Coming in the midst of Black History Month, I can think of no better way to honor this President's Day than to read two essays. Both by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and both published in The Atlantic, but with completely opposed subjects.

The first essay, "My President Was Black" was published a little over four years ago, in January 2017. Obama had just left office, and Coates wrote a long, reflective essay on what the Obama Presidency had meant, both for him as a Black person, and for the country as a whole. He explored Obama's unique raising, and how that had influenced his perspective on race relations in America. He talks about how Obama achieved so much as President, despite a coalition of racist opposition that formed from his very first day in the Oval Office. And he covers how Obama disappointed him, in the way he spent more time chastising Black people for "blaming White people" and not enough time openly calling out the structures of white supremacy.

Like all of Coates' writing, it's powerful, it's though-provoking, and it's worth your time.

The second essay, "The First White President", was published just ten months after the first, in October of 2017. Even then, Coates could see clearly what many commentators could not, until after the Capitol Riot: that Donald Trump's entire political philosophy, such as it is, can be summed up as white nationalism. That Trump would not have been President at all, were it not for the racism that undergirds all politics in the United States. Trump was the ultimate expression of that racism, of that contempt for non-Whites. His racist supporters elected him as if to say, "True, a Black man can be President, after a lifetime of struggle and study. But any incompetent White man can trip into it, if he hates Blacks enough."

Everything in that essay still rings true. It's a potent reminder that Trump's grounding in racism was always there to see, if we were willing to see it. That so many people were not willing, for so long, tells us exactly how deep white nationalism's roots go in this country, and how much work we have left to do to pull it out.

I realized, this morning, that I'd never read Dr King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. So I found this copy online, and read it straight through.

It took only twenty minutes to read. But in that one letter, King evokes philosophers and thinkers from Martin Buber to St Augustine to Thomas Jefferson, laying out the justice of his cause and defending nonviolent direct action. It's a powerful, compelling, argument.

Reading the letter, it struck me how little has changed, in how police still react with violence to Black people who are nonviolently seeking justice. In King's day, they attacked marchers with dogs, billy clubs, and fire hoses. In ours, they do it with tear gas, rubber bullets, and tasers. But the demands are the same, and the violence committed in the name of upholding racist power is the same.

I urge you, if you haven't before, to read the letter. And as we speed away from 2020 and into 2021, let's remember Black people were murdered by police in 2019, and they will continue to be murdered by police in the new year, until racist power is broken, and justice is granted to all those Black families that have been told to "wait."

The Washington Post has a comprehensive run-down of everything the Trump regime has broken over the last four years. The list is long, and it starts from the very first day of their time in office.

We need to roll it all back.

But more than that, we need to fix the broken parts of American democracy, that have allowed a minority government to stall progress and enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

We need to reform the Supreme Court. Justices should have term limits. And the power the justices have arrogated to themselves of deciding the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress should be removed, and placed in a completely separate, explicitly bi-partisan, Constitutional Court.

We need to abolish the Electoral College. We elect governors and mayors directly. We should elect the President directly, too.

We need to admit both Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. They deserve the full rights (and responsibilities!) of citizenship.

Finally, we need to address the balance of power between Congress and the Executive. Congress should take back powers it's given away, like the ability to declare a state of emergency.

And it should reduce the powers of the executive branch where they have been delegated. For example, border patrol agents should have no special powers to search and seize, no matter how close to the border we are. Federal police should not be able to deploy military weapons against citizens who have peacefully assembled. And moving funds between agencies or programs (when Congress has explicitly earmarked them) should be labeled a crime, and thus an impeachable offense.

All this, in addition to specific policy shifts, like stopping the provision of military gear to police departments, ending the abuse of refugees and migrants, and rebuilding the State Department as the primary driver of foreign policy.

It's a lot. But it's not impossible. We can do it, but it's going to take all of us.

So please, vote. Vote not as the end, but as the beginning, of building a better country together.

Because none of us are free, unless we are all free.

I can't believe Breonna Taylor's killers are going to walk free.

I mean, I can believe it, in the sense that racism is real and cops are killers and they're killers because they kill and get away with it in this country.

But it's just...hard to grasp that after all we've been through, these United States, in 2020, a group of people could decide it's just fine to charge into the home of one of their fellow citizens and murder them, so long as the murderers are wearing badges.

It's also hard for me to wrap my head around the President of the United States saying for months that the only election he could lose is a fraudulent one, and there's no howls of indignation from his side of the aisle. No Senators lining up to condemn his words and ask that the House open a new impeachment investigation.

Nothing. Not a fucking peep.

Meanwhile in my state, in supposedly progressive California, we still use inmates as firefighters, paying them perhaps a dollar a day, which is slave labor by any other name. And once they've served their time, if they happened to have been born somewhere else, we hand them over to ICE for deportation.

Oh, and there's still a pandemic on, so walking around outside to enjoy the air newly-cleared of smoke and ash means constantly dodging people who aren't wearing masks.

So it's all I can do right now, when I'm not doomscrolling, to keep editing the novel. One chapter at a time.

I feel like I should be making more progress. Editing more than one chapter a day. Maybe even racing to the finish line.

Or picking up the story I was outlining a few months ago, and starting to actually put words to paper.

But I can't.

I just...can't.

The writing spirit is very willing, but the writing flesh, the meaty brain and hands that would summon words from the void, are quite busy right now.

So I press on, one chapter at a time. I'm not stopping, but I'm not able to move any faster right now.

Because this book's become even more important to me, lately.

It's about prisons. It's about all the different kinds of people that get locked up, and why. It's about exploitation, and greed, and how it's all kept going by the people that look the other way. The ones that hold their noses so they can benefit.

It's also about forgiveness, and change. About making yourself vulnerable again, after holding onto a hurt for so long.

I want to finish it. I need to finish, to have this story told. To share it.

There's not much else I can do, so I'm doing this.

Voting. Donating. Speaking up.

And writing.

I've mentioned before that I've always been afraid of the police.

Not that I have any negative experience to make me afraid. No, I grew up White and privileged, shielded from the things they did to others.

Yet I was afraid. And I was right to be.

Because if the police can pull you over for a broken taillight, insist on a search of your car, and choke you to death when you resist said illegal search, you never want to be pulled over.

If the police can raid your house on an anonymous tip and kill your dog when it tries to protect you from the armed intruders violating your home, then leave without even an apology when they learn it's the wrong home, you never want to have them pay you a visit.

And if they have the power to insist that the only way you're going to get help with your heroin addiction is to plead guilty to a crime that hurt no one but yourself, you never want to ask them for help.

But that's where we are, in the United States. We've expanded the role and powers of police so much, that the often the only hand being held out for those who are homeless, or addicts, or mentally disturbed, is the one holding a gun.

As we re-examine the place of police in our society, Vitale's book is essential reading. It's not a screed, and not wishful thinking about how everything would be peaceful if the police went away.

Instead, it takes a hard look at what the police are for, and then dares to ask the question: Are they successful at it?

As it turns out, they're not. They're not any good at solving homelessness, or making sex work safe, or getting addicts into recovery, or reducing gang violence, or helping the mentally ill get treatment, or disciplining school children, or even something as mundane as actually preventing crime.

Police, in a word, are a failure. They're an experiment that we need to end.

Because the problems we've asked them to address can be, just by different means.

We can get the homeless into homes, and use that as a foundation to get them standing on their own again.

We can invest in businesses in and around gang-troubled neighborhoods, to give the people who might join those gangs the opportunity to do something better.

We can find other ways to discipline children than having them handcuffed and marched out of school.

The End of Police is both a passionate plea for us to find a better way, and a dispassionate look at how badly our approaches to these problems have gone wrong.

It's not too late to try something else. We just need to make the choice.

Since reading Ibram X Kendi's How to be an Antiracist, I'm starting to re-examine certain policies I've taken for granted. What I've previously thought of as meritocratic or race-neutral might be neither; it might instead be part of the problem.

In that book, he gives a clear criteria for whether a policy or idea is a racist one: Does it establish or reinforce racial inequality?

With that in mind, I thought I'd look at my own house -- the tech industry -- and at our very real tendency to run companies composed mostly of white males.

There are many reasons why this happens, but I'd like to drill into just one: The university degree requirement.

Most "good jobs" these days require some sort of university degree. Tech goes one step further, and asks for a degree specifically in computer science or another STEM field.

The degree isn't enough to get the job, of course. Most interview processes still test skill level at some point. But the field of candidates is narrowed, deliberately, via this requirement.

The question is: Does requiring this technical degree bias the selection process towards White people?

Criteria

Before diving into the statistics, let's back up and talk about the criteria here. How can we tell if the degree requirement biases selection?

In order to do that, we need to know what an unbiased selection process would look like.

And here is where it's important to note the composition of the general US population (and why the Census being accurate is so very very important). If all things are equal between racial groups, then the composition of Congress, company boards, and job candidates will reflect their percentages in the population.

Anything else is inequality between the races, and can only be explained in one of two ways: either you believe there are fundamental differences between people in different racial groups (which, I will point out, is a racist idea), or there are policies in place which are creating the different outcomes.

With that criteria established, we can examine the possible racial bias of requiring university degrees by looking at two numbers:

• How many people of each racial group obtain STEM degrees in the United States?
• How does that compare to their level in the general population?

Who Has a Degree, Anyway?

According to 2018 data from the US Census, approximately 52 million people (out of a total US population of 350 million) have a bachelor's degree in the US.

Of those 51 million, 40.8 million are White.

Only 4.7 million are Black.

That means White people hold 79% of all the bachelor degrees, while Black people hold only 9%.

Their shares of the general population? 76.3% White, 13.4% Black.

So Whites are overrepresented in the group of people with bachelor degrees, and Blacks are underrepresented.

So by requiring any university degree, at all, we've already tilted the scales against Black candidates.

Who is Getting Degrees?

But what about new graduates? Maybe the above numbers are skewed by previous racial biases in university admissions (which definitely happened), and if we look at new grads -- those entering the workforce -- the percentages are better?

I'm sorry, but nope. If anything, it's worse.

Let's drill down to just those getting STEM degrees (since those are the degrees that would qualify you for most tech jobs). In 2015, according to the NSF, 60.5% of STEM degrees were awarded to White people, and only 8.7% of them went to Black people.

The same report notes that the percentage of degrees awarded to Black people (~9%) has been constant for the last twenty years.

So universities, far from leveling the racial playing field, actually reinforce inequality.

Conclusion

Simply by asking for a university degree, then, we're narrowing our field of candidates, and skewing the talent pool we draw from so that White people are overrepresented.

Thus, we're more likely to select a White candidate, simply because more White people are able to apply.

That reinforces racial inequality, and makes requiring a university degree for a job -- any job -- a racist policy.

What can we do instead? To be honest, if your current interview process can't tell candidates who have the right skills from candidates who don't, then requiring a college degree won't fix it.

If your interview process leans heavily on discovering a candidate's background, instead of their skills, re-balance it. Come up with ways to measure the skills of a candidate that do not require disclosure of their background.

In programming, we have all sorts of possible skill-measuring techniques: Asking for code samples, having candidates think through a problem solution during the interview, inviting essay answers to questions that are open-ended but can only be completed by someone with engineering chops.

By asking for a demonstration of skill, rather than personal history, we'd both make our interviews better -- because we'd be filtering for candidates who have shown they can do the job -- and less biased.

And if we're serious about increasing diversity in our workplaces, we'll drop the degree requirement.

Daryl: About the protests the other day--

Wayne: Assholes with authority are assaulting folks for asinine reasons.

Daryl: But--

Wayne: Beating bystanders with billy clubs and then bleating for bills is bully talk.

Daryl: Can't we just--

Wayne: Cancel the cops.

Daryl: Do you mean...?

Wayne: Defund the detectives. Defang the dildo-wielding degenerates who deal damage and destruction wherever they descend.

Daryl: Even if they--

Wayne: Evict those eager eagles from their erroneously elevated nest.

Daryl: For how long?

Wayne: Until fascist fuck-ups who would fancy frisking a black fish if they found one finally confess.

Daryl: Golly

Wayne: Granted god-like powers to grab goods and grandstand on greatness, they gotta go.

Daryl: Have you thought about--

Wayne: Heave ho to the hot-headed hitmen with hearts of hate and habits of heavy fists.

Daryl: Just--

Wayne: Justice doesn't jump out and jack-boot a juggler in the jiggles just for laughs.

Daryl: 'Kay.

Wayne: Keep the keystone kleptocracy kilometers away from kids, is all I'm saying.

Daryl: Likely.

Wayne: Laying into little Leopolds and Lillys without legal legitimacy is for losers.

Daryl: Maybe they--

Wayne: Mashing moppets every month for making messes is monstrous.

Daryl: Not if they--

Wayne: Noting the narcs neglect of their neighbors in favor of nightly numbers.

Daryl: Ouch.

Wayne: Overlooking obvious offenders in their offbeat overstretch creates opposition.

Daryl: Proof.

Wayne: Punching protestors is poor protection of the public.

Daryl: Quotas.

Wayne: Quenching their quixotic quest for quotidian quiet.

Daryl: Right?

Wayne: Radical rascals who reject right-thinking and responsibility.

Daryl: Sounds like--

Wayne: Shifty seneschals who shit on any semblance of sanity.

Daryl: Talking about--

Wayne: Tiny totalitarians who top out thinking tanks make them trustworthy.

Daryl: Unbelievable.

Wayne: Utterly unsatisfactory and unscrupulous usage of ubiquitous umbrellas of immunity.

Daryl: Verily.

Wayne: Vanquish the vicars of vicious vicissitude and vampires of verification.

Daryl: What you mean is--

Wayne: Walk over to those wankers with their whale-like wads of cash, wax their ears, and wash 'em off our way-fares.

Daryl: Extreme.

Wayne: Exactly.

Daryl: You really think--

Wayne: Yes.

Daryl: Zounds.

Wayne: Zip 'em up, and zero out their budgets.

Daryl: All righty then.

Wayne: Black Lives Matter, bud.

Growing up in Texas, we didn't talk about Juneteenth in school.

We talked about the Civil War, of course. Of the "brave" and "fearsome" soldiers that Texas sent to fight for the Confederacy. But not about slavery, other than it being a "bad thing" that "was over now."

We talked about Texas' War of Independence from Mexico. That war was also motivated by slavery, by the desire for white Texans to have and import slaves. But we didn't talk about that either. Only the Alamo, and Santa Anna, and again, the "brave" soldiers who fell.

But we never mentioned the brave slaves who ran away from home, in a desperate flight to freedom. Knowing they would be beaten if caught, and possibly killed.

We never talked about the black soldiers that served in the Union army, knowing the whites in that army still thought of them as "lesser men," and that if captured by the Confederates they'd be made into slaves, even if they'd been raised free.

We didn't talk about that kind of bravery.

So we didn't talk about Juneteenth, and how its origins were Texan. How white Texans were so desperate to hold onto their human property that it took a Union Army arriving on the Gulf shore to force them to give them up.

Because our history was written and taught by white Southerners, who, being racist themselves, can't see anything but shame in such a holiday. They identify too strongly with the losing side.

But having learned about the holiday as an adult -- too late, true, but better than never -- I can see pride in it, mixed in with the shame.

Not white pride, mind you, but American pride. Pride that the Civil War was fought and won by the side of justice. Pride that the slaves were freed, that we set off on a path to give all Americans the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The path is long and stony, and we've still a long way to go. But we can celebrate the progress we've made, even while pushing forward into the future.

I'm spending this Juneteenth catching up on more of the history that I missed in school. And thinking on how I can do my part to move us further down the path to becoming a truly free country.

Justice for Breonna's killers.

Defund the Police.

Black Lives Matter.

George Floyd

Breeona Taylor

Sean Reed

Ahmaud Aurbery

Eric Garner

Michael Brown

Dontre Hamilton

John Crawford III

Ezell Ford

Tamir Rice

Sandra Bland

Freddie Gray

Trayvon Martin

Rodney King

Malcom X

Martin Luther King, Jr

Donate to Black Lives Matter

Donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund

The Washington Post is tracking all the people killed by US police