy write in their 2011 study of how pride influences our feelings about other people, “Hubristic pride results from success that is attributed to internal, stable, and uncontrollable causes (‘I did well because I’m great’).” In contrast, “authentic pride results from success attributed to internal, unstable, and controllable causes (‘I did well because I worked hard’),” and is closely associated with feelings of accomplishment and humility. Their experiments—as well as several others by GGSC-affiliated scientists—have closely linked hubristic pride to prejudice, impulsivity, and aggression. Authentic pride had exactly the opposite effects, encouraging self-control, compassion for others, and positive attitudes toward out-groups. Other research by UC Berkeley’s Matt Goren and Victoria Plaut finds that the negative effects of pride are mitigated if we are conscious of the power and privilege granted by our status. So the challenge is fairly clear: to cultivate authentic, power-cognizant pride among citizens of the United States. If we feel pride, it should be in the accomplishments of our fellow citizens and in any contributions we ourselves have made toward making our country and community a better place, however small and local. Pride of simply being born American leads to hubris, which leads to bigotry and belligerence. For pride to be authentic, it must be something we feel we have earned. The best American leaders have always made that distinction. We all know this line from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” But few seem to remember the next line: “My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” The brutal Cold War context of these words is almost lost to us now, but the higher ideals behind them are not ambiguous. Kennedy presented himself as a patriot of the United States and as a citizen of the world, seeing no contradiction. These words are, at root, an appeal for authentic pride—citizenship as something that must be earned, in a nation that is part of a community of nations. Those are ideals worth celebrating on the Fourth of July. Tracker Pixel for Entry Comment Share Email Print About The Author Jeremy Adam Smith is producer and editor of the Greater Good Science Center’s website. He is also the author or coeditor of four books, including The Daddy Shift, Rad Dad, and The Compassionate Instinct. Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a 2010-11 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. You can follow him on Twitter! Like this article? Here's what you can do: * Share it on Facebook * Sign up for our e-newsletter * Become a member of Greater Good and the Greater Good Science Center * Make a donation to support our work Donate Related Articles * A Nation of Cowards? * Toward a More Mindful Nation * The Socially Intelligent Superpower * America’s Trust Fall * Altruism in Space * Hope on the Battlefield * In Faces We Trust * Brain Trust * Trust and Inequality Tags altruism, brain, compassion, empathy, evolution, forgiveness, kindness, mindfulness, morality, prejudice, prosocial behavior, racism, trust, violence Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus Story Topics Find the subjects that interest you. altruism brain children communication compassion conflict resolution cooperation creativity dacher keltner depression development education emotional intelligence emotions empathy evolution family forgiveness generosity gratitude habits happiness health helping heroism kindness love marriage meaningful life meditation mindfulness money morality neuroscience optimism parenting play politics positive emotions positive psychology prejudice prosocial behavior racism relationships religion self-compassion social connections social-emotional learning stress success teachers trust violence well-being work Greater Good in Your Inbox Sign up here to get the Greater Good Science Center's e-newsletters. 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Login|Signup Login|My Dashboard|Register Logout|My Dashboard * Send Letter to the Editor * Submit News * Email Alerts * E-Edition * Back Page Ads (PDF) Memorial Day service 'not possible without patriotism' - Herald Mail Media: Local News ____________________ Go Hot Topics * 2015 Meritus Guide * At Home Places - Winter 2014-2015 * Hometown Guide Flipbook Herald Mail Media * Home * News + Local News + Election 2014 + Annapolis + Your Town + Tri-State News + Police and Fire + National + Email Alerts + Submit a News Tip Top Story + Mayor, two councilmen face challengers in Hancock election HANCOCK, Md. — The mayor and two members of the Hancock Town Council face are facing challengers when voters go to the polls for a municipal e… o posted: January 23 o rss More headlines + USMH celebrates 10 years of 'partnership' + GOP nominates Serafini for Shank's Senate seat + Aging water main repaired but slated to be replaced * Sports + Baseball + Blogs + Video + World Cup Posters Top Story + Hubs forfeit 8 wins A “clerical error” might prevent the North Hagerstown wrestling team from making another run at the Maryland Class 4A-3A state dual-meet title. o posted: January 22 o rss More headlines + Wildcats bounce back with victory over Hubs + Boys basketball notebook: Saturday's Saints-Gaels clash will decide IPSL title + Robinson scores career-high 35 in Saint James win * Opinion + Letters + Feedback + Tim Rowland + Editorials + Guest Editorials Top Story + Tuition plan would open doors for many who could benefit In the past, we have been strong supporters of the Greater Hagerstown Committee's proposal to provide graduating students of Washington County… o posted: January 22 o rss More headlines + Allan Powell: McDonnell decision is an invitation to white-collar crime + Letter to the Editor - Jan. 23 + Feedback - Jan. 23 + Enforcement of inmate release policy a positive step * Life + Entertainment + Weddings & Engagements + Worship + Calendar + Physicians Directory + Hagerstown Eats + Video Top Story + Is love worth the risk of heartache? 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Originally broadcast Jan. 22, 2015. o posted: January 22 o rss More videos + News Now: Jan. 22, 2015, part 2 + News Now: Jan. 22, 2015 part 3 + Afternoon Report: January 22, 2015, part 1 * Photos & Videos * Calendar * About + Contact Us + Advertising + Career Opportunities + Submit a story + Subscribe * Weather * Traffic * Subscribe * Obituaries * Classifieds + Local Classifieds + Today's Ads + Jobs + Autos + Marketplace + Coupons + Place an ad Home * News * Local News Memorial Day service 'not possible without patriotism' * Story * Comments * Image (2) * Video (1) Print Create a hardcopy of this page Font Size: Default font size Larger font size Previous Next Flags at Rest Haven Joe Crocetta/Staff Photographer Flags at Rest Haven U.S. flags bearing the names of deceased veterans were posted around Rest Haven Cemetery Monday afternoon during the annual Memorial Day Tribute. Buy this photo Bagpiper Joe Crocetta/Staff Photographer Bagpiper Bagpiper Rick Conrad performed Amazing Grace Monday morning at the start of the Rest Haven Cemetery and Funeral Home Memorial Day Tribute. Buy this photo Related Videos Rest Haven Cemetery and Funeral Home, in Hagerstown's North End, held a Memorial Day tribute on Monday. video kaltura 0_u1p2uut5 Rest Haven tribute read more Rest Haven Cemetery and Funeral Home, in Hagerstown's North End, held a Memorial Day tribute on Monday. Posted: Monday, May 26, 2014 4:00 pm | Updated: 7:54 am, Tue May 27, 2014. Memorial Day service 'not possible without patriotism' * jgreene * Posted on May 26, 2014 by Julie E. Greene Memorial Day is about remembering those who gave their lives for our country, about remembering those we loved. Sullivan Ballou, with the Rhode Island Militia during the Civil War, expressed his love of country and his family in a July 14, 1861, letter to his wife, Sarah, while anticipating his possible death in battle. Subscription Required An online service is needed to view this article in its entirety. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? Login Now Need an online subscription? Subscribe Already a Print Subscriber? Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Need an account? Create one now. 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AC@>@E65 2 `ai_` A]>] >@>6?E @7 D:=6?46 H9:=6[ 244@C5:?8 E@ E96 &]$] s6A2CE>6?E @7 '6E6C2?D p772:CDV H63D:E6[ E96 }2E:@?2= |@>6?E @7 #6>6>3C2?46 :D 2E b A]>] @? |6>@C:2= s2J]k^Am kAmk6>myF=:6 t] vC66?6 :D 2 C6A@CE6C 7@C %96 w6C2=5\|2:=] $96 42? 36 C624965 G:2 6>2:= 2E k2 9C67lQ>2:=E@i;F=:68o96C2=5\>2:=]4@>Qm;F=:68o96C2=5\>2:=]4@>k^2m]k^6 >mk^Am Thank you for reading HeraldMailMedia.com free articles on our site. You can come back at the end of your 30-day period for more free articles, or you can purchase a subscription and continue to enjoy valuable local news and information. If you need help, please contact our office at 301-733-5131. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? Login Now Need an online subscription? Subscribe Already a Print Subscriber? Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Need an account? Create one now. Choose an online service. + 1 Digital-Only Subscription $5.99 for 30 days $65.89 for 365 days Chose this option if you're signing up for a new digital subscription + 2 One-Day Digital Subscription $0.99 for 1 day Get full access to heraldmailmedia.com for one day for $0.99 Current print subscribers + 1 Print + Digital Subscription Choose this option if you are a current print subscriber. Already a Print Subscriber? None of these apply to you? Back Need an account? Create one now. * Discuss * Print * Posted in Local on Monday, May 26, 2014 4:00 pm. Updated: 7:54 am. Similar Stories * Mayor, two councilmen face challengers in Hancock election * USMH celebrates 10 years of 'partnership' * Berkeley County Democratic Association to meet Monday * GOP nominates Serafini for Shank's Senate seat * Discrimination suit filed against Md. transit officials Most Read * W.Va. couple charged with neglecting their children * Victim identified in deadly assault over the weekend in Hagerstown * Maryland State Police seek two men in area robberies * Police say suspect in fatal shooting in Charles Town takes own life * Police say suspect in fatal shooting in Charles Town takes own life Submit your news! Submit your news! We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! 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Powered by BLOX Content Management System from TownNews.com. [ Terms of Use | Privacy Policy ] schurz communications inc. Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Need an account? Create one now. #trivalleycentral.com Search Close * Casa Grande Dispatch * Casa Grande Dispatch * Maricopa Monitor * Coolidge Examiner * Eloy Enterprise * Florence Reminder & Blade-Tribune * Arizona City Independent/Edition * San Tan Valley Sentinel * TriValley Digital * Contact Us * E-Edition * Print Subscription * Online Subscription * About Us * NIE * Archives Patriotism is topic of soldier’s speech - trivalleycentral.com: Area News Advanced Search ____________________ GO * Welcome! Login|Signup Login|My Dashboard|Register Logout|My Dashboard * January 23, 2015 trivalleycentral.com * Obituaries * Opinion + Our View + Letters to the Editor + Columns + Web Polls + Dear Abby * Courts/Police + Police Log + Sheriff’s Log + Fire Log + Court Log * Special Sections + TV Roundup + Pinal Real Estate Buyers' Guide + Special Sections * Photo Galleries * Public Notices + Local Notices + Arizona Notices + National Notices * Books For Sale * Community + Local Entertainment + Calendar + Area Links * Classifieds + Classifieds + Place Ad Home * Casa Grande Dispatch * Area News Patriotism is topic of soldier’s speech * Story * Comments Print Create a hardcopy of this page Font Size: Default font size Larger font size Previous Next Matt Slaydon Courtesy of Matt Slaydon Matt Slaydon Matt Slaydon is shown in his Air Force uniform several years ago, left, and more recently after recovering from multiple surgeries, right. Posted: Monday, March 4, 2013 9:10 am Patriotism is topic of soldier’s speech SCOTT McNUTT, Staff Writer Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. Retired Air Force Tech. Sgt. Christopher “Matt” Slaydon is to deliver an address on patriotism at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Ride for the Warrior bike rally and festival in Casa Grande. Slaydon served in the Air Force for 151⁄2 years and worked as an explosives ordnance disposal operator. During his career he participated in more than 200 combat missions and successfully disarmed more than 100 IEDs. On Oct. 24, 2007, Slaydon earned a Purple Heart Medal. That day, like so many others in the past, Slaydon was called in to disarm an improvised explosive device near Kirkuk Air Base in Iraq. Slaydon was in the process of disarming the bomb when it detonated. Subscription Required An online service is needed to view this article in its entirety. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? 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D2:5] “p =@E @7 E:>6D J@F 92G6 E@ E2<6 2== J@FC 862C @77 E@ 86E :? E96 3@>3 DF:E 2?5 :E D=@HD J@F 5@H? — :E’D >@C6 @7 2 =2DE C6D@CE]”k^Am kAm$=2J5@? =@DE 6J6D:89E :? 3@E9 6J6D 2?5 9:D 5@>:?2?E 2C> 23@G6 E96 6=3@H H2D 2>AFE2E65] w6 2=D@ DF776C65 724:2= 2?5 ;2H 7C24EFC6D[ =@DE E66E9 2?5 2 =F?8 4@==2AD65] $=2J5@? DA6?E `d >@?E9D C64@G6C:?8 7C@> 9:D :?;FC:6D 2E qC@@<6 pC>J |65:42= r6?E6C 2E u@CE $2> w@FDE@? 2?5 E96 r6?E6C 7@C E96 x?EC6A:5 :? $2? p?E@?:@[ %6I2D]k^Am kAm$=2J5@? D2:5 96 925 H@C<65 @? E92E A2CE:4F=2C 3@>3 7@C >@C6 E92? b_ >:?FE6D 2?5 :E D9@F=5 92G6 366? 4=62C]k^Am kAm“%96 3@>3 24EF2==J >2=7F?4E:@?65 H96? x H2D :? E96 AC@46DD @7 86EE:?8 :E @FE @7 E96 8C@F?5 — 2 H:C6 D9@CE\4:C4F:E65 — :E D9@F=5?’E 92G6 8@?6 @77[” $=2J5@? D2:5]k^Am kAm$=2J5@?[ ?@H ca[ EC2G6=D H:E9 9:D H:76[ p??6EE6[ 2?5 9:D D66:?8\6J6 5@8[ “{686?5[” 2 v6C>2? D96A96C5] p??6EE6 H@C256 2== E96 5:776C6?46 :? E96 H@C=5[” $=2J5@? D2:5]k^Am kAm$=2J5@? 42==D pG@?52=6 9@>6 2?5 EC2G6=D 2D 2 >@E:G2E:@?2= DA62<6C AC:>2C:=J 2E p:C u@C46 6G6?ED] w6 D2:5 96 766=D AC6EEJ 8@@5[ 2== E9:?8D 4@?D:56C65]k^Am kAmw:D >6DD286 :D D:>A=6] “*@F 5@?’E 92G6 E@ H62C 2 F?:7@C> @C 7@==@H 2 A2CE:4F=2C A@=:E:42= A2CEJ E@ 36 2 A2EC:@E[” 96 D2:5] “xE’D 23@FE 6>3C24:?8 J@FC 7C665@> 2?5 36=:6G:?8 :? E96 r@?DE:EFE:@? — E92E’D A2EC:@E:D>]”k^Am Thank you for reading 9 free articles on our site. You can come back at the end of your 30-day period for another 9 free articles, or you can purchase a subscription and continue to enjoy valuable local news and information. If you need help, please contact our office at 520-836-7461. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? Login Now Need an online subscription? 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If you are already a subscriber to the print edition of the Casa Grande Dispatch you get this access for $1 a month. Call 520-423-8685 and we will set that up for you! None of these apply to you? Back Need an account? Create one now. * Discuss * Print * * Posted in Area news on Monday, March 4, 2013 9:10 am. Clear 46° Clear [54beb8dcbba7c.image-83079ffb2052097a4e4ac17255a45c0b.jpg] IFRAME: http://trivalleycentral.platypost.net/f2f/widget/html/postfeed/all/0/20 /160/1/0 Today's e-Edition Friday - January 23, 2015 Updated: 12:05 am | See more * tab 0 * tab 1 * tab 2 * tab 3 * tab 4 Click Classifieds * Promote your Help Wanted ads in Click Classifieds + + icon Updated: August 29 * Picture This! 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Create one now. #alternate - www.pe.com Log in Subscribe Today Customer Service P-Edition Advertise Top Workplaces UnidosSC.com Weather * Home * News * Sports * Entertainment * Business * Life * Opinion * Blogs * Photos * Obits Register Connect ____________________ * CARS * JOBS * HOMES * Shop * Classifieds City NewsPoliticsTopicsEnvironmentEducationAnnouncementsTrafficPhotosBlogs * News SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY: DA to prosecute cardboard thieves * News MURRIETA: Rocket launcher found along I-15 * office-jan-pieces-later News NORCO: Treasured lion statue recovered in pieces; 2 arrested * Entertainment ONTARIO: WWE makes Citizens’ Arena return in March News CARL LOVE: Teaching patriotism to fifth graders It’s not easy to explain such concepts to students, but Murrieta’s Field of Honor helps Tweet [btn_email.gif] * * [5cd2c64b-c47b-4c72-b060-47bd57b5f034.png] * Trending Riverside Yellow Pages THINGS TO DO IFRAME: http://event.pe.com/widget [a9869948-3383-4b01-9a2b-fbf303762453.png] BY CARL LOVE / CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST Published: Nov. 15, 2014 2:28 p.m. CARL LOVE: Teaching patriotism to fifth graders Print Photo Email This Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share [pin-favicon.png] Pin It More Galleries ADVERTISEMENT Bob DeCubellis talks to fifth graders in front of one of the memorials during a field trip to the Murrieta Field of Honor. Bob DeCubellis talks to fifth graders in front of one of the memorials during a field trip to the Murrieta Field of Honor. CARL LOVE , COURTESY PHOTO Related article » Getting 10-year-olds to understand grownup matters such as service, patriotism and the ultimate sacrifice are not easy. Which explains the goal of the annual fifth-grade field trips to the Murrieta Field of Honor. I’m a fifth-grade teacher at Rail Ranch Elementary. I know my students will find things kids think are cool, such as the one who noted that a fallen soldier shared her first name. And in the place dedicated to local heroes, people from our area who’ve died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a number of kids talk excitedly about finding someone who died the day they were born. Life and death, the cycle of cycles. Amid all this innocence is the wisdom of the people who put on the annual program that attracted more than 1,600 students last week. I had my kids later write about the experience – it’s the price you pay when your teacher is a writer -- and a number of them mentioned how much they liked 88-year-old Charlie Cram, who served in World War II. Fifth grader Halina Klaput talked about the impact Cram had on her, the tears that came as she thought of three people she knows of who served in the war. And now to meet somebody who was there, too – on a field trip of all things. “When I calmed myself down, I gave Charlie a hug which made me feel a lot better and he is my favorite person there, he always will be,” Halina wrote. Vietnam veteran Bob DeCubellis told the fifth graders freedom isn’t free, that it takes the kind of service symbolized by the sea of flags on display here to keep our country safe. He challenged the kids to take up the mantle if our country is to remain free. “You can’t do that if you don’t study hard and pay attention,” he said. The teacher part of me loves this guy. Kids being kids, not all were inspired by the moment. One student wrote the trip was boring because we walked so much. Another felt useless because almost everybody else seemed to have family members who served. Kids do take things personally. Others could see the reason for the event. “Everybody was having fun, talking to their friends,” noted Cassie Cadena, “but inside, everybody felt sad about all the men and women that fought for our freedom.” Of the many kids who noted that a fallen hero passed on their birthday, Paige Casas said: “I think that this means we celebrate our birthdays on the day that a service member died for us.” Walking through the section dedicated to our local heroes can be numbing. You take note of the long list of people from Riverside, Hemet, San Jacinto, Cathedral City, San Bernardino, Rancho Cucamonga, Menifee, Temecula, Murrieta and too many other places. Nathan Buechler told his friends, “That’s kind of sad, how many people died from Murrieta.” In the end, as the school buses pulled out of the dirt parking lot and headed down the street, we were left with the image of a remarkable 2,014 flags standing regally in the distance. “It looked like a long rainbow of red, white, and blue,” wrote Halina. A rainbow of service, patriotism and the ultimate sacrifice, something these kids now appreciate so much more. Contact the writer: carllove4@yahoo.com More from Carl Love + CARL LOVE: Catching up on Temecula Flipping channels one day leads to a visit with the public access channel that is all things Temecula. + CARL LOVE: Hey, we got a season! It lasted about five days, but ‘winter’ actually showed up in Southwest Riverside County + CARL LOVE: The quiet life again Now that the kids have returned to their real lives, things slow down in the old hometown COMMENTS | PRINT | EMAIL | Join the conversation Comments are encouraged, but you must follow our User Agreement Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to allow Freedom Communications, Inc. the right to republish your name and comment in additional Freedom publications without any notification or payment. Return to Top * Home * News * Cities * Sports * Entertainment * Business * Life * Opinion * Blogs * Photos * Obituaries * Weather * Real Estate * Jobs * Cars * Classifieds Copyright © The Press-Enterprise. All Rights Reserved. About Us | Privacy Policy | User Agreement | Site Map [set.aspx?action=add&advid=1518&token=FOCI1] Quantcast Powered by the Parse.ly Publisher Platform (P3). #AFPS News Articles DOD Press Advisories DOD News Releases DOD Contract Announcements DOD Transcripts DOD Speeches DOD Secretary of Defense Speeches DOD Blogger's Roundtable United States Department of Defense United States Department of Defense ____________________ Submit Search News * News Articles * News/Casualty Releases * Press Advisories * News Transcripts * Publications * Speeches * Contracts * Testimony * Messages * Special Reports Secretary of Defense * Biography * Speeches * Messages * Testimony * Travels * News Photos Deputy Secretary of Defense * Biography * Speeches * Travels * News Photos Photos/Videos * Lead Photos * News Photos * Photo Essays * Week in Photos * Videos * DoD Video News * Imagery Archive Other * Briefing Slides * Pentagon Press Badges * Press/Media Queries * Military Commissions * Detainees * Other News Sources DoD News Bookmark and Share E-Mail A Copy | Printer Friendly | Latest News News Article Recruiters Recall Patriotism of Post-9/11 America By Lisa Daniel American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2011 – Like so many Americans, Army Sgt. Cheri Depenbrock watched the horror of 9/11 unfold from her office television. What was different for the Army recruiter was how it changed her job in the weeks after. Click photo for screen-resolution image Like other military recruiters, Army Master Sgt. Juan Dozier witnessed a spike in patriotism following Sept. 11, 2001, that led many Americans into recruiting stations. U.S. Army courtesy photo (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. In seven years of helping ensure the Army met its recruiting goals, Depenbrock was used to reaching out to young people, telling them what the Army could do for them, and mostly answering their questions about how they could get their college paid for by signing up. “It was almost always for college, for money, and for having a full-time job,” she said, referring to the reasons people enlisted. Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. In the days, weeks and months thereafter, Depenbrock, like military recruiters around the nation, watched in amazement from her Cincinnati office as people who never would have thought of joining -- or rejoining, as many would have it -- approached recruiters with the sole purpose of defending America. “It was amazing the people walking into that office, the ages,” she said. “We had so many prior-service folks wanting to come back. I was amazed at how many older people tried. I know some of them were in their fifties. And, military-wise, we couldn’t do anything for them.” Some younger people with prior service did rejoin, Depenbrock said, and the first-time recruits were different. While patriotism has always driven young people to service, it was almost always matched with a desire for college money or new opportunities. Suddenly, they weren’t asking about money, she said. “It was all about the patriotism,” Depenbrock said. “They didn’t care about anything else. Money had nothing do with it. I swear, I think half those kids would have joined if we hadn’t paid them.” An annual Pentagon survey of young people’s propensity to join the military showed an 8-percent increase among young men likely to enlist immediately after 9/11, and remained high until 2005, a Defense Department official said. One of those young men was William Grigsby, now an Army staff sergeant who enlisted in early 2002. “The events of 9/11 had everything to do with my decision to enlist,” he said. Grigsby, an aircraft electrician on a three-year detail as a recruiter in Houston, graduated high school in June 2001 and was indecisive about his plans, first considering the Army, then college, and then deciding against both. Three months later, “I was working a dead-end job at a grocery store,” Grigsby recalled. He was driving home from the night shift on the morning of 9/11 when he heard a news report about two hijacked planes being flown into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Almost immediately after, Grigsby said, his mind went back to joining the Army. As U.S. forces moved into Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaida and their Taliban backers, “I watched in awe as our military forces took control of the country,” he said, adding that he had no reservations at the prospects of deploying to war. Recruiters from around the country remember post-9/11 as a time when many potential recruits came to them. Army Master Sgt. Juan Dozier calls himself “a recruiter of two different generations.” There was the generation before 9/11 -- his generation -- who enlisted for various benefits the military could provide. “There wasn’t so much of a sense of purpose, of ‘What can I do for my country?’” he said. “It was more, ‘I need the training or education money.’” Dozier didn’t begrudge them -- he was one of them. Raised in the tough Southside Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, Dozier enlisted in the Army in 1989 as a way out. “The only thing I wanted to do was have different scenery,” he said. “They took a chance on me being from Southside Chicago,” Dozier said, adding that his recruiters asked him to take a bus to meet them outside of his neighborhood because they were concerned about violence there. “The only time they came and got me was when it was time for boot camp,” he said. After serving as a motor transportation operator in Germany, then California and Texas, Dozier was working as a recruiter in Columbia, S.C., when 9/11 occurred. People began flowing into the recruiting station, and they were prepared to fight, he said. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and his predecessor, Robert M. Gates, have praised the more than 3 million young people who have joined the military since 9/11, all knowing they likely would go to war. Dozier compared their mindset to that of peacetime recruits caught off guard by military interventions such as the Persian Gulf War that began in 1990. “Back then kids were saying, ‘I didn’t join for this, and a lot of them were trying to get out,’” he said. “These kids now, they know what they’re signing up for. For most of them, they know war is part of the job.” Recruiters say they now hear a mixture of reasons for enlisting, with many potential recruits still citing patriotism, but a growing number also looking for benefits such as health care. “When they come in now, they’re looking at benefits,” Depenbrock said. “They’re not talking about the GI Bill. -- they’re talking about a safety net.” Contact Author Related Sites: Special Report: Remembering 9/11 Comments Article is closed to new comments. The opinions expressed in the following comments do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense. 9/8/2011 6:42:49 PM I am a former SRP/SRC PROVIDER in Washington and Colorado 2003-2005 where I interviewed soldiers for pre and post deployment issues, the national guard and reservist for entry and return from active duty. Every soldier, especially those after 9/11 and those older than 26 yo, when I asked why join? They would respond ....... join for patriotic reasons, do their share after 9/11. As a former Vietnam Era vet and Active Regular Army Retiree I was impressed. This meant not only did America have an All Voluntary Force but they were motivated by Patriotism. Thus the worlds best trained Armed Forces. America owes alot to these troops who voluntarily commited and sacrificed for their Nation. - panv, colorado Most Recent News Stories 01/23/2015 Hagel: Late Saudi King Was Committed Friend, Partner 01/23/2015 Hagel Calls to Congratulate New Japanese Defense Minister 01/23/2015 Face of Defense: Air Force Officer Trains for Iditarod 01/23/2015 Operation Inherent Resolve Airstrikes Continue in Syria, Iraq 01/22/2015 Hagel Discusses Alliance Progress With South Korean Counterpart 01/22/2015 Face of Defense: Soldier’s Trade Supports Battalion’s Mission 01/22/2015 Airstrikes Continue Against ISIL Targets in Syria, Iraq 01/22/2015 Hagel Thanks U.S. Military, Lauds American Leadership 01/22/2015 DoD Seeks 10-year Extension of Small Business Mentoring Program 01/22/2015 Hagel: Budget, Congressional Partnership Central to DoD Strength . 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Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about FacebookEmailTwitterGoogle+LinkedInPinterest Patriotism not thoughtless nationalism: Column This Fourth of July, Americans should focus on what we have in common and reflect on our future. Loading… Post to Facebook ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ {# IFRAME: http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=6Lf7fuESAAAAAJ3_KMIDbkQySsEE0vMkLXU kq4eY #} CancelSend Sent! A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. 7 Join the Nation's Conversation To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs Patriotism not thoughtless nationalism: Column James S. Robbins 4:53 p.m. EDT July 2, 2013 This Fourth of July, Americans should focus on what we have in common and reflect on our future. Fourth of July fireworks Fireworks over the Capitol and the Washington Monument on July 4.(Photo: Alex Brandon, AP) Story Highlights * Public confidence in national institutions is at a historic low. * For some, the word patriot has become a rallying cry. For others, it is a dirty word. * Patriotism is not a thoughtless glorification of all things American, whether good or ill. 119 CONNECT 8 TWEET 1 LINKEDIN 7 COMMENTEMAILMORE America's 237th birthday arrives with the country deeply divided. Whether over politics, policies or lifestyles, Americans seem to be gravitating into distinct and irreconcilable camps. In Washington, partisanship in the halls of Congress has grown to levels not seen since the decades following the Civil War. Public confidence in national institutions such as the government, the news media, big business and big labor is at a historic low. Common ground is vanishing. Civility is in short supply. The country is hanging together, but who knows for how long. However, divisiveness is not destiny. A core set of American values remains, rooted in freedom and the experience of generations of self-government. They encompass the American dream of a better life for our children. They are an expression of life and liberty of a free people. July 4 should be a time to join together and focus on the commonalities of life in this country. It is a day to celebrate freedom and reflect on the future of the American experiment. 90% 'very patriotic' Independence Day is our patriotic holiday. For some, the word patriot has become a rallying cry. For others it is a dirty word, implying thoughtless nationalism. But most Americans believe it accurately describes them. The American values poll taken annually by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press shows that the percentage of people who agree with the statement "I am very patriotic" has been right around 90% in every poll since the center began asking the question in 1987. Granted, patriot can mean different things to different people, but that has always been the case. The word is far older than the United States. Today, we associate the word patriot with the American revolutionaries, but various parties in the British Parliament also referred to themselves as patriots. And King George III had long been known as "the patriot king," a title he inherited from his father. Thus, every side in the American Revolution claimed to be patriotic, except the Hessian mercenaries hired by Britain. In finding a way to unite around the patriotic feeling that is common across that 90% of Americans, it is tempting to look to political leaders, but they might be more the cause of division than its cure. Campaign pledges of post-partisanship and bridge-building have foundered on the hard rocks of power politics. This is a bipartisan problem and has grown more severe in the 21st century. According to Gallup surveys, nine of the 10 most polarized years took place during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, even as both men ran on the idea of uniting a divided nation. Reaching out, not preaching But reaching out to the other side, not just preaching, entails risk. Contemporary politicians have found it easier not to lead. They would rather press wedge issues than forge solutions. The Constitution put compromise at the center of every aspect of government. And the inability to establish meaningful ties across the aisle is the principle reason for the dysfunction in government today. If that is to change, the people, not politicians, must be the ones to do the work. They can recapture the American spirit, consciously embrace the American identity and seek common ground. Accept a shared history and common vision for the future based on American principles. Tone down the disputes that ravage the body politic. Heat up the melting pot and stop drawing lines that divide people. End the fighting over the supposed moral high ground that has left it a burned over hill. Rediscover the positive virtues and harness the natural optimism of a free people. Patriotism is not a thoughtless glorification of all things American, whether good or ill. It is the recognition of American ideals, and a belief in seeking the best for the country as a whole. It is a reaffirmation of the aspects of Americanism that speak to the best in everyone. Patriotism is a commendable sentiment. It is only through nurturing this sense of goodness and recognizing it in each other, even those with whom we disagree, that the country can survive, if it is meant to. There is nothing wrong with the USA that couldn't be fixed if the country had more American patriots. James S. Robbins, author of Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism and the New American Identity, is deputy editor of Rare.us. In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. 119 CONNECT 8 TWEET 1 LINKEDIN 7 COMMENTEMAILMORE Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/16368as Log in with your social account: __________________________________________________________________ Or, you can log in or sign up using Forbes. * Forbes Forbes * New Posts +3 posts this hour * Most Popular America's Youngest Billionaires * Lists The 2015 30 Under 30 * Video 30 Under 30 * ____________________ submit 15 Stocks to BUY for 2015 Help | Connect | Sign up | Log in Karlyn Bowman Karlyn Bowman, None Follow Following Unfollow 7/01/2010 @ 11:15AM American Patriotism In 2010 comments, called-out How patriotic are Americans? The answer is simple and straightforward. Americans love their country and aren’t afraid to say so. Americans would rather live in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world, and they still believe the fundamental structure of our democratic system is sound. But American patriotism is not of the knee-jerk or blind variety. They are vocal in their criticisms, and right now, are deeply dissatisfied and frustrated with the way things are going in the country. Patriotic attitudes are generally very stable. In a question Gallup asked in January 2001, 87% said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. When Pew repeated the identical question last year, 86% gave that response. In 2001 and 2009, only 1% said they were “not at all proud.” The 9/11 tragedy produced more overt displays of patriotism and heightened sentiment, but responses soon returned to the norm. When the Pew Research Center asked people last year to agree or disagree with the statement “I am very patriotic,” 54% “completely” agreed with it and another 34% did so “moderately,” for 88% overall agreement In 1987, when Pew asked this question for the first time, 89% agreed. Pew notes that there has been little variation in responses in more than a dozen iterations of the question. There are some interesting differences among subgroups the population. Young people are less likely than older ones to express strong patriotic sentiment. Patriotism, in other words, may come with age. Black Americans’ attitudes have become more positive about many aspects of society since Barack Obama became president, but there has been little change in the willingness of blacks to express strong patriotism. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they are very patriotic. Pollsters also ask people about the patriotism of their countrymen. In a Pew question from 2010, one-third said they were more patriotic than their fellow citizens, but a clear majority, 59%, said they were about as patriotic. Only 6% considered themselves less so. Americans’ patriotism is steadfast in part because they believe they have the best system of government in the world. In 2007, during the divisive Iraq war, a pollster asked people about the statement, “Whatever its faults, the United States still has the best system of government in the world.” Eighty-one percent agreed. That response is very similar to the one ABC got when it first asked this question in 1992 (85%). Americans are very critical today of the performance of many of our central institutions. Two new polls this week show that around two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, and many other surveys reveal deep anxiety. But the fundamental structure seems sound to most people. In his travels in the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville described America as exceptional, or qualitatively different; the surveys bear this out. In World Values Surveys, Americans are more likely than people in most other countries to say that they are very patriotic, and more people in the U.S. than elsewhere say they prefer to live in their home country. In 1948 Gallup asked people whether they would live in another country if they were free to do so, and only 3% said they would. In a 2009 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics question, 7% said another country would be a better place to live than the U.S. Ninety percent said the U.S. was the best place to live. Not a bad run. A 1983 question from The New York Times that hasn’t been repeated since asked people whether you actually have to do something to be patriotic or whether it is enough to love one’s country. One-third said a person had to do something, but two-thirds said it was enough to love one’s country. When asked what kind of acts would be demonstrations of patriotism, large majorities answered voting, joining in the singing of The Star Spangled Banner and serving in the military or on a jury. After 9/11 around 80% of Americans told pollsters that they flew the flag. A few years later around 60% gave that response. A shock like 9/11 can produce more intense patriotism, but the ordinary everyday variety of American patriotism appears very durable indeed. Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, writes a weekly column for Forbes. 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Blow * David Brooks * Frank Bruni * Roger Cohen * Gail Collins * Ross Douthat * Maureen Dowd * Thomas L. Friedman * Nicholas Kristof * Paul Krugman * Joe Nocera [kicker-opinionpages.png] Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web ____________________ (Submit) Search The Stone Is Our Patriotism Moral? By Gary Gutting July 3, 2012 7:05 pm July 3, 2012 7:05 pm (Submit) The Stone The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. To my mind, the Fourth of July has a lot going for it compared with other holidays: great food without a lot of work, warm weather, no presents, and fireworks. And, in our house, at least, there’s the special moment when we read out loud the Declaration of Independence and follow with a toast (American sparkling wine, of course), “To the United States of America!” And I have to force back tears of pride at being an American. Patriotism need not conflict with a universal moral outlook. This is my own distinctive experience of what we call “patriotism,” and I suspect that many Americans experience something similar, and acknowledge it in their own ways. Amid the frequent confusion, frustration and anger of our political disagreements, patriotism — a deep-seated love of our country — remains something that has the potential to bring us together, particularly at times of national crisis or triumph. But within my own particular intellectual tribe of philosophers, patriotism is often regarded as a “problem,” an emotion that many find hard to defend as morally appropriate. Of course, many Americans are uneasy with, even repelled by, certain expressions of patriotism — perhaps the obligatory flag-pins of politicians, the inanity of “freedom fries,” the suggestion in the revised Pledge of Allegiance that atheists aren’t patriotic, or even readings of the Declaration of Independence. But the philosophical problem of patriotism is not about whether or not certain expressions of patriotism are appropriate; it is about the moral defensibility of the attitude as such. (For a good survey of the philosophical issues see Igor Primoriz’s Stanford Encyclopedia article.) At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates asks what justice (doing the morally right thing) is, and Polemarchus replies that it’s helping your friends and harming your enemies. That was the answer among the ancient Greeks as well as many other traditional societies. Moral behavior was the way you treated those in your “in-group,” as opposed to outsiders. Socrates questioned this ethical exclusivism, thus beginning a centuries-long argument that, by modern times, led most major moral philosophers (for example, Mill and Kant) to conclude that morality required an impartial, universal viewpoint that treated all human beings as equals. In other words, the “in-group” for morality is not any particular social group (family, city, nation) but humankind as a whole. This universal moral viewpoint seems to reject patriotism for “cosmopolitanism” —the view perhaps first formulated by Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, replied that he was a citizen of the world. Certainly, patriotism can take an explicitly amoral form: “My country, right or wrong.” But even strong traditional patriots can accept moral limits on the means we use to advance the cause of our country. They may agree, for example, that it’s wrong to threaten Canada with nuclear annihilation to obtain a more favorable trade agreement. But the moral problem for patriotism arises at a deeper level. Suppose the question is not about blatantly immoral means but simply about whether our country should flourish at the expense of another? Suppose, for example, that at some point Saudi Arabia, now allied with China, threatened to curtail our access to its oil, thereby significantly reducing our productivity and tipping the balance of world economic power to China. Imagine an American president who declined to oppose this action because he had concluded that, from a disinterested moral viewpoint, it was better for mankind as a whole. Even if we admired such a response, it’s hard to think that it would express patriotic regard for the United States. Should we therefore conclude that patriotism is ultimately at odds with a moral viewpoint? There remains the option of denying that morality has the universal, all-inclusive nature modern philosophers think it has. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, argues that morality is rooted in the life of a specific real community — a village, a city, a nation, with its idiosyncratic customs and history — and that, therefore, adherence to morality requires loyalty to such a community. Patriotism, on this view, is essential for living a morally good life. MacIntyre’s argument (in his Lindley Lecture, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”) has provided the most powerful contemporary defense of a full-blooded patriotism. It may seem, then, that we must either accept modern universalist ethics and reject patriotism as a basic moral virtue or accept patriotism along with MacIntyre’s traditional localist morality. But perhaps, at least in the American context, there is a way of avoiding the dilemma. For what is the animating ideal of American patriotism if not the freedom of all persons, not just its own citizens? This is apparent in our Declaration, which bases its case for independence on the principle that governments exist to “secure the rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to which all persons are equally entitled. This principle is the avowed purpose of all our actions as a nation, and we may read our history as the story of our successes and failures in carrying out this principle. America, then, is the paradox of a local historical project that aims at universal liberation. Through this project, we have a way of combining traditional patriotism with universal morality. Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series. This project has had many failures, most often when we forget that the freedom of a nation must always grow from its own historical roots. We cannot simply wage a war that rips up those roots and then transplant shoots from our own stock (American-style capitalism, political parties, our popular culture). We have also often forgotten that the liberation of our own citizens is by no means complete. But none of this alters the fact that our governments have often worked and our soldiers died not just for our own freedom but for the freedom of all nations. We are a MacIntyrean community that is still trying to live out a modern morality that seeks the freedom of everyone. I love America because I still believe that this sublime project is possible. __________________________________________________________________ Gary Gutting Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone. Correction: July 4, 2012 An earlier version of this article misidentified the speaker in Plato's Republic who declares that justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies. It was Polemarchus, the son of Cephalus, not Cephalus himself. 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Reports from local media confirmed that hundreds of students from Dakota Ridge, Chatfield, Arvada West, Pomona, Ralston Valley, Evergreen, Wheat Ridge, and Golden high schools participated in the walkouts and demonstrations which included the blocking of a main intersection in suburban Denver on Wednesday morning. The proposal, submitted by a three-member majority of the school board calling itself the "Board Committee for Curriculum Review," stated: "Theories should be distinguished from fact. Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage. Content pertaining to political and social movements in history should present balanced and factual treatment of the positions." The walkouts came on the heels of a "sick-out" involving some 50 teachers on Friday, which was planned in response to the US history curriculum proposal and to new teacher evaluation measures. A statement issued Monday by Conifer High School teachers participating in the sick-out denounced "the Board's insistence on censoring the college preparatory AP US History curriculum," saying it would "require teachers to completely ignore certain aspects of American history." The statement further condemned the imposition of "an arbitrary, nontransparent evaluation system that vests absolute authority in administrators." Students organized their own protests for the following week via Facebook after learning of the teacher sick-out. The students were strongly warned against participating in the demonstrations by school administrators but proceeded to walk out anyway, local parents said. Jefferson County, the second largest school district in Colorado, is among several districts that have become focal points for controversy surrounding efforts to revise the AP US History curriculum (APUSH) nationwide. Opponents of the revised history curriculum, described by Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams as unduly emphasizing "race, gender, class, ethnicity, grievance and American-bashing," have sought to alter local education statutes to favor a more "conservative" approach to US history. Such efforts have already met with some success in Texas, where operating rules drawn up by the State Board of Education (SBOE) in 2013 contain language almost identical to that of the Jefferson County proposal: "The materials should not include selections or works that encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the law. Violence, if it appears, should be treated in the context of its cause and consequence. It should not appear for reasons of unwholesome excitement or sensationalism." The Texas SBOE rules state openly that historical curricula should be designed to promote "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods; investments that are determined by private decision rather than by state control; and prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined in a free market." No serious history of the United States could be written without giving extensive treatment of “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of law,” including such epochal advances as the American Revolution, the Civil War, the struggles of the labor movement over a century, and the civil rights movement. Presumably the defenders of private ownership are outraged by positive treatment of the greatest state attack on “private” property in world history up to that point, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves throughout the Confederacy, without compensation to the slave-owners. While media coverage presents the issue as a struggle between "conservatives" and "liberals," in reality the assault on historical knowledge by the ultra-right is bound up with the broader education "reform" agenda being implemented nationwide by the Obama administration, which has continued and deepened the reactionary education policies of the George W. Bush administration. In its education policies, as in everything else, the Obama administration stands shoulder to shoulder with the most rabidly pro-corporate elements in American society, advancing a program of merit pay, teacher evaluations based on standardized testing, and privatization of education through promotion of charter schools. In a commentary published in the Colorado Observer commending the newly elected Jefferson County school board, Dustin Zvonek of the ultra-right Americans for Prosperity, part of the Koch brothers lobbying empire, called for "common sense reforms" such as "funding fairness for charter schools" and "a merit pay system which links better documented performance to higher pay for teachers." Zvonek's recommendations have the full support of the Democratic Party leadership and the Obama administration, not just the Republican right. No struggle against the destruction of public education and the associated process of historical falsification can succeed without a complete break from the Democrats and the entire "liberal" establishment. This has to be the starting point for the Jefferson County students and all who support their efforts. The Jefferson County student protests appear set to continue, in one form or another. The JeffCo Students Defending History Facebook page announced Wednesday that students and teachers should come to school on Friday dressed as historical figures or movements responsible for "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law." Commenting Discussion Rules » Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. 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President Barack Obama speaks on the economy in Georgetown Waterfront Park on July 1, 2014, in Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama speaks on the economy in Georgetown Waterfront Park on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. By Katherine Peralta July 1, 2014 | 4:21 p.m. EDT + More * * * * * * * President Barack Obama called for “economic patriotism” – bipartisan action to boost American growth – in remarks on the economy at the Georgetown Waterfront Tuesday. Obama used the Key Bridge as the literal background to push for congressional action to replenish the quickly depleting Highway Trust Fund. The account provides funding for highway, bridge and road repair and is slated to run out of money by the end of August. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx sent letters Tuesday to state departments of transportation warning of the urgency of the situation and noted that without congressional action, the Federal Highway Administration soon might not be able to make same-day payments to reimburse states for infrastructure projects. [READ: The U.S. Workforce Is Going Gray] This puts nearly 700,000 jobs at risk, Obama said. “It’d be like Congress threatening to lay off entire population of Denver, Seattle or Boston,” he said. Through business tax reform, the Obama administration has proposed a four-year, $302 billion transportation reauthorization plan called the GROW AMERICA Act to help address the fund's shortfall. “It’s not crazy, it’s not socialism, it’s not the imperial presidency,” Obama said. “We’re just building roads and bridges the way we’ve been doing for 50, 100 years.” Obama called Republican inaction on economic issues like the Highway Trust Fund and raising the minimum wage “not just a political stunt” and that it has tangible effects on the American middle class. [ALSO: Census Shows White Deaths Outpace Birth] “The economy doesn’t grow from the top-down, it grows from the middle-up. We could be doing so much more if Republicans in Congress were doing more,” he said, adding that he’ll continue to forge ahead without the support of Congress to implement economic proposals. “I’d rather do things with [Congress] – pass some laws, make sure the Highway Trust Fund is funded so we don’t lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. Middle-class families can’t wait for members of Congress to do stuff. So sue me,” he said, referencing Republican House Speaker John Boehner’s recent announcement that he’s suing Obama. “As long as they do nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something,” he added. TAGS: Obama, Barack Obama administration infrastructure Congress Boehner, John minimum wage economy * * * * * * + More * Katherine Peralta Katherine Peralta is an economy reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow her on Twitter or reach her at kperalta@usnews.com. 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By Scott O., University Place, WA More by this author Modern Patriotism Image Credit: Pooja B., Naperville, IL What makes a patriot? People through the ages have carried out both horrible and wonderful acts under the banner of patriotism. How then are we to define it? The concept of patriotism is just as debated and relevant today as it was during the Civil War. If our nation is to survive its current challenges, the definition of a true patriot must be clear. So, what is true patriotism? Only 57 percent of U.S. citizens over 18 described themselves as either “extremelyâ€� or “veryâ€� patriotic in a study by AARP. Can our nation really survive on 57 percent? I believe these shoddy Âratings are the result of widespread misuse of the term “patriot.â€� Many believe patriotism to be blind obedience to one's nation. Samuel Johnson, one of the most quoted European writers in history, said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.â€� Are patriots really just a bunch of yes-men who bow to the president's every whim? If so, one wonders how we have managed to remain a democracy all these years. I have to disagree with Johnson. I prefer to quote Carl Schurz, the German revolutionary and, later, American political scientist who said, “My country … if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.â€� Schurz's idea of patriotism is often referred to today as “loyal opposition.â€� This means seeking to change the social behavior of your country out of feelings of national love and patriotic duty. Loyal Âopposition is not the blind obedience of the uninformed and ignorant but rather active and sensible Âreconstruction of a system that one believes to be Âessentially good but critically flawed. As a student at a somewhat liberal school in an Âexceedingly liberal state, I constantly find myself Âannoyed when my peers talk about “moving to Canadaâ€� or some other nonsense. My response? “Go ahead. Please move to Canada. It'll be much easier for the rest of us to fix things without your constant whining.â€� While some may consider this harsh, I invite anyone who can't see the good in America, despite her blemishes, to leave. We must love our country enough to stay and work to change it for the better. We must follow the example of civil rights Âactivist James Baldwin, who said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, Âexactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.â€� He and other members of the then-loyal opposition understood that the desire to change America is itself a demonstration of one's love for the nation. Some say that there is little reason to love America. I don't believe any rational person would accept this. Sure, our country has made mistakes throughout history, but while the ethics behind some of these Âdecisions were admittedly murky, it is not right to blame the entire nation for a few morally ambiguous politicians. After all, think of the many wonderful contributions America has made to the world. The the cotton gin, steamboat, cylinder printing press, telephone, light bulb, gasoline-powered car, and even air conditioning were American inventions. The first slave to patent an invention did so in America, and the modern rocket was developed here. The first flight across the Atlantic took off from America. Think of where the world would be now were it not for this country. Despite our achievements, it is important that we not lose sight of the big picture. Part of loyal opposition in modern America is a long-term world view. We must look into the future and decide what role we will play in it. As Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana said, “A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.â€� Many third-world nations receive regular and Âcrucial support from America. Our relationship with China will become more significant as that country's wealth and power grow. It will take the practical Âinvestment of time and resources by loyal activists to ensure America's continued prosperity. In the words of Norman Thomas, “If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.â€� F This work has been published in the Teen Ink monthly print magazine. This piece has been published in Teen Ink’s monthly print magazine. 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Report abuse [162984.jpg] KelliB said... May 9, 2012 at 12:04 pm Very interesting perspective. I don't have that problem with living in a liberal area like you do because my state and city are extremely democratic, but there are some of them. I find that close mindedness is common this subject. It is kosher to believe, specifically in TX, that patriotism means that you are in the military. I do not agree there. I believe what you said. That patriotism is believing in your country even when its in a dark place. I believe America is akin to a phoenix. We've had... (more ») [162984.jpg] KelliB replied... May 9, 2012 at 12:06 pm oh--sorry i forgot-- Bravo Scott!! Wonderful job! Applause to you. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] AthenaBook said... Dec. 29, 2011 at 7:38 pm Nicely done; engaging, yet informative. I was drawn in to this interesting topic and I was glad it was so well written because I really enjoy the topic you've chosen. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [157844.jpg] Pumpkinscout said... Oct. 24, 2011 at 1:11 pm This is excellently written, and Scott makes a great point. The U.S.A. is indeed flawed, in many ways, it has bad politicians, and bum laws, and all the rest, just like every country, but the thing about America is that because of the way our constitution is laid out, laws can be made fair, bad politicians can be removed from office by the people, and ammends can be made to things that are not fair or morally right. Here in the U.S. we have far more freedom than people in some other countries, y... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [153903.jpg] WishfulDoer said... Jul. 6, 2011 at 2:59 am I don't hate America in the least. But I'm one of those restless people who just wants to get out of here already, you know? Not because it's America, but because I'm tired of being in the same place. I want to travel and explore other countries and nations. At the same time, I want to see how everything here at home plays out from the front lines. I guess I'm just a bystander...a restless bystander, for that matter. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] MrNathanXD said... Jul. 6, 2011 at 2:02 am "The difference between a patriot and a rebel is who is in power at he time." Patriot, i believe, is one of those words that vary between connotations immensely, and i just lost my train of thought x) Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] Clopsey said... Jan. 10, 2011 at 3:00 pm I think people just get confused between nationalism and patriotism. The difference in the two is huge, but they don't actually ever teach that in schools... Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] TheBirdman1014 said... Nov. 28, 2010 at 10:53 pm There is no reason to love America over any other nation. Countries are nothing more than boundries fought over by the powerful through the blood of the innocent. Political boundries are nothing more than barriers that stop people, in this nation and in others, from focusing on the global problems and instead only trying to make theirown nation achieve prosperity. Why do we want to ensure American prosperity, yet not the prosperity of other nations (meaning their citizens)? It should b... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] K.T.S. said... Nov. 18, 2010 at 5:24 pm Your article was very innovative. Very interesting to read. I believe America is just a piece of land, with people on it that live their lives without monarchy. Free of tierney and free to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want. Just to pu that out there. And patriotism is a hard word to define these days. We don't have too much of it, as you have clearly supported. America is just so involved with every other country that has stayed interested in us for 100's of years. We ... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse Don Draper said... Oct. 15, 2010 at 2:17 pm I have pride in my country because of it's many accompishments. We put a man on the moon, we gained our independence when it looked like we weren't going to win, we stopped the spread of Nazis and Imperialists, and even though we committed crimes in the past. We acknowledge those mistakes and we're learning from it. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. [103157.jpg] BlueRain replied... Jul. 24, 2012 at 5:36 pm Out of those 4 examples, in at least the last three we had help involved. The French helped us in the Revolution, a whole bunch of other countries joined in the war with the Nazis, and at one point, American itself was Imperialist in policy. Like someone above said, it's just about national boundaries. And about the people who say they'd rather move to Canada, most aren't serious. It's their way of saying "I'm so sick and tired of this place", their way of expressing their distaste at ... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [112889.jpg] NihilTico said... Sept. 23, 2010 at 9:46 pm Nationalism, Patriotism, Jingoism. Of those, I would declare most of America to be Jingoist. There is a dividing line between patriotism and nationalism. No one can choose where to be born. I commend your attention, it reminds me of a Kingsolver essay we read once in class. It goes by the name "Jabberwocky" Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] Thinker said... Apr. 22, 2010 at 7:06 am I agree with the loyal opposition piece, but there are a few things that are a bit off. When your in a society of libertarians, the messages are often misconstrued, for one moving to another country is a sarcastic act, experssing the anger one has for the lack of expediance in changes in our country. Lastly, AARP is a group that protetects the rights and opinions of the elderly, so any statisitcs on the young are most likely also misconstrued. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [default_face.gif] elfiewrites said... Mar. 31, 2010 at 2:17 pm Excellent work! If you get the chance, may you please please please comment on my work too? Thanks so much Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse [90720.jpg] Montherieth said... Mar. 13, 2010 at 4:42 pm I personally find Mark Twain's definition of a patriot to be the most accurate (and amusing): "Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about." However, your article provided an interesting perspective on patriotism I have not thought of before. Loyal opposition is much better than the bigotry expressed by today's 'patriots'. Still, there are plenty of reasons to despise the U.S. There is little reason inde... (more ») Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse rightbehindyou61 said... Nov. 20, 2009 at 8:05 pm good job, i found myself nodding my head throughout the writing Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse Roberto_from_Dallas said... Sept. 30, 2009 at 10:56 pm A nice view of patriotism; well said. Let's hope for the renewal of loyal opposition, and for the decline of intolerance. "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." -- Abraham Lincoln Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse John said... Sept. 30, 2009 at 12:44 pm This is an excellent article if it were written by anyone but from a teenager it's exceptional. I only wish more 'adults' were able to think as clearly about their patriotism as Scott. I trust he will only grow to live out his convictions and be the kind of leader for his generation that we need. Sorry our generation hasn't done a very good job of standing up for America by holding the standards high. Reply [arrow_reply.png] Report abuse mimi said... Sept. 28, 2009 at 8:38 pm Well written, insightful, and deeply profound! Much truth to be found in this! 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Share on Reddit Share on StumbleUpon Tell A Friend 3 (3 Shares) IFRAME: http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=157889207614942&href=ht tp://www.opednews.com/articles/Our-Declining-Patriotism-by-Sam-Amer-130 327-616.html&send=false&layout=button_count&width=85&show_faces=false&a ction=like&colorscheme=light&font=verdana&height=21 Printer Friendly Page Save As Favorite View Favorites View Stats 3 comments Exclusive to OpEdNews: OpEdNews Op Eds 3/27/2013 at 16:11:05 Our Declining Patriotism By Sam Amer (about the author) Permalink (Page 1 of 1 pages) Related Topic(s): American Dream; American Exceptionalism; American Friends Service Committee; American Withdrawal Of Combat Troops From Iraq; Americans; Americans Killed; Great_American_Depression; PNAC Neocon Project For A New American C; Race African American Black Negro; Saving The American Republic; (more...) The_American_War_Against_Afghanistan, Add Tags (less...) Add to My Group(s) View Ratings | Rate It opednews.com Translate Page In reading the comments of some Iraq war veterans on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, you cannot escape the conclusion that American patriotism is in clear decline. The word "patriotism" comes from the Latin "patria," meaning "native land," which is in turn related to the Latin "pater," meaning "father." "Patriotism" thus invokes a paternal relationship. It embodies love and respect for your country, and the willingness to protect it, just as a father loves, respects and seeks to protect his children. Feelings of patriotism are therefore most intense when your country faces a common enemy. When we need to protect it from the invaders, along with our family, home, and possessions that are a part of it, we band together as one and fight to the death. In contrast, it is hard to feel patriotism and risk dying for your country when the cause for doing so is not clear or defensible, and your country is not directly threatened. Since World War II, too many wars for too many causes, and for unclear and ill-defined purposes, have eroded feelings of patriotism in everyday Americans. This was the case when we attacked Iraq on the suspicion that it had weapons of mass destruction. The same would hold true if we attacked Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. And, today, even after nearly twelves years of war in Afghanistan, many Americans are still questioning why we got into that war in the first place. Nowadays, Americans are not conscripted to serve in the military, nor do they volunteer to serve out of an abundance of patriotism. They join the armed forces mostly to get a job. Most of those fighting in Afghanistan right now would prefer to be at home, if only they could find a job and a better income there. The decline in patriotism in America has grown more pronounced as many Americans have come to feel that their country has abandoned them. This is especially true of the lower classes, who are increasingly aware of the unfairness of the country's growing wealth inequality. As those who return from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to poverty and joblessness in America frequently ask: What did we fight for? How can you love your country as you do your father, if it does nothing to help you find a job, secure a good life for your family, or enroll your kids in a good school? Still, it is not only the poor or the disintegrating middle class in America that feels less patriotic; the top one percent feels the same. They think that the country is taxing their income unfairly and giving their money to those who have not worked for it or don't deserve it in the first place. In response, they are stashing their money in other countries to avoid paying taxes. This is not necessarily surprising. For many of the rich, all countries, including the United States, are only places to do business. Not much patriotism there. The diminished patriotism in most developed countries can also be seen as an expression of modernity. In the modern world, tradition, religion, family and country are now defining us less. We are expected to be scientific, broad-minded and individualistic. Applying ancient rules of religion, family and country is now considered backward and underdeveloped. Our world is moving toward a more secular and universal liberal democracy. One consequence of this trend is that it is now becoming less and less acceptable for a civilized country to declare war against another, no matter what the reason. As a result, even our historical military heroes are falling out of favor. Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier of WWI said, "War is organized murder, and nothing else. There is nothing heroic about killing for your country. When you come right down to it, enemy combatants are defending their country from the foreign American attackers." Today, many Americans feel the same way. As they see it, American soldiers are invading foreign countries primarily for the benefit of the oil companies and other multinational corporations. They do so because they are getting paid for it. They are, in fact, just mercenaries. Most of the wars that America was, or is, involved in, do not generate national enthusiasm. Those in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all failed to stir nationalistic emotions in the American public. Because no important American national interest was really at stake, no one cared about these wars, except when the body bags came back. All the wars were like financial transactions, which involve little emotion. Moreover, unlike World War II, the end of hostilities did not engender feelings of pride and victory. It turned out that U.S. forces were better at initiating these wars than at winning them. America's Global War on Terror has also proved irrelevant to most Americans. While the U.S. was expending trillions of dollars in a futile effort to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Awakening turned the Middle East upside down without organized warfare. In hindsight, the War on Terror now appears pointless. It is probably still true that America is by far the greatest country on earth, partly because it projects ideals of freedom, liberty and human dignity. To remain great, however, we must hold on to those ideals and continue to promote them. In recent decades, America's inconsistency in pursuing its foundational ideals has diminished its citizens' feelings of loyalty and patriotism. America always talks about human rights and often bullies small countries over their human rights performance, especially when it is politically expedient. But when human rights concerns conflict with our interests, our ethical beliefs take a back seat nearly every time. The United States has plenty of allies whose human rights performance ranges from questionable to awful. Saudi Arabia and China are not-so-shining examples. America's moral failings were especially brought to light with the events of 9/11. After three thousand Americans were killed, the government felt it had to take some action that proved it was still the toughest guy on the block. The trouble was, there was no country to blame or retaliate against, so we attacked Iraq, which had almost no connection to our loss. As a result, the war failed to stimulate our feelings of patriotism. Worse yet, those who instigated that disastrous war were never disciplined or indicted. Nor were any of the senior officials in the Bush administration who authorized torture and renditions in either Iraq or Afghanistan ever faced with indictment or even serious investigation. And now, with the increased use of drones under Obama, and the frequent collateral killing of innocents, America may be coming close to losing totally both the dwindling patriotism of its citizens and its claim on moral authority in the world. What does all this mean for the future? The United States better think long and hard about any future wars in which it chooses to be engaged. If our national interests are not directly threatened and our cause not clearly justified, the government may find it very hard to recruit young Americans who are patriotic enough to be willing to give their lives for their country, no matter what the salary. It may also find that the world at large, which is rapidly adopting its own values of liberal democracy, may well be far less tolerant of an America that seeks to dominate weaker nations for no other reason than its own self-interest. Retired Pharmacologist with two masters and a Ph.D. Share on Google Plus Submit to Twitter Add this Page to Facebook! Share on LinkedIn Pin It! Add this Page to Fark! Submit to Reddit Submit to Stumble Upon Go To Commenting The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors. Writers Guidelines [bulletmail.gif] Contact Author [bulletmail.gif] Contact Editor [bulletarchive.gif] View Authors' Articles Related Topic(s): American Dream; American Exceptionalism; American Friends Service Committee; American Withdrawal Of Combat Troops From Iraq; Americans; Americans Killed; Great_American_Depression; PNAC Neocon Project For A New American C; Race African American Black Negro; Saving The American Republic; (more...) The_American_War_Against_Afghanistan, Add Tags (less...) Related Content [s_180_opednews_com_48597_Casablanca_129Pyxurz-02015_01_13_09_37_27-0.g if] America: Je Suis Not Interested [screen-shot-2015-01-03-at-7-31-17-pm-png_79_20150103-569.png] David Swanson: "War is So 2014!" 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Comments: (_) Expand (_) Shrink (_) Hide 3 people are discussing this page, with 3 comments To view all comments: Expand Comments (Or you can set your preferences to show all comments, always) Refresh We must continue to support our ideals irrespectiv... by Sam Amer on Wednesday, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:11:05 PM The decline in patriotism coincides with the rise ... by Bill Johnson on Wednesday, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:18:20 PM are what political entities are; lines drawn in th... by molly cruz on Thursday, Mar 28, 2013 at 1:30:07 PM __________________________________________________________________ [lwc_oen.jpg] The Last War Crime movie What if there was only one chance for justice? Build a Community of Supporters Ad info: click here Help us restore justice and free Don Siegelman [jonascover.jpg] Traces the pathway the Republican-Christian Alliance took, from historical reality to an all-too-predictable dystopic future * Classics of Liberal Thinking * Progressive Radio Links Tell a Friend: Tell A Friend _____________________________________________________ Copyright © 2002-2015, OpEdNews Powered by Populum Quantcast #alternate alternate PUBLIC BOOKS | Go to January 15 Issue Public Culture An interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies * Home * Issues * Articles * People * Books * News & Events * Info * Search ____________________ You are viewing an article. Access the full version or browse recent articles . Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere Craig Calhoun Globalization and the coming of postnational and transnational society are often presented as matters of necessity. Globalization appears as an inexorable force—perhaps of progress, perhaps simply of a capitalist juggernaut, but in any case irresistible. European integration, for example, is often sold to voters as a necessary response to the global integration of capital. In Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, a similar economistic imaginary is deployed to suggest that globalization moves of itself, and governments and citizens have only the option of adapting. Even where the globalist imaginary is not overwhelmingly economistic, it commonly shares in the image of a progressive and imperative modernization. Many accounts of the impact and implications of information technology exemplify this. Alternatives to globalization, on the other hand, are generally presented in terms of inherited identities and solidarities in need of defense. Usually this means nations and cultural identities imagined on the model of nations; sometimes it means religions, civilizations, or other structures of identity presented by their advocates as received rather than created. The social imaginary of inherited cultural tradition and social identity is prominent in ideologies like Hindutva and essential Ethiopianness, for example, as well as widespread notions of “cultural survival.” These are denigrated by proponents of transnational society, who see national and many other local solidarities as backward or outmoded, impositions of the past on the present. Both nationalist economic protectionism and Islamist movements, thus, are seen as being simply the regressive opposite of globalization. In each case, such a perspective leaves obscure the transnational organization of the resistance movement. In many settings, the economistic, or technologistic, imaginary of globalization is embraced by the very political leaders who advocate nationalist, religious, or other imaginaries that emphasize inherited cultural identity. The contradiction is avoided by assigning these to separate spheres. The Chinese phrase ti-yong has long signaled this, a condensation of “Western learning for material advancement, Eastern learning for spiritual essence.” Similarly divided imaginaries inform many Asian, Middle Eastern, and other societies. Even in Canada, a recent Financial Times article reported, “the country wants to become a lean global competitor while maintaining traditional local values.”1 In this essay, I take up two aspects of this discourse of globalization. First, I want to call attention to the dominance it grants social imaginaries that emphasize necessity and obscure options for political choice. Second, I want to address the inadequacy of most approaches to social solidarity in this literature. I will focus especially on the work of advocates of “cosmopolitan” approaches to transnational politics, including Jürgen Habermas with his notion of “constitutional patriotism.” I don’t mean to denigrate cosmopolitanism—in which I hope I share—but to problematize its acceptance of economistic, modernizing imaginaries without giving adequate attention to the formation of solidarity and the conditions that enable collective choices about the nature of society. In addition to questioning whether “thin identities” are adequate underpinnings for democracy, I will suggest that the public sphere be conceptualized not simply as a setting for rational debate and decision making—thus largely disregarding or transcending issues of identity—but as a setting for the development of social solidarity as a matter of choice, rather than necessity. Such choice may be partly rational and explicit, but is also a matter of “world-making” in Hannah Arendt’s sense. The production of new culture is as important as inheritance (and distinctions between the two are less clear than common usage implies). We should accordingly broaden the sense of constitutional patriotism to include culture-forming and institution-shaping senses of constitution, as well as narrowly legal-political ones. New ways of imagining identity, interests, and solidarity make possible new material forms of social relations. These in turn underwrite mutual commitments. The moment of choice can never be fully separated from that of creativity or construction. Cosmopolitanism and Constitutional Patriotism Contemplating simultaneously the questions of German integration and European integration, Habermas has called for grounding political identity in constitutional patriotism.2 This is an important concretization of a more general and increasingly widespread but not uncontested cosmopolitanism. The concept suggests both constitutional limits to political loyalty and loyalty to the legally enacted constitution as such. In the latter dimension, which Habermas emphasizes, the constitution provides both a referent for public discussion and a set of procedural norms to organize it and orient it to justifiable ends. The specific contents of any conception of the good life may vary, then, and modern societies will always admit of multiple such conceptions. Constitutional patriotism underwrites no single one of these, but rather a commitment to the justification of collective decisions and the exercise of power in terms of fairness. It is thus compatible with a wide range of specific constitutional arrangements, and with a variable balance between direct reference to universal rights and procedural norms on the one hand and a more specific political culture on the other. Similarly, ideas of rights and justice underpin a new movement of calls for cosmopolitan democracy, democracy not limited by nation-states.3 Though this is not a uniquely European development, there is a notable link between the cosmopolitan message and a certain sense of “movement” in European intellectual life. It harks back directly to the Enlightenment (complete with residual echoes of eighteenth-century aristocratic culture). It also commonly expresses a sense of what Europeans have learned about living together in a multinational region and of how Europeans may take on a civilized (if not precisely civilizing) mission in a conflict-ridden larger world. Cosmopolitanism is potentially consonant with a vision of a Europe of the nations—preserving not only cultural difference but also political autonomy—so long as nationalism is not ethnically communitarian and is subordinated to human and civil rights. But it has a stronger affinity with visions of confederation or of an even greater degree of integration, although it emphasizes the outward obligations of Europeans. What it eschews most is nationalism—especially in its separatist forms, but also any application of the nationalist vision of cultural community to supranational polities. What it claims most, in the spirit of Kant, is that people should see themselves as citizens of the world, not just of their countries. End of Excerpt | access full version Notes Earlier versions of parts of this text were presented as a Benjamin Meaker Lecture at the University of Bristol in June 2000 and to the Center for Transcultural Studies in July 2000. I am grateful for discussion from both audiences and especially to colleagues in the Center for their sustained challenges to and shaping of my ideas over many years. 1. Scott Morrison and Ken Warn, “Liberals Strive to Sharpen Competitive Edge,” in “Canada Survey,” Financial Times, 11 June 2001, 1–2. 2. Habermas’s abstract theoretical formulations are not altogether separate from his contributions to German public debate—notably, in this case, in relation to the incorporation of the East into a united but West-dominated Germany; to the “historians’ debate” over the legacy of the Third Reich; and to the debate over changes in the citizenship law, enacted in watered-down form to grant the children of immigrants naturalization rights. See, among many others, the essays collected in Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 3. For thoughtful examples, see essays in Daniele Archibugi and David Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1995); and Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin Köhler, eds., Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); and the more sustained exposition in David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). Habermas issues a similar call in Inclusion of the Other. See also the essays connecting the present to Kant’s cosmopolitan project in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Details Version Excerpt ( access full version ) Published in Volume 14, Number 1 Download Citation Info EndNote, Reference Manager, ProCite, BibTex, RefWorks Share This * Tweet this * Share on Facebook * Share on LinkedIn Also in Volume 14, Number 1 * Islam in Public Space Ludwig Ammann * African Modes of Self-Writing Achille Mbembe * "From Taiwan, Nationally Known Paris Bridal Salon: France, Taipei, Kaohsiung, Beijing, Shanghai, Dalien, Shantou, National Chain," Xi-Dan, Beijing, June 2000 Shujen Wang * Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner About the Journal Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year in Fall, Winter, and Spring for the Institute for Public Knowledge by Duke University Press. The journal's full archives are available online at Dukejournals.org. © Copyright 2006–2009 Public Culture and Duke University Press. All Rights Reserved. Contact Info Public Culture 20 Cooper Square, Suite 517 New York, NY 10003 212-998-7866 212-998-8468 Fax info@publicculture.org Download vCard Site Tools * Subscribe to the journal * Subscribe to web feeds * Join our mailing list * Submit your work * Get permissions * Contact us * View Sitemap [spacer.png] ____________________ (Submit) Search * Home * Events * News * Columns * Arts * Music * Nightlife * Eat * Photos * Classifieds * Us * Membership * Win Articles ____________________ (Submit) Search Duty to Warn Thursday Jul. 10th, 2014 Articles Thoughts on Patriotism, Real Democracy, Corrupt Crony Capitalism, Elections and Politics in America Add a Comment » by Gary G. Kohls, MD This week I am devoting most of my column to the writings of several progressive, anti-imperialist (economic or military), anti-racist, anti-fascist (that is, anti-corporatist and anti-militarist), pro-democracy, pro-environment, pro-sustainability writers with whom I resonate. These writers have been saying for years exactly what many of us have been thinking about for a long time—and they are saying it far better than I ever could. The excerpts below are from BlackAgendaReport.com and Fubarandgrill.org. Before the last presidential election (in 2012), Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon wrote the following criticism of America’s two-party system, which still rings true. Dixon wrote: “Your vote really is your voice, and in the modern era, every government on earth claims to rule with the consent of the people. This bestows upon the vote a unique kind of legal and symbolic power. The gap, however, between this legal, this symbolic power of the vote and any real ability to change things for the better is a vast one. The authorities rightly fear the people’s voice, and so have contrived law and custom to ensure that we are seldom heard and almost never heeded. “They would never dream of allowing us to vote on the price of gas, food, housing, credit or college tuition. But they don’t mind at all letting us choose between corporate-funded Republicans and corporate-funded Democrats. The powers that rule our economy, our media and our politics won’t let us vote on whether to bring the troops home from 140 countries and the seven seas, or whether to continue spending more on weapons of death and destruction than the other 95% of humanity combined. But they will let us choose between an ignorant, crazy or racist Republican who promises to give banksters, polluters and corporate criminals a free pass, and a sane, smart, level-headed free market liberal Democrat who does exactly the same thing, no matter what he promised. “The authorities won’t let us vote on whether the broadcast spectrum should be privatized, whether we should have the right to start and join unions, whether to create millions of good-paying green jobs. They won’t allow voters to decide whether corporations deserve more rights than flesh and blood people, or whether the president should be able to kidnap, torture, imprison and murder people without trials or even charges. But they will let us choose between a white guy and a black guy. As long as it’s their white guy, and their black one as well.” Why We Need a Viable Third Party That Does Not Bow Down to Corporations and Other War-Profiteers Dixon expands his thoughts on patriotism, democracy, corrupt crony capitalism, elections, and politics in America in his Fourth of July 2014 edition. The entire essay can be accessed at http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/why-elections-still-matter-exc ept-when-they-dont. Democrats and Republicans Have Created Ballot Access Hurdles “In states like Georgia where I live, third party candidates face incredible obstacles to even getting a candidate on the ballot. A Green Party congressional candidate, for example, has to get 20-25,000 signatures on a nominating petition to appear on the ballot, and a statewide candidate needs more than 60,000, distributed in a complicated formula among several core counties, while Republicans and Democrats simply pay a nominal fee. These are laws passed on the state level by Democrats and Republicans working together. Access to media is limited by private owners of print, broadcast, cable networks “Cable networks are laid and maintained beneath public streets and roads, with massive public subsidies and gobs of corporate welfare, but are privately owned by a handful of greedy corporations. Broadcast spectrum wasn’t invented by any clever engineer working for a corporation, it’s a property of the physical universe, like sunlight. But the same handful of greedy telecoms own that too, along with most of the print newspapers. “The private owners of these public resources have decreed that the only candidates and causes who can afford campaign commercials are those bankrolled by wealthy individuals and greedy corporations, often with legally anonymous cash. With no interest in an informed public, the billionaires who own print, cable and broadcast outlets have, for several decades, been firing reporters and spending less every year on journalism. Reporters refuse to cover third party candidates in partisan elections, lest their careers end prematurely. In nominally “nonpartisan” races like mayor in most medium and large cities, the owners of media all but refuse to cover the existence of candidacies not endorsed by local elites.” In a response to Dixon’s piece, a blogger wrote, “The first thing we need is a massive coalition of leftists of all stripes, even left-liberals and anti-imperialist, populist, right-wing libertarians. We need a true movement of the 99% and that means bringing into the coalition libertarian types who decry so-called ‘crony capitalism’ and not capitalism per se. If in the short-term we can just take some small pockets of space and power for ‘regular folks’ then that will be very helpful toward our final end goal of completely transforming society. Local and (possibly) state elections MIGHT, depending on a variety of factors including our strengths, weaknesses, resources (money, human, etc.) and those of the enemy arrayed against us in that particular space or arena, be helpful in growing a populist movement.” In another, more lengthy response to Dixon’s piece, Mark E. Smith of Fubarandgrill.org commented. (Note: Smith’s website’s name references the U.S. military grunt’s derogatory appraisal of the Pentagon’s bureaucratic inefficiencies. FUBAR is short for “f----- up beyond all recognition,” as in SNAFU, which is U.S. military lingo for “situation normal: all f----- up.” His thoughtful essays can be found at http://fubarandgrill.org.) Smith writes, “I think we are all agreed that there are times and places when voting can be useful and that there are times and places when it is not. Where we differ is when and where such places may be and how to determine which is which. “I’m often accused of being opposed to voting and this is my usual response: “A democratic system of government is one in which power is vested in the hands of the people. That’s the dictionary definition and most people will agree to it. Is America Actually a Pseudodemocracy “An undemocratic system of government is one in which power is vested in the hands of the government [Author’s note: or in the hands of corporations or their wealthy elites]. That government could be a dictatorship, a monarchy, a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or even a pseudo-democracy, but if power is vested in the hands of the government [Author’s note: or corporate elites] rather than in the hands of the people, the system does not meet the definition of a democratic form of government. “In a democratic form of government, where power is vested in the hands of the people, voting is the most precious right of all, as it is the way that the people exercise the power vested in them, either directly by voting on issues, budgets, and policies, or indirectly by voting for representatives who are obligated to represent their constituents and can be directly recalled by the people at any time that they fail to represent the people who elected them. “In an undemocratic form of government, where power is vested in the hands of the government rather than in the hands of the people, voting is totally worthless and a waste of time, as the people do not have power and the government doesn’t have to count their votes, can miscount and/or ignore their votes, can overrule the popular vote, and elected representatives are not obligated to represent their constituents but can represent their personal beliefs or philosophies, their big donors, or whatever they wish, and cannot be held accountable as long as they continue in office, which is the only time that people need them to represent the interests of the people. “In an undemocratic form of government, voters can hope that their votes might be counted, can hope that their elected officials might represent them, but have no power to ensure that their votes are counted or that their elected officials actually represent them. “Which system we have—democratic or undemocratic (i.e. pseudo-democratic)—makes all the difference. “In a democratic system, voting is precious and essential. In an undemocratic system, it can be fatal, as it can allow the destruction of the economy, military adventurism, obstacles to basic human rights such as jobs, education, food, clothing, shelter, and health care, and other tragic consequences of allowing government to exercise uncontrolled power rather than vesting power in the hands of the people. “Most people in the U.S. today are opposed to our government’s ongoing wars of aggression. Even those who are uninformed and uneducated, who aren’t aware that historically, the way that most empires fell was because they became militarily overextended, sense that there is something wrong with spending trillions of dollars on foreign wars while basic domestic needs go unmet. “But because we do not have a democratic system of government, we have no power to end the wars. The best we can do is vote for candidates we hope might end the wars, but… there is nothing we can do about it because our government has the power to start or end wars, and we do not. If wars were on the ballot, it could only be as a nonbinding referendum, as there is no Constitutional way to force the government to obey the will of the people. The Constitution vested power in the government rather than in the hands of the people. “I do not oppose voting any more than I oppose breathing. I oppose voting only when it occurs within an undemocratic form of government, thus legitimizing an undemocratic form of government and consenting to be governed undemocratically, just as I oppose breathing only when in a toxic or anaerobic environment where breathing can be fatal. “Just as I would want to try to help anyone trapped in a toxic or anaerobic environment to hold their breath until they could escape, I want to try to help people trapped in an undemocratic form of government withhold their votes until they can escape. If I tell a drowning person to hold his breath until he can get his head above water, I am not condemning breathing. If I tell people not to vote until they have a democratic form of government, I am not condemning voting. “…my thesis is that the way to decide if voting is useful or not is to determine whether or not it is taking place within a democratic form of government where the votes are the voice of the people and are the final say in deciding policy. If the votes are not the final say, they are no say at all, just a trick and a trap to get people to relinquish their power and vote for their own oppression.” I conclude this column by paraphrasing a useful item from an anonymous blogger that I also found on the Fubarandgrill.com website: “The U.S. government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big multinational private corporations that fund it, and no matter who is in office, it will continue to do the bidding of the wealthy global elites intent on continuing to murder millions of innocents and pollute the entire planet for profit. Those profits all go to the wealthy elites and their puppets, with ordinary people never seeing any benefit. Ordinary people in the U.S. are being taxed to pay for the troops and mercenaries that are committing these genocides on behalf of private corporations.” Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug mental health care for the last decade of his career. He is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and writes about mental ill health, fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism and other violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements. Tweet Share « Previous [3689_10_584_Forrest_Johnson.jpg] Next » [3693_1558_188_John_Laforge2014.png] More Articles Like This Duty to Warn Articles Call Us: 218.722.0173 We’re likely on the beat, but will get back to you. Email Us: info@duluthreader.com(info (at) duluthreader [d0t] com,) Photos, original cartoons, & articles are welcome. Advertise: advertise@duluthreader.com(advertise (at) duluthreader [d0t] com,) Robert Boone Publisher • Editor Paul Whyte Staff Writer Address: Reader Weekly, Inc. P.O. Box 16122 Duluth, Minnesota 55816 #Politics Skip to Main Content subnav toggle NPR Search ____________________ Toggle search * Stations * Donate * Shop * Sign In/Register * + + Logout * News * Arts & Life * Music * Topics + News + U.S. + World + Politics + Business + Technology + Science + Health + Race & Culture + Education + Arts & Life + Books + Movies + Pop Culture + Food + Art & Design + Performing Arts + Photography + Music + First Listen + Songs We Love + Music Articles + Tiny Desk Concerts + Videos * Programs + News and Conversations + Morning Edition + All Things Considered + Fresh Air + Here & Now + The Diane Rehm Show + Latino USA + On The Media + On Point + Weekend Edition Saturday + Weekend Edition Sunday + Storytelling & Humor + Ask Me Another + The Best Of Car Talk + Bullseye + Invisibilia + Radiolab + Snap Judgment + StoryCorps + TED Radio Hour + Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! + Music + All Songs Considered + Alt.Latino + First Listen + From The Top + Jazz Night In America + Metropolis + Microphone Check + Mountain Stage + Piano Jazz + Song Travels + The Thistle & Shamrock + World Cafe * Listen NPR logo NPR * News > * Politics America's Love Affair With Nationalism September 28, 201112:40 PM ET Linton Weeks 2010 Linton Weeks Twitter Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays celebrate during the singing of "God Bless America" during the game against the Boston Red Sox at Tropicana Field on Sept. 11 in St. Petersburg, Fla. Fans of the Tampa Bay Rays celebrate during the singing of "God Bless America" during the game against the Boston Red Sox at Tropicana Field on Sept. 11 in St. Petersburg, Fla. J. Meric/Getty Images hide caption itoggle caption J. Meric/Getty Images Picture this: An alternate-reality, suspended-in-space American metropolis where steampunk contraptions — like propeller-driven dirigibles, squeaky trolley wires and clunky robotic creatures — operate against a backdrop of clanging liberty bells; red, white and blue powder kegs; and jingoistic posters warning: "Patriots! Arm Thyself Against the Foreigners and Anarchists!" OK. So you can't quite picture it. No sweat. It's the surrealistic setting of Bioshock: Infinite, a video game — sequel to the critically acclaimed Bioshock — scheduled for release from Irrational Games in 2012. The storyline is imaginative, assimilating eclectic influences. But one salient characteristic is unmistakable: The pro-Uncle Sam, protectionist feel of the game reflects the mood of many present-day American nationalists. "The nationalism thrown throughout this is so overt," says video game critic Hilary Goldstein in a preview trailer. “ Nationalism can contribute to human progress and freedom and education and economic vitality, or it can contribute to violence, fear, and international conflicts. - Lloyd Kramer You don't need to fire up the Xbox 360 to know that there has been among many Americans a swell of nationalism in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. • Go to a baseball game where fans often croon "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch. • Check out the American flag pins on the lapels or collars of nearly every politician. • Listen to Toby Keith's current hit Made in America and read how it inspired a Michigan kindergarten class to create an "American-made show-and-tell." Call it what you will — American nationalism or patriotism — it is covering the country like a Wi-Fi cloud — above the fruited plain from sea to shining sea. Where does this rising nationalism spring from? And is it a positive or a negative trait for a country? That all depends ... A Sense of Selfhood Nationalism flows through our lives every day, observes Lloyd Kramer, author of the recent book Nationalism in Europe and America. And, like most "isms," Kramer says, nationalism carries with it both good and bad characteristics. "When people feel committed to larger communities or interests or to ideas of human rights and political progress, for example, nationalism can contribute to a sense of hope about the future. It can build positive personal and collective identities and a sense of selfhood in the modern world " Festival-goer Josh Bleeker waits for the first act on the main stage at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival, April 30 in Indio, Calif. Festival-goer Josh Bleeker waits for the first act on the main stage at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival, April 30 in Indio, Calif. Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images hide caption itoggle caption Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images On the other hand, he says, "nationalism often encourages fears of all kinds of other people: fears of other religions or races or cultures or ethnic groups or homosexuals. This fear can be mobilized for violence and scapegoating. It can lead people to feel aggrieved and constantly at risk." In various ways, he adds, "nationalism can contribute to human progress and freedom and education and economic vitality, or it can contribute to violence, fear and international conflicts." Nationalism, according to Kramer, is often in full flower on national holidays, during major sports events and at public memorials for deceased military troops. And nationalistic symbols, rituals and rhetoric are especially ramped up as the country moves toward a presidential election. A Political Tool? He's not kidding. Patriotism permeates contemporary American politics. As do accusations of unpatriotic behavior. Of course, the word "patriot" is a subjective characterization, and most politicians use it as code for someone who shares their beliefs. Americans "are a patriotic people," said Mitt Romney at the recent Republican presidential debate in Orlando. "We place our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem. No other people on Earth do that." So does that mean that people who don't place their hands over their hearts while the anthem is played are not patriots? Speaking to a Tea Party gathering in New Hampshire on Labor Day weekend, possible presidential candidate Sarah Palin said, "We patriots should not focus on petty political squabbles and media game sound bites. The Tea Party has got to be focused on the broader, much more important goals of this movement — replace Obama." Does that mean that someone who supports the president of the United States is not a patriot? From the Democratic angle, Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, speaking recently on the Tavis Smiley Show, suggested that members of the Tea Party should "stop being Tea Party people instead of patriots and Americans." Does that mean a Tea Partier cannot also be a patriot and an American? And Rick Perry in a new Web ad intones, "We don't need a president who apologizes for America. I believe in America. I believe in her purpose and her promise. ... God bless the United States of America." International Nationalism Though the United States may have its own brand of nationalism, most countries have a strong streak of patriotic pride. There are times when nationalism becomes more prominent on a global scale and other periods when it is displaced by other issues, says Peter Rutland, who writes the NationalismWatch blog. The last big wave was the post-Communist 1990s, when Yugoslavia became a handful of republics. Now we are experiencing another wave, Rutland says. "The economic rise of the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India and China] and other middle-income countries is often accompanied by nationalist assertion, China being the obvious case, also Turkey and many others." Increased globalization, he adds, "produces a countereffect of increased national assertion, worries about the loss of identity. Then we see a new wave of democratization — starting with the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union and now the Arab spring." He cites the book From Voting to Violence by Jack Snyder, which shows that democratization often leads "to an uptick on nationalist politics as media and political parties use nationalism as an organizing principle for the new political situation." The Arab spring, for example, is leading to more nationalist rhetoric and possibly policy changes to follow in places like Egypt, he says. And "Turkey shows that Islamism and nationalism can go together." — Linton Weeks After watching that ad, CNN's Carol Costello asked: "Should patriotism be a political tool?" She then pointed out that "patriotism has worked for Democrats, too, during the 2008 campaign. Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said wealthy Americans should pay more taxes because it's time to be patriotic." The Patriotic Center Patriotism, nationalism. Is there a difference? Peter Rutland, a professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., says that in the U.S., the word "nationalism" often has negative connotations. "So we talk instead about patriotism." He says, "Other people are nationalists; we are patriots." But for the sake of argument, the terms "nationalism" and "patriotism" are pretty much interchangeable, Rutland says. He studies this instinct on a global level and posts observations on his NationalismWatch blog. Rutland, Kramer and others who track nationalism point out that U.S. nationalism has swelled since 2001. Countrywide concerns about a faltering economy and a flood of immigration only intensify the notion of nationalism. Both liberal and conservative politicians have been adapting their language, Rutland says, "to try to appeal to the patriotic median voter." Rutland says that in light of that quest for the patriotic center, Obama's language has been particularly striking. "If you read his speech announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., or his inaugural address, you see a heavy emphasis on the common national narrative — the sacrifices of Gettysburg, the legacy of past generations, etc. — classic nationalist/patriotic imagery." Shovels To Snowshoes That nod toward nationalism served Obama well in the 2008 election. It has also worked for a number of business people, such as Todd Lipscomb. Not too long ago, Lipscomb was an executive in a California tech company. He lived in and traveled through Asia and the Pacific Rim for seven years. As his American company's global business increased, Lipscomb began to worry about the folks — their jobs and financial futures — back in the U.S. Four years ago, he resigned from his company, moved home to California and launched the website Made in USA Forever. He sells products — everything from shovels to snowshoes — that are domestically manufactured. "Stand with us to protect America's ability to produce, create jobs, and remain a world leader," the website intones. From his home in San Clemente, Lipscomb says "sales are surging. Conversely to the economic trends, the bad news has energized my customer base." Customers know "they are doing something real for our economy," Lipscomb says. "Every item is made here from U.S.A. components, so from the farmer that grows the cotton through every step of the way it helps our economy and creates jobs in a virtuous circle." There are many similar sites for domestically manufactured products, including Made in USA and the Made in America store. Lipscomb's website offers more than 2,800 products from over 480 "mostly small, family-owned business," Lipscomb says. But he adds, "Where we are weak is in electronics." Lipscomb has written a couple of books about his experience, including Re-Made in America: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing and Compete with the World. The issue of nationalism or patriotism is not a partisan concern, he says. He has been asked to appear on Ed Shultz's progressive radio show as well as the conservative Fox & Friends national TV program. He says his website attracts people of all stripes. "Conservatives, progressives, outdoorsmen, union members, immigrants, and many, many other groups come together on the website as Americans." In the end, he says, "this is not a red state or blue state issue, but truly a red, white and blue one." * Share + Facebook + Twitter + Google+ + Email * Comment More From Politics Asia Obama's India Visit Arrives At A Moment Of Optimism Julie Byard, head of a Detroit nursery, tells children stories and sings them songs prior to their afternoon nap in June 1942. Politics U.S. Once Had Universal Child Care, But Rebuilding It Won't Be Easy A woman cadet of National Cadet Corps (NCC) walks past the saluting base during the full dress rehearsal for Republic Day rehearsals in Kolkata, India, on Saturday. President Obama will be the chief guest at the parade. 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Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. __________________________________________________________________ Ta-Nehisi Coates June 2014 Presented by Chapters 1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses” 2. II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree” 3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony” 4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From” 5. V. The Quiet Plunder 6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto 7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way” 8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty” 9. IX. Toward A New Country 10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany” * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Email And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15 Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation. — John Locke, “Second Treatise” By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. — Anonymous, 1861 I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses” Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law. Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz) In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.” The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system. Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.” “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported. When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping. This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.” Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education. Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17. “I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.” Sharecropper boys in 1936 (Carly Mydans/Library of Congress) The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program. reporter’s notebook Elegant Racism “If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination.” Read more It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.” Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service. Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law. Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years. In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market. Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself. The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.” Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated. Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage. Explore Redlining in Chicago IFRAME: /media/interactives/2014/06/chicago/holc.html?v=15 A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FHA-backed mortgages. (Map development by Frankie Dintino) “A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.” The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth: Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable. In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.” reporter’s notebook The American Case Against a Black Middle Class “When a black family in Chicago saves up enough to move out of the crowded slums into Cicero, the neighborhood riots.” Read more The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.” Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto. Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy. “We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was. “When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.” Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme. The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.” The story of Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.” Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations. II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree” According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind, not degree.” Interactive Census Map IFRAME: /media/interactives/2014/06/chicago/index.html?v=15 Explore race, unemployment, and vacancy rates over seven decades in Chicago. (Map design and development by Frankie Dintino) In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.” The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them. This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous. And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.” A national real-estate association advised not to sell to “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education.” The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back. Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country. With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating. One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance. The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.” An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country, with no particular bias toward skin color. The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative. The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality. IFRAME: //www.theatlantic.com/galleries/reparations/1/?layout=features III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony” In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature: The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude. WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives. Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous. Click the image above to view the full document. “A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.” As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ” Click the image above to view the full document. Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one.” In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job: Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.” Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?” In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court. But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.” Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us. Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.” A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested. reporter’s notebook What We Should Be Asking About Reparations “Any contemplation of compensated emancipation must grapple with how several counties, and some states in the South, would react to finding themselves suddenly outnumbered by free black people.” Read more “It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.” That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy? One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge. Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look. There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810. We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From” America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.” Slaves in South Carolina prepare cotton for the gin in 1862. (Timothy H. O’sullivan/Library of Congress) When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676. One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves. This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance. For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.” In this artistic rendering by Henry Louis Stephens, a well-known illustrator of the era, a family is in the process of being separated at a slave auction. (Library of Congress) The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country. Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.” Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family. When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed: The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence. In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.” V. The Quiet Plunder The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent. Click the image above to view the full document. “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.” Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished. A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy. The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow. “The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.” In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.” But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.” The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline. In August 1957, state police pull teenagers out of a car during a demonstration against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsyvlania. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham) Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.” That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.” The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods. One man said his black neighbor was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.” “For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued. The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals. VI. Making The Second Ghetto Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means. Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks. It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans. In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods. Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away. In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out. The September 1966 Cicero protest against housing discrimination was one of the first nonviolent civil-rights campaigns launched near a major city. (Associated Press) When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way” Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract. To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators. “The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.” Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972. Click the image above to download a PDF version of The Atlantic’s April 1972 profile of the Contract Buyers League. Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks.” Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ” In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’ “The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.” White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social engineering. Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ” I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments. “You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.” “You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected. Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos Javier Ortiz) “You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.” Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone. Deputy sheriffs patrol a Chicago street in 1970 after a dozen Contract Buyers League families were evicted. (Courtesy of Sun-Times Media) “A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ” VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty” On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.” Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.” Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.” Visit North Lawndale today with Billy Brooks We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys. “That’s their corner,” he said. We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.” Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.” From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast. Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people. Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference. After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.” reporter’s notebook White Racism vs. White Resentment “The idea that Affirmative Action justifies white resentment may be the greatest argument made for reparations—like ever.” Read more The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries. This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.” Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this. Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject. The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured. Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence. (Carlos Javier Ortiz) “All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records. Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them. The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ” IX. Toward A New Country When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region. “He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.” Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body. And this was just one of their losses. Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races. To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte. Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world. The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags. On some level, we have always grasped this. “Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany” We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge. In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people. reporter’s notebook The Auschwitz All Around Us “It’s very hard to accept white supremacy as a structure erected by actual people, as a choice, as an interest, as opposed to a momentary bout of insanity.” Read more “The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ” Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.” Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition. “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns,” said David Ben-Gurion, “I would do that.” Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!” Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted. Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.” Nahum Goldman, the president of the Jewish Claims Commission (center), signs 1952 reparations agreements between Germany and Israel. The two delegations entered the room by different doors, and the ceremony was carried out in silence. (Associated Press) Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia. Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.” The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.” Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes. Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name. Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said: For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses. Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ” In the spring of 1921, a white mob leveled “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, wounded prisoners ride in an Army truck during the martial law imposed by the Oklahoma governor in response to the race riot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis) A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them. John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders. In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches.” “High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending,” Rugh and Massey write, “and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities’ minority neighborhoods.” Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.” “We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.” In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods. *** If you wish to comment, you may do so here. * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Email * [author-headshot.jpg?502c0990] Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. 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Create one now. #alternate Quantcast Follow @MicNews Policy Arts World Music Identities News Science Most Viewed Today in [ZjNhMzg0MjIxZCMvb1B3RjZ6Rl9feGVHcDduZDl1YXp1OTNTUmpJPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL2licDM5dXgxc Wk2MXFvdmZoOHdyNDNvbWFvZGFnbWZwNnN5eXp5Y3hvNmV6NWVrMnRhd3J5eHFtczdib3gz ZzEuanBn.jpg] Why the Republican Plan to Court Young Voters Is Doomed to Fail [ZDkzOTBkMTAxMiMvR2Q0NW1pUXFXaDcybUo5Y2FremtLSG5ROVJjPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL2NwcTBtdXJ0Y XY3emxieHhhcWN0cXU4cG9pcDY2bnBqdDJocWt0ZnJvamkweXBidnJrZGZwN2J6ZXB6bm5o eTUuanBn.jpg] Shocking Lawsuit Claims McDonald's Fired Workers From Store With 'Too Many Black People' [NWM5OTU0ODllMCMvMjNlV3VYb3hLUFJVOE9GM2Jaa25NbnBDUG1BPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzLzk3ZWppeGlhY 2JnM2dlbTdmOW51a3ZoamM4aXlwb3hkMTl1amx3MHM5bnhiZWl1ajQ5amZieTJvZWxqZmNv dHAuanBn.jpg] Congress Just Gave Its Most Important Immigration Jobs to Senators Who Hate Immigration [ZTQ4NDA5MGYyOCMvUzlCTGZhTlZMVnNDTUloc0tJVWY1Tm84Q0Y4PS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzLzkwaGl6YXVke mFqc2V6dG1hdXYzbzR0eHhsNTRtaTdqd25ybm5uZXh6aHk4eDNtZDdodTZxaGFvczE5ejRr d20uanBn.jpg] No, Two-Thirds of Young People Aren't Dying to Move to the Suburbs [OWY5ZTI2ZTMxNyMvZ1Y2Qjd3VXNPUUZXbUNPZnNSX2VoZEh3MXdFPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL2NqdzhvOXZja XJwbmhkdG92Y2xja3d5Z3B1YTVyZnVhaTdnZ25qZjB2MGlnb245OXBwMzIweGlhN3NybGN6 YWcuanBn.jpg] 'American Sniper' Is Having a Huge Weekend and Breaking All Sorts of Records [NTc3MWNhNzc5NSMvY3FPNGQ2a2J2TFh2ODNMaUZSai12Y2ZxTWdrPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL21pMHo4Nm9zc HVjemg5NnNnaXF2dHVvcmZuYTlqdWJ3Zmt4dGd5MWtkY2I3amxlejJmbmg0bXRheHZuMzM0 N2UuanBn.jpg] 'Harry Potter' Activists Just Won an Unprecedented Victory Against Child Slavery [ZjdiNTkzY2M3MyMvd1pYLWc2b2pwVEd0RU5oSWQwUTZWMzNQazlZPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL2g5dmphZGFpa 21lNXRsd2w2MWR4eWxybG9wZG5ncWRibXJydHVqZXZtdnptbjlqYzlxbGJrdWZjeGRieHhn amguanBn.jpg] The First Trailer for Tina Fey's Netflix Original Series Is Here, and It's Hilarious [NWM3OTdhNTVhNCMvMU9ub1JuNW14VDhjVXZVNnpRLXA0SjV0TTdjPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL3FjcnZyb3FkZ Wl2Y2RpbGNkMzZuaXdtNGd3dXlxa3pncXZrbG5tOWVuaGlndjlzZ2tkbmp3OWt5eWhuZHpk Z24uanBn.jpg] What Everyone Gets Wrong About 'American Sniper,' According to a Former Soldier [ODA2N2I2NWE5NiMvakU1dGkycldfMmVNYnJEdHZFTmIxcFgzT3pVPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL3V2djhuYWhkY nJxc21pdW1nb2IyZWhkb214amVyaGt1d2cyeXBobWl6Y2NpbmxicHpsaWtqc2Z2em9pZmtw bG4uanBn.jpg] One of Ancient Egypt's Most Precious Artifacts Has Been Irreparably Damaged [MDIyNzFjOTU4OCMvUFR0VzFBbmtPSHQxN2xRTWxyVGhVeHktT3ljPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL25wZWM0Y2x3b 2xmZzdydXh6enF6aGpqaXRoc2Fjb3Jtbmlwbnk4YXF1M2Y5dXNwcWRpdWt4cmVta2ZwbXpq Y2EuanBn.jpg] Queen Elizabeth II Once Trolled King Abdullah in the Best Possible Way [ZTc5YTdjZDU3OCMvaFBWYUhtTS1IeFBJRzRWNnczeGQ5eTJCVkhVPS8xNjR4MTE1L3NtYX J0L2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL3A1czBhcGlvM WVlZHZhemxxYm96N2lmazBneHV6cGw0YmJqZzF2MnVtYTl6ODg1Zms0aGM0cnpqNmx0Y3Vq dHouanBn.jpg] Yemen's Government Just Completely Collapsed. 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Instead, since founding the nation, we have more explicitly championed the idea that patriotism means loyalty to a set of principles; ideal principles that not only ask, but demand for dissent, criticism, and an actively inquisitive body to challenge those in power who may violate those standards. Today we technically celebrate the American Revolution, and more specifically, the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4^th. Yet our citizens still declare their patriotism even today through the same demands of social and political progress. During the Civil Rights movement within America, Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, "the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right." When a group of conscientious citizens activate this patriotic (and human) right to voice an opinion, they embody that nation and can live and breathe the true definition of patriotism, regardless of any individual person's political or social affiliations. President Barack Obama said: "I have no doubt that, in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it ... Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it. If you do, your life will be richer, our country will be stronger." It does not matter how patriotism is celebrated, with salutes or beer or barbecue or visiting memorials, as long as it is recognized and profoundly appreciated for the value and power it holds as a vehicle for social progress rather than a dogmatic commandment for blind nationalism. The time-honored symbol of the American people, history and ideals — the American flag — is not owned by the administration in power, but by the people; and these people use that symbol to stand for basic democratic values including economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, and as a welcome mat for the world's oppressed people. Even with the dark realities that come with extreme corporate power, far-right xenophobia, and social injustice, the nation has called upon patriotism time and time again to overcome and achieve those fundamental moral principles we have so dearly held on to throughout history. American movements — the abolition of slavery, farmers' populism, women's suffrage, workers' rights, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights, and countless others — all hold very similar core human values of fairness, equality, freedom, and justice. All of these values have been adopted and championed as American ideals. While we may battle over the standards by which we achieve these values, every American, whether they vote red or white or blue, has an equal right and duty to claim their ideas and actions in search of these ends as their own. Ultimately, it is these values that define patriotism. Not just American patriotism, but human patriotism. As long as we continue to challenge the betterment of our nation through our association with these philosophies, then together as a nation we can consider ourselves patriotic. Happy July 4th. Like us on Facebook: SHARE TWEET Alexandra Cardinale's avatar image Alexandra Cardinale Alexandra Cardinale curious, quirky, and vivacious student currently researching Communications, Business and Law at New York University. Her extensive study in 16 countries have given her a unique perspective on both domestic U.S. policy and current international policy outside. She works to apply this inquisitive point of view to her writings here at PolicyMic and to any and all of her political discussions. 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CORE THEMES: * Gratitude * Altruism * Compassion * Empathy * Forgiveness * Happiness * Mindfulness Mind & Body Can Patriotism Be Compassionate? By Jeremy Adam Smith | July 2, 2013 | 0 comments Feeling ambivalent about the Fourth of July? New psychological research points to how we can feel authentic pride for our country—and still be citizens of the world. * Decrease Font Size Text Increase Font Size * Comment * Share * Email * Print * IFRAME: http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http://greatergood.be rkeley.edu/article/item/can_patriotism_be_compassionate&layout=butt on_count&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light&he ight=21 “I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her classic 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. “I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.” In some corners, patriotism has a bad name. “Patriot” is mildly defined in my desktop dictionary as a “supporter of one’s own country”—and yet my thesaurus suggests the word “patriotism” can be synonymous with jingoism, chauvinism, nativism, and xenophobia. Particularly during times of war, patriotism does indeed seem to go hand-in-hand with dehumanization of outsiders, as well as intolerance of internal dissent. LIFE magazine But that’s not the whole story. Patriotism also drives people to extremes of altruism and self-sacrifice on behalf of the homeland—as the cliché has it, war brings out the best and worst in human beings. Shared support for a country strengthens social bonds among its citizens and provides an incubator in which trust and compassion can grow among them. Thus patriotism helps tie us together within national borders, but there’s a catch: It seems to diminish our ability to see the humanity in citizens of other nations. That’s why national holidays like the Fourth of July always present me—and many windmill-tilting idealists who’d like to foster peace and cross-group understanding—with a Gordian knot: We feel forced to choose between country and humanity. But does that have to be the case? Can one celebrate the Fourth of July without hating and fearing other countries? The short answer to the second question is yes… probably. In fact, when the Greater Good Science Center analyzed the results of its “connection to humanity” quiz, we found plenty of people who identified with both country and humanity. They are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, so far the research literature suggests that the problem is not with patriotism itself. Human beings are built to be part of groups, but groups do not have to be self-focused and belligerent. New psychological research points to how we can feel authentic pride for our country—and still be citizens of the world. Why does patriotism exist? In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that morality arises from intuitions, not reasoning, and that our intuitions rest upon six foundations, which he defines as a series of binary opposites like Care/Harm; Fairness/Cheating; Loyalty/Betrayal; and Authority/Subversion. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind The values of the political Left, he says, derive mainly from the foundations of Care and Fairness—while conservatives tend to more highly value Loyalty. This makes “patriotism” a special property of the Right. To define the Loyalty foundation, Haidt describes a classic 1954 experiment by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif, who pitted two groups of 12-year-old boys against each other in an effort to understand how collective identities are formed. The boys quickly forged tribal micro-cultures and “destroyed each other’s flags, raided and vandalized each other’s bunks, called each other nasty names, made weapons….” When morality rests upon the Loyalty foundation, says Haidt, right is anything that builds and defends the tribe; wrong is anything that undermines it. Thus violence against members of the other tribe is moral, and betrayal of one’s own tribe is the worst crime of all. That sounds terrible to people whose morality rests upon Care and Fairness—and the reason why, for example, conservatives vilify whistleblower Edward Snowden while many liberals hail him as a hero. But Haidt argues the Loyalty foundation has deep evolutionary roots and cannot be wished away by those who prefer Care as a basis for morality. Humans have always had to band together to survive and thrive, and bonding with some seems to naturally involve excluding others. This is true down to a neurochemical level. Oxytocin, for example, has been nicknamed the “love hormone” for its role in bonding people with each other. But what’s less well known is that oxytocin plays a role in excluding others from that bond. One 2011 study found that Dutch students dosed with oxytocin were “more likely to favor Dutch people or things associated with the Dutch than when they had taken a placebo.” Furthermore, they were more likely to say “they would sacrifice the life of a non-Dutch person over a Dutch person in order to save five other people of unknown nationality.” We can just as well call oxytocin the “patriotism hormone”! This is only one example of how our bodies are seemingly built for group cohesion and loyalty—which makes traits like patriotism an intractable part of human psychology. Even liberals and radicals who imagine themselves to be above tribal squabbling can be easily observed exhibiting the same behaviors as the 12-year-old boys in Muzafer Sherif’s experiment. When I was an undergraduate student activist, I thought nothing of defacing the posters and banners of the campus “White Student Union.” I still think the agenda of that group was repulsive—and it’s worth noting that Haidt’s research into political difference grew out of research into feelings of disgust—but I now realize that my actions followed an unconscious, evolutionary script. I wasn’t promoting a higher ideal; I was just trashing the other team, largely because I enjoyed the self-satisfied shot of dopamine I got when I spray-painted “RASCISM SUX” on one of their banners. My friends cheered me on; I was strengthening bonds within my tribe by committing an anti-social act of vandalism against another tribe. Four paths to a more compassionate patriotism So is there a solution? Or are we simply doomed to follow these scripts? In her 2011 essay, “Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom,” the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum argues that while there are many dangers inherent in teaching patriotism, we still “need patriotic emotion to motivate projects that require transcending self-interest.” Just as strong attachment to parents can serve as a template for healthy relationships throughout life, so secure attachment to one’s nation can give us the confidence to respect other people’s countries. Nussbaum searches American history for leaders who were able to build a more compassionate, cosmopolitan patriotism, as when Martin Luther King, Jr., argued in 1967 that opposing war is the “privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions.” Nussbaum draws on history and philosophy to make her case for a new brand of patriotism, but does her argument cut against human nature, as some allege? The answer is no—recent psychological research points to many steps we can take to extend the legacy of King. As we celebrate this Fourth of July, here are four for us to consider. 1. Make love of humanity an explicit goal. Evolution bequeathed to us a brain that is wired for connection to the group, which is what makes patriotism such a two-edged sword, cleaving “us” from “them.” And the brain is very, very good at spotting differences in its environment, including racial differences. As the essays in the Greater Good anthology Are We Born Racist? reveal, we cannot stop ourselves to going into high alert when we encounter something out of the ordinary or someone different from ourselves. Does this mean that prejudice and xenophobia are inevitable? No, because the human brain is also adept at overcoming fear and adapting itself to change. Study after study finds that repeated exposure to other peoples and cultures erodes prejudice. The brain has one other advantage in the effort to transcend xenophobic nationalism: It is goal oriented. If we tell ourselves—and tell our kids—that extending compassion and forgiveness to people of other countries is a worthwhile goal, “the brain can do that, though it may take a bit of effort and practice,” as neuroscientist David Amodio writes in his Greater Good essay about overcoming racism, “The Egalitarian Brain” . Group formation and loyalty are indeed natural and supported by our bodies, but we are also very well equipped to overcome our kneejerk fears or prejudices. We just need to give ourselves opportunities for reflection on our biases—and dedicate ourselves to overcoming them. 2. Teach that compassion and empathy are unlimited resources. The argument for a narrow, self-interested patriotism starts with the idea that there is only so much good feeling to go around—and that therefore we need to ration fellow-feeling for those closest to us. But more and more studies reveal that this premise is false. “In my research, I have found that the limits of empathy are actually quite malleable,” writes psychologist C. Daryl Cameron in “Can You Run Out of Empathy?” His studies find that people will ration their empathy and compassion for the in-group when they worry help for the out-group will be too costly or ineffective. But, he explains: People’s expectations about empathy can have powerful effects on how much empathy they feel, and for whom. Identification with all humanity is an empirically documented individual difference that predicts more empathic emotion and behavior. And research with mindfulness interventions suggests that training people to approach, rather than avoid, their emotional experiences can decrease fear of empathy and increase pro-social behavior. In short, “The research so far says empathy isn’t a non-renewable resource like oil. Empathy is more like wind or solar power, renewable and sustainable.” Knowing this to be true is one of the steps that allows people to extend their fellow feeling beyond their immediate circles, to encompass a broader swath of humanity. 3. Extend self-compassion to America. Both liberals and conservatives would benefit from applying some self-compassion to themselves as Americans. IFRAME: //www.youtube.com/embed/eBw_aEOT2Dk As a group, American liberals, progressives, and radicals tend to be harsh with our own country—I say “our” because I count myself among them. We decry our history of slavery and racism, the genocide of Native Americans, wartime atrocities committed in our name, illegal actions by intelligence agencies, and more. The most thoughtful and self-conscious critics are aware that we are harsh in part because we blame ourselves: we identify with our nation, take responsibility for its worst actions, and are ashamed. That’s a valid manifestation of patriotism, in my view—but one that can interfere with taking positive action to make things better. Meanwhile, many rock-ribbed conservatives treat any criticism of America as a personal blow to their self-esteem. “People who invest their self-worth in feeling superior and infallible tend to get angry and defensive when their status is threatened,” writes University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff, who could be describing the Bush administration. Neff’s solution to both these psychological dilemmas is self-compassion: “People who compassionately accept their imperfection, however, no longer need to engage in such unhealthy behaviors to protect their egos.” IFRAME: //www.youtube.com/embed/Uf6FJbc2vss As she writes in “Why Self-Compassion Trumps Self-Esteem”: As I’ve defined it, self-compassion entails three core components. First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental. Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering. Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it. For the Right, these are all qualities that could help build a kinder, gentler, less defensive patriotism. For the Left, feelings of shame can make us come down harshly on ourselves and our countrymen without also recognizing our nation’s positive qualities—the values and accomplishments that motivate us to connect with other Americans and celebrate our shared identity. For both groups, research by Neff and her colleagues finds that self-compassion actually leads to greater compassion for others. If you know how to identify and address suffering in yourself, you are better able to do the same for other people. But will self-compassion reduce our will to change and challenge injustice? Here, the research says absolutely not. “We think we need to beat ourselves up if we make mistakes so that we won’t do it again,” says Neff. “But that’s completely counterproductive. Self-criticism is very strongly linked to depression. And depression is antithetical to motivation: You’re unable to be motivated to change if you’re depressed. It causes us to lose faith in ourselves, and that’s going to make us less likely to try to change and conditions us for failure.” When we are compassionate with ourselves, however, we can admit that we made a mistake—and then simply try to do better next time. That’s a citizenship skill worth cultivating. 4. Embrace authentic, not hubristic, pride. More on Compassionate Patriotism Take our quiz to measure how much you love humanity. Learn how to increase your compassion bandwidth. Listen to this interview with Jonathan Haidt, and subscribe to Greater Good's podcast series. Learn what your own moral foundations are at Jonathan Haidt's website, www.yourmorals.org. Discover more Greater Good articles and videos about the science of compassion and altruism. Pride is a natural emotional response to success and high social status, but some forms of pride are healthier than others. Many recent studies have revealed the downside of what psychologists call “hubristic pride,” which is associated with arrogance and self-aggrandizement. As Claire E. Ashton-James and Jessica L. Tracy write in their 2011 study of how pride influences our feelings about other people, “Hubristic pride results from success that is attributed to internal, stable, and uncontrollable causes (‘I did well because I’m great’).” In contrast, “authentic pride results from success attributed to internal, unstable, and controllable causes (‘I did well because I worked hard’),” and is closely associated with feelings of accomplishment and humility. Their experiments—as well as several others by GGSC-affiliated scientists—have closely linked hubristic pride to prejudice, impulsivity, and aggression. Authentic pride had exactly the opposite effects, encouraging self-control, compassion for others, and positive attitudes toward out-groups. Other research by UC Berkeley’s Matt Goren and Victoria Plaut finds that the negative effects of pride are mitigated if we are conscious of the power and privilege granted by our status. So the challenge is fairly clear: to cultivate authentic, power-cognizant pride among citizens of the United States. If we feel pride, it should be in the accomplishments of our fellow citizens and in any contributions we ourselves have made toward making our country and community a better place, however small and local. Pride of simply being born American leads to hubris, which leads to bigotry and belligerence. For pride to be authentic, it must be something we feel we have earned. The best American leaders have always made that distinction. We all know this line from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” But few seem to remember the next line: “My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” The brutal Cold War context of these words is almost lost to us now, but the higher ideals behind them are not ambiguous. Kennedy presented himself as a patriot of the United States and as a citizen of the world, seeing no contradiction. These words are, at root, an appeal for authentic pride—citizenship as something that must be earned, in a nation that is part of a community of nations. Those are ideals worth celebrating on the Fourth of July. Tracker Pixel for Entry Comment Share Email Print About The Author Jeremy Adam Smith is producer and editor of the Greater Good Science Center’s website. He is also the author or coeditor of four books, including The Daddy Shift, Rad Dad, and The Compassionate Instinct. Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a 2010-11 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. You can follow him on Twitter! Like this article? Here's what you can do: * Share it on Facebook * Sign up for our e-newsletter * Become a member of Greater Good and the Greater Good Science Center * Make a donation to support our work Donate Related Articles * A Nation of Cowards? * Toward a More Mindful Nation * The Socially Intelligent Superpower * America’s Trust Fall * Altruism in Space * Hope on the Battlefield * In Faces We Trust * Brain Trust * Trust and Inequality Tags altruism, brain, compassion, empathy, evolution, forgiveness, kindness, mindfulness, morality, prejudice, prosocial behavior, racism, trust, violence Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus Story Topics Find the subjects that interest you. altruism brain children communication compassion conflict resolution cooperation creativity dacher keltner depression development education emotional intelligence emotions empathy evolution family forgiveness generosity gratitude habits happiness health helping heroism kindness love marriage meaningful life meditation mindfulness money morality neuroscience optimism parenting play politics positive emotions positive psychology prejudice prosocial behavior racism relationships religion self-compassion social connections social-emotional learning stress success teachers trust violence well-being work Greater Good in Your Inbox Sign up here to get the Greater Good Science Center's e-newsletters. 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Login|Signup Login|My Dashboard|Register Logout|My Dashboard * Send Letter to the Editor * Submit News * Email Alerts * E-Edition * Back Page Ads (PDF) Memorial Day service 'not possible without patriotism' - Herald Mail Media: Local News ____________________ Go Hot Topics * 2015 Meritus Guide * At Home Places - Winter 2014-2015 * Hometown Guide Flipbook Herald Mail Media * Home * News + Local News + Election 2014 + Annapolis + Your Town + Tri-State News + Police and Fire + National + Email Alerts + Submit a News Tip Top Story + Questions remain on Serafini Senate nomination process ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A day after Del. Andrew Serafini was nominated by the Washington County Republican Central Committee to fill a Senate seat va… o posted: January 24 o rss More headlines + Weather-related delays, closings and cancellations - January 24, 2015 + Weekend snow, sleet target Tri-State region + Slam poetry artist connects with seventh graders at Western Heights Middle School * Sports + Baseball + Blogs + Video + World Cup Posters Top Story + 'Mr. Cub' Ernie Banks dies Hall of Fame slugger Ernie Banks, the two-time MVP who never lost his boundless enthusiasm for baseball despite years of playing on losing Chi… o posted: January 23 o rss More headlines + Lazich, Clear Spring come of age at Hancock's expense + Williamsport shows strength against short-handed Smithsburg + Eagles boys fend off Knights * Opinion + Letters + Feedback + Tim Rowland + Editorials + Guest Editorials Top Story + Tuition plan would open doors for many who could benefit In the past, we have been strong supporters of the Greater Hagerstown Committee's proposal to provide graduating students of Washington County… o posted: January 22 o rss More headlines + Allan Powell: McDonnell decision is an invitation to white-collar crime + Letter to the Editor - Jan. 23 + Feedback - Jan. 23 + Letters to the Editor - Jan. 22 * Life + Entertainment + Weddings & Engagements + Worship + Calendar + Physicians Directory + Hagerstown Eats + Video Top Story + Speakers and topics Beaver Creek Christian Church, the Rev. Mark Curran will preach at the 9:30 a.m. service Sunday on "Not for Some, But for All." Sunday school … o posted: January 24 o rss More headlines + Click here for story + Click here for story + Is love worth the risk of heartache? * HMTV6 + Meet the Anchors + Our Meteorologists + Weather Blog Top video + News Now: Jan. 23, 2015 part 1 HMTV6’s News Now with News Anchor Valerie Bonk, Meteorologist Jennifer Pagliei and sports with Joe Hutzler. Originally broadcast Jan. 23, 2015. o Updated: Yesterday o rss More videos + News Now: Jan. 23, 2015 part 2 + News Now: Jan. 23, 2015 part 3 + PM Weather Update: January 23, 2015 * Photos & Videos * Calendar * About + Contact Us + Advertising + Career Opportunities + Submit a story + Subscribe * Weather * Traffic * Subscribe * Obituaries * Classifieds + Local Classifieds + Today's Ads + Jobs + Autos + Marketplace + Coupons + Place an ad Home * News * Local News Memorial Day service 'not possible without patriotism' * Story * Comments * Image (2) * Video (1) Print Create a hardcopy of this page Font Size: Default font size Larger font size Previous Next Flags at Rest Haven Joe Crocetta/Staff Photographer Flags at Rest Haven U.S. flags bearing the names of deceased veterans were posted around Rest Haven Cemetery Monday afternoon during the annual Memorial Day Tribute. Buy this photo Bagpiper Joe Crocetta/Staff Photographer Bagpiper Bagpiper Rick Conrad performed Amazing Grace Monday morning at the start of the Rest Haven Cemetery and Funeral Home Memorial Day Tribute. Buy this photo Related Videos Rest Haven Cemetery and Funeral Home, in Hagerstown's North End, held a Memorial Day tribute on Monday. video kaltura 0_u1p2uut5 Rest Haven tribute read more Rest Haven Cemetery and Funeral Home, in Hagerstown's North End, held a Memorial Day tribute on Monday. Posted: Monday, May 26, 2014 4:00 pm | Updated: 7:54 am, Tue May 27, 2014. Memorial Day service 'not possible without patriotism' * jgreene * Posted on May 26, 2014 by Julie E. Greene Memorial Day is about remembering those who gave their lives for our country, about remembering those we loved. Sullivan Ballou, with the Rhode Island Militia during the Civil War, expressed his love of country and his family in a July 14, 1861, letter to his wife, Sarah, while anticipating his possible death in battle. Subscription Required An online service is needed to view this article in its entirety. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? Login Now Need an online subscription? Subscribe Already a Print Subscriber? Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Need an account? Create one now. 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E96 A2DE 2?5 :D 2 H6==\6?E2CJ]k^Am kAm!6@A=6 D2E :? =2H? 492:CD @C DE@@5[ >2?J :? 2 4:C4=6 2C@F?5 2 8C2DDJ 2C62 H96C6 E96 EC:3FE6 H2D 96=5 :? 7C@?E @7 E96 7F?6C2= 9@>6 :? w286CDE@H?VD }@CE9 t?5]k^Am kAmQx H@F=5 =:<6 E@ E92?< J@F 7@C E2<:?8 E96 E:>6 E@52J E@ 4@>6 G:D:E @FC 46>6E6CJ[ 2?5 A2FD6 2?5 C67=64E FA@? E96 D24C:7:46D @7 E96 >6? 2?5 H@>6? H9@ 92G6 D6CG65 @FC 4@F?ECJ G2=:2?E=J[Q ~DE66? D2:5]k^Am kAmQ%@52JVD D6CG:46 :D ?@E A@DD:3=6 H:E9@FE J@FC A2EC:@E:D>[Q 96 D2:5]k^Am kAm%96 C@25D :? E96 46>6E6CJ H6C6 =:?65 H:E9 5@K6?D @7 =2C86 p>6C:42? 7=28D E92E H6C6 @?46 5C2A65 @G6C =@42= G6E6C2?DV 4@77:?D[ #6DE w2G6? @77:4:2=D D2:5] %96 7=28D H6C6 5@?2E65 @C =@2?65 E@ E96 7F?6C2= 9@>6 2?5 92G6 366? FD65 7@C J62CD 7@C E96 46C6>@?J[ D2:5 r92C=:6 qC@H?[ @H?6C @7 E96 46>6E6CJ]k^Am kAm$@>6 @7 E96 7=28D 762EFC65 E96 DE:E4965 ?2>6D @7 E96 G6E6C2?D E@ H9@> E96J H6C6 8:G6?]k^Am kAmQ%96J 2== =@G65 2?5 =:G65[ 2?5 D6CG65 E96:C 4@F?ECJ H:E9 5:DE:?4E:@?[Q ~DE66? D2:5]k^Am kAm%96 46C6>@?J :?4=F565 #:4< r@?C25 A=2J:?8 E96 328A:A6D 2?5 `` G@=F?E66C 3F8=6CD A=2J:?8 Qt49@ %2AD]Qk^Am kAm%96C6 92D 366? 2 D9@CE286 @7 3F8=6CD 7@C J62CD[ 2?5 qF8=6D p4C@DD p>6C:42 AC@G:565 E96 G@=F?E66C 3F8=6CD @? |@?52J[ |2CJ=2?5 $E2E6 s:C64E@C v]!] Qr9:AQ $E:4<=6C D2:5]k^Am kAm~DE66? D2:5 96 962C5 E96C6 H2D 2 ?2E:@?2= >@>6?E @7 D:=6?46 AC@>@E65 7@C `ai_` A]>] |@?52J[ 2?5 E9@D6 2E E96 6G6?E 9@?@C65 :E 367@C6 E96 DEC:?8 32?5 7@==@H65 H:E9 :ED =2DE D@?8[ QpD9@<2? u2C6H6==[Q H9:49 >FD:4:2? r92C=:6 r2D23@?2 D2:5 2=D@ H2D 762EFC65 :? qFC?DV 5@4F>6?E2CJ]k^Am kAm%96 xC2B 2?5 p7892?:DE2? '6E6C2?D @7 p>6C:42 @C82?:K2E:@? AC@>@E65 2 `ai_` A]>] >@>6?E @7 D:=6?46 H9:=6[ 244@C5:?8 E@ E96 &]$] s6A2CE>6?E @7 '6E6C2?D p772:CDV H63D:E6[ E96 }2E:@?2= |@>6?E @7 #6>6>3C2?46 :D 2E b A]>] @? |6>@C:2= s2J]k^Am kAmk6>myF=:6 t] vC66?6 :D 2 C6A@CE6C 7@C %96 w6C2=5\|2:=] $96 42? 36 C624965 G:2 6>2:= 2E k2 9C67lQ>2:=E@i;F=:68o96C2=5\>2:=]4@>Qm;F=:68o96C2=5\>2:=]4@>k^2m]k^6 >mk^Am Thank you for reading HeraldMailMedia.com free articles on our site. You can come back at the end of your 30-day period for more free articles, or you can purchase a subscription and continue to enjoy valuable local news and information. If you need help, please contact our office at 301-733-5131. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? Login Now Need an online subscription? Subscribe Already a Print Subscriber? Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Need an account? Create one now. Choose an online service. + 1 Digital-Only Subscription $5.99 for 30 days $65.89 for 365 days Chose this option if you're signing up for a new digital subscription + 2 One-Day Digital Subscription $0.99 for 1 day Get full access to heraldmailmedia.com for one day for $0.99 Current print subscribers + 1 Print + Digital Subscription Choose this option if you are a current print subscriber. Already a Print Subscriber? None of these apply to you? Back Need an account? Create one now. * Discuss * Print * Posted in Local on Monday, May 26, 2014 4:00 pm. Updated: 7:54 am. 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Powered by BLOX Content Management System from TownNews.com. [ Terms of Use | Privacy Policy ] schurz communications inc. Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Need an account? Create one now. #trivalleycentral.com Search Close * Casa Grande Dispatch * Casa Grande Dispatch * Maricopa Monitor * Coolidge Examiner * Eloy Enterprise * Florence Reminder & Blade-Tribune * Arizona City Independent/Edition * San Tan Valley Sentinel * TriValley Digital * Contact Us * E-Edition * Print Subscription * Online Subscription * About Us * NIE * Archives Patriotism is topic of soldier’s speech - trivalleycentral.com: Area News Advanced Search ____________________ GO * Welcome! Login|Signup Login|My Dashboard|Register Logout|My Dashboard * January 24, 2015 trivalleycentral.com * Obituaries * Opinion + Our View + Letters to the Editor + Columns + Web Polls + Dear Abby * Courts/Police + Police Log + Sheriff’s Log + Fire Log + Court Log * Special Sections + TV Roundup + Pinal Real Estate Buyers' Guide + Special Sections * Photo Galleries * Public Notices + Local Notices + Arizona Notices + National Notices * Books For Sale * Community + Local Entertainment + Calendar + Area Links * Classifieds + Classifieds + Place Ad Home * Casa Grande Dispatch * Area News Patriotism is topic of soldier’s speech * Story * Comments Print Create a hardcopy of this page Font Size: Default font size Larger font size Previous Next Matt Slaydon Courtesy of Matt Slaydon Matt Slaydon Matt Slaydon is shown in his Air Force uniform several years ago, left, and more recently after recovering from multiple surgeries, right. Posted: Monday, March 4, 2013 9:10 am Patriotism is topic of soldier’s speech SCOTT McNUTT, Staff Writer Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. Retired Air Force Tech. Sgt. Christopher “Matt” Slaydon is to deliver an address on patriotism at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at the Ride for the Warrior bike rally and festival in Casa Grande. Slaydon served in the Air Force for 151⁄2 years and worked as an explosives ordnance disposal operator. During his career he participated in more than 200 combat missions and successfully disarmed more than 100 IEDs. On Oct. 24, 2007, Slaydon earned a Purple Heart Medal. That day, like so many others in the past, Slaydon was called in to disarm an improvised explosive device near Kirkuk Air Base in Iraq. Slaydon was in the process of disarming the bomb when it detonated. Subscription Required An online service is needed to view this article in its entirety. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? 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D2:5] “p =@E @7 E:>6D J@F 92G6 E@ E2<6 2== J@FC 862C @77 E@ 86E :? E96 3@>3 DF:E 2?5 :E D=@HD J@F 5@H? — :E’D >@C6 @7 2 =2DE C6D@CE]”k^Am kAm$=2J5@? =@DE 6J6D:89E :? 3@E9 6J6D 2?5 9:D 5@>:?2?E 2C> 23@G6 E96 6=3@H H2D 2>AFE2E65] w6 2=D@ DF776C65 724:2= 2?5 ;2H 7C24EFC6D[ =@DE E66E9 2?5 2 =F?8 4@==2AD65] $=2J5@? DA6?E `d >@?E9D C64@G6C:?8 7C@> 9:D :?;FC:6D 2E qC@@<6 pC>J |65:42= r6?E6C 2E u@CE $2> w@FDE@? 2?5 E96 r6?E6C 7@C E96 x?EC6A:5 :? $2? p?E@?:@[ %6I2D]k^Am kAm$=2J5@? D2:5 96 925 H@C<65 @? E92E A2CE:4F=2C 3@>3 7@C >@C6 E92? b_ >:?FE6D 2?5 :E D9@F=5 92G6 366? 4=62C]k^Am kAm“%96 3@>3 24EF2==J >2=7F?4E:@?65 H96? x H2D :? E96 AC@46DD @7 86EE:?8 :E @FE @7 E96 8C@F?5 — 2 H:C6 D9@CE\4:C4F:E65 — :E D9@F=5?’E 92G6 8@?6 @77[” $=2J5@? D2:5]k^Am kAm$=2J5@?[ ?@H ca[ EC2G6=D H:E9 9:D H:76[ p??6EE6[ 2?5 9:D D66:?8\6J6 5@8[ “{686?5[” 2 v6C>2? D96A96C5] p??6EE6 H@C256 2== E96 5:776C6?46 :? E96 H@C=5[” $=2J5@? D2:5]k^Am kAm$=2J5@? 42==D pG@?52=6 9@>6 2?5 EC2G6=D 2D 2 >@E:G2E:@?2= DA62<6C AC:>2C:=J 2E p:C u@C46 6G6?ED] w6 D2:5 96 766=D AC6EEJ 8@@5[ 2== E9:?8D 4@?D:56C65]k^Am kAmw:D >6DD286 :D D:>A=6] “*@F 5@?’E 92G6 E@ H62C 2 F?:7@C> @C 7@==@H 2 A2CE:4F=2C A@=:E:42= A2CEJ E@ 36 2 A2EC:@E[” 96 D2:5] “xE’D 23@FE 6>3C24:?8 J@FC 7C665@> 2?5 36=:6G:?8 :? E96 r@?DE:EFE:@? — E92E’D A2EC:@E:D>]”k^Am Thank you for reading 9 free articles on our site. You can come back at the end of your 30-day period for another 9 free articles, or you can purchase a subscription and continue to enjoy valuable local news and information. If you need help, please contact our office at 520-836-7461. You need an online service to view this article in its entirety. Have an online subscription? Login Now Need an online subscription? Subscribe Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Password Forgot? ____________________ [_] Remember me on this computer Login Screen Name or Email ____________________ Change Password Now I remember! Or, use your facebook account: (facebook) facebook Need an account? Create one now. Choose an online service. * 1 Premium Online Access $0.99 for 3 days $7.00 for 31 days $14.00 for 61 days $21.00 for 92 days $28.00 for 122 days $35.00 for 153 days $42.00 for 183 days $49.00 for 214 days $56.00 for 244 days $63.00 for 275 days $70.00 for 350 days $77.00 for 336 days $84.00 for 365 days This subscription gives you access to the electronic edition of the Casa Grande Dispatch, as well as unlimited articles in the Area News and Obituaries sections. It is important that you give us complete and accurate information for our system. Please make sure you add your apartment/unit/space number if applicable and also your phone number including area code. If you are already a subscriber to the print edition of the Casa Grande Dispatch you get this access for $1 a month. Call 520-423-8685 and we will set that up for you! None of these apply to you? Back Need an account? Create one now. * Discuss * Print * * Posted in Area news on Monday, March 4, 2013 9:10 am. Clear 57° Clear [54beb8dcbba7c.image-83079ffb2052097a4e4ac17255a45c0b.jpg] IFRAME: http://trivalleycentral.platypost.net/f2f/widget/html/postfeed/all/0/20 /160/1/0 Today's e-Edition Saturday - January 24, 2015 1:00 am | See more * tab 0 * tab 1 * tab 2 * tab 3 * tab 4 Click Classifieds * Picture This! 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Create one now. #alternate - www.pe.com Log in Subscribe Today Customer Service P-Edition Advertise Top Workplaces UnidosSC.com Weather * Home * News * Sports * Entertainment * Business * Life * Opinion * Blogs * Photos * Obits Register Connect ____________________ * CARS * JOBS * HOMES * Shop * Classifieds City NewsPoliticsTopicsEnvironmentEducationAnnouncementsTrafficPhotosBlogs * News RIVERSIDE: Ex-teacher admits to molesting students * News VICTORVILLE: Man wanted for trying to abduct 2 women * Business JOBS: Inland unemployment falls to 7.2% in December * News ONTARIO: Quilts take center stage at show News CARL LOVE: Teaching patriotism to fifth graders It’s not easy to explain such concepts to students, but Murrieta’s Field of Honor helps Tweet [btn_email.gif] * * [5cd2c64b-c47b-4c72-b060-47bd57b5f034.png] * Trending Riverside Yellow Pages THINGS TO DO IFRAME: http://event.pe.com/widget [a9869948-3383-4b01-9a2b-fbf303762453.png] BY CARL LOVE / CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST Published: Nov. 15, 2014 2:28 p.m. CARL LOVE: Teaching patriotism to fifth graders Print Photo Email This Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share [pin-favicon.png] Pin It More Galleries ADVERTISEMENT Bob DeCubellis talks to fifth graders in front of one of the memorials during a field trip to the Murrieta Field of Honor. Bob DeCubellis talks to fifth graders in front of one of the memorials during a field trip to the Murrieta Field of Honor. CARL LOVE , COURTESY PHOTO Related article » Getting 10-year-olds to understand grownup matters such as service, patriotism and the ultimate sacrifice are not easy. Which explains the goal of the annual fifth-grade field trips to the Murrieta Field of Honor. I’m a fifth-grade teacher at Rail Ranch Elementary. I know my students will find things kids think are cool, such as the one who noted that a fallen soldier shared her first name. And in the place dedicated to local heroes, people from our area who’ve died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a number of kids talk excitedly about finding someone who died the day they were born. Life and death, the cycle of cycles. Amid all this innocence is the wisdom of the people who put on the annual program that attracted more than 1,600 students last week. I had my kids later write about the experience – it’s the price you pay when your teacher is a writer -- and a number of them mentioned how much they liked 88-year-old Charlie Cram, who served in World War II. Fifth grader Halina Klaput talked about the impact Cram had on her, the tears that came as she thought of three people she knows of who served in the war. And now to meet somebody who was there, too – on a field trip of all things. “When I calmed myself down, I gave Charlie a hug which made me feel a lot better and he is my favorite person there, he always will be,” Halina wrote. Vietnam veteran Bob DeCubellis told the fifth graders freedom isn’t free, that it takes the kind of service symbolized by the sea of flags on display here to keep our country safe. He challenged the kids to take up the mantle if our country is to remain free. “You can’t do that if you don’t study hard and pay attention,” he said. The teacher part of me loves this guy. Kids being kids, not all were inspired by the moment. One student wrote the trip was boring because we walked so much. Another felt useless because almost everybody else seemed to have family members who served. Kids do take things personally. Others could see the reason for the event. “Everybody was having fun, talking to their friends,” noted Cassie Cadena, “but inside, everybody felt sad about all the men and women that fought for our freedom.” Of the many kids who noted that a fallen hero passed on their birthday, Paige Casas said: “I think that this means we celebrate our birthdays on the day that a service member died for us.” Walking through the section dedicated to our local heroes can be numbing. You take note of the long list of people from Riverside, Hemet, San Jacinto, Cathedral City, San Bernardino, Rancho Cucamonga, Menifee, Temecula, Murrieta and too many other places. Nathan Buechler told his friends, “That’s kind of sad, how many people died from Murrieta.” In the end, as the school buses pulled out of the dirt parking lot and headed down the street, we were left with the image of a remarkable 2,014 flags standing regally in the distance. “It looked like a long rainbow of red, white, and blue,” wrote Halina. A rainbow of service, patriotism and the ultimate sacrifice, something these kids now appreciate so much more. Contact the writer: carllove4@yahoo.com More from Carl Love + CARL LOVE: Catching up on Temecula Flipping channels one day leads to a visit with the public access channel that is all things Temecula. + CARL LOVE: Hey, we got a season! It lasted about five days, but ‘winter’ actually showed up in Southwest Riverside County + CARL LOVE: The quiet life again Now that the kids have returned to their real lives, things slow down in the old hometown COMMENTS | PRINT | EMAIL | Join the conversation Comments are encouraged, but you must follow our User Agreement Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to allow Freedom Communications, Inc. the right to republish your name and comment in additional Freedom publications without any notification or payment. Return to Top * Home * News * Cities * Sports * Entertainment * Business * Life * Opinion * Blogs * Photos * Obituaries * Weather * Real Estate * Jobs * Cars * Classifieds Copyright © The Press-Enterprise. All Rights Reserved. About Us | Privacy Policy | User Agreement | Site Map [set.aspx?action=add&advid=1518&token=FOCI1] Quantcast Powered by the Parse.ly Publisher Platform (P3). #AFPS News Articles DOD Press Advisories DOD News Releases DOD Contract Announcements DOD Transcripts DOD Speeches DOD Secretary of Defense Speeches DOD Blogger's Roundtable United States Department of Defense United States Department of Defense ____________________ Submit Search News * News Articles * News/Casualty Releases * Press Advisories * News Transcripts * Publications * Speeches * Contracts * Testimony * Messages * Special Reports Secretary of Defense * Biography * Speeches * Messages * Testimony * Travels * News Photos Deputy Secretary of Defense * Biography * Speeches * Travels * News Photos Photos/Videos * Lead Photos * News Photos * Photo Essays * Week in Photos * Videos * DoD Video News * Imagery Archive Other * Briefing Slides * Pentagon Press Badges * Press/Media Queries * Military Commissions * Detainees * Other News Sources DoD News Bookmark and Share E-Mail A Copy | Printer Friendly | Latest News News Article Recruiters Recall Patriotism of Post-9/11 America By Lisa Daniel American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Sept. 8, 2011 – Like so many Americans, Army Sgt. Cheri Depenbrock watched the horror of 9/11 unfold from her office television. What was different for the Army recruiter was how it changed her job in the weeks after. Click photo for screen-resolution image Like other military recruiters, Army Master Sgt. Juan Dozier witnessed a spike in patriotism following Sept. 11, 2001, that led many Americans into recruiting stations. U.S. Army courtesy photo (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. In seven years of helping ensure the Army met its recruiting goals, Depenbrock was used to reaching out to young people, telling them what the Army could do for them, and mostly answering their questions about how they could get their college paid for by signing up. “It was almost always for college, for money, and for having a full-time job,” she said, referring to the reasons people enlisted. Sept. 11, 2001, changed that. In the days, weeks and months thereafter, Depenbrock, like military recruiters around the nation, watched in amazement from her Cincinnati office as people who never would have thought of joining -- or rejoining, as many would have it -- approached recruiters with the sole purpose of defending America. “It was amazing the people walking into that office, the ages,” she said. “We had so many prior-service folks wanting to come back. I was amazed at how many older people tried. I know some of them were in their fifties. And, military-wise, we couldn’t do anything for them.” Some younger people with prior service did rejoin, Depenbrock said, and the first-time recruits were different. While patriotism has always driven young people to service, it was almost always matched with a desire for college money or new opportunities. Suddenly, they weren’t asking about money, she said. “It was all about the patriotism,” Depenbrock said. “They didn’t care about anything else. Money had nothing do with it. I swear, I think half those kids would have joined if we hadn’t paid them.” An annual Pentagon survey of young people’s propensity to join the military showed an 8-percent increase among young men likely to enlist immediately after 9/11, and remained high until 2005, a Defense Department official said. One of those young men was William Grigsby, now an Army staff sergeant who enlisted in early 2002. “The events of 9/11 had everything to do with my decision to enlist,” he said. Grigsby, an aircraft electrician on a three-year detail as a recruiter in Houston, graduated high school in June 2001 and was indecisive about his plans, first considering the Army, then college, and then deciding against both. Three months later, “I was working a dead-end job at a grocery store,” Grigsby recalled. He was driving home from the night shift on the morning of 9/11 when he heard a news report about two hijacked planes being flown into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Almost immediately after, Grigsby said, his mind went back to joining the Army. As U.S. forces moved into Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaida and their Taliban backers, “I watched in awe as our military forces took control of the country,” he said, adding that he had no reservations at the prospects of deploying to war. Recruiters from around the country remember post-9/11 as a time when many potential recruits came to them. Army Master Sgt. Juan Dozier calls himself “a recruiter of two different generations.” There was the generation before 9/11 -- his generation -- who enlisted for various benefits the military could provide. “There wasn’t so much of a sense of purpose, of ‘What can I do for my country?’” he said. “It was more, ‘I need the training or education money.’” Dozier didn’t begrudge them -- he was one of them. Raised in the tough Southside Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, Dozier enlisted in the Army in 1989 as a way out. “The only thing I wanted to do was have different scenery,” he said. “They took a chance on me being from Southside Chicago,” Dozier said, adding that his recruiters asked him to take a bus to meet them outside of his neighborhood because they were concerned about violence there. “The only time they came and got me was when it was time for boot camp,” he said. After serving as a motor transportation operator in Germany, then California and Texas, Dozier was working as a recruiter in Columbia, S.C., when 9/11 occurred. People began flowing into the recruiting station, and they were prepared to fight, he said. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and his predecessor, Robert M. Gates, have praised the more than 3 million young people who have joined the military since 9/11, all knowing they likely would go to war. Dozier compared their mindset to that of peacetime recruits caught off guard by military interventions such as the Persian Gulf War that began in 1990. “Back then kids were saying, ‘I didn’t join for this, and a lot of them were trying to get out,’” he said. “These kids now, they know what they’re signing up for. For most of them, they know war is part of the job.” Recruiters say they now hear a mixture of reasons for enlisting, with many potential recruits still citing patriotism, but a growing number also looking for benefits such as health care. “When they come in now, they’re looking at benefits,” Depenbrock said. “They’re not talking about the GI Bill. -- they’re talking about a safety net.” Contact Author Related Sites: Special Report: Remembering 9/11 Comments Article is closed to new comments. The opinions expressed in the following comments do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense. 9/8/2011 6:42:49 PM I am a former SRP/SRC PROVIDER in Washington and Colorado 2003-2005 where I interviewed soldiers for pre and post deployment issues, the national guard and reservist for entry and return from active duty. Every soldier, especially those after 9/11 and those older than 26 yo, when I asked why join? They would respond ....... join for patriotic reasons, do their share after 9/11. As a former Vietnam Era vet and Active Regular Army Retiree I was impressed. This meant not only did America have an All Voluntary Force but they were motivated by Patriotism. Thus the worlds best trained Armed Forces. America owes alot to these troops who voluntarily commited and sacrificed for their Nation. - panv, colorado Most Recent News Stories 01/23/2015 Hagel: Late Saudi King Was Committed Friend, Partner 01/23/2015 Hagel Calls to Congratulate New Japanese Defense Minister 01/23/2015 Face of Defense: Air Force Officer Trains for Iditarod 01/23/2015 Operation Inherent Resolve Airstrikes Continue in Syria, Iraq 01/23/2015 Dempsey: Keep All Options on Table for Use of Force Against ISIL 01/23/2015 Army Releases Report on Fort Hood Shooting Investigation 01/23/2015 Marine Corps Officer Takes Defense Intelligence Agency Reins 01/23/2015 U.S. Troops to Begin Establishing Syrian Opposition Training Sites 01/23/2015 Pentagon Press Secretary Reads Out Busy Week for DoD Leaders 01/23/2015 Fewer Air Targets as ISIL Terrorists Hide, Change Tactics . 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