In Honor of Tony Van Westrum - Symposium on Race, Denver

Because of our wonderful Denver community in general, and because of Tony in particular, the Symposium on Race has been a great success, and it grows every month. If folks wish to make donations in honor of Tony van Westrum to the Symposium on Race, we request that donations come to us via the church (St. Mark’s) who has hosted our group since its inception.
Donations are tax deductible, would benefit only the Symposium on Race group at the church, and would help us continue to grow and thrive. We plan to continue to honor Tony, who was so supportive as a participant, friend of, and recruiter for the Symposium on Race, and so important to our wonderful conversations and our growth in this community.
Donations should state in the note section: "In Honor of Tony van Westrum," and/or "For Symposium on Race," and be addressed to:
St. John's Lutheran Church
Attn: Sherri Stegeman
700 S. Franklin St.
Denver Co 80209
Thanks so much!
Angie Arkin and Al Harrell
________________________
We have received a generous donation from Ben Aisenberg to create and maintain this website in honor of Tony van Westrum, who left us on JANUARY 20, 2019.

Anthony Colby van Westrum, age 74, of Golden, Colorado passed away on Sunday, January 20, 2019. He was born April 10, 1944 in Indianapolis, Indiana.  Tony was a loving father and grandfather. He was an accomplished attorney for 50 years, held in high esteem by his colleagues. He was also much admired and respected by his friends. As an avid photographer and lover of the outdoors, Tony spent countless hours in nature. He was a voracious reader of all genres, always looking for new ways to learn and to challenge his mind. Anthony is survived by his wife Jenny, son Derek (Jen), daughter Heather (Mike) and granddaughter Ruby. He will be deeply missed, and his impact on the those who knew him will be lasting.
_
"Angie and Members of the Symposium:
   It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that one of our members and a stalwart in the Bar, Tony Van Westrum , passed away on Sunday. He suffered a fall and did not survive. It’s a severe loss to all of us.
Ben Aisenberg"
Date: January 22, 2019 at 11:54:12 AM MST
To: Ben Aisenberg, and Members of the Symposium on Race, Denver:
This is a great shock, and a great loss for all of us. Please keep us informed of the plans to honor his life.
Tony was a strong supporter of the Symposium from the very beginning, and was committed to being a force for change to the betterment of all people of color, and all of those that have suffered and continue to suffer from racism in our society, and in Denver in particular. He will be sorely missed.
Warm best wishes,
Angie Arkin And Al Harrell
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Emails and Articles from Tony:
From: Anthony van Westrum
Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2018 9:24 AM
To: Jackson, Gary - DCC Judge
Subject: An honor
Date: February 22, 2018
Subject: An honor
To: The Honorable Gary M. Jackson, at [email protected]
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
Dear Gary,
I've just downloaded the SCBA email telling me that Senator Fields will honor you tomorrow in the Senate chambers.
And I congratulate you, Gary — though that seems like such an inadequate gesture for all that you do, all that you have done for so long.
And I am so thankful for your friendship — and tolerance — of me over these years.
I will be there in the chambers tomorrow, barring another snowfall that I might have to clear from our 500 ft. driveway so early in the morning.
Yours in immense admiration,
—Tony--
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Anthony van Westrum
Anthony van Westrum LLC
Blackacre, on Lookout Mountain
651 Go-A-Quah Road
Golden, Colorado 80401-9511
303-295-1515 — [email protected]
[bafk022218]
Date: July 7, 2018
Subject: Race matters
To: The Honorable Angela R. Arkin,
And: The Honorable Alfred C. Harrell,
And: Magistrate Don Toussaint,
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
Dear Colleagues:
I've just finished — it was a marathon start-to-finish exercise, as the book is so good — Sapiens: A Brief History of the Human Race by Yuval Noah Harari, and that induced me to go back and take a second look at Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, which is a newer book (written in the Trump era and with great regret about that era) but which I first read some months ago.
Back in Pinker's book, I jumped to the chapter entitled "Equal Rights" and found his sanguine look to be refreshing; I've attached the first several pages, stopping after the discussion of racial equality and before diving into the discussion of gender equality. I've attached a scan of those pages.
Now, Pinker is known for being sanguine about the progress of the Human Race, as earlier evidenced in books such as The Better Angels of Our Nature. But he, like Harari, makes a good case for it's getting better. And, of course, neither of them would have us put our guard down.
Yours,
—Tony--
"CHAPTER 15 EQUAL RIGHTS. Humans are liable to treat entire categories of other humans asHmeans to an end or nuisances to be cast aside. Coalitions bound by race or creed seek to dominate rival coalitions. Men try to control the labor, freedom, and sexuality of women.1 People translate their discomfort with sexual nonconformity into moralistic condemnation! We call these phenomena racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they have been rampant, to varying degrees, in most cultures throughout history. The disavowal of these evils is a large part of what we call civil rights or equal rights. The historical expansion of these rights-the stories of Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall-is a stirring chapter in the story of human progress.>
The rights of racial minorities, women, and gay people continue to advance, each recently emblazoned on a milestone. The year 2017 saw the completion of two terms in office by the first African American president, an achievement movingly captured by First Lady Michelle Obama in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016: "I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn." Barack Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential election, less than a century after American women were even allowed to vote; she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year. In a parallel universe very similar to this one until November 8, 2016, the world's three most influential nations (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) are all led by women. And in 2015, just a dozen years after it ruled that homosexual activity may not be criminalized, the Supreme Court guaranteed the right of marriage to same-sex couples. But it's in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come. An axiom of progressive opinion, especially in universities, is that we continue to live in a deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic society-which would imply that progressivism is a waste of time, having accom- plished nothing after decades of struggle. Like other forms of progressophobia, the denial of advances in rights has been abetted by sensational headlines. A string of highly publicized killings by American police officers of unarmed African American sus- pects, some of them caught on smartphone videos, has led to a sense that the country is suffering an epidemic of racist attacks by police on black men. Media coverage of athletes who have assaulted their wives or girl- friends, and of episodes of rape on college campuses, has suggested to many that we are undergoing a surge of violence against women. And one of the most heinous crimes in American history took place in 2016 when Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three. The belief in an absence of progress has been fortified by the recent history of the universe we do live in, where Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton was the beneficiary of the American electoral system in 2016. During his campaign, Trump uttered misogynistic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim insults that were well outside the norms of American political discourse, and the rowdy followers he encouraged at his rallies were even more offensive. Some commentators worried that his victory represented a turning point in the nation's progress toward equality and rights, or that it uncovered the ugly truth that we had never made progress in the first place. The goal of this chapter is to plumb the depths of the current that carries equal rights along. Is it an illusion, a turbulent whirlpool atop a stagnant pond? Does it easily change direction and flow backwards? Or does justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a mighty stream? I'll end with a coda about progress in the rights of the most easily victimized sector of humanity, children. By now you should be skeptical about reading history from the headlines, and that applies to the recent assaults on equal rights. The data suggest that the number of police shootings has decreased, not increased, in recent decades (even as the ones that do occur are captured on video), and three independent analyses have found that a black suspect is no more likely than a white suspect to be killed by the police.6 (American police shoot too many people, but it's not primarily a racial issue.) A spate of news about rape cannot tell us whether there is now more violence against women, a bad thing, or whether we now care more about violence against women, a good thing. And to this day it is unclear whether the Orlando nightclub massacre was committed out of homophobia, sympathy for ISIS, or the drive for posthumous notoriety that motivates most rampage shooters. Better first drafts of history can be gleaned from data on values andfrom vital statistics. The Pew Research Center has probed Americans' opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a "fundamental shift" toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly wide- spread prejudices sinking into oblivion.? The shift is visible in figure 15-1,which plots reactions to three survey statements that are representative of many others. ....
Other surveys show the same shifts. Not only has the American population become more liberal, but each generational cohort is more liberal than the one born before it. As we will see, people tend to carry their values with them as they age, so the Millennials (those born after 1980), who are even less prejudiced than the national average, tell us which way the country is going. Of course one can wonder whether figure 15-1 displays a decline inprejudice or simply a decline in the social acceptability of prejudice, with fewer people willing to confess their disreputable attitudes to a pollster. The problem has long haunted social scientists, but recently the econo- mist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has discovered an indicator of attitudes that is the closest we've come to a digital truth serum.11 In the privacy of their keyboards and screens, people query Google with every curiosity, anxiety, and guilty pleasure you can imagine, together with many you can't imagine. (Common searches include "How to make my penis bigger" and "My vagina smells like fish.") Google has amassed big data on the strings that people search for in different months and regions (though not the identity of the searchers), together with tools for analyzing them. Stephens-Davidowitz discovered that searches for the word nigger (mostly in pursuit of racist jokes) correlate with other indicators of racial prejudice across regions, such as vote totals for Barack Obama in 2008 that were lower than expected for a Democrat. He suggests that these searches can serve as an unobtrusive indicator of private racism. Let's use them to track recent trends in racism, and while we're at it, private sexism and homophobia as well. Well into my adolescence, jokes featuring dumb Poles, ditzy dames, and lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals were common in network television and newspaper comics. Today they are taboo in mainstream media. But do bigoted jokes remain a private indulgence, or have private attitudes changed so much that people feel offended, sullied, or bored by them? Figure 15-2 shows the results. The curves suggest that Americans are not just more abashed about confessing to prejudice than they used to be; they privately don't find it as amusing. And contrary to the fear that the rise of Trump reflects (or emboldens) prejudice, the curves continue their decline through his period of notoriety in 2015-2016 and inauguration in early 2017- Stephens-Davidowitz has pointed out to me that these curves proba- bly underestimate the decline in prejudice because of a shift in who's Googling. When the records began in 2004, Googlers were mostly young and urban. Older and rural people tend to be latecomers to technology, and if they are the ones who are likelier to search for the offensive terms, that would inflate the proportion in later years and conceal the extent of the decline in bigotry. Google doesn't record the searchers' ages or levels of education, but it does record where the searches come from. In response to my query, Stephens-Davidowitz confirmed that bigoted searches tended to come from regions with older and less-educated populations. Compared with the country as a whole, retirement communities are seven times as likely to search for "nigger jokes" and thirty times as likely to search for "fag jokes." ("Google Ad Words," he told me apologetically, "doesn't give data on 'bitch jokes.'") Stephens-Davidowitz also got his hands on a trove of search data from AOL, which, unlike Google, tracks the searches made by individuals (though not, of course, their identities). These threads confirmed that racists may be a dwindling breed: someone who searches for "nigger" is likely to search for other topics that appeal to senior citizens, such as "social security" and "Frank Sinatra." The main exception was a sliver of teenagers who also searched for bestiality, decapitation videos, and child pornography -anything you're not supposed to search for. But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts.
... US, 2004-2017 Source: Google Trends (www.google.com/ trends), searches for "nigger jokes," "bitch jokes," and "fagjokes," United States, 2004- 2017, relative to total search volume. Data (accessed Jan. 22, 2017) are by month, expressed as a percentage of the peak month for each search term, then averaged over the months of each year, and smoothed. Sexist jokes. Until they do, these older and less-educated people (mainly white men) may not respect the benign taboos on racism, sexism, and homophobia that have become second nature to the mainstream, and may even dismiss them as "political correctness." Today they can find each other on the Internet and coalesce under a demagogue. As we will see in chapter 20, Trump's success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights. Progress in equal rights may be seen not just in political milestones and opinion bellwethers but in data on people's lives. Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27-6 percent in 2014 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).'5 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today. As we will see in the next chapter, the racial gap in children's readiness for school has been shrinking. As we will see in chapter 18, so has the racial gap in happiness.'? Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has fallen further since the FBI started amalgamating reports on hate crimes in 1996, as figure 15-3shows. (Very few of these crimes are homicides, in most years one or zero.) The slight uptick in 2015 (the most recent year available) cannot be blamed on Trump, since it parallels the uptick in violent crime that year (see figure 12-2), and hate crimes track rates of overall lawlessness more closely than they do remarks by politicians. Figure 15-3 shows that hate crimes against Asian, Jewish, and white targets have declined as well. And despite claims that Islamophobia has become rampant in America, hate crimes targeting Muslims have shown little change other than a one-time rise following 9/11 and upticks following other Islamist terror attacks, such as the ones in Paris and San Bernardino in 2015. At the time of this writing, FBI data from 2016 are not available, so it's premature to accept the widespread claims of a Trumpist surge in hate crimes that year."
Subject: Race matters
Date: July 1, 2018 at 9:19:26 PM MDT
To: "Angela R. Arkin" , "Alfred C. Harrell", "Donald J. Toussaint"
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
Dear Colleagues:
I am not sure how much traction I am getting with my thought that the pervasive brutality of slavery as it was practiced in the American South may be causative in even black-on-black violence today, as I suggested in my email to you of June 7th.
But my son gave me a marvelous book just yesterday, which I've not been able to put down yet: Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. And beginning at p. 140, Harari says this, in a chapter titled "There Is No Justice in History" and a subchapter thereof titled "Purity in America" [I have bold-faced a particularly pertinent passage]:
"A similar vicious circle [,similar to that of the Hindu caste system] perpetuated the racial hierarchy in modern America. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the European conquerors imported millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of America. They chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or East Asia due to three circumstantial factors. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it was cheaper to import slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam.
       Secondly, in Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade (exporting slaves mainly to the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was very rare. It was obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing market than to create a new one from scratch.
       Thirdly, and most importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenceless and died in droves. It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African slave than in a European slave or indentured labourer. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters! Due to these circumstantial factors, the burgeoning new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjugated caste of black Africans.
       But people don't like to say that they keep slaves of a certain race or origin simply because it's economically expedient. Like the Aryan conquerors of India, white Europeans in the Americas wanted to be seen not only as economically successful but also as pious, just and objective. Religious and scientific myths were pressed into service to justify this division. Theologians argued that Africans descend from Ham, son of Noah, saddled by his father with a curse that his offspring would be slaves. Biologists argued that blacks are less intelligent than whites and their moral sense less developed. Doctors alleged that blacks live in filth and spread diseases — in other words, they are a source of pollution.
       These myths struck a chord in American culture, and in Western culture generally. They continued to exert their influence long after the conditions that created slavery had disappeared. In the early nineteenth century imperial Britain outlawed slavery and stopped the Atlantic slave trade, and in the decades that followed slavery was gradually outlawed throughout the American continent. Notably, this was the first and only time in history that a large number of slaveholding societies voluntarily abolished slavery. But, even though the slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom.
       The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle. Consider, for example, the southern United States immediately after the Civil War. In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution outlawed slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment mandated that citizenship and the equal protection of the law could not be denied on the basis of race. However, two centuries of slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less educated than most white families. A black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less chance of getting a good education and a wellpaid job than did his white neighbours. His children, born in the 1880s and 1890s, started life with the same disadvantage - they, too, were born to an uneducated, poor family.
       But economic disadvantage was not the whole story. Alabama was also home to many poor whites who lacked the opportunities available to their better-off racial brothers and sisters. In addition, the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigration made the United States an extremely fluid society, where rags could quickly turn into ri ches. If money was all that mattered, the sharp divide between the races should soon have blurred, not least through intermarriage. But that did not happen.  By 1865 whites, as well as many blacks, took it to be a simple matter of fact that blacks were less intelligent, more violent and sexually dissolute, lazier and less concerned about personal cleanliness than whites. They were thus the agents of violence, theft, rape, and disease. If a black Alabaman in 1895 miraculously managed to get a good education and then applied for a respectable job such as a bank teller, his odds of being accepted were far worse than those of an equally qualified white candidate. The stigma that labelled blacks as, by nature, unreliable, lazy and less intelligent conspired against him.
       You might think that people would gradually understand that these stigmas were myth rather than fact and that blacks would be able, over time, to prove themselves just as competent, law-abiding and clean as whites. In fact, the opposite happened- these prejudices became more and more entrenched as time went by. Since all the best jobs were held by whites, it became easier to believe that blacks really are inferior. 'Look,' said the average white citizen, 'blacks have been free for generations, yet there are almost no black professors, lawyers, doctors or even bank tellers. Isn't that proof that blacks are simply less intelligent and hard-working?' Trapped in this vicious circle, blacks were not hired for white-collar jobs because they were deemed unintelligent, and the proof of their inferiority was the paucity of blacks in white-collar jobs.
       The vicious circle did not stop there. As anti-black stigmas grew stronger, they were translated into a system of 'Jim Crow' laws and norms that were meant to safeguard the racial order in the South. Blacks were forbidden to vote in elections, to study in white schools, to buy in white stores, to eat in white restaurants, to sleep in white hotels. The justification for all of this was that blacks were foul, slothful and vicious, so whites had to be protected from them. Whites did not want to sleep in the same hotel as blacks or to eat in the same restaurant, for fear of diseases. They did not want their children learning in the same school as black children, for fear of brutality and bad influences. They did not want blacks voting in elections, since blacks were ignorant and immoral. These fears were substantiated by scientific studies that 'proved' that blacks were indeed less educated, that various diseases were more common among them, and that their crime rate was far higher (the studies ignored the fact that these 'facts' resulted from discrimination against blacks.)
       By the mid-twentieth century segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late nineteenth century. Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi.
       Nothing was as revolting to American southerners (and many northerners) as sexual relations and marriage between black men and white women. Sex between the races became the greatest taboo and any violation, or suspected violation, was viewed as deserving immediate and summary punishment in the form of lynching. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist secret society, perpetrated many such killings. They could have taught the Hindu Brahmins a thing or two about purity laws.
       With time, the racism spread to more and more cultural arenas. American aesthetic culture was built around white standards of beauty. The physical attributes of the white race — for example light skin, fair and straight hair, a small upturned nose — - came to be identified as beautiful. Typical black features — dark skin, dark and bushy hair, a flattened nose — were deemed ugly. These preconceptions ingrained the imagined hierarchy at an even deeper level of human consciousness.
       Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimized by history are likely to be victimized yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.
       Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis - they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one good reason to study history. If the division into blacks and whites or Brahmins and Shudras was grounded in biological realities — that is, if Brahmins really had better brains than Shudras — biology would be sufficient for understanding human society. Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can't explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel — and very real — social structures."
(I recommend the book to you for many reasons, this passage being just one of them.)
Yours,
—Tony--
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
From: Anthony van Westrum <[email protected]>
Subject: Fwd: A request
Date: June 7, 2018 at 6:45:43 PM MDT
To: "Angela R. Arkin" "Alfred C. Harrell" , "Donald J. Toussaint"
Date: June 7, 2018
Subject: Race matters
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
Dear Colleagues:
I was, well, "blown away" comes to mind, with Don's comments at the end of last night's wonderful discussion, as he pointed out to us all what we'd not thought of the whole prior discussion: That some of the perpetrators of the injustices we saw were black policemen. That, for me, turned the whole discussion upside down, getting to a much more fundamental truth than what we'd been considering. The message I took home — and it haunted me all the way home and all through my dreams last night — is that society has so debased black people that even black people look askew at their own kind.
Angie and Al, I have previously sent to you an email to which was attached an article in The New York Review of Books that introduced me to John Hope Franklin and his book From Slavery to Freedom.. The article proposes that America needs a truth and reconciliation, South-African-style, about its history of slavery. My suggestion to you earlier was that you might want, at some time in this marvelous Race Symposium you have crafted, to tackle the legacy of slavery that pervades our societ(ies).
I could be dead wrong about all of this — I am well-aware that I will always remain hopeless naïve about so much of the matter we nickname racism — and I am sure the three of you can cut me short if you think I am. But I now keep associating this idea, that we need a truth-and-reconciliation to root out the pernicious effects of Southern American slavery, in my mind with what Don pointed out last night. And I remember that neither Don or anyone else offered a reason why even blacks treat blacks more poorly than they treat white folk.
I still remember the exit interview I had with the general counsel of Ford Motor Company (whose name I remember to this day but will not here disclose), in his corner office on the tenth floor of Ford's American Way building east of Ann Arbor where I was in law school, as I left my clerkship at the end of summer, 1968. There were five of us in the clerkship class, and, of course, we dined together in the cafeteria every day and got to know each other pretty well. The smartest of us by far — and you can make those assessments after two-and-a-half months together — was the student from Harvard, who went by the nickname Butch (I remember well his last name, too, but I won't disclose it here). I was the first to leave at the end of the summer, as Jenny and I planned a trip into Canada before school resumed. The general counsel made me a nice offer — matching the starting salaries of New York, which had just jumped from $10,000 to $15,000 (a fifty percent increase in one swoop) and adding a Shelby Mustang — but he asked me not to tell the others, as I was the only one getting an offer. "Not Butch?" (the smartest of us all). "Oh, no. Butch has done well, but we can't hire him. Blacks have brains only half the size of whites, you see." To my shame to this very day, I said nothing in reply.
But I recount that story here because I think that thoroughly evidences the deep deep distortion that Southern American slavery has done to all our thinking about the black race [if we are going to talk about "racism," I guess we have to use the word "race," also]. Nowhere else in the world — not even in South America, where Africans were also enslaved at the time they were being enslaved in Georgia and Alabama but where Franklin tells us blacks were never stigmatized societally and the societies there now think nothing of mulattos and their mixed kindred, mestizos — has such a degradation occurred.
Only in the southern United States — where the whip and the lash that Odetta sings of so powerfully was necessary to break the spirit and reduce the black to one who would work like an animal and was thus regarded as an animal — was a people so degraded.
And, Don, perhaps an explanation for what even you found inexplicable last night is that — is the slavery that was practiced here in the United States for so long.
(Angie, I learned from Anna Martinez that "people of color" is a term that includes all the world other than white people. Clearly that makes me not a "white man" — that term you said last night you did not like — but, rather, a "colorless man." Fitting, eh?)
Yours,
—Tony--
Forwarding 4/5/18 email and attachment
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Date: March 23, 2018
Subject: A request
To: The Honorable Angela R. Arkin,
And: The Honorable Alfred C. Harrell,
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
Al and Angie, if you find what I set forth below to be appropriate, would you forward it to the Race Symposium participants? If you don't find it such, would you let me know?
Thanks.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Anthony van Westrum
    * * * * * * * * * *
Date: April 5, 2018
Subject: I'm concerned
To: Race Symposium Symposiers
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
Dear Colleagues:
I am a newcomer to this wonderful Race Symposium that Angie Arkin and Al Harrell have created before our very eyes; last night was only my second meeting, where I watched Anthony Doane and Connie Talmage begin a very fruitful discussion of racism in education.
But I grew more and more concerned as the discussion proceeded and as I listened to the history of this country's efforts either to keep two blocks of peoples on separate educational tracks or to bring them together on the same track — with, today, an apathy perhaps leading to their separation again.
What kept me concerned, through the evening, was our fundamental assumption that there are, and must naturally be, two blocks. I kept thinking of what I'd read recently in John Hope Franklin's wonderful work, From Slavery to Freedom (my book is the 1956 second edition of his work, originally published in 1947) — what I'd read in Chapter XIX, "Freedom South of the Border," about race south of the border. I've attached a text-searchable scan of that chapter.
What I take away from that chapter is this:
"THE steady amalgamation of racial elements constituting the population of the Latin American republics on the mainland makes it exceedingly difficult for students of the history of the United States to bring the racial problems of the area South of the Rio Grande into the framework of the pattern of this country's problems. It will be recalled that this intermingling was a continuous process during the slave regime. (See Chapter IX). If anything, it has been hastened since emancipation; in some countries—Argentina, for example—Negroes as a distinct ethnic element have disappeared almost altogether.
   * * * *
       As Negroes came more and more to be absorbed into the population and as their opportunities to participate fully in the cultural life of the community increased, Negro institutions, as such, tended to disappear. There are no Negro schools, no Negro churches, few Negro newspapers and periodicals, and few other agencies of group articulation and cohesion. Only the color of Negroes remains to give evidence of their presence, and only where some aspect of the African culture has persisted is there evidence of the presence of the Negro as a distinct cultural and intellectual force.
   * * * *
       Thus Negroes have become a basic element in the life of the republics of Latin America. They are co-partners with Indians and whites in the development of their countries. In many areas they are in the minority, but they do not constitute a minority problem in the sense that persons in the United States understand the term. They are among the best examples that can be found of what happens to peoples when acculturation is permitted to proceed without legal restrictions and racial inhibitions and prejudices.
Maybe there is much to be mourned in that acculturation — the loss of an identity — but a moment's reflection on the vitality of the amalgamated cultures south of our border must assuage that mourning, surely."
Elsewhere in Hope's book, he attributes our racial fixations to our particularly brutal form of slavery in the Southern States, where masters could maintain some sense of personal respect only by convincing themselves that their slaves were — as we learned once again last night from Anthony's and Connie's history lesson about the ruling in Dred Scott — "so far inferior that they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect." My understanding from Hope's work is that, in South America and elsewhere, that kind of diminishment (what other word should I use?) of a group (I strive to avoid the term "race") of human beings was not in the mental composition of even those who owned slaves and thus did not animalize a whole people, retarding the subsequent acceptance of them as equals.
This is discussed in the New York Review of Books article that I've attached, the article that introduced me to Franklin. (When I received my copy of the issue, I looked at the cover photo of Bill Clinton with Franklin and was shocked the colorful evidence of my ignorance; I had known nothing of Franklin before then. It is notable that the article, deeply concerned though it is with the racial divides that even then still split our peoples, was written in a more optimistic era: 2015.)
The article proposes that America needs a truth and reconciliation, South-African-style, about its history of slavery. Now, we developed an agenda last evening for the Race Symposium that will keep us filled with things to discuss well into July. But might we not want, at some time, to tackle the legacy of slavery that pervades our societ(ies)?
My wonderment is whether we here in the United States should continue to play with blocks or, instead, should begin the work of being a melting pot. And, perhaps, to find ways to move beyond blocks to more adult activities?
You will learn, as I participate with you in the Race Symposium, that I am hopelessly naïve about these matters; indeed, I did not realize until late 2014 how lily-white is the Colorado Bar Association to which I have devoted thirty years of service. But I gained an important insight just recently, when an Hispanic friend confirmed for me that Hispanics are included among the peoples contained within the phrase "people of color." Apparently everyone is within that phrase except for whites — leaving the likes of me, by definition, "colorless."
Yours,
—Tony--
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Date: March 19, 2018
Subject: My enlightenment
To: The Honorable Angela R. Arkin,
From: Anthony van Westrum, at [email protected]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Dear Angie:
You did not take me up on my unsolicited offer, which I had phrased this way:   "I've a long explanatory email to my children about my belated enlightenment that I could send to you." But you have taken me on for lunch, so now I'll send it to you anyway.
I'll do that in the form of an attached pdf file. This means a great deal to me, is why I do so, and you are obviously far ahead of me on the path to an understanding of division and discrimination in our world, including our world of lawyers. I am just learning, but I find myself to be an avid learner.
Yours,
—Tony--
File attached: bakw031918.Arkin.pdf
Subject: A Little Black History
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2016 12:01:19 -0600
From: AnthonyvanWestrum<[email protected]> To:
Dear Children of Mine, Today I ordered for each of you, from Amazon, the book From Slavery to Freedom, written in 1948 and reissued in 1954, by John Hope Franklin. I learned of the book from The New York Review of Books article that I've attached. It's only available in used form, and the supply seems to be dwindling, perhaps because I've sent it to a number of my law colleagues recently; I hope the copies you receive are decent ones. I'll warn you that even my black colleagues, introduced to this book in their teens or early adult years, have told me they find it hard going. It's astonishingly thorough and documented, and very eloquently written, but one can get bogged down at the beginning in the overview of African kingdoms and in census numbers from before the Revolutionary War. You may want to start at p. 184 with the chapter "That Peculiar Institution," followed by the next chapter on "The Quasi-Free Negro." Mom's heard all about what I'm about to recount to you two now, and maybe I've already recounted some or all of this to you already; I've recounted it to a great number of people, by email and in person, since I got wrapped up in this in October 2014, and I lose track. I'll start by forwarding an email I sent to two colleagues, one white, one black, early this year, in which I refer specifically to the book. Then I'll end with an email I've sent to several folk about my introduction into the black bar in Colorado, the Sam Cary Bar Association or SCBA. * * * * * December 2015 email to John and Steve * * * * * [At lunch today] I mentioned truth and reconciliation as something America ought to undertake to expunge — well, surely the most that could be expected would be dilution — the impact of our history of slavery from our relations with each other, blacks and whites, today. To give it more context, I am setting forth below the text of my email to three members of the Sam Cary Bar Association with whom I had first voiced my idea that slavery has a more immediate impact on black/white relations in America, still today, than we acknowledge or, 1 perhaps, are even aware. I had come to that thought before reading this article — came to it, so far as I am aware, all on my own. (I've changed the names of my correspondents to protect their innocence.) **** * Dear Allison, George, and Theresa: At lunches that I've had with you recently, Allison and George, I've waxed on about what I've come to believe is the continuing, pervading, deleterious effect of slavery on relations today between blacks and whites in America. I realize that I may be overstaying my visit with you, but something I read this weekend in The New York Review of Books — attached — makes me wax on some more. What I'd said to you before had followed from what I'd read in The Invisible History of the Human Race about the phenomenally lasting effects of history. George, after our lunch, I'd sent you a copy of an email I'd sent to my friend, Negussie Abraha; I'll repeat a portion of it here because I've not previously sent this to Allison or Theresa: [Negussie,] I think I sent you a copy of [Christine Kenneally's book] The Invisible History of the Human Race recently. I've sent a good deal of time thinking about the author's discussion of the persistence of cultural concepts, including biases, across generations. It begins at p. 142 of the book, and just in case I did not send the book to you, I've attached an extraction of the pages that particularly interest me. The discussion includes review of a study of pervasive distrust today in those African communities in which the slave trade several hundred years ago had been particularly intense, where even family members sold their brethren — literally, their brothers — to the slavers, the study finding in comparison that trust is a more ready attribute today in those communities where the populace did not aid the slavers. Another study finds that the German holocaust was more ferocious in communities that, during the Black Death plague, had been particularly violent toward the Jews who they thought caused the plague than in nearby communities in which the response to the plague had not led to pogroms against the Jews. And yet others on the impact, generations ago, of the invention of the plow on the perceptions of the proper place for men — in the fields — and women — in the home, and the impacts today in Chinese communities based on whether the historical crop was wheat or rice. What keeps throbbing in my head from all that is the impact, in 2015, of the practice of slavery that ended in America 150 years ago this year. I see it comparing the black lawyers I've spent so much time with this year — in my quest to make the Colorado Bar Association more welcoming to them — to you. All of my black lunch companions are the descendants of slaves. In contrast, I understand, you, Negussie, are a descendant of a 2 lineage that you are able to visualize going back 5,000 years, whose names and ages at death you are able to remember one by one — a lineage that has not been scarred by enslavement. As a manifestation of the contrast I've seen, I've heard colleagues say, with some intensity, that they do not look back beyond the Middle Passage that brought their forebears here. I find some support for the thesis I proposed to Negussie in the article I've attached, from the NYRB, focusing on the views of John Hope Franklin — whom, I should clearly be embarrassed to say, given the photograph that begins the article and the delineation in the article of his writings and impacts, I had not previously known — and two other younger scholars, whom I also had not known. The article makes the important point that white folk are very pleased to say to themselves 'we've had the civil rights movement and all is resolved now' — and to say, hurt by the thought that black people are not grateful, 'what's the matter with you people'; the point being that all's been done that needs to be done. But-- Before the Civil War, we as a nation created a narrative of racial difference to legitimize slavery, [Bryan Stevenson] explains, and we convinced ourselves of its truth. As a result, instead of genuinely ending slavery, we helped it evolve into a succession of new forms of unfreedom, culminating in today's mass incarceration. Burdened by a past of racism and cruelty, "we don't like to talk about our history," he observes. We have been "unwilling to commit ourselves" to a necessary "process of truth and reconciliation," so we have not succeeded in transcending our past, in confronting and abandoning its assumptions and inequities. We have been too "celebratory" about the civil rights movement we "congratulated ourselves too quickly" that the ugliness of racism was eliminated when it continued to infuse our institutions and our attitudes. But history is important; the history of slavery is fundamental to our history: "[S]lavery was not 'ancillary to American history' but 'foundational.' It remains as a 'ghost' over all American policy today.'" And, "History must move beyond the academy, must become a recognized part of everyday life and understanding for all those who would themselves be free from its weight." Following my email to Negussie — in which I asked, "So, Negussie, is there anything to this suspicion of mine? Do you sense fundamental differences between your own perceptions of yourself and the self-perceptions of the black lawyers and others you know [here in America] who are descended from slaves?" — he and I had an hour-and-a-half telephone call last Wednesday. He did not agree explicitly with what I had asked: As the scion of an always-free people, does he somehow stand free of America's slave history? [I was not so naïve as to believe that he does also not suffer cop-stops when "out while being black," as any slave descendant would have to endure in this land of the free and home of the brave, just because he is Ethiopian; he told me that the trick he has learned, to say "I am a Federal agent," works pretty well in those events.] But he eloquently spoke of some of the differences that he senses between himself — born an Ethiopian, coming to adulthood as a real rebel (not a Ben Carson rebel, but one who carried Uzis and still carries shrapnel in his leg from getting strafed) in a country with a three 3 thousand year old monarchy and a continuing respect for its ages-old laws despite the overthrow of that monarchy that he was instrumental in accomplishing — and American blacks. [Allison, I've not gotten used to saying "browns" instead; no one seems to know what that means.] Negussie knows that among both blacks and whites he is perceived as an outsider, an immigrant, not a real American. But he thinks blacks think of him that way — as an outsider — because they, paradoxically, feel very American in comparison to him. None of that is quite what I was saying to you, George: Kenneally's discussion shows that events, cultural structures, beliefs from long long ago can have great staying power, subtly affecting our thoughts today notwithstanding that the bases therefor — the Black Death, for example — are so long past that they are not consciously remembered. My thought was that slavery, so brutal, distorting, and recent, must still be having a subconscious effect on the views that American blacks and whites both have of themselves and of each other — an effect that we should consciously acknowledge and come to grips with. The Franklin article, instead, makes the more direct points that whites actively bend the slavery history of this country to serve their needs and assuage their consciences and that history has impacts of which we are all too much aware of to admit of. A little South African Truth and Reconciliation might, indeed, be useful. And those living six or seven centuries from now can wonder whether a Kenneally effect then exists, notwithstanding efforts in the 2000s at Truth and Reconciliation. Looking back at what I've just written to you, I see that I must hasten to add that my concern about the cultural impact of slavery on race relations today is more about (a) the inability I and other whites have to recognize that the impact is ongoing, affecting our views of blacks, affecting our views of that other people who supposedly now stand as equal with us under the law and in all other fields, than it is about (b) the continuing impact of that history on the American black's view of himself. As a measure, I believe that our slavery history leads whites, unwittingly but unremittingly, to view blacks quite differently from all of the other minorities that are rapidly becoming, in combination, the majority in America. We've forgotten our bloody prejudices against the Chinese coolies who worked to build the railroads, against the Irish who took our jobs in the early 1900s, against the Italians, against . . . . But we still treat blacks differently, and badly, because of our own guilt for our enslavement of them — because, as the article says, we created a narrative of racial difference to legitimize slavery and we convinced ourselves of its truth. Real Truth and Reconciliation is needed, but how can we get white America to see the truth that it was all based on a lie? Again: Sorry. I am so caught up in this, trying so hard to understand. And very well aware that, to the three of you, I am hopelessly a newbie, hopelessly naïve. **** * [Steve and John,] I have no understanding of how South Africa accomplished its truth and reconciliation effort; I had feared for years that there was no end to apartheid but a very bloody bath, and yet somehow Mandela — and I assume de Klerk helped — pulled off something that 4 avoided that and has (I guess, for I don't really follow what's going on there) become a fairly stable nation. But how about us trying something like this, on the very small scale that even I might be able to handle, here in Colorado? I mentioned Bruce Benson's name during our lunch yesterday. I made a similar proposal to Benson in an email in December, no doubt lost in the maw of his office since I had no direct email address for him. (I suppose I should have tried the standard [email protected]; maybe I will try that eventually.) What I said to Benson, after some long stretches of text drawn from other emails, as I have done above here for the two of you, was: If you've made it this far, Bruce, and are still with me, I'd welcome your thoughts on how my goal of bringing black lawyers into the Colorado Bar Association and your goal of improving diversity on the CU campus can be joined. (I know a number of professors at your wonderful Law School — we've been drafting geeks together for many years — but I have not yet engaged any of them in this quest of mine.) Yes, I know that there are other groups that feel quite left out. But I can't deal with all the problems in the world, and I've decided to focus on the estrangement of black lawyers from our midst. One of the reasons I feel that way was well expressed in a recent book review in The New York Review of Books, a copy of which I've attached, that details the continuing effects of our slavery history on black/white relations in America, a history that whites have with no other minority group, even those such as the Chinese, Hispanics, Irish, Italians, and Jews who have suffered discrimination here. The article's suggestion is that America could profit from some truth and reconciliation, South Africa style, about slavery 150 years after "emancipation." The best solution I've come up with personally is to lunch with as many black colleagues as I can, repeatedly; friendship bridges all kinds of barriers. But perhaps your university and my bar association could actually set up a little truth and reconciliation right here in the center of Colorado. Can you two, John and Steve, tell me whether there is any merit in this? And, if so, how someone might go about getting something started, at the CBA level perhaps or at either or both of the law schools? * * * * * Now, my introduction to the black bar: email to Harry, a Jewish colleague of many years on the CBA Ethics Committee, on 3/28/2015, forwarding other emails * * * * * Dear Harry, You reminded me, at last week's Ethics Committee meeting, of something you'd told me long ago: You are a member of the Sam Cary Bar Association. I told you that I've recently become a member too. So, now I'm looking for your help in my quest to make our Colorado Bar Association a more diverse body — in particular, to make it more welcoming to black lawyers. To explain, here's an extract from an email I've just sent to my former partner, Carlton, in which I explained the origin of my quest and sought his help. 5 [Carlton,] I've got a concern that I'd like to talk to you about. If you'll give me a moment — or several, for this turned out longer than I expected — I'll tell you how it developed and what (little) I've done about it so far. Ben Aisenberg invited Jenny and me to attend, at his table, the Sam Cary Bar Association dinner last October at which he received the SCBA Warrior for Justice Award. When I walked into the room at the Colorado History Museum in which the event was held, I was instantly stunned with the intensity of life, of enjoyment, that everyone who was already there exhibited. And I was instantly stunned with the thought that I knew very few of them — Wiley Daniel, Gary Jackson, YE Scott (I don't think you were there, or at least I didn't spot you) — even though they were all members of the Colorado bar, were all members of the profession I profess to practice. And nearly all of them — most of them other than those who sat with Ben at his table — were black. In short succession after that wonderful dinner, I attended three further bar functions: Gary Abrams' annual wine-tasting party for CLE presenters and two functions in the Ralph Carr atrium put on by the Supreme Court, one to thank the volunteers on its various committees and one to recognize Chuck Turner on his retirement as the CBA executive director. And at each of these functions I knew a large fraction of the attendees, but I was instantly stunned by how white they all were. I've been going to various CBA functions steadily for nearly three decades now and I'd never had a moment's thought about the complexion of its skin until these four events last fall. I'd never realized what a lily-white group it is, though it hopes and purports to represent all the lawyers in the state. In quick succession after the fourth of those events, I had lunch with these lawyers/judges to get their ideas about my epiphany: Gary Jackson, Chuck Turner, Wiley Daniel, and Rich Gabriel. And in mid-January, Wiley hosted all of us and Ben Aisenberg (actually, Chuck could not attend) at a brown bag lunch in his chambers to talk together about this concern of mine, about which I'd already talked to each of them separately. What I heard, very explicitly from Gary and Wiley in Wiley's chambers, is that the CBA is not a welcoming place to blacks. (Later, at a reception for the Court's Attorney Mentor Program participants, I got an earful from Freddy Alvarez when I mentioned the concern to him; it's not a welcoming place to Hispanics, either.) That was from Wiley, the only black president the CBA's ever had, and from Gary, the winner of its Award of Merit in 2011 — surely they qualify as CBA insiders and know what they are talking about here. (Gary noted, as an aside, that it's hard to get young black lawyers to join even the SCBA, but that doesn't go to this problem of mine; I'm sure every black lawyer who goes to a SCBA affair feels very welcome there, unlike the feeling when attending something at the CBA.) But none of us at that brainstorming session could think of some way to change that,6 other than to get individual lawyers to change their own attitudes. Even before the lunch in Wiley's chambers, Gary suggested that I join the Sam Cary Bar Association — he pointed out that he's joined most of the minority bar associations. I replied to him in an email as follows: I was fortunate enough to be in the House lobby yesterday morning after an early-morning Legislative Policy Committee meeting — there on other business I must confess — and heard the Representatives, mostly white, riding on Dr. King's coattails. Yet I did not find the speeches to be hypocritical; rather, I considered what I heard to mean that that giant of a man has truly become part of our nation's pantheon, for all of us. But that coattail 'cept must be lodged in my mind, because it came to mind when I read your email. I would welcome being a member of the Sam Cary Bar Association but for my concern that I would be riding on your coattails, on the coattails of the black lawyers who make up the SCBA — and doing so only for my self-aggrandizement. The SCBA website says it very clearly: The Sam Cary Bar Association (SCBA) was formed in September of 1971, in order to create a self-help group to instill professionalism and serve as a vehicle for the exchange of ideas among African-American lawyers. I hope I've convinced you that I work hard to instill professionalism in myself and other lawyers and to drive the CBA to serve as a vehicle for the exchange of ideas among all lawyers. But I just feel odd even contemplating the injection of myself into the middle of a group with whom I am, by definition, different. (Yet, as I type those words, I wonder whether the lesson is awaiting me: Join a group in which you are different and see what it feels like.) Something about me recoils from the reflected light of other people; I don't deserve its enhancement of my features, and I try to avoid it. (The only reflected light that does not give me that feeling is the light reflected from my wife and children — albeit undeservedly, I relish that light.) I think you or he has told me that Ben has been a member of the SCBA for a long time, and you say here that you have been a member of most of the specialty bar associations for some time. So, you and he, both wiser than I, have seen your ways through these issues that I am having a hard time articulating even to myself. So, Gary, if you have time to tell me, please tell me what it is I am missing. And, thanks again for the invitation; that alone moves me deeply. 7 Gary [Jackson] did have time to tell me more, encouraging me to join the SCBA, and I did so, Carlton. My entrée into the organization was a wonderful, four-hour lunch with its president, Terraine Bailey, on the patio of YaYa's that one seventy-five degree day we had at the end of January. Delightful. And I've attended its two monthly meetings since then, feeling quite out of place as I'd told Gary I would. But by way of introducing myself to those who were in attendance, I said this about the CBA: It is the one organization in Colorado where lawyers meet the development of the law: Its amicus brief committee is respected by the Court; indeed, the Court invites its briefs on many matters. Its legislative policy committee determines what legislation the organized bar will support, or oppose, during the legislature's sessions; and it carries a very great deal of weight there. And its many substantive sections spend a great deal of effort drafting much of that legislation; that's what I've been doing for twenty-seven years now. I'm not a groupie. I had nothing to do with the CBA from my first year in Colorado, 1969, until very late in the 1980s when I got involved in the revision of the Colorado Corporation Code as a member of the drafting committee that Claude Maer had chaired since I'd been in junior high school (actually, he heard me say that one day and corrected me: He was on the committee when I was in junior high school but did not become chair until I was in high school; he's still active at 96). I'd never gone to a CBA convention, even when Don Stubbs was its president. I wanted nothing to do with it, or with organizations of any kind (including the organization in which I was your partner). But I love drafting statutes, and I found that I love the other geeks who are enamored of that kind of work. They became my good friends as well as drafting colleagues, and our drafting sessions are now usually followed by an hour or two of drinks at Shelby's afterwards. And yet all my drafting colleagues are white; they include women — your partner Winona among them — but all the women, too, are white. Even on the ethics committee, with some 120 members, there have been very few blacks in all the years I've been on it. Always Marcus Squarrell, thankfully; and Robert Mack has been on for a number of years; Rico Munn was there too, until he went off to grander venues. But very few others. In short, I am, selfishly, feeling very deprived of the companionship of a large group of folk who I am sure are very interesting and would add a great deal to my personal society. I have pursued this concern of mine — this concern that this entity to which I've now devoted so many years is segregated to my personal disadvantage and loss — at lunches with a number of folk: With Patrick Flaherty, the replacement for Chuck Turner as the new CBA executive director; with Greg Martin, who's been number two at the CBA for a couple of decades now; with Y.E. Scott, who once tied my daughter's nursing license up in knots until I brought the only lawsuit I've ever filed, against her client the Board of 8 Nursing, and got the knot untied (she told me I was right to have won that case); and yesterday with Barbara Kelley, whom I've known since we worked on Telluride Ski Area matters decades ago and who, flatteringly, looked me up when she came back to Colorado from practice in California some years later. What I've heard, consistently, from my black interlocutors, is that what I think I've learned is right: The CBA is not a welcoming place to people who are not white. And what I've heard from the CBA leadership is that they are (kinda) aware of the problem but don't know what to do about it. I've gotten indications from the current president, Charley Garcia, that he and the incoming president, Loren Brown, intend to do something about it, but . . . . And no one has any programmatic fix in mind. I'd like your thoughts, Carlton. Like Barbara and Gary and Marcus and Wiley, you seem to have put up with, or blasted through, the prejudice and played within the CBA (and our white society at large) notwithstanding this problem. All this reminds me — as I told Barbara Kelley at lunch yesterday — of a similar naïveté of which I became aware in a lunch conversation with our former partner Beth Cornell somewhere in the middle of the eighth decade of the last century. I was telling her what a wonderful profession this is, this law profession: It doesn't matter what box the brain on the other side of the negotiating table is housed within; that brain and mine are simply applying the same law to the same facts and circumstances, in a pure equality. I may be wearing a jacket and tie — I did in those days — and the other box may be wearing a dress, but the law we deal with is the same. What a marvelous profession. And Beth looked at me as if I were crazy: How many of the last dozen associates we threw out the door were women? Uh, two-thirds, I guess. How many members of our management committee have been women? Well, I guess I can't think of any. I've been as naïve about the CBA, thinking it is a wonderfully liberal (it is) organization, welcoming to all lawyers (well, to my chagrin, I guess not). I will keep picking away at this until I can find something useful to do, some way to make the CBA a more welcoming place, a place in which black lawyers, in particular, but all lawyers in general, feel at home, a place which they feel is useful to them, in which they feel they can be useful. But I haven't really got a clue about what I can do. And I've asked Carlton to lunch, to talk about this. I'd like to talk with you about it, too, Harry, if you are willing. You and I are white guys on the inside of the CBA. There must be something you and I, with others, can do to change this situation, to change the cast of the CBA's complexion. * That'sIt,Children* 9 This is all very interesting to me. The one fundamental truth I've discovered — and I've said it to the entire executive council of the Sam Cary Bar Association — is that I can spend the rest of my life with an open heart and mind trying to learn about all this and I will nevertheless never know what it means to be black. But Franklin's book helps (as do those by James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Cornel West that I've added to my library). Love,
—Dad--
File attached: avoc120615 - John Hope Franklin.pdf ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Anthony van Westrum
Blackacre, on Lookout Mountain, Golden, Colorado
[email protected]
"[azln111117.Model.Attachment.AvW's.Learning.Process.wpd] 10 12/6/2015 John Hope Franklin: Race & the Meaning of America by Drew Gilpin Faust | The New York Review of Books John Hope Franklin: Race & the Meaning of America Drew Gilpin Faust DECEMBER 17, 2015 ISSUE Font Size: A A A:
Bill Clinton and John Hope Franklin discussing race relations in America at the New York Public Library, October 2005 The historian John Hope Franklin, who died in 2009, would have turned one hundred this year. I have thought of him often in recent months as we have seen a conservative Republican governor call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds, as the Democratic Party has renamed the JeffersonJackson Day dinner in order to distance itself from two slaveowning forebears, as Yale University debates removing the name Calhoun from one of its undergraduate colleges. Many Americans in 2015 seem to be undertaking an unprecedentedly cleareyed look at the nation’s past, at the legacy of slavery and race that has made us anything but a colorblind society. There could be no more fitting tribute to Franklin’s one hundredth birthday than this collective stocktaking, for no one has done more to delineate the contours of that shameful legacy and to insist upon its importance to America’s present and future. And in that effort he has also done something more for history itself: insisting not just upon its relevance, but indeed its preeminence as the indispensable instrument of change and even salvation from legacies that left unexamined will destroy us. “Good history,” he remarked in 1989, “is a good foundation for a better present and future.” Franklin’s childhood in segregated Oklahoma introduced him to racism’s cruelties at an early age. He was just six when he and his mother were ejected from a train for sitting in a whiteonly car. His father was so embittered by his treatment as a black lawyer that he moved his family to an allblack town after resolving to “resign from the world dominated by white people.” Yet Franklin’s parents insisted that he was the equal of any other human being, and his mother repeatedly urged him to tell anyone who asked him about his aspirations that he planned to be “the first Negro president of the United States.” If you believe in yourself, his mother urged, “you won’t be crying; you’ll be defying.” Defying, not crying. That captures John Hope Franklin’s life, and it captures the history he wrote, a history that would, in his words, “attempt to rehabilitate a whole people” and serve them as a weapon of collective defiance. Inspired by a brilliant teacher at Fisk University, Franklin came to see how “historical traditions have controlled...attitudes and conduct,” and how changing history, challenging the truth of the “hallowed past,” was the necessary condition for changing the present and future. In important ways, the study of history was for Franklin not a choice; it was an imperative. “The true scholar,” he wrote in 1963, “must pursue truth in his field; he must, as it were, ply his trade.... If one tried to escape,...he would be haunted;...he would be satisfied in no other pursuit.” History, in the many meanings of the term, chose him. But the “Negro scholar,” Franklin wrote, should not imagine he could disappear into an ivory tower. The choice to “turn his back on the world” was not available. From Jonathan Edwards, to Thomas Jefferson, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, to John Kenneth Galbraith, Franklin observed, the American scholar had been drawn into policy and the practical. The black scholar must fully embrace this tradition of American intellectual life. “I now assert,” Franklin proclaimed, that the proper choice for the American Negro scholar is to use his history and ingenuity, his resources and talents, to combat the forces that isolate him and his people and, like the true patriot that he is, to contribute to the solution of the problems that all Americans face in common. Fundamental to the task at hand would be rewriting the history of history, revising the “hallowed” falsehoods, illustrating how the abuse and misuse of history served to legitimate systems of oppression not just in the past but in the present as well. Misrepresentations of the past, Franklin came to recognize, had given “the white South the intellectual justification for its determination not to yield on many important points, especially in its treatment of the Negro.” Post–Civil War southerners had endeavored to “win with the pen what they had failed to win with the sword.” Franklin detailed the way the antebellum South rewrote the history of the American Revolution to justify its increasing commitment to slavery, how the popular history represented by the 1915 film Birth of a Nation worked to justify the earlytwentiethcentury revival of the Klan, how in a volume commissioned for a prominent series on southern history, respected historian E. Merton Coulter’s racist assumptions produced a distorted view of Reconstruction that made an implicit argument against the extension of civil rights in the years immediately following World War II. But Franklin did not simply critique and revise; he did not just overturn existing interpretations by bringing a different lens to bear, or even by just grounding the narrative of the past in what were quite revolutionary assumptions of common human capacity and dignity. Franklin, the scholar, unearthed reams of new facts —facts no one had bothered to look for previously, facts buried in archives, newspapers, government records, facts no historian had searched for until history decided black lives mattered. Franklin’s approach to the doing of history is perhaps most faithfully and explicitly chronicled in the introduction to his biography of the nineteenthcentury African American historian George Washington Williams. A pioneer in charting the black experience, Williams, who died in 1891, had been all but forgotten until Franklin began “stalking” him. Franklin recounts the story of how over three decades he traveled to countless offices, libraries, and archives on three continents. He pursued clues and leads with imagination and unquenchable curiosity until he was able to piece together a full portrait of the man and his work. Franklin rescued Williams from oblivion to install him in his rightful place as a pathbreaking black intellectual, a precursor to Franklin himself in creating a true history of the nation’s past and the place of AfricanAmericans within it. The kind of exhaustive research Franklin undertook and described for this biography underpinned all his efforts to expand the scope of American history. He discovered the ironies and contradictions of American unfreedom in the lives of free blacks in antebellum North Carolina; he demonstrated how the pervasive presence of violence shaped and controlled every aspect of white—as well as black—lives in southern slave society; he illustrated the hunger for liberation in the records of runaways determined to free themselves. And in From Slavery to Freedom (1958) he sought to create an overarching American and global narrative to explain it all. The book has sold more than three million copies. Even Franklin, who had personally felt the brunt of segregation, who had understood the terrors of racial violence and oppression, was sobered by what he found. Writing From Slavery to Freedom, piecing together a comprehensive account of five hundred years of black history, brought tales of horror before his eyes: I had seen one slave ship after another...pile black human cargo into its bowels.... I had seen them dump my ancestors at New World ports as they would a load of cattle and wait smugly for their pay.... I had seen them beat black men...and rape black women until their ecstasy was spent leaving their brutish savagery exposed. I had heard them shout, “Give us liberty or give us death,” and not mean one word of it.... I had seen them lynch black men and distribute their ears, fingers, and other parts as souvenirs.... I had seen it all, and in the seeing I had become bewildered and yet in the process lost my own innocence. The past and present of racial oppression in America angered Franklin. His own treatment in graduate school, in the profession, in humiliating incidents that occurred till the very last years of his life provoked him to express his outrage— in autobiographical writings and in what he called “literary efforts” that he refrained from publishing. He was scrupulous and insistent that such emotions and any of what he called “polemics” or “diatribes” should not “pollute” his scholarly work. Yet he acknowledged that “the task of remaining calm and objective is indeed a formidable one.” Franklin reserved a particularly vehement resentment for any effort to coopt or distort his own historical work—to undermine its truths in support of a particular agenda. What he came to regard as one of the worst of such incidents occurred in the early 1960s when the US Commission on Civil Rights invited him to write a history of civil rights since the nation’s founding, to be completed in time for the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1963. When Franklin delivered the manuscript, however, it was greeted with disappointment by commission members who had anticipated “a note of greater tolerance and moderation.” Franklin reminded the commission that the history of blacks in the United States was “not a pretty picture,” and continued, “I am afraid that I cannot ‘tidy up’ the history that Americans themselves have made.” Forty years later, Franklin still deplored the commission’s “blatant and crude use of me in its effort to present a false picture of ‘Negro progress.’” Just as bad, it was also a blatant and crude use of history. The truth that was at once scholarship’s product and purpose must not be undermined. The black scholar, he wrote, “must understand the difference between hardhitting advocacy on the one hand and the highest standards of scholarship on the other.” This commitment embraced both idealism and instrumentalism. I am struck as I reread John Hope Franklin’s meditations on history by his sense of vocation, by the awe with which he regarded the role of scholar, by the almost sacred language with which he spoke of what I fear is today now more often regarded as just another job or profession. For Franklin, it was a transcendent calling, one that in the logic of his era and origins should have been unattainable for him. Franklin recognized an irony in this. The black scholar must “pursue truth while, at the same time, making certain that his conclusions are sanctioned by universal standards developed and maintained by those who frequently do not even recognize him.” The revisionist history Franklin sought would, he believed, be unassailable, would overtake past interpretations and exert its force in changing the world because it would, within the clearly articulated standards of the prevailing historical enterprise, be more exhaustively researched, more powerfully argued. It would be a quintessential use of the master’s tools to take down the master’s house. Franklin had a deep and inextinguishable faith in the power of an accurate and just history to change the world. It was, as he put it, “armed with the tools of scholarship” that he did battle against laws, superstitions, prejudices designed to destroy “humane dignity” and even “his capacities for survival.” Yet the historian did not need to be entirely confined to the realm of pure scholarship. The tools of history could also—though separately —be deployed in policy work where past realities could illuminate pressing contemporary dilemmas. Perhaps the most meaningful of such engagements for Franklin was his work with Thurgood Marshall and the team of lawyers and advisers building the case against school segregation for Brown v. Board of Education. The legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment would be a crucial element in the case. This was an instance, Franklin proclaimed with some pride, of “historians to the rescue!” In this circumstance, he deemed it appropriate to present his findings “like a lawyer’s brief,” rather than aspiring to the more “objective” and dispassionate stance of the disinterested scholar. Harvard University Archives A photograph of John Hope Franklin from his Harvard University admissions file, circa 1935
Ultimately, Franklin concluded as he looked back, “I could not have avoided being a social activist even if I had wanted to,” but the tensions between this activism and his scholarly ideals compelled him throughout his long life to self consciously negotiate the treacherous shoals between advocacy and objectivity. “While I set out to advance my professional career on the basis of the highest standards of scholarship,” he observed in his autobiography, “I also used that scholarship to expose the hypocrisy underlying so much of American social and race relations. It never ceased being a risky feat of tightrope walking.” In 1980, in an address that marked his departure from the University of Chicago, where he had taught for sixteen years—what proved to be only his first retirement —Franklin announced an explicit shift in perspective in relation to the past. With now unimpeachable credentials as a highly distinguished historian, with a large and influential oeuvre of historical writing, and as the recipient of almost every imaginable honor, he perhaps felt the burden of establishing legitimacy partially lifted. He had earned the right and freedom to speak his mind. Up to this point in his career, he said, he had regarded himself as among “the faithful disciples of Clio, concerned exclusively, or at least primarily, with the past.” He had for four decades, he said, left it to “sociologists, political scientists, and soothsayers” to chart a course for the future. But now, as he was leaving formal teaching responsibilities, “I propose to shift my focus and to dare to think of Clio’s having a vision of the future.” In actuality, Franklin can hardly be said to have abandoned his accustomed rigorous historical research during the twentynine remaining years of his life. Nor had he been entirely silent about the future in his first sixtyfive years. His evolution would perhaps better be described as an expansion of focus rather than a shift. But as the twentieth century approached its end, Franklin began to envision the century to come and to anticipate the persistence of race and its legacy into a new time. In April 1992, while Franklin was in the air en route to the University of Missouri to deliver a series of endowed lectures, a Simi Valley, California, jury announced the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who had beaten Rodney King. By the time he reached the St. Louis airport, Los Angeles had erupted in riots that ultimately killed fiftythree people before the California National Guard was summoned to quell the violence. For Franklin, these events seemed a tragic affirmation of the argument at the core of his alreadyprepared Missouri lectures: racism, “the most tragic and persistent social problem in the nation’s history,” had not been eliminated—even with the notable progress of the civil rights movement. As W.E.B. Du Bois had proclaimed the problem of the twentieth century to be “the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” so now Franklin cast his eyes forward to declare it the fundamental challenge for the twentyfirst. “I venture to state categorically,” he proclaimed, “that the problem of the twenty first century will be the problem of the color line.” And again (or still) he worried about willful distortions of history—this time including more recent emerging histories—that threatened to undermine the nation’s capacity to confront and eliminate racial injustice. The myth of a colorblind society, often erected upon a cynical celebration of the achievements of civil rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act, was being developed in the 1980s and 1990s, Franklin believed, to end the struggle for racial equality by proclaiming it already achieved. “A colorblind society does not exist in the United States,” Franklin stated emphatically to his Missouri audience, “and never has existed.” But to advance the myth, Franklin asserted, was not simply a delusion; it was a far more pernicious act of bad faith. “Those who insist we should conduct ourselves as if such a utopian state already existed have no interest in achieving it and, indeed, would be horrified if we even approached it.” Brown had, in Franklin’s words, been “no magic wand.” “Litigation, legislation, and executive implementation, however effective some of it was, did not wipe away three centuries of slavery, degradation, segregation, and discrimination.” Color remained “a major consideration in virtually everything Americans thought, said, or did.” Rodney King’s beating was clear testimony to the persisting force of race. Today, more than twenty years later, Franklin could deliver the same message. We are neither colorblind nor postracial. Franklin would have been deeply saddened, but I doubt he would have been surprised, by the events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Charleston, Cleveland, Baltimore. He would have been equally saddened and, one guesses, angered by the recent evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and by the threat to student body diversity in higher education implied by the Supreme Court’s decision to reconsider Fisher v. University of Texas. In the last months of his life, Franklin was buoyed by the rise of Barack Obama, which he declared “amazing.” “I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.” He dared hope that the nation had “turn[ed] a significant corner.” But he knew that erasing the color line required far more than electing a black president. Until we had a new history, we could not build a different and better future. The fundamental requirement, what we need to do as a nation and as individual members of society is to confront our past and see it for what it is. It is a past that is filled with some of the ugliest possible examples of racial brutality and degradation in human history. We need to recognize it for what it was and is and not explain it away, excuse it, or justify it. Having done that, we should then make a good faith effort to turn our history around. In other words, it is history that has the capacity to save us. “Historians to the rescue!” Dare we think that the recent rejections of Confederate symbols and of the reputations and legacies of slaveowners might be the opening for such a revisionist and clarifying effort? How can we lodge the truth of history in national discourse and public policy?
In an editorial on September 4, 2015, The New York Times underscored how a full understanding of history must be at the heart of any resolution of America’s racial dilemma. In words that come close to echoing Franklin’s, the Times wrote of what it called the “Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’”—a truth rooted in the legacies of the past. “Demonstrators who chant the phrase,” the Times noted, are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a halfcentury ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact—that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued. People who are unacquainted with this history are understandably uncomfortable with the language of the movement. Only if we understand and acknowledge this past can we grapple with the conflicts of the present and the promise of the future. “To confront our past and see it for what it is.” Franklin’s words. The past “is.” Not the past was. The past lives on. What would it mean to confront it, to see it clearly? Recent history can offer us some examples of nations that have taken on the burden of their history. Germany and its Nazi past. South Africa and apartheid. The principle, and in South Africa an explicit policy and practice, was that of “truth and reconciliation,” a recognition that only a collective investigation and acknowledgment of past wrongs can exorcise them and liberate a nation and a people for a better future. History must move beyond the academy, must become a recognized part of everyday life and understanding for all those who would themselves be free from its weight. Recently, two powerful new advocates have taken up Franklin’s call for history to come to America’s rescue, echoing many of his observations and insights for a new time and across new and different media. These two twentyfirstcentury black intellectuals are outside the formal precincts of the academy, yet speak explicitly about why historical scholarship and understanding must play a central part in addressing the tragedies of race in American life. They offer us new, yet in many senses familiar, ways of approaching a moment when it seems possible that both history and policy might change. Nearly a halfcentury younger than Franklin, Bryan Stevenson, who grew up in segregated southern Delaware, remembers saving his money for a first youthful book purchase: From Slavery to Freedom. Stevenson’s life and work reflect the historical sensibility that characterized Franklin’s understanding of the American present. In a TED Talk that has been viewed more than two and a half million times, in a bestselling book, and in a life dedicated to the pursuit of equal justice, Stevenson has joined in summoning history to the rescue. Before the Civil War, we as a nation created a narrative of racial difference to legitimize slavery, he explains, and we convinced ourselves of its truth. As a result, instead of genuinely ending slavery, we helped it evolve into a succession of new forms of unfreedom, culminating in today’s mass incarceration. “Burdened” by a past of racism and cruelty, “we don’t like to talk about our history,” he observes. We have been “unwilling to commit ourselves” to a necessary “process of truth and reconciliation,” so we have not succeeded in transcending our past, in confronting and abandoning its assumptions and inequities. We have been too “celebratory” about the civil rights movement; we “congratulated ourselves too quickly” that the ugliness of racism was eliminated when it continued to infuse our institutions and our attitudes. Aside from his teaching at NYU, Stevenson’s day job is directing the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama—suing to stay executions of innocent prisoners, persuading the Supreme Court that children should not be tried as adults and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. But he has made himself a historian as well. The EJI recently issued a detailed report on the slave trade in nineteenthcentury Montgomery—part of a project its website describes as focused on developing a more informed understanding of America’s racial history and how it relates to contemporary challenges. EJI believes that reconciliation with our nation’s difficult past cannot be achieved without truthfully confronting history. EJI joined with the Alabama Historical Commission to sponsor three historical markers in downtown Montgomery memorializing the domestic slave trade in which the city played such a prominent part. Now Stevenson has embarked on a new project to erect markers at the sites of the thousands of lynchings that terrorized blacks in the post–Civil War South. TaNehisi Coates, nearly sixteen years younger than Bryan Stevenson, was born six decades after John Hope Franklin. Martin Luther King was seven years dead; much of the hope of the civil rights movement had evaporated; racism, bitterness, and a combination of militancy and despair prevailed. Coates’s father, a former member of the Black Panther Party, was an initially selftaught intellectual who became an archivist of black history and created a press to share the record of those of African descent from ancient Egypt to Marcus Garvey to Attica. Paul Coates grounded his son “in history and struggle,” lessons that would make Franklin’s work seem a bit oldfashioned, conciliatory, perhaps even compromising. It was Malcolm X who became TaNehisi’s hero. “I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied.... He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief.” Coates resisted white tools or rules. And he would flee the academy—dropping out of Howard without completing a degree. But he too embraced history. “My reclamation,” he wrote, “would be accomplished, like Malcolm’s, through books, through my own study and exploration.” Perhaps, he mused, “I might write something of consequence someday.” It would seem he has done just that. On the second page of his recent meditation on race, Between the World and Me, Coates proclaims, “The answer is American history.” His own deep immersion in the past—“I have now morphed into a Civil War buff,” he confesses—served as epiphany and impetus: “I could not have understood 20thcentury discrimination without understanding its 19thcentury manifestations.” Searching for a deeper understanding of the forces underlying the realities of black oppression that he already knew so acutely, Coates turned to scholarship and the traditions of AfricanAmerican history that John Hope Franklin had done so much to build. Coates has mastered the academic literature and from it he has come to understand that slavery was not “ancillary to American history” but “foundational.” It remains as a “ghost” all over American policy today, as Coates has demonstrated in his call for reparations to counter the enormous inequities of race reinforced by modern federal housing and zoning legislation. In Coates’s view, whites have been urged away from their real history by myths that have hidden the violence and injustice at its core. America must reject Civil War narratives that have obscured the war’s origins in slavery, that have permitted unexamined celebration of Confederate gallantry, and that have turned the “mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor and élan.” The “lie of the Civil War,” he explains, “is the lie of innocence.” It is a dream, a myth that has lulled and blinded white America as it denied and evaded so much of its past.
White Americans “have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.” It is the denial of this history that sustains an emollient innocence and makes the injustices of the present possible. As John Hope Franklin learned when he undertook the research that he fashioned into From Slavery to Freedom, an understanding of history destroys innocence. And the brutal and undeniable truths of murders captured and shared on social media challenge our national presumptions of innocence as well. Can this unavoidable confrontation with the realities of our present open us in new ways to the meaning of our troubling past? Can history help relieve us once and for all of the burden of that ignorance and the evil it can produce? Are we as historians committed—and prepared—to seize this responsibility to extend history beyond the academy? Are we as a nation at last ready to welcome the truth that can yield reconciliation? If so, it is in no small part because of the kind of history John Hope Franklin dared to write and the ideals he represented as he walked the “tightrope” between engagement and objectivity, as he struggled to unite history with policy and meaningful change, as he sought truths to save us all. Black Lives Matter. History Matters. John Hope Franklin showed us how much they matter to each other.
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Anthony van Westrum