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Ed Webb

South Philly, explained - Philadelphia Weekly - 0 views

  • South Philadelphia neighborhoods remain extremely segregated. Girard Estates, a largely Italian American pocket of South Philly, is 91.8 percent white,  and Packer Park isn’t far behind at 80 percent white, per US Census Data. On the other hand, poorer neighborhoods like Point Breeze, Grays Ferry, and Southwest Philadelphia,  are about 70 percent Black. 
  • To some South Philly Italians, removing the Rizzo statue was a personal attack to their identity. Many Philadelphians remember Rizzo as a racist who told voters to “vote white” and encouraged Philly police to use excessive force, but South Philly Italians see him as a no-nonsense tough guy who stood up – for them. 
  • Much like Frank Rizzo, white residents of South Philadelphia gave up on the Democratic Party as it began to signal race in politics and failed to address their needs. In 2016, there was a dramatic shift in mostly white neighborhoods (South and Northeast Philly) to vote for Donald Trump. 
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  • Feelings of resentment toward an ineffective Democratic Party and the blackness of popular culture, along with major demographic shifts visible in their everyday lives led South Philly Italians to the Christopher Columbus Statue on June 13
  • The truth is, all of South Philadelphia has been left behind. Years of ineffective governance and corporations reaching to maximize profits have left the majority of America behind. In June 2020, the response of many Americans to the significant amount of injustice in the world was to stand together with the Black Lives Matter movement; to South Philly Italians this was salt in the wound. 
  • On Sunday, June 14, hundreds of white South Philadelphia residents congregated at the statue of Christopher Columbus to prevent it from being torn down. Armed with knives, bats, guns, and a myriad of blunt objects, they stood there, waiting for someone to let out their anger. The “statue protectors” were out bright and early, drinking like it was a Phillies tailgate
  • Not one word was spoken about the merits of Christopher Columbus. The South Philly Italians sang “Happy Birthday” to Donald Trump, begged counter-protesters to fight them, and assaulted a number of people. The Philadelphia Police stood idly by as the South Philly residents got drunker and drunker. Multiple times things got violent. A  journalist from Unicorn Riot was chased into the street and attacked, one man in a Frank Rizzo shirt smacked a counter-protester in the direct view of police officers, and little to nothing was done. 
  • No one in Philadelphia actually cares about Christopher Columbus. Saturday and Sunday were simply the boiling point for a chunk of the population desperate for a win in the culture war. 
Ed Webb

America's Democracy Was Far Less Peaceful Than Political Scientists Pretended - 0 views

  • Many political scientists like political behavior to fall into neat boxes, whether those be typologies cleanly defining terms or spreadsheets in which every row contains a discrete observation. They recognize that there’s always phenomena that won’t fit, cleanly, but those can be the basis of future research—or relegated to the “error term,” the leftover bin for the facts that theory doesn’t explain.
  • When the implicit definition of democracy is democracy with American characteristics, the exceptions don’t even register as exceptions—until some event so far out of the comfort zone of mostly white, upper middle-class academics forces us to confront them as if they were brand new.
  • The Center for Systemic Peace’s widely used Polity scores, for instance, give the United States between a +8 and +10 from 1809 to 2016—a stable, indeed maximally scoring, democracy. That period includes the Civil War, when the losing side launched a violent conflict rather than accept the election results.
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  • The United States Political Violence (USPV) database records numerous riots around elections during the mid-19th century. In April 1855, for example, hundreds of nativists “invaded” a German area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Subsequent fighting led to two deaths. In August of that year, nativist Protestants attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 20. In Baltimore, election violence became routine in the 1850s, with 30 dead and 350 wounded in the 1856 election alone
  • The bloodiest efforts came in the repression of Black people. The USPV lists nearly 70 incidents of political riots and assassinations in the decade after the formal cessation of hostilities, mostly in the South but including riots in Philadelphia and Indianapolis
  • Widespread political violence around elections only really ended when the federal government conceded that the South would be run by whites. Even then, anti-government violence took place.
  • Flattering coding rules used to produce datasets make it too easy to dismiss any aberration when a look at the historical record keeps turning up aberration after injustice after atrocity. Historians, scholars of Black history, and political scientists specializing in race and ethnic politics have long been sharply critical of the idea that that concepts like democracy, sovereignty, or the rule of law can be as bluntly coded as standard datasets long did.
  • A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself
  • American democracy did not penetrate to state level until the 1960s. Nearly a quarter of the states denied voting rights to Blacks—who made up a majority in some of those states before the Great Migration—from the late 19th until the mid-20th century
  • Despite the abolition of slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow meant that neither Congress nor the presidency were elected by fully democratic, or even representative, means
  • Consider Max Weber’s workhorse definition of the state: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. By that definition, large swathes of the United States approached failed-state status for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries
  • just as today, there were voices even at elite institutions counseling patience and unity. An 1898 Yale Law Journal article defended lynching as a natural outcome of Reconstruction having given the ballot to former slaves too early, and urged “education,” not federal intervention, as the cure. Woodrow Wilson, a leading historian and political scientist long before he became president of the United States, defended the Ku Klux Klan and white terrorism as “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” Such efforts eventually paid off in helping to efface such atrocities from textbooks even as monuments—and popular culture—embraced Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy.
  • Revisiting the United States as a partial or flawed democracy means confronting much of the history that celebrants of the liberal world order claim as a series of triumphs for democracy
  • social scientists have lately become more skeptical of the conventional verities of progress. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has compiled indices of democracy that are more sensitive to conditions like racial segregation. They show the United States as substantially less democratic than other countries, like the United Kingdom or Sweden, for most of the 20th century. Political scientists investigate topics that once attracted little attention, like the relationship between American political violence and social transformation, how national economic integration led to the decline of lynching, or how the “carceral state” (more than 2 million people are held in U.S. prisons or jails) degrades U.S. democracy today.
  • In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, reporters and others turned to the British seizure of the Capitol building in 1814 as the closest analogue. Turning to foreign invasion rather than domestic precedents, however, says a lot. It suggests that people do not know the domestic precedents even exist, and it reinforces the notion that American political violence is “unthinkable.” (Even describing the 1814 incident as “foreign” is complex. The burning of Washington in 1814 was carried out by a British force that included marines previously enslaved by Americans—and motivated by hatred of the slavery system.)
  • it’s time to think more openly—and less defensively—about the totality of U.S. political history and behavior at home and abroad
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