Rights and Discrimination

 #Philip Deloria, "Defiance," The New Yorker, November 2, 2020."

"Tecumseh's effort marked the last time Native people would be able to mobilize in concert with a formidable European military." "George Washington is today remembered as both a President and a slaveholder, an embodiment of foundational American contradictions. He should also be remembered as one of the most aggressive landowners in the early republic, holding title, at his death, to more than fifty thousand acres across several states." 

"American interlopers ignored Indian territorial rights, bringing with them violence, and a racialized hatred for Native people forged through generations of Colonial conflict." "The only way to check the evil of American encroachment, Tecumseh said, was 'for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for  it never was divided, but belongs to all for the use of each." "The U.S. he saw, was a continually ambitious enemy that racialized diverse Indian people as one, and killed them on that basis, while seeking to divide and conquer tribes with gifts, promise, and threats."

#Hau Hsu, "Bloc by Bloc," The New Yorker, November 2, 2020.

"There are some eleven thousand nail salons in California, about eighty percent of which are owned and staffed by Vietnamese Americans." At the current rate of growth, according to the Pew Research Center, by 2055, Asian Americans will be the country's largest immigrant group. "Nearly two in five Asian American voters aren't registered as either a Democrat or a Republican."

"The median income of Asian American households is around ninety-eight thousand dollars -- nearly thirty thousand dollars more than the American median." "The broader category of Asian Americans in which higher rates of poverty are often invoked as a 'negative test case' to disapprove the model-minority [narrative], and that's the only time it enters into the Asian American conversation."

#Gene Seymour, "Fade to White," The Nation, November 2-9, 2020.

"Today, more than half a century after Black Americans helped reenergize the sport, baseball once again has a color problem: a steep decline of African American interest and participation in the game." "When Rock's 'Real Sports' essay first aired, the percentage of Black Americans in major league baseball had fallen from its 1981peak of roughly 18.7 percent to just 8.0." "According to NCAA statistics from 2018,only 4 percent of collegiate baseball players are African American."

"In the wonderland that is American pro sports, basketball rules in terms of player income, according to the most recent available figures, with the average National Basketball Association's salary about $8.3 million per year." "The average major league baseball fan in that much-coveted (by advertisers) 18-to-34 demographic -- the same age bracket that encompasses most active ballplayers." 

"Think of all the teens and tweens, twenty-to-thirty-somethings, and even fifty-to-seventy-somethings you might catch in your TV webs (in 'Variety's' speak) if you regularly aired those games during Eastern Time happy hours."

#Rachel Monroe, "Stolen Valor," The New Yorker, October 26, 2020.

"Politicians lie to get us into wars; generals lie about how well things are going; soldiers lie about what they did during their service." B.G. (Jug) Berkelt, stockbroker and Vietnam veteran, "caught so many people distorting or inventing their military service  that he began to wonder whether the dissemblers might be evidence of a national phenomenon, a weird ripple in the American psyche." "At the time, wearing an unearned military medal was against the law, but there was no particular consideration given to lies about military service."

"Researching potential phonies was once a lonely enterprise; now there are a dozen Web sites, boards, and Facebook groups that provide instructions, and coordinate the work." "The Website, 'Military Phonies', gets more than a hundred thousand unique views on a good day, according to the Web site's administrators." 

#Eyal Press, "Safety Last," The Nation, October 26, 2020.

His [Eugene Scalia, Secretary of Labor and Justice Antonin Scalia's son] longtime agenda has been curtailing government, and at the Labor Department he has overseen the rewriting of rules that were put in place to protect workers. As the coronavirus has overrun America, Scalia's impulse has been to grant companies' leeway, rather than to demand strict enforcement of safety protocols."

"Limited resources, meek penalties, and fierce opposition from business interests have long inhibited OSHA's ability to address the unsafe conditions that lead to the deaths of some five thousand workers on the job annually, with injuries sustained by nearly three million more."

In regard to the coronavirus, instead of rules to deal with it, a Department of Labor memorandum relieved the vast majority of employers of any duty to keep records about whether coronavirus infections were "work-related."