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The San Diego Voice & Viewpoint
• Thursday, APRIL 7, 2022
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EDITORIAL/COMMENTARY/OPINION Lessons Republicans Can Learn From Ukraine By Dr. John E. Warren, Publisher The San Diego Voice & Viewpoint While Russia brought almost 200,000 troops against the people of the Ukraine, the most impressive thing was not the numbers of the attackers, but the unity of the people who rose up to meet the assault on their culture and their way of life. The Republican Party here in the United States is much like the Russians, attacking a way of life without regard for life or property. The destruction of life and property is much like the assault on our democratic institutions such as the fair election of a President of the United States, according to our own Constitution. Yet, the Republicans, much like the Russians, have no regard for anything that exists outside of their own marching orders. Just take a look at the hearings to nominate Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court. Like the Russians looking at the institutions and culture of the Ukraine, yet bent on destruction of the same with no regard for their value, the Republicans understand the value of the U.S. Supreme Court and the importance of those who serve. These same Republican senators have twice voted to confirm Judge Jackson to two courts, yet, this time, Senators like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, who have voted twice for her in the past, now refuse to vote to confirm this Black woman to the highest Court in the land. To support their insanity, they created concepts like Judicial Philosophy, which have nothing to do with service. Interestingly enough, the Constitution does not even require that a Supreme Court Justice be a lawyer, just get confirmation. As the Russians left and are continuing to leave the bodies of men, women, and children in the streets as symbols of the human carnage
of their war crimes, so are bodies being left in the streets of this country as the result of mass shootings by weapons so many Republicans refuse to outlaw like AK47 assault rifles, which have nothing to do with the Second Amendment Right to keep and bear arms. Yes, like the Russians, the Republicans do not care about the threat to democracy and the way of life it guarantees to all Americans. While some allow the use of bullets others prefer Voter Suppression, the removal of polling sites, and penalties for eating or drinking while waiting in long lines to vote. The good news is that we, the American people, still believe in democracy, our constitution, and equality for all. Like the people of Ukraine, we can unite and fight the inhumane and conspiratorial conduct of our Republican Russians. Like the people of Ukraine, we must rally around democracy and fight with the weapons of our institutions and our votes to remove the Russians among us.
Fighting the Corruption of Power By Ben Jealous President of People For the American Way We keep learning more about the attack on the U.S. Capitol. And we keep learning more about the many schemes former President Donald Trump and his team tried to use to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In some ways, it is discouraging. We know just how badly Trump’s inner circle was corrupted by his desire to keep power at all costs. We had lawyers writing memos about how to break the law and stop Congress from affirming Trump’s defeat. We had members of Congress repeating his lies about a stolen election and trying to take the decision away from the voters. In other ways, it is encouraging that the truth continues to come out. News stories that expose lies and corruption remind us of the importance of a free press. The investigation by the Jan. 6 select committee reminds us how much we need the checks and balances that are built into our system. Those checks and balances—like the ability of Congress to conduct oversight of the Executive Branch—are necessary to prevent abuses of power and hold politicians accountable But for those protections to work, we must have public officials who are committed to upholding the rule of law. That’s not what we’re seeing from former Trump staffers and advisers. Just the opposite. They are stonewalling the congressional investigation and defying its subpoenas. And with just a few exceptions, congressional Republicans are not acting honorably. Rather than embracing the search for truth, they try to discredit the investigation. Rather than face up to the anti-democratic rot in their party, they would like to sweep it all under the rug. Let’s be clear. Trump and his lawbreaking friends are trying to keep Americans from learning the truth
about the attack on Congress and the attempt to overthrow the will of the voters. Specifically, Trump and his supporters are trying to run out the clock. They are counting on their allies taking a majority in the House of Representatives in this year’s elections. And then they’ll shut the investigation down before the full truth can come out. That would be disastrous for our democracy. Consider just a few of the things we have learned recently. When the White House handed over logs of Trump’s calls on the day of the insurrection, there was a seven-hour gap covering the crucial hours before, during, and after the attack on Congress. What violations of law are hiding in that gap? We also learned that Ginni Thomas, a hard-right activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was in regular contact with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days and weeks after the presidential election. She embraced even the most extreme and ridiculous far-right conspiracy theories about the election. She even said she hoped it was true that
members of the “Biden crime family,” reporters, and elected officials were being arrested and would be held on barges in Guantanamo Bay to face military trials for sedition. She urged Trump not to concede defeat. It just so happens that Justice Clarence Thomas was the only Supreme Court justice who backed Trump’s attempt to keep White House records from being shared with the Jan. 6 committee. It was an 8-1 vote. That explains why so many people are now calling on Thomas to resign—or at the very least to recuse himself from any other cases about the insurrection that come before the Court. We can’t make Clarence Thomas act honorably. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless to protect our democracy. It was we the people who voted Trump out of power. Trump’s ability to pressure and bully election officials and legislators into joining his corrupt schemes was limited by the fact that he lost in multiple battleground states, not just one. His supporters’ ability to shield him from accountability will be determined in part by what happens in this year’s elections. When Americans go to the polls this fall to elect members of Congress, we will not only be participating in democracy. We will be determining its future. Ben Jealous serves as president of People For the American Way and Professor of the Practice in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches leadership.
The Politics of the Slow Pendulum of Change By Dr. David L. Horne, PHD Founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute A few years ago, I wrote a column for Our Weekly that decried the then-current usage of racist and misogynistic place names for a significant number of mountains, streams, hills, valleys and other places in this country, including in California. Contemporarily, names like Dead Negro Hollow, Tenn., Wetback Tank, N.M., and Dead Injun Creek, Ore. are still far too plentiful in this country’s topographical identifications. During Barack Obama’s term, he started the process of trying to clean that American anomaly up. However, when he left office, the task was far from complete and not continued by his successor. Currently, at last count, there are yet over 1,441 racist and/or sexist names still recognized in American mapmaking, parks and tourist areas. For example, still existing is Pickaninny Hills in San Bernardino County, and just recently (2021), after years and months of complaints and protests, the former Olympic ski resort, Squaw Valley, Calif. near Lake Tahoe, finally agreed to change its name. It is now to be called Palisades Tahoe, but that name has not yet caught on. Additionally, after a century or so, Squaw Tits Mountains just received
a name change in California, to the Thimble Mountains. Geographic places carelessly saddled with derogatory names exist in every state, though current data show that the largest clusters of such names in the U.S. are still in the West and the South. Our state, California, has at least 159 such place names that are disrespectful and offensive to either Native Americans, African-Americans, the Chinese, Italians or some combina-
tion of them all. The king of the hill for racist topography, though, is still Arizona with a true hornet’s nest of racist place names in its armory. Part of the reason for the recent pressure to get rid of such anachronisms was the national focus on this and other issues growing from the George Floyd murder and trial. The other strong reason is the presence of the new federal Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, a former congresswoman and the first such federal official who is still an active member of a Native American tribal group. In November 2021, this new Secretary of the Interior formally established a new process that would review and replace derogatory names used in any federal governmental publication to identify the nation’s geographic features. She also declared “squaw” to be a derogatory term that had to be eliminated wherever it was found in federal land descriptions and ordered the federal Board on Geographic
Names — the federal body in charge of naming geographic places — to implement the appropriate procedures necessary to remove the term forever from federal usage. In California recently, two California lawmakers, in Assembly Bill 2022, have proposed removing the word “squaw,” a slur against Native American women, from all geographic features and place names in the state. Introduced by Assemblyman James Ramos (D-Highland) and Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), the ban is scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. Ramos said the word “squaw” “is an idiom that came into use during the westward expansion of America, and is not and has never been, a tribal word.” “AB 2022 would ban the use of the S-word and establish a process for renaming locations with that offensive racial and sexist term which began as a derogatory word used
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against Native American women. For decades, Native Americans have argued against the designation’s use because behind that expression is the disparagement of Native women that contributes to the crisis of missing and murdered people in our community,” Ramos said in a statement when he publicly announced the bill. He also added that as of 2021-22, more than 100 locations in California still contained the squaw word as part of their name and would be forced to change once his assembly bill passed. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on the state legislation to ban “nig*er” and “nig*a” from state designations. Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). This article first appeared in Our Weekly.
