Category Archives: Immigration

Recovering Humanity Amid Terror

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When I first moved to Chicago, in November 1985, I came alone from Omaha. My wife, who grew up in Nebraska, chose to stay there until the fall semester was over. She was teaching across the river in the Council Bluffs, Iowa, public schools. I needed to settle in with my new job and find an apartment, after which we would move our belongings from Omaha. That happened in December. Jean house-sat for a carpenter friend in Omaha who vacationed in the winter until she too moved to Chicago in late January of 1986.

During those initial weeks, I stayed in a home owned by a widow in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago. She had a spare room to rent. We talked on a few nights as I got used to my new setting, and I learned she was Swiss but had emigrated from Czechoslovakia after World War II. She had married a Czech and was trapped with him in Prague after Hitler’s armies invaded Czechoslovakia.

In Switzerland, she presumably would have been safe. But one night, she told me, the Gestapo took her into custody because her failure to fly the Nazi flag outside their home raised suspicions. During the interrogation, they pulled out her fingernails, an absolutely excruciating torture intended to force her to reveal whatever they thought she knew about something or other, which she maintained was nothing. She simply had not flown a flag. Maybe it was a slow night for the German secret police in Prague. But the nightmare still haunted her in Chicago more than 40 years later. She seemed withdrawn and shy, telling me all this in a low but calm and insistent voice. Perhaps my willingness to listen, a trait developed as a journalist and interviewer, put her at ease about talking to me. I am not sure. It just happened.

After the war, and I don’t remember how, she found her way to the United States and was able to build a new life in Chicago. For her, this nation became a safe haven, an escape from terror.

The point of relating this brief story is that it made a huge impression on me. It made me acutely aware on a very personal level of how trauma shapes and distorts personality and lingers in the subconscious. I could not imagine reliving her experience. Just being a patient listener was deeply humbling. It is one thing to know of such horrors from a distance or from reading about them, quite another to sit across the kitchen table from a person who can share with you how she was subjected to them.

The world is still full of people experiencing such horrors even today. Certainly, the nightmare of the Russian invasion of Ukraine comes to mind, with all the trauma it will leave in its wake even if the Ukrainians succeed in defending their freedom from what clearly is now an insane regime in Moscow. There is also the war in Syria, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the list goes on. Many in America have a profound tendency to compartmentalize, to choose categories, such as white Europeans, with whom we will sympathize, and to exclude from consideration Africans and Latin Americans, for instance, even though the reality of their own suffering is often no less traumatic.

This reality has in recent days become very clear in Chicago, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in his remarkably callous fashion, added to his short list of Washington, D.C., and New York, as sanctuary cities to which he would dispatch unannounced busloads of migrants from the southern border with no preparation for their arrival, in order to protest federal border policy according to his own far-right vision of who belongs in America and who does not. In response, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has welcomed them and called for donations, but that alone will not solve the long-term problem.

With that in mind, a small volume atop a pile of book award submissions from five years ago kept calling to me. Busy with other work, I ignored it, but it would not go away. It sat there atop this small pile on the floor, perhaps getting more attention because I had not yet decided what to do with that pile. I was not ready to cull more books from my collection. That pile was a remnant from the last year I had served as a judge for the Society of Midland Authors book awards contest. It had not made the cut, and to be honest, I had scanned it at the time. There are too many submissions, and too little time, to read every book thoroughly. Each judge uses their own techniques to manage that problem, which can involve evaluating 70 to 100 books in some categories in a matter of two or three months. My approach was to scan the first 20 pages to see if the book absolutely captivated me, then to concentrate on thoroughly reading the smaller contingent that made the cut, so that I could give potential winners the attention they deserved. With three judges on each panel, we sometimes influenced each other, suggesting attention to something that one judge found particularly meritorious. It was a collaborative effort.

None of that means the books left behind did not merit attention. They simply did not make it to the final rounds. Think of it as a preliminary heat in an athletic competition.

So it was with Human Rights and Wrongs, a 111-page collection of true stories by psychologist Adrianne Aron, who lives in Berkeley, California, and somewhat accidentally found her mission in life. She is a go-to expert for lawyers seeking to document asylum claims for immigrants who have suffered more trauma than most of us could handle. Sometimes, they can’t handle it either, but somehow, they made it to the U.S. and are seeking mercy and refuge, which is not always granted. To protect them, Aron does not use their real names, but she conveys very real stories with the flair of an aspiring fiction writer. If only what she relates were fiction. But these are real people, and she displays a unique and very human knack for finding ways to unravel the real story behind someone’s plea for asylum despite layers of fear, emotional numbness, and very often, cultural misunderstanding and language barriers.

I will offer two examples. One involves a woman from El Salvador whose religious beliefs became the shield against reality that allowed her to avoid becoming detached from reality through post-traumatic stress. The other involves a Haitian man, arrested while defending himself from a drunken attacker, whose (mis)understanding of his rights in American courts was quite naturally molded by the rampantly unjust proceedings he had experienced in Haiti. Judges cannot (or should not) assume that asylum seekers see the world through the highly educated eyes of the social circles in which judges circulate. The need for a more diverse judiciary, in fact, stems in part from the frequent inability of privileged people to understand the world and experiences from which most refugees have emerged.

The Salvadoreña, whom Aron calls “Ms. Amaya,” was a simple mother from a rural community who had a story to tell, but her lawyers feared that, if she told it all, she would not be credible. Yet, not allowing her to tell her whole story would deprive her of the power to tell her own story as she knew it. It would continue the process of disempowering her that had begun in Central America when soldiers came to her house, accusing her of hiding arms of which she knew mothing. The soldiers took her to an army post, where she was gang-raped and tortured for four days before being released. She prayed to the Virgin Mary for salvation for her children’s sake and thanked her when it was over and she was still alive. As the detention wore on with other ordeals, she saw the hand of God in causing soldiers’ lit matches to go out when they threatened to set her on fire, and when their rifles misfired as she expected to be shot. But how could she know this was an intimidation tactic common in Latin America? It fell to Aron, the psychologist, to document the use of such tactics and to show that Ms. Amaya’s deep faith in divine intervention and mercy in fact protected her from the sort of deep psychological damage she might otherwise have suffered from confronting the reality of what was done to her. Religion gave her a belief structure that fit with her culture and afforded her some sense of divine protection.

Having helped make a successful case for Ms. Amaya’s grant of asylum, Aron also thought it wise not to mention in her brief that some of the oppressive tactics used by the Salvadoran military were actually consistent with those taught to visiting Latin American military officers by the U.S. School of the Americas. Challenging the judge’s world view might not have led to the best results for her client. Save that education for another day.

Reprinted from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute.

Louis Antoine was attacked by a drunk one day who stumbled into his path on the way out of a bar. As local police arrived, they saw him striking back. He ended up in the police car; the drunk walked away. Louis peed his pants from fear on the way to the station. After growing up in Haiti, being beaten by the Tonton Macoutes, the murderous gangsters who enforced the rule of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier when he was a child and who had killed both his mother and father, he expected nothing but the worst when hustled into the back of a police car. One obstacle to retaining the political asylum granted him earlier was that he did not understand what he had pled to in court and, speaking Haitian Kreyol, did not understand the proceedings. Nor did he understand that the purpose of the French translator sitting with him was to help represent him because he spoke only Kreyol, not French. Why had he not asked for translation into a language he understood? It was not his experience that the defendant was allowed to understand. In Haiti, the French-speaking elite simply handed down decisions to the less fortunate masses. Simply put, he was unaware of rights in America that he had never experienced in Haiti. The psychologist’s job was to explain all this, based on the horrific injustices that Louis Antoine had experienced in Haiti. The man had shown the resourcefulness to save money and find his way to the United States, seeking a better life, so it was not emotional inhibition or trauma that held him back, but lack of knowledge of how the system worked. It fell to Aron to document his history and make clear where the American system had failed him until she helped reframe his case.

Underlying these and several other poignant stories is the fact that Aron’s techniques were not simply a matter of professional expertise, but of her very human willingness to listen, to find effective interpreters, and to probe deeply enough to make sense of it all and restore voice and agency to people who had mostly experienced distance and disempowerment from those who determined their fate. The American system has the potential to dispense real justice, but only when staffed and supported by people willing to invest the time and moral imagination to make it work.

For that very reason, although the book is now five years old, every story it tells retains a powerful relevance to current circumstances. We remain a nation that must rise above its petty prejudices to bestow mercy and live up to the very promises that brought Aron’s clients here in the first place.

Jim Schwab

 

Hidden Treasures in Plain Sight

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My mother was definitely a neatnik. Everything in its place, but don’t keep too many things in the first place. If something did not have an obvious use, get rid of it. A sentimentalist, she was not.

She lived her life in the suburbs of Cleveland, which is where I grew up. At the age of 29, however, I effectively “flew the coop,” a phrase I’ve hyperlinked for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with its usage. I moved to Iowa, took the helm of a public interest group, later transitioned to graduate school at the University of Iowa, and after completing my degrees, ended up in Chicago. The rest is history, both personal and professional.

That meant that, on occasion, my parents visited our home in Chicago, though I far more frequently visited family in Cleveland. On every occasion that I can recall, at some point she would look around and ask, “What do you want with all these books?” The obvious answer was that I have a voracious reading habit, which she mostly did not share. That made it difficult for her to fathom the extent of the collection, not to mention that most of the books held no attraction for her. Her firstborn had a depth of intellectual curiosity that was also hard for her to fathom, though it clearly drove my academic success, which she respected.

It’s not that the collection was messy. As needed, I have acquired and assembled bookshelves, and I keep the collection well organized. Unlike some bibliophiles, I give away some books that I cannot imagine using anymore; I believe in thinning the herd. My mother, who also was frugal, surely wondered how much all those books had cost. In truth, while I spend a modest amount on books, I have also benefited from my writing habit, something else that was a bit foreign to her, though she tried to understand it as entrepreneurial activity. That habit meant that, as a volunteer book awards judge over many years with the Society of Midland Authors, I received dozens of annual awards entries in either biography and memoirs, or adult nonfiction, the two categories I judged in various years. Judges are permitted to keep the submissions. Some were worth keeping; others, I gave away after the contest was over. Other books arrived as review copies, also complimentary. I have occasionally reviewed books on this blog, but have also done so in magazines and journals.

Shortly after moving to Chicago, I carried my mother’s tradition of frugality into uncharted territory by discovering that Powell’s, a chain of used bookstores, had the habit of putting discards on the sidewalk outside their E. 57th St. store and letting customers take what they wanted. At the time, I lived and worked not far away, so this was very convenient. I would flip through the pile to find what I considered hidden gems and take them home, quietly building my collection and sometimes immediately indulging in great finds. Like a bear drawn to honey, sometimes I also entered the bookstore to find something I was willing to pay for. Used books, often in good condition but cheaper, have exactly the same information as the new versions—imagine that! And unlike a used car, they don’t lose value. They just sit on the shelf, patiently awaiting their opportunity to expand your mind.

I must also acknowledge that my wife and I, on gift dates like birthdays and Christmas, often recognize each other’s reading interests with gifts. Jean’s tastes tend toward mysteries and spy thrillers and similar genres, on one hand, but also, since the rise of Donald Trump, toward the cornucopia of investigative journalism that has arisen in his wake. He is almost certainly the greatest focus of such political journalism since Watergate. My own interests are so varied that I must pose a challenge for her, but she often turns to environmental books and biographies as reliable pleasers. Her instincts about my interests are usually quite accurate.

By now, you may be wondering, after a few weeks of radio silence on this blog, why I am writing a paean to books, including old ones that may need the dust blown off before use. I will confess that recent events, both personal and professional, have kept me off balance enough to delay a new blog post. That is largely an incoherent story of distractions large and small and often unrelated and not worth relating. But the evolving circumstances induced me to spend more time reading, at a deliberate pace, books that I had previously put aside, books that have offered me a different way to see life and the world—even the universe—around me.

The point is that these are not brand-new books that just arrived on my doorstep. While I often may cite and hyperlink older works as sources for facts I use in blog posts on various topics, I have seldom centered whole discussions on them. But thank God they were sitting here because I am realizing some of them deserve attention in their own right, even if they are no longer “hot off the press.” One book, for instance, discusses in searing imagery the impacts of trauma on refugees seeking asylum in America. One hallmark of wisdom for any of us is to realize, no matter how much we know or think we know, how much more we can learn as long as the capacity is still in us. Much of that learning may come from books that in the past just never got our full attention.

So, don’t be surprised if I center a few articles in upcoming weeks and months on those very books, whether they are just three years old or ten or twenty years old, or even older. I will certainly be selective and purposeful about it, but I will give them their due while also discussing current issues and examining the new books that come my way. But I simply want to share the gems that have emerged from those back shelves. They are giving me a whole new motivation to learn and share.

Now, if someone could just come over and help me find that missing copy of Les Miserables . . . .

Jim Schwab

No Time for Cowards

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Crowd at Daley Plaza in Chicago, March 6

This past Sunday, I attended a rally for Ukraine at Chicago’s downtown Daley Plaza. I am no expert at crowd counts, but it was clear that hundreds attended, filling most of the plaza. The point was painfully obvious: People were hugely upset with the unwarranted Russian invasion of Ukraine that began two weeks ago.

It is hard not to notice such things in Chicago, particularly on the near North Side. We live about one mile from a neighborhood known as Ukrainian Village. Chicago hosts the second-largest Ukrainian population in the U.S., estimated at 54,000. Many of us know or work with Ukrainian-American friends and colleagues. One of our daughters has a long-time friend from her junior college years. She talked to her recently and reported that, while Ivanka had talked to her frightened grandmother in Ukraine, she subsequently learned that her grandmother died in a Russian attack on her apartment building.

Welcome to Hell on Earth, Putin-style. Nothing is too brutal or inhumane if his personal power is at stake. Despite this savage reputation, well-earned in places like Syria, he has his admirers in the U.S., including a recent former president who shares an inability to put morality ahead of self-interest. Trump’s willingness to sacrifice Ukraine for the mere bauble of finding supposed dirt on Joe Biden surely provided a signal to Putin that Ukraine was fair game. The infamous telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalenskyy, of course, led to Trump’s impeachment, followed by a highly partisan acquittal in the U.S. Senate. Both Trump and Putin have massive amounts of blood on their hands. With more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees so far flowing into Eastern Europe, this is no time to be polite in saying so.

My own awareness of the crisis is heightened by having been a political science major at Cleveland State University, where I indulged in Soviet and Russian history and learned a modest dose of the Russian language in a class half full of Ukrainian-Americans. That enabled me to read some of the signs at the rally that were not in English, though most were. One caught my eye: Русскийй Военный Кораблъ: Иди Нахуй. It was the challenging anatomical assignment that a Ukrainian commander on Snake Island threw back at a Russian warship that demanded his troops’ surrender. It seemed to sum up the sentiment on the Ukrainian side of the conflict.

Why was I there? Along with having donated $100 that Trip Advisor offered to match to support the efforts of World Central Kitchen to feed the mass of refugees at the Polish border, I felt it was the least I could do in a nation of comforts while millions of Ukrainians were being forced either to flee their homes or fight for them against a massive invading Russian army. That army has been finding, to Putin’s surprise, that Ukrainians are not inclined to surrender their sovereignty, especially in the face of massive human rights violations and war crimes. What awaits them if they surrender may be worse than the fight itself, so they will fight.

The issue is that, after reaching seemingly comfortable accommodations in recent decades with autocratic and authoritarian regimes in major nations like Russia and China, we collectively underestimated the potential malevolence of such leadership anywhere. It is certainly true that the United States alone, and even NATO and the European Union collectively, cannot hope to convert every nation in the world to democratic principles. Those are societal features that must be internalized by any culture that wishes to share a more enlightened world view. Whole books, particularly but not only by political scientists, have explored the necessary conditions for fostering such systems. In the past decade, even in the U.S., we have seen just how fragile democratic systems can be when faced with an onslaught of disinformation and the personality cults of those who offer simplistic answers to complex questions.

But the problem for Ukraine is different. Ukrainians had been steadily and deliberately working to steer their own society toward those principles, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy represents a remarkable commitment by new and talented leadership to those ideals. The problem is that Ukraine is a former Soviet republic with an extensive Russian border, led by a neighboring leader who suffers from profound paranoia and a delusional belief in the glory of the former USSR. Putin is remarkably lacking in moral principle and empathy, and thus, it should be no surprise that, at the same time that he refers to Russians and Ukrainians as ethnic “brothers”, he is willing to kill his alleged brother in order to save him from Western-style democracy. It is the classic bear hug of an abusive older sibling whose only real concern is getting what he wants, no matter the cost in human lives and suffering. If they don’t love me, the thinking goes, I will make them wish that they did.

The concept of doing the hard work required to create a Russian society that is actually attractive to the outside world escapes him. After all, he does not even trust his own people with the truth. If he did, the Russian Duma would not have rubber-stamped legislation to impose 15-year prison sentences on those who tell the Russian people anything the Kremlin does not want them to hear—such as the simple fact that Russia has launched an unfathomably violent attack on a peaceful neighbor.

The challenge for America and the democracies of the world is to rise to the occasion and accept whatever sacrifice may be necessary to squeeze the Russian war machine dry of whatever resources it needs to maintain its grip on Ukraine, which could easily be followed with a bear hug of Moldova and other former Soviet republics and allies, possibly including some that have already joined NATO. That, of course, could trigger the insanity of world war. It is certainly the case that direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia may be highly inadvisable at the moment, given Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the possibility of increased irrationality by Putin if he senses that he is a trapped man. The stakes for the world in such a case are extremely high.

There are, nonetheless, numerous ways in which we can help and indeed already have helped, including provision of military weapons like anti-tank missiles and other vital supplies.

The sudden withdrawal from Russia of major Western companies can also send a signal to Russian citizens, otherwise deprived of legitimate information, that the world is unwilling to tolerate Russian aggression. At the rally, for instance, one speaker noted that McDonald’s was still doing business in Russia. That is no longer true. Dozens of major U.S. corporations, including McDonald’s, are suspending business in Russia, although McDonald’s is paying its workers while the stores are closed. That move may be more powerful than simply withdrawing completely, by causing numerous workers to wonder about the logic of an American company paying them to stay home. Even AECOM, a major infrastructure and engineering consulting firm with which I have had some experience, has chosen to suspend operations in Russia. Eventually, Russia will have a difficult time replacing such expertise.

No discomfort for America and even most of Europe, however, can even begin to approach that of the struggling, fighting Ukrainians in this moment. The last time the United States saw large numbers of war refugees wandering its own landscape was during the Civil War. Even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, killed nearly 3,000 citizens in places of commerce or government, but those who fled returned to homes physically untouched by conflict. If we muster the will, we are capable of far more support for Ukraine in the present situation than most of us imagine. Are gasoline prices higher as a result of banning imports of Russian oil? Let’s find a way to handle it without turning it into a partisan cudgel over inflation. In the longer run, we can only benefit from expanding our commitment to electric vehicles, renewable energy sources, and other ways of escaping the nagging noose of fossil fuels. A world that needs fewer and fewer resources from corrupt petro-states is a world that already is better prepared for peace.

It is one thing to expand world trade as an avenue toward peace. It is another to be fatally dependent on fundamental commodities that put us in the death grip of authoritarian states. We have the means, the wisdom, the diversity, and the creativity to find our way out of that death grip. Let’s get busy, stop bickering, and commit ourselves to a more democratic and less violent world.

Jim Schwab

Charting a Path to Sustainability

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A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future.

But they are only trying because the right to map out an alternative future is still ours. The capacity to imagine a different future is one of the defining characteristics of a society that is capable of renewal, resilience, and sustainability. It is vitally important that civic leaders, academics, and authors help us clarify the truth of our past and map out paths to a better future. And, presidential transitions notwithstanding, it can and should happen below the national level, to help states and communities explore their unique history and their opportunities.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce readers to Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, the work of Charles E. Connerly, who by next summer will be retiring as professor and the director of the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, recently renamed the School of Planning and Public Affairs after Connerly’s successful push to incorporate a Master’s in Public Affairs to the program’s offerings. Connerly has been at Iowa since 2008 since migrating back to his Midwestern roots after a long tenure at Florida State University in Tallahassee. As a matter of full disclosure, he was also responsible for hiring me as an adjunct assistant professor to teach one course each fall that has come to be known as Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. His many years at Florida State, working alongside Robert Deyle, a colleague who worked with me on disaster issues as far back as the 1990s, made him supremely aware of the importance of addressing hazards in the planning process. I was hired in the immediate aftermath of the massive 2008 floods in Iowa.

Connerly (in gray jacket) during a 2014 field trip of post-flood redevelopment in Cedar Rapids.

Connerly is truly a comprehensive thinker in the best planning tradition, and this book shows it. While I am certain, because of publishing schedules, that he had completed his manuscript before the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over the Memorial Day weekend, his book is incredibly timely in the fall of 2020 because of his focus on the history of racial and ethnic disparities in Iowa. In fact, Chapter 4 is simply titled, “Why Is Iowa So White?”

Indeed, that is a very good question. It is not just a matter of Iowa being farm country. After growing up in the Cleveland metro area in Ohio, then moving to Iowa in January 1979 before ultimately enrolling in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I remember being struck by the apparent lack of diversity, especially outside the handful of cities above, say, 50,000 people. There is, after all, industry in these cities, and industry has often attracted multiracial work forces. Unless, that is, political and social forces intervene to prevent such an outcome. Most people, however, never notice such forces at work and never learn about them in school. History can be very silent about such matters unless diligent researchers insist on exposing that legacy to sunshine, aka “the best disinfectant.”

Connerly digs deep on this topic, all the way back to antebellum Iowa politics. Sitting just north of Missouri, a slave-holding border state, Iowa was both a frontier of the Underground Railroad and a harbor of typical northern mixed feelings about African Americans. In 1850, Iowa was no less than 99.8 percent white, and did not dip below 99 percent, Connerly notes, until 1970. Since then, there has been a substantial growth in minority populations. But African Americans have historically been concentrated in just four urban counties. All that said, it was also the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2008 that launched Barack Obama on a streaking path to the presidency. What accounts for this paradoxical history?

From the early days of statehood, Iowa suffered from a typical northern moral conflict between supporting emancipation and not particularly wanting too many blacks in the neighborhood. That is not putting too fine a point on the matter. Connerly notes that before the Civil War, Iowa had enacted laws banning blacks from the state. The territory avoided enacting such black codes to win statehood, but once that was achieved, Iowa legislators had no problem backtracking on the issue. The bottom line was that Iowans, overall, opposed slavery but did not necessarily favor civil rights for freed slaves.

That changed somewhat after the Civil War, with Radical Republicans pushing through changes that liberalized matters considerably, but it was only following World War II and through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that serious, permanent change began to occur. By that time, however, previous history had done its work in making African Americans largely feel unwelcome. Iowa stayed overwhelmingly white, but not entirely by accident. At the same time, the state has been receptive to refugees, for example, after the Vietnam war, and remarkably progressive on some other issues. Northwest Iowa elected the remarkably ignorant Steve King to Congress, but Republicans themselves dethroned him in this year’s June primary.

Prior to white settlement and the rise of modern agriculture, much of the Iowa landscape enjoyed by Indians consisted of prairie. Photo by Suzan Erem

Connerly writes that African Americans were not the only minorities to feel the impact of 19th-century American racism. Before European settlement, which took place in earnest only after Iowa became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, fourteen Native American nations had, over millennia, occupied some part of what became Iowa. Before the 1800s, their interaction with Europeans was largely through trade, but eventually their land ended up in the hands of white settlers. The short answer as to how that happened is simple: “We took it from them.” Today, only the Mesquaki settlement in Tama remains as a reminder of the formerly dominant Native American presence.

The Hispanic presence, and that of various Asian minorities, is a product of more recent history, some of it involving the evolution of labor relations, particularly in agriculture and meat processing plants, but today there is a distinct, but distinctly disadvantaged, Hispanic presence. It is no accident that earlier this year, some of the most intense controversy over coronavirus spread in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota involved minority workers in the meat-packing industry and deficiencies in safety protocols among the companies involved. In a whole chapter dealing with labor issues over time in both the food and agricultural equipment industries, one can see the steady decline of leverage among white-dominated labor unions and the rise of cheap labor and mass production within the industry as it is today. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these social and economic changes have had profound impacts on, and implications for, the future of Iowa’s economy and society. Iowa did not shift from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and 2020 without some massive strains within the body politic. How those tensions are resolved will go a long way toward determining whether Iowa can chart a successful path to a sustainable future, as Connerly’s book suggests. Iowans will have serious work ahead in improving social equity while adjusting to a changing demographic makeup across the state.

But I do not wish to create the impression that the book is strictly focused on such demographic issues, as important and critical as they are. It is important to notice that Connerly has tied together the issues of environmental health, fairness, and prosperity in his title. His larger point is that all these questions are inextricably related. To quote some planners I have known, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Connerly takes us on a detailed, well-documented tour not only of Iowa’s demographic history, but of its environmental and economic history as well. Iowa clearly entered statehood as a predominantly rural, agricultural state, though not necessarily producing the corn and soybeans that predominate now. Originally, in fact, it grew more wheat, but trends shifted to corn and hogs. But the state is still heavily dependent on agriculture, with 43 percent of its 2015 manufacturing centered on either food processing or machinery used in agricultural production. These two gave rise in the twentieth century to some powerful unions representing workers who were largely able to achieve a blue-collar version of middle-class prosperity. Hogs, supported by state laws exempting agriculture from county zoning laws, gave rise to the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the past 40 years, and the meat-packing industry itself became more concentrated and able to mechanize increasingly and replace high-wage jobs with lower-wage mass production and weaker unions. The people working in the newer factories are definitely more racially diverse but definitely not more empowered and definitely paid less. The growing inequities have resulted in a shrinking middle class.

One factor that distinguished the Iowa packing plants prior to the major, union-busting shifts of the 1970s and 1980s was that the plants were closer to the farms, and thus, unlike larger plants in Chicago and Kansas City, bought animals directly from farmers. Connerly maps out the consequences in urban development for Iowa, namely, that Iowa never developed the metropolitan magnets of neighboring states like Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois because of the dominance of the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City, and instead has a number of smaller cities, the largest being Des Moines, which has about 215,000 people, though the entire metro area is about three times that size. Smaller cities have mostly grown around agriculture-related industries.

All this has had significant consequences not only for quality of life but the quality of the environment, with water quality problems arising from rural land use issues such as CAFOs, soil erosion, and nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Connerly’s final chapter asks whether Iowa truly is the “best state in the nation,” a title bestowed in 2018 by U.S. News and World Report. As a former Iowan, I do not offer this review as a way of trashing the state, nor does Connerly offer his book in that spirit, but the question is an opportunity to explore the complexity of a state that too many elsewhere see as simply white and rural. Iowa, with the right policies, the right incentives, and the right opportunities, has the potential to create a healthy environment and economy, but it must examine current trends and determine how to reverse those that are moving the state in the wrong direction. The last chapter is a succinct compendium of recommendations for moving Iowa toward a growing middle class, a healthier environment with better recreational opportunities, and a progressive approach toward making agriculture more ecologically sound and resilient in the face of natural hazards, most notably, floods.

Testing facility of the Iowa Flood Center, 2019.

The state has created some interesting mechanisms for doing this, but has a stubborn habit in recent years of shooting itself in the foot. In 1987, the legislature wisely passed the Groundwater Protection Act, which created the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, which has done remarkable research on establishing a balance between economic and environmental needs in agricultural practices. Yet, in recent years, the legislature has significantly limited state funding for the center at the behest of corporate agricultural interests. In 2010, following the devastating floods in 2008, the legislature funded creation of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which has become a model in advancing flood prediction and mitigation that other states are considering copying, yet some question the need for continued funding. It is almost as if Iowa wants to replicate the larger national battle between science and an increasingly poisonous distrust of “experts.” Would it not be better to marshal and support the best intellectual resources Iowa can muster for an assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead?

Connerly points out, in contrast, how Iowa could take the lead in solving problems like climate change and excessive nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin that leads to both groundwater contamination locally and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. This last chapter is the biggest single reason to read the book, but its logic is only fully clear after reading the thorough research that precedes it.

My final comment is that it may seem that this is a book that is primarily or perhaps solely relevant to Iowans. I think that conclusion, however, would be short-sighted. While I am profoundly aware of the many books others have produced about other states, regions, and metropolitan areas across the U.S., I think it is vitally important that other scholars across the nation undertake similar efforts to assess the path to sustainability for their own states, regions, and cities. We could sorely use such a book in Illinois, and the same is probably true for every neighboring state. As I suggested at the outset, it is not enough to chart a new national path. We need these serious explorations at subnational levels as well. In that sense, I believe Connerly has done a major service for the Hawkeye state. I’d like to see more such books.

Jim Schwab

Make America Mature Again

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What follows is an adapted, re-edited version of a Facebook post from today that seems to have struck a nerve, attracting dozens of likes, comments, and shares. As a result, I concluded that perhaps I should add it to this blog.

 

No pictures here, just observations:

We as a nation come from ancestors who nearly starved to death at Valley Forge but stuck it out to ensure the success of a revolution that created a new nation built on liberty, imperfectly at first, but expanding its range over centuries.

Some of the toughest Americans come from ancestors who endured slavery over centuries to help build upon that legacy of liberty when they finally won their freedom.

We come from ancestors who endured four grueling years of civil war to ensure that liberty and equality retained a fighting chance to become this nation’s hallmark.

We come from ancestors who endured long passages across sometimes rough seas to reach a land that promised them a better life, and when they arrived, many endured hard work and, often, discrimination to assert their role in building our democracy.

We come from ancestors who, toward the end of World War I, endured endless months of influenza pandemic, with shutdowns and deaths and illness comparable to those we are experiencing now, until the danger passed and lives could be rebuilt.

We come from ancestors who, just a decade later, underwent the grueling agony of the Great Depression. We elected a president who, riddled with polio, understood the virtues of patience and perseverance in solving problems that seemed daunting by any measure, then entered World War II to help save the world from some of its most vicious tyrannies in modern times.

I could go on. But . . . .

Someone forgot to teach these lessons to a narcissistic president with the attention span of a fruit fly, a spoiled upper-class brat who has never faced serious challenges in life until now, a man who never learned much history, judging from the evidence of his comments.

Someone forgot to teach those lessons to protesters who, after a single month of one of the greatest public health challenges in anyone’s lifetime, refuse to learn that life never promised them that everything would turn up roses at the flick of a finger, and who never learned to analyze and understand a problem to find out whether the reopening they say they want might produce more harm than good, that a temper tantrum never solved anything.

Millions of Americans, probably most, of course, despite everything, understand that sacrifice will be part of the solution. But others have never, apparently, been steeled by a personal Valley Forge and just want what they want. Isn’t it time for a little maturity to settle in? Thank God for some governors and mayors out there with common sense and fortitude.

This is America. We’re supposed to be tougher than just throwing temper tantrums. Let’s prove it, people.

 

Jim Schwab

 

Small Gestures Matter

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Last week was for me an eventful time, including a four-hour trip to Dubuque, Iowa, on Thursday for the Growing Sustainable Communities conference, an event the city sponsors every year. I spoke in a session that afternoon, October 24, on community planning for drought, but mostly what I remember was the combination of keynote speeches that addressed the major issues of our time, notably including a luncheon talk on Friday by Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech University, on communication about climate change. It was impressive and inspiring but underscored how much work lies ahead to reverse damaging trends affecting our planet.

But the week started out differently, with smaller actions that I think are extremely important in setting the tone for the way all of us relate to our fellow human beings.

My wife and I are members of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, in Chicago. Situated catacorner from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago on E. 55 St., our church enjoys the benefit of the knowledge that abounds among the LSTC faculty. I serve as coordinator of the Adult Forum, an adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday School hour. That makes me responsible for finding speakers, programming discussions, and promoting the events. On Sunday, October 20, we discussed actions we could take following a five-week series covering the World War II Nazi death camps, visited by Dr. Esther Menn and her husband, Bruce Tammen, in August during a trip to Poland and Ukraine, which fed into considerations of how we treat immigrants and minorities in our own time.

Our pastor, Rev. Nancy Goede, told me about an incident that occurred the prior Tuesday in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, at Lincoln United Methodist Church. Lincoln has chosen to become a sanctuary church out of concern for the safety of undocumented immigrants, but a man shouting Nazi slogans came to the building in an angry confrontation with church staff. It was not the first time the church had been targeted for its actions. The man proceeded to smash the front window.

There is little we can do directly about an incident that is already past, but we decided that we could establish a supportive relationship with the congregation in the face of this hate crime, so we composed the following letter, eventually signed that day by at least 25 members of Augustana:

To the Members and Staff of Lincoln United Methodist Church:

We are very sorry to hear about the incident on October 15, in which a man shouting Nazi slogans smashed the glass window on the front door of Lincoln United Methodist Church.  We have learned that you have been targeted by right-wing groups for your stance in establishing Lincoln UMC as a sanctuary church.  We support your efforts and pray for your safety as you continue to follow your consciences in doing the Lord’s work.

Your Brothers and Sisters in Christ at Augustana Lutheran Church

Indeed, part of the purpose of this letter is to reassure Lincoln United Methodist Church that its members are not being left to handle this attack in isolation from the rest of the Christian community. We had learned a great deal about the high cost of silence during the Holocaust, as well as the need to forcefully address racial equality as we commemorated the 100th anniversary of Chicago’s race riots in 1919, a story detailed well in Claire Hartfield’s recent book, A Few Red Drops.

But that is not all we chose to do. Esther Menn then noted the American Jewish community on this past weekend would be commemorating the first anniversary of a violent anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which eleven members were killed, and seven others wounded, by a man apparently inspired by right-wing rhetoric. Robert Bowers, a truck driver from Baldwin, Pennsylvania, was arrested for the massacre, and authorities said he used social media beforehand to post criticism of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has been supportive of the human rights of immigrants to the U.S.

In solidarity, Augustana announced that members of the congregation, as well as people from LSTC and McCormick Seminary, would gather last Friday evening to walk to nearby KAM Isaiah Israel congregation in Hyde Park to join its Friday evening shabbat service. Once again, Augustana would make a simple statement in opposition to hate crimes and violence against religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants. Because traffic on the way back from Dubuque that afternoon obviated the possibility of my own participation, Esther related to me that 27 people from Augustana and the two seminaries joined the effort, plus others who met them at the synagogue, and that their presence was greatly appreciated.

Supportive visitors at the doors of KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue. Photo provided by Esther Menn.

Sometimes, it is worth remembering that the simple act of reaching out to say we care and stand behind others is enough to establish lasting and meaningful bonds between otherwise disparate groups of human beings. It certainly is a place to start.

Jim Schwab

If You See Something, Say Something

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National Park Service photo

We have become so accustomed to a certain Homeland Security phrase since the events of September 11, 2001, that we have never seriously contemplated its larger meaning. “If you see something, say something,” for most people simply means that, if you notice something strange, someone leaving a package on a train platform and walking away, for instance, you need to call 911 or point it out to a nearby security official. Having done our civic duty, we can go on about our lives and hope for the best. We may save someone’s life, or we may simply be exercising caution. Check it out.

But suppose we interpreted that phrase in the context of our duties as citizens of an endangered, or even potentially endangered, democracy. Suppose the threat were to our democratic institutions and not just to the lives of those in a single public place. Suppose the threat involved policies that affected thousands of people threatened by racism, ignorance, or hatred? Ought we not to speak up? How different would the history of the world have been if millions of Germans had spoken up about what they saw even in 1933? How many Russians in the past two decades have risked their lives and their careers to speak up about the threats they see to a democracy being strangled in its cradle? In the past year, the people of Sudan have arisen against a brutal military dictatorship and forced remarkable changes. Are we Americans somehow so special as to be free from such obligations? Do we not eventually lose our moral authority to speak for democracy in the world if we fail to speak for it at home?

If you see something, say something. Let me tell you what I see:

I see children housed in filthy cages at the southern border by the U.S. government, separated from their parents, their eyes full of fear and bewilderment, when their only alleged crime was to be brought here by parents from Central America who sought to remove them from gang warfare, violence, crime, and corruption in desperately poor countries. I see a U.S. President, as a form of retribution, cutting aid to those countries that was meant to promote reform and economic opportunity to reduce people’s need to flee such chaos in the first place.

I see Temporary Protective Status (TPS) denied to survivors of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, a neighboring country with deep ties to the U.S., even as that nation struggles to rescue and house its own people in the face of mind-numbing devastation. The rationale from the President was that “very bad people” would harm our country if this were allowed, although TPS has been standard practice in the past in the very same circumstances. It is unclear, other than being people of color, what makes the Bahamians especially dangerous in his eyes.

I see neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us” through the campus of the University of Virginia and the streets of Charlottesville, defended ardently by a President who sees “very fine people” on both sides while an innocent young woman is run over and killed by a young Nazi sympathizer with his car. I see this rhetoric emboldening an ever-widening circle of mass shooters who sow terror in American cities with unlimited access to weapons of war, but I also see a widening circle of brave citizens rising to demand effective action against such terror.

I see America losing the moral courage of the Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty, pleading for the world to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and nearly mocking Lady Liberty as she seeks to lift her lamp beside the golden door. The Golden Door is becoming instead the Great Border Wall built with money never legitimately appropriated by Congress, and members of the President’s own party unable and unwilling to stop him or even raise the weakest of objections lest they be expelled from the halls of power—or are they becoming halls of obeisance, like the Roman Senate in Nero’s time?

I am telling you what I see because I understand the moral and civic obligation to say something. We must all be whistleblowers for the future of democracy. What do you see? Are you prepared to say something as well? And what shall we do once we have spoken?

Jim Schwab

Stop the Madness

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I am angry on Father’s Day. I am deeply disturbed by what I am seeing. I am a Christian who is insulted by the use of the Bible to justify the separation of children from parents who brought them to the U.S. border in search of safety and political asylum. First, it is a policy decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration that the United States will not consider flight from violence and gang warfare a reasonable excuse for seeking asylum. The families now being torn apart with minimal ability even to find out where their parents or children are made a dangerous trek across hundreds of miles in the belief that this country would treat them with some sort of dignity once they surrendered at the border with a request for asylum. Few, if any, expected the treatment now being imposed upon them.

The news reports are now widespread and, however painful to read, I encourage readers of this blog to follow them. The tactics in practice by U.S. border authorities remind us of horrors long ago that we thought this nation had put to rest—slave fathers and mothers sold away from their children, never to see them again, while auctioneers were deaf to their pleas for mercy, American Indian children removed from reservations to be sent to distant “Indian schools” where they punished for speaking English. Are we still no better than that?

I have been a father for decades. My wife and I became foster and adoptive parents in the 1990s, and we know firsthand the difficulties of locating children in a new environment when the state has determined that the birth parents have failed in their duties through neglect or abuse. It is difficult even then but often necessary to protect children whose health, safety, and welfare are in jeopardy. That is and long has been a primary state responsibility. But even then, courts and social workers provide notice of what is expected and give parents an opportunity to improve before taking more drastic steps. And yes, it is true that convicted criminals are removed from their spouses and children when they are incarcerated, but if the convictions are just, we can at least say that the crime was a choice made by the parent, not the state. And despite all this, my heart aches when it becomes clear such intervention is necessary.

It aches even more in this situation because very young children are being pulled away from their parents with no idea why, no idea where they are going, and no idea when or whether they will ever see them again. Even in cases of convicted criminals, the family can visit the prisoner and knows where he or she is and the length of the sentence. In foster care, parents typically have visitation rights. None of that appears to be happening with these refugees.

I find myself all the angrier when I hear people justifying the current Trump administration policy by comparing asylum seekers to these situations by saying the parents at the border are breaking the law. International conventions on asylum do not at all contemplate that asylum seekers will be treated by democratic nations as criminals upon arrival. They need a fair hearing to demonstrate their claim for asylum. In the vast majority of cases, their clear motive for making the dangerous trip across Mexico to the U.S. border from nations in Central and South America and elsewhere is not to commit a crime but to protect their families from political and gang violence and, in some cases, sexual and physical abuse tolerated by a foreign government that is either unwilling or incapable of preventing it.

Quoting Bible verses about respecting the law is no defense of unjust laws and never was, even in Biblical times, when St. Peter once stated, “We must obey God rather than men.” His assertion was the very basis of the insistent rise of Christianity through what was effectively a form of civil disobedience because Christian faith was illegal in the Roman empire, which required primary fealty to the emperor. I do not wish to engage defenders of administration policy in a battle of Bible quotations because such battles generally involve short passages taken out of context amid a larger failure to understand the comprehensive message of Jewish and Christian scriptures, but if there is one passage that may highlight that larger message of Jesus, it is in Matthew 25, and for that reason I have used it before because it goes to the heart of Christian morality:

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Jim Schwab

Donald Trump’s Racism Diminishes America

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Depiction of Du Sable taken from A.T. Andreas’ book History of Chicago (1884). Reprinted from Wikipedia

Greetings from the U.S. city founded by a Haitian immigrant.

Sometime in the 1780s, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, reportedly born of a French father and an African slave mother, who had gained some education in France and made his way from New Orleans to the Midwest, settled with his Potawatomi wife on the north shore of the Chicago River. He developed what became a prosperous trading post before eventually selling it for $1,200 (no small sum in the early 1800s) before relocating to St. Charles, in what is now Missouri, where he died in 1818. According to the best-known assumption about his date of birth (1845), he would by then have been 73, a ripe age on the early American frontier. You can learn more about the admittedly sketchy details of his life here as well as through the link above. However, Chicago has long claimed him as part of its heritage, and his origins speak volumes about not only Chicago but the diversity of the American frontier despite the attempts in some quarters to continue to paint a much whiter portrait of the nation’s history than the truth affords. His story, and those of many others, can be viewed at the Du Sable Museum of African American History on Chicago’s South Side.

Du Sable Museum of African American History, photo from Wikipedia

What does this have to do with President Donald Trump? As almost anyone not living in a cave knows by now, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that Trump, while Durbin was at the White House for a meeting with the President and several Republican members of Congress to discuss a possible compromise on legislation concerning immigration and border security, began a verbal tirade asking why the nation was allowing so many immigrants from “shithole countries” such as Africa and Haiti. Yes, Trump now denies saying it, but there were other witnesses, and even Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) acknowledges it and reports confronting Trump personally about his remarks. Moreover, the sad fact is that such remarks are consistent with a much broader pattern of similar comments ranging from his initial campaign announcement decrying Mexican “rapists” to provably untrue tweets to his infamous praise of “truly fine” people among the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members protesting the pending removal of Confederate statues in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. Since those comments last August, Trump has continued to lacerate the Twitterscape with new gems of disingenuous absurdity.

It also betrays a disturbing lack of depth of any historical knowledge that might ground Trump in the truth. There is surely little question that Haiti is one of the poorest and most environmentally beleaguered nations in the Western Hemisphere. But it helps to know how it got there, which takes us back to what was happening in Du Sable’s lifetime. Emulating the ideals of both the American and French revolutions, including the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, deeply oppressed African slaves rebelled in 1791. An ill-advised expedition sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to suppress the revolution—Napoleon was more interested in financing his European wars with Haitian revenue than in honoring liberty among Africans—failed miserably when nearly 80 percent of 57,000 French troops first fell victim to yellow fever before being pounced upon by Haitian revolutionaries in their weakened state. Only a small contingent ever made it back to France alive. As time went on, however, Haiti found itself isolated in the New World. The United States, under presidents from Thomas Jefferson onward until the Civil War, refused to recognize the new republic, fearing a similar uprising among its own growing population of slaves in the South. Recognition finally happened in 1862, with the Confederacy in full rebellion against the Union and with Abraham Lincoln in the White House. The story gets much, much worse, including Haiti’s long-time mistreatment by France, its former colonial overseer, but those with more intellectual curiosity than our current U.S. president can read about it in a variety of books including Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois; the fictionalized but brutally vivid and historically accurate trilogy (starting with All Souls’ Rising) by Madison Smartt Bell, whom I met 20 years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference; and the more modern history of exploitation, The Uses of Haiti by Paul Farmer. There is much more; just search Amazon or your local library. It is all there for the learning. We are at least partly responsible for helping to create the historical pattern of misery and poverty in Haiti. Its people have suffered through vicious, greedy dictators like the Duvaliers and yet bravely insisted on creating a democracy despite all obstacles.

Why do I review all this? Because, especially as we celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday and the ideals of the civil rights movement, history matters. For the President of the United States, at least a respectable knowledge of history matters, as do an open mind and a willingness to learn what matters. Little of that has been in evidence over the past year. And that remains a tragic loss for the nation.

Instead, we have a President who, before taking office, spent five years helping to peddle the canard that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and thus not a native-born U.S. citizen as required by the U.S. Constitution. Based on his recent comments, one might suspect that, all along, he regarded Kenya as among the “shithole countries.” It is small wonder, then, that he holds Obama’s legacy in such low regard. (Several years ago, while in Oahu, my wife and I met a Punahou School high school classmate of Obama, working as a tour guide, who said he knew Obama’s grandparents. “I was not in the delivery room,” he mused, but “I think I would have known” if Obama had not been born in Honolulu.)

The problem, as millions of Americans seem to understand, is that, despite Trump’s claim that these nations “do not send us their best,” our nation has a history of watching greatness arise from humble origins. Abraham Lincoln, in fact, arose from starker poverty in Kentucky and southern Illinois than many immigrants even from African nations have ever seen. Major League Baseball might be considerably diminished without the many Dominicans who have striven mightily to escape poverty and succeed, more than a few making it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. (I worked in the Dominican Republic in 2000-2001, organizing HUD-funded Spanish-language training on site planning for design professionals working on reconstruction after Hurricane Georges, and can attest first-hand to the national pride Dominicans feel about their achievements in the U.S.) How many Americans visit doctors who emanated from India, Nigeria, and other countries who saw opportunity here to expand their talents and contribute to this nation’s welfare? And, lest we forget, Steve Jobs, who created more and better American jobs through Apple than Trump ever dreamed of creating, was the son of Syrian immigrants.

Only willful ignorance and prejudice can blind us to these contributions and lead us to accept the validity of Trump’s vile observations. As adjunct assistant professor, I teach a graduate-level seminar (Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery) each year at the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning. Since this began in 2008, I have taught not only Americans but high-quality students—in a few cases, Fulbright scholars—from places like Zambia, Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. They do not see themselves as coming from “shithole countries,” but they do perceive that they are availing themselves of excellent educational opportunities in a nation they have typically seen as a paragon of democratic ideals. Now we are undermining that perception at a breakneck pace. These students, whose full tuition helps undergird the finances of American universities, know there are viable alternatives for a modern education in Britain, France, Germany, and Canada, but until now they have believed in the promise of America.

Meanwhile, Europeans—the very people whom Trump apparently would like to see more of among our immigrant ranks—are watching this charade with alarm and dismay. I know this evidence is anecdotal, but my wife and I, as noted in recent blog posts, traveled to Norway last July. We encountered New Zealand, South African, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, German, British, and Norwegian citizens, among others, as we traveled. Almost no one we met was impressed with Trump. This is a new development in European perception of American leadership. Moreover, our perceptions then are supported by reporting in the last few days on reaction to Trump’s comments. Despite Trump asking why we cannot have more immigrants from Norway, NBC News reports that Norwegians are largely rejecting this call as “backhanded praise.” If we want more European immigration to the U.S., we would do far better impressing them with our sophistication and our commitment to the democratic ideals we have all shared since World War II.

Beyond all this, it must be noted that thousands of dedicated Americans serve overseas in the nations Trump has insulted, wearing the uniforms of the Armed Services, staffing diplomatic missions, and representing their nation in other ways. No true patriot would thoughtlessly place them in jeopardy and make their jobs more awkward than they need to be. It is one thing to face the hostility of Islamic State or other terrorist-oriented entities because of U.S. policy. Those who enlist or take overseas jobs with the U.S. government understand those risks. It is another to engender needless fear and hostility among nations that historically have been open to American influence and leadership. How do we mend fences once they perceive the U.S. President as an unapologetic bigot?

That question leads to another, more troubling one. Silence effectively becomes complicity, but far too few Republican members of Congress have found the moral backbone to confront the reality that both their party’s and their nation’s reputation will suffer lasting damage if they remain too timid to stand up to the schoolyard bully they helped elect. A few, like Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Mitt Romney, and members of the Bush family, have demonstrated such integrity, but most have not. It is one thing to recognize that you badly misjudged the character of the man you nominated and helped elect. It is another entirely to refuse to speak up once it is obvious. Admittedly, Democrats right now have the easier job. But this problem transcends partisan boundaries. It is about America’s badly damaged license to lead in the world. We either reclaim it, or we begin the long, slow torture of forfeiting it.

Jim Schwab

The Voice of Identity

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For many Americans, including numerous prominent Republicans, one of the more troubling phenomena in the 2016 presidential election was the rise of certain groups who seem to attach their own identity to resentment and rejection of those who do not fit traditional images in our culture. The frequently demonstrated reluctance of Donald Trump to distance himself from advocates of white nationalism or supremacy served only to reinforce a sense of unease about the direction our nation was taking. The situation raised some disturbing questions about who we are as a nation at the same time that it also revealed a very real sense of the loss of possibility among those who embraced the Trump messages. Before we hasten to condemn this trend, it is important to keep in mind that many of the people who launched Trump into the White House have felt a very real unease of their own, a feeling of losing their footing in what they experience as a stagnating economy. The feeling transcended party boundaries and went a long way toward explaining the surprising popularity of the Bernie Sanders candidacy in the Democratic primaries. This great stirring is far from over just because Trump won.

I do not raise this issue to reach any partisan conclusions or even to address it in any specifically political terms. But I was moved to think about it in part after observing some of the more blatant instances of racist prejudice in post-election interviews with the likes of Richard Spencer and his National Policy Institute. Spencer grabbed some attention with a speech that included the phrase “Hail Trump,” a barely veiled echo of “Heil Hitler,” and, according to a recent article in The Atlantic, made clear his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.” It is hard to imagine how ethnic cleansing can possibly be peaceful, so I think one can hardly be blamed for suspecting deceitful propaganda. No matter how many disclaimers the alt-right may use in trying to reframe its identity, the old stench of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi movements refuses to go away.

But I want to make a larger point and then delve into the very question of how we frame identity, and how it frames us. Our sense of identity can be both liberating and oppressive, both loving and resentful, thoughtful and downright stupid. Spencer, in a recent television interview, effectively expressed the notion of simply claiming his white identity in the same way that blacks take pride in theirs. Many on the alt-right take pains to note how much white people have contributed to our society as a means of expressing dominance. This is rather simplistic for the obvious reason that our society long was of predominantly European origin, so it stands to reason that most of our heritage bears that mark. But it is not nearly so simple as all that. The whole notion bears some dissection.

What has come to be identified as the African-American experience, for starters, resulted from a forced common experience of bondage in which most slaves lost any or most of their specific African heritages under circumstances that were not only unquestionably racist but involved violent subjugation as well. It is no accident that black slaves often readily identified with the biblical story of the Israelite release from slavery. Liberation movements throughout world history have played a role in forging new identities through struggle. The fact that the struggle has continued to this day in the form of civil rights battles has served only to strengthen those ties.

And yet—one needs only to observe the assimilation into American society of African and Caribbean black immigrants to realize that there are subtleties and variations in the African identity. President Barack Obama himself, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a Kenyan student at the University of Hawaii, struggled in his youth to establish his own sense of identity, which did not come from claiming slave ancestors in the Deep South. In current American society, one can see expressions of Ghanaian culture, as well as of Ethiopians, Nigerians, and Somalis, all arriving long after the most bitter civil rights and liberation struggles have been fought, seeking to establish their own ethnic identities in a very diverse America. The tapestry is ornate and continues to enrich American society with everything from new cuisines and artistic expression to new ways of understanding what attracts people to the American dream.

These variations and nuances extend to the frame of “white American” experience. Because what became the United States of America began with English colonies, the experience of early Americans was very English in nature—but not entirely. Early on, the British empire absorbed Dutch and French settlers into its universe, as well as a modest number of American Indians who intermarried. (It should also be noted that perhaps one-fourth of African-Americans have some American Indian ancestry, in no small part because of slaves escaping to Indian communities and integrating and intermarrying over time. See Black Indians for just one interesting exposition of this fascinating history.) Over two or three centuries, “white” America gradually absorbed more non-English elements, beginning with the Irish and Germans, and eventually including all sorts of largely non-Protestant immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Lebanese, Turks, and others.

All these people brought with them unique cultural attachments. For example, Greeks brought not only their Orthodox church, but numerous specific perspectives on the world based on their own historic and philosophical outlooks, all tempered over time by new experiences in the New World. In many cases, those initial experiences included some discrimination and challenges in becoming American. Any serious student of American history is aware of such phenomena as the Know-Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s, a period when factory doors often sported signs indicating that “Irish need not apply.” Tensions boiled over at times, including one notable instance in Chicago in 1855 known as the Great Lager Beer Riot. Know-Nothing Mayor Levi Boone sought closure on Sundays of the pubs and bierstuben that the Irish and German workingmen patronized, and a confrontation erupted. Boone became a one-term mayor, and his initiative came to naught.

The targets of white-on-white discrimination shifted over time into the early and even mid-20th century, as assimilation proceeded and various nationalities won grudging acceptance. American literature is replete with very personal interpretations of these experiences from Norwegians, Lebanese, Greeks, Russians, and others trying to find their place in American society. One astute student of the subtleties of this evolution, Mel Brooks, generated the biting and wickedly comic satires Blazing Saddles. I have long felt that movie, which I have watched several times, offers far more insight than meets the unlearned eye into the sometimes explosive mixture of influences that shaped the American West. My own discerning eye for the subtleties of this movie came after living in Iowa for more than six years and researching a book on the farm credit crisis, as well as marrying a Nebraskan, all of which made me very aware of the diverse ethnic communities that comprise much of the West. Rural America is not nearly as monochrome as many urban Americans imagine it to be.

Let me return briefly to the phony vision of the alt-right. What I have just described should make abundantly clear that the notion of “white identity” can have only one purpose. That purpose is white supremacy and the oppression of minorities because the overall “white” experience in America is itself so diverse and has evolved so far from its English colonial roots that the only possible meaning one can attach to this “white identity” is that of suppression of any other form of identification with the meaning of “American.” I also do not think a blog article like this can do more than scratch the surface of this subject. Whole books have been devoted to the formation of personal and collective identity in the American melting pot without successfully exploring all the nooks and crannies of the issues involved. Nonetheless, I strongly believe we must keep this subject open for further exploration. We have little choice if we want to understand both ourselves and what is happening around us.

I also want to make clear that I do not believe that Donald Trump is endorsing white supremacy. What troubles me is his willingness to exploit this sentiment to advance his political ambitions. Many of the obvious splits within the Republican party had as much to do with the discomfort of Mitt Romney, John Kasich, John McCain, and the Bush family, among others, with this exploitation of prejudice as with any other stance that Trump took. These past Republican leaders simply found themselves unable to stomach such intolerance. Trade and foreign policy issues are fair game in a presidential contest, but for reasons related to his own view of the imperative of winning at any cost, there is little question that Trump took the low road in making his arguments. That choice will leave him mending fences for the next four years if he truly wants to be president of “all the people.”

Ultimately, our collective national identity is a composite of the many individual identities we construct for ourselves. Some of us construct these identities carefully and deliberately over many years, and others simply accept inherited attitudes, privileges, or resentments. But one of the central claims of the conservative right has been that America has traditionally been a Christian nation. That is a position that, in some respects, also ignores the freedom of religion that is enshrined in the First Amendment, which includes the right of people to observe other faiths or no faith at all. But I would prefer to confront white identity on Christian grounds both because I am willing to claim Christian identity and because real Christian faith flatly excludes white identity: “For in Christ there is no longer Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male or female.” (Galatians 3:28) Saint Paul did not need to add “black nor white” to make his point perfectly clear. The only thing that is remarkable is how often this simple point is missed or ignored.

Another piece of Christian wisdom is well known and comes directly from Jesus (Luke 12:48), that from those to whom much has been given, much also is demanded. I can think of few things more appalling than to waste one’s life and talents disseminating hatred and bigotry in a world badly in need of greater love and understanding. An honest search for our collective or personal identity demands both an open mind and respect for our fellow citizens. I can think of nothing that would ever alter my perspective on that final observation.

Jim Schwab