Just Musing Was I
The ungodly path to James Crow Junior.
Just musing today, on a walk, was I.
When Henry the Small White Dog and I set out every morning, whether he’s leashed or unleashed, the path is always the same. He knows his mind.
Not me. Mine is always in flux, and never more than on the dog walks, when Henry sticks to his route as my thoughts wander and sometimes coalesce. If the dog didn’t have to relieve himself, and if I didn’t also take showers, I’d have not a thought in my head. Nor any measure of financial security. I’ve had more profitable ideas standing upright than I ever did sitting at my keyboard. It’s like Aristotle’s peripatetic mode of thinking; it liberates the mind. Even without a toga or a trailing cluster of protégés.
Today was a case in point. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless, 9/11 blue with just a slight nip in the air. A life-affirming, sunny spring morning with chirping birds, the scent of freshly cut grass and my furry, moronic beast strutting like a Disney character en route to his everywhere latrine. A gorgeous day. Or, in the phrase that came to mind: overwhelming beauty.
Overwhelming, I thought. Then I thought about the adjective in its less positive sense, defeat at the hands of irresistible forces. Then I thought about how easily we succumb to relatively ordinary stresses and frustrations of daily life. Then I thought about how much less overwhelmed I myself get these days, in spite of terrifying existential threats, than I did for most of my life. Why suddenly so copacetic? Then I thought, “I’m usually quite whelmed.” Which I thought was funny, and imagined adopting as a slogan or epitaph: “Usually Whelmed.” Then I realized (correctly) that the absurd wordplay can’t possibly be novel and adopting it as a one-liner would probably just make me look derivative, like people throwing around Seinfeld jokes. Then I thought about the countless episodes throughout human history that left people overwhelmed by vastly more than the ordinary stresses or frustrations of daily life.
It’s a bitch to get a jury-duty summons or to get charged a late fee for a bill that had been lost in the mail, but famine is arguably worse. And plague. And war. And slavery. These were my fleeting thoughts. And then, not two minutes after reveling in the splendid weather, my ruminations turned to Jim Crow.
Probably for two reasons. One is that I’m in the middle of reading the monumental history of America’s great northern migration of Black southerners, Isabel Wilkerson’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, which documents the violence, indignity and ceaseless terror of the institutionalized racism embedded in southern-state laws for 80 years after the (shameful) collapse of Reconstruction. Segregated water fountains, schools, housing and almost all other public accommodations. Blacks in the back of the bus. Poll taxes. Sharecropping that amounted to serfdom. Bowing and scraping under the penalty of God knows what. Kangaroo courts for invented offenses. Lynchings.
Just musing was I, about the timeline of hell on earth. And the path to redemption.
Slavery. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution were meant to undo the horrors of human bondage and permanently establish equal rights under the law — guaranteed not just by legislation but also by federal troops deployed to former slave states to enforce justice where the economy, political leaders and popular resentment clung to evils of their lost way of life.
Against those forces, and countless state and local laws designed to disempower the newly free Black population, Reconstruction functioned for more than a decade after the war. Then came the disputed presidential election of 1876, not resolved until the eve of the 1877 inauguration by an election commission offering a ruinous compromise.
To ensure the swearing in of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (remember that in the 19th century Democrats were the pro-slavery party and Republicans the abolitionist liberals), the GOP acceded to the demands of the southerners in Congress to withdraw the federal troops from the old Confederacy. It was a despicable devil’s bargain, which led immediately to the promulgation in those states of segregationist laws effectively mooting federal statute and the Constitution itself. Together, this inhumane statutory regime was dubbed Jim Crow. Southern Blacks were nominally free, but for a century they were treated not only as second class citizens, but fundamentally subhuman. Think about that when 2026 southerners display the Confederate flag in honor of their lost “way of life.”
Henry the Small White Dog, today in fact roaming off the leash, sniffed every blade of mowed grass as I mused about the “Sweet Land of Liberty,” land of the pilgrims’ pride, where millions of our citizens didn’t have the freedom of movement enjoyed by my fucking dog. And then I thought of Plessy-Ferguson. Of this grotesque 1886 Supreme Court decision I mused. Sickened was I.
This was the notorious “separate but equal” ruling, justifying and perpetuating Jim Crow for another 70 years. If Reconstruction offered hope for equal justice under the law, that hope was snuffed by the insane notion that human beings in everyday life can be divided by race and consigned to a parallel universe of “equal” rights. We fought a bloody internecine war over human rights, we passed landmark federal laws and amended our Constitution, we bet our Republic on the eradication of injustice and then watched it all obliterated with the stroke of the Supreme Court’s pen. The vote, by the way, was 7-1. If you wonder why Sammy Davis Jr. couldn’t stay in the hotels where he performed, and why Black teenagers were swinging lifeless from tree limbs in 1964, do some musing yourself. Seven to one.
Now I said there were two reasons my mind was a’wandering along this jagged path. The first, yes, is Wilkerson’s book — which, by the way, is as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. The second reason is the notion that a society can undergo such cataclysmic events as Civil War, and such revolutionary reforms as Reconstruction, and such tragic sacrifices on the path to actually realizing our nation’s founding promise, only to see the highest court undo it all with a decision that will result in the systematic reestablishment of the discriminatory, white-supremacist, politically emasculating “old way of life.”
Which is exactly what is taking place now. Today. In Washington, DC, at #1 1st St, NE, in the shadow of the Capitol and the beating heart of reactionary regression.
The same John Roberts court that unleashed unlimited corrupt “dark money” into the political process (Citizens United); reversed Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health) and permitted states to deprive women control of their own bodies; ignored the framers’ separation of church and state (Hobby Lobby) on a path to theocracy; granted impunity to a presidential tyrant for any depraved act in office (Trump v. The United States); greenlit the virtually unregulated ownership of guns amid an epidemic of mass shootings (District of Columbia v. Heller); diluted government’s role in regulating against environmental harms (most recently last week in Seven County Infrastructure v. Eagle County, CO) and sanctioned other menaces, has now fully gutted the historic Civil Rights Act of 1965.
And, like Plessy-Ferguson, it is a ruling built on a preposterous premise: that, amid constant red-state violence to the rule of law, the old South can now be trusted to behave honorably. The Roberts Court began the step-by-step reversal in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder, which declared that the Department of Justice need no longer routinely monitor southern compliance with the Voting Rights Act. Now today came the death blow of Louisiana v. Callais, which rules it is not enough for courts to find that gerrymandering and voter suppression have a discriminatory effect. To invalidate racist state laws, the federal government now must prove the legislatures’ motives were discriminatory, which is as impossible as the truth is obvious.
It is the Plessy-Ferguson of the MAGA era. Roberts, he of the amiable demeanor and well-practiced facade of impartial judicial dignity, has taken us back to the future, Making America Worse Again.
Thus commences James Crow Jr.
That wrenching historical march for justice — forged over a century and finally partially realized after WWII as the Civil Rights Act and other long-overdue laws of the land at last began to fulfill and codify our founding promises — has reversed course. It is no longer the path toward redemption.
It is a retrograde quest for the old power structures, the old bigotries, the old impediments to the lame, radical-left fetish for “human rights.” It is a return trip to the dark ages, embraced by Neanderthals who think The Enlightenment was too woke.
My morning unconstitutional was at an end. Henry the Small White Dog headed up the hill toward home. He was refreshed. Exhausted, was I. Exhausted and overwhelmed.
I'm afraid Justice Alito might be mistaken about the absence of racial animus in this country... especially in those states rushing to erase proportional representation for persistently marginalized groups... they can call it "partisan gerrymandering" if they want, most of us know the real motivation.
No worries... they'll hear from us this November.
It was all too easy at the time - for me, anyway, closet optimist that I am - to view the election of Obama as America finally coming of age: at long last we'd got it right. What I didn't fully grasp was that much of America viewed his ascension to the Oval Office -- a black man in the White House -- as an intolerable abomination that simply could not be allowed to stand ... and then the Empire Struck Back.
So here we are (and apologies for two film metaphors), Back to the Future ... but this trip won't be nearly so much fun - or end as well - as the movie.