Dear Lehman Community:
Wednesday’s events in Washington D.C. have shaken our nation, and for many of us at Lehman, they landed like a kick to the stomach. What happened was surely an assault on democracy in the broadest sense, incited by the president and his self-serving enablers, but there is even more in these events that is disturbing to our community.
The presidential election of 1876 was mentioned by several senators when their session resumed on Wednesday night as they debated accepting the electoral votes of Arizona. The election of 1876 was truly corrupt, and it was not settled until Congress reached an informal agreement termed the Compromise of 1877. The compromise awarded enough electoral votes to Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes to make him president by one vote. In gaining the presidency, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction and beginning the sordid era of Jim Crow.
When Confederate flags were paraded inside the U.S. Capitol building Wednesday, it was a clear reminder that we are a long way from being free of that era. And it was not only the Confederate flags and other symbols of white supremacists that were alarming. It was also the challenge to the electoral votes by members of the House and Senate whose thinly-veiled motivation was to disenfranchise the votes of residents in urban areas that have large minority populations. The racist underpinning of what transpired is unmistakable, and we can’t help but feel it was directed at our community and all others like it.
Wednesday night we heard rousing rhetoric about the importance of the democratic institutions housed in the Capitol Building. But we didn’t hear anything about the racist basis that continues to this day to be foundational for one of them: The Senate. The composition of the Senate was designed from the beginning of the nation to mollify slave-holding states and secure the dominance of landed white males. Its very composition is still serving that purpose as low-population, largely white states maintain hugely disproportionate influence on decisions such as who sits on the Supreme Court.
The other alarming dimension of what transpired on Wednesday was the stark contrast between the treatment of the violent, mostly white mob that occupied the Capitol building, and the treatment of Black Lives Matter protestors in the Capitol and around the country since this past summer. The near absence of a police response and the failure to subsequently make more than a few arrests on Wednesday has been widely noted and should be fully investigated in the aftermath. The difference is undeniable. I am glad there was not a blood bath on Wednesday in the Capitol building, but the police brutality against peaceful demonstrators we have seen for many months, even in our own city, is reprehensible and even less justifiable in light of what happened on Wednesday in Washington.
As deeply disturbing as these events have been, I hope we can find a large measure of hope in the response to the insurrection that occurred. In saying that, I am not referring to the much too late and, frankly, risible attempts by some of Trump’s cabinet members, members of his administration and supporters to now create some distance between themselves and him. Rather, the hope I see is in those who as recently as November 3rd voted for Trump but who are now willing to admit their regret at having done so. His anti-democratic actions have never been hidden, and now at least more citizens are acknowledging them. Tom Krugman, New York Times columnist and member of the CUNY Graduate Center faculty, wrote in today’s Times,“Appeasement Got Us Where We Are: It’s time to stand up to the fascists among us.” He notes that what happened this week is not an aberration and is only just one more dramatic instance of what has been not only tolerated but supported by many in power. Maybe as a few more Americans awaken to the long-running history of fascist sympathy and promotion in the U.S., we can reverse our growing susceptibility to it, and once again denounce it.
Shining examples of moral courage by leaders have been very few in recent months, but Republican Senator Mitt Romney was one of them when he stood alone against his party’s acquittal of Trump last January. He was joined by a few more of his Republican colleagues in calling out Trump’s refusal to concede the election. We should hold these up as examples and signs of hope, for surely it took more courage to take these stands as Republicans than it did for those of the other party to hold the same positions. They demonstrated that morality and genuine patriotism are not partisan traits and that they are not extinct.
A resounding source of hope is the election of Georgia’s first ever Black Senator, Rev. Raphael Warnock--the South’s first Democratic Black senator--and of Georgia’s first Jewish Senator, Jon Ossoff. Those victories, which are a strong counterpoint to the Confederate flags carried in the Capitol building, happened partly through the ten-year effort of Stacey Abrams and her grassroots voter registration efforts, which resulted in a large Black voter turnout. What an example that is for all of us! The work is hard, and it takes time, but it can make all the difference. That is an inspiration and a real sign of hope for us to hold on to.
The final marker of hope I want to call out is much closer to home. At the end of the Fall term, I received the report of the Campus Climate Task Force I commissioned last summer. I first must thank all the members of the Task Force, co-chaired by Professor Joe Fera and Chief of Staff Gladys Maldoon. Many hours were invested by everyone on the task force, and they were assisted by many others who responded to surveys and offered comments and suggestions. The report is now in the hands of the Cabinet and I will be initiating actions in the coming weeks based on its recommendations. The work of being anti-racist will never be over, but this is an important step for the Lehman community in that effort.
The hope in these developments outweighs the despondence we all feel at Wednesday’s events and everything that led up to them. The hopeful signs are real, not wishful fantasies. They show us the pathway we need to continue to follow.
Daniel Lemons
President
