CHRISTIE: I also recognize that my job, one of my jobs as Governor, is to clearly communicate to people what I’m thinking, every time I open my mouth. And I try to be very good about being very direct about what I say so that there’s no ambiguity but obviously when I was talking last week at the town hall meeting about the civil rights movement in the South, I wasn’t clear enough. I just wasn’t.

And what I did was, by saying those things, I left them open to misinterpretation and obviously there are some folks out there whose feelings I hurt or sensibilities I offended. And I apologize for that, because that’s my job. My job is to clearly communicate all the time. And so to those folks out there who were somehow offended or concerned about the ambiguity in my statement, I apologize for that because very clearly what I was trying to say, I said yesterday at the press conference about five or six times.

He did, however, defend calling those who compared him to segregationists as “numbnuts,” explaining that his mother used to use the term for him. “Maybe I should have said ‘stupid, out-of-line,’” he suggested, after asking, “What’s wrong with “numbnuts’?” In fact, Christie didn’t actually take back any of his comments, but merely tried to assuage those who were offended. Listen to it:

Christie’s remarks have triggered a strong backlash from African-American leaders, such as Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who suggested Christie “has not read his recent history books” and pointed out that “most of the governors…were outright segregationists.” Newark Mayor Cory Booker responded simply: “Frankly, I wouldn’t be where I am today” if states had voted on civil rights.

Meanwhile, five former New Jersey govenors, including Democrats Brendan Byrne and James Florio, have broken with Christie by endorsing marriage equality. “I think the climate is right on a basis of civil rights,” said Byrne, the oldest of the former Garden State governors. “I would ask that the Legislature pass it.” Former Govs. Jon Corzine and Jim McGreevey, both democrats, are on record as supporting marriage equality, as well as two Republicans, Tom Kean and Christie Todd.

(Fatima Najiy contributed to this post)

In an interview this morning on CNN, the younger Paul was asked to defend his father’s disregard for one of the most important legislative accomplishments in American history. His answer? Allowing private businesses to maintain a culture of virulent racism is the price we must pay in order to have cigar bars:

RAND PAUL: There are things that people were concerned about that were unintended consequences [of the Civil Rights Act], for example, people who believe very fervently in people having equal protection under the law, and are against segregation and all that, still worried about the loss of property rights…for example, I can’t have a cigar bar any more, and you say, “well, that has nothing to do with race” — the idea of whether or not you control your property, it also tells you, come in here I want to know the calorie count on that, and the calorie Nazis come in here and tell me. [...] The point is that its not all about that. It’s not all about race relations, it’s about controlling property, ultimately.

Watch it:

Later in the same interview, Paul attacks the interviewers for “dwelling on an obscure issue” by questioning his father’s opposition to desegregation. Simply put, there are not very many victims of the apartheid state that the Civil Rights Act helped end who would describe desegregation as an “obscure issue.”

In particular, the study found that Arpaio’s office targeted Latinos both in the workplace and in the streets. “Latino drivers are four to nine times more likely to be stopped than similarly situated non-Latino drivers,” read the report, and his office often targeted individuals simply for having “dark skin” or speaking Spanish. In one example, as Ian Millhiser writes, “One inmate was refused new bed sheets, even after she used a fellow inmate to explain in English that her old sheets were soiled, because the jail told the inmate that she had to make the request herself in English.”

Though instances of lawlessness like this have been ubiquitous in Arpaio’s office, conservatives are beginning to rush to the Arizona sheriff’s defense. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) echoed this sentiment on the radio late last week, telling host G. Gordon Liddy that the investigation was a “waste of taxpayer money.” Poe went on to excuse Arpaio, saying the sheriff was simply “doing his job.”

LIDDY: The attack on the sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, again by the federal government, accusing him of racial profiling, because apparently Hispanics are more likely to be illegal aliens than anybody else. [...]

POE: [...] Sheriff Arpaio and Maricopa County has the authority under a program called the 287-G program, authorized by the federal government, to investigate people in his jail that are illegally in the United States. He’s authorized by the federal government to do this. Now the federal government is saying, “ahh, we don’t want you doing this anymore,” and has named a bunch of excuses. They’ve been investigating him for three years. It’s amazing. Three-year investigation and they’re still not through. Another waste of taxpayer money. Program authorized by the federal government, approved by this sheriff, and now the federal government is saying, “obviously, he’s doing such a good job we don’t want him doing it anymore and want to take away his ability to even inquire as to people in the county jail as to whether they’re illegally in the country or not.”

The Justice Department’s findings against Arpaio are devastating in their scope. In Maricopa County, there are more individuals – over 540,000 – who primarily speak Spanish than in all but six other counties in the nation, yet Arpaio’s office routinely singled out non-English speakers to target. They even once employed a police operation at a local McDonald’s because they received a letter claiming that one of the workers didn’t speak English. Such racially-motivated targeting has been so commonplace under Arpaio that the Justice Department warned they will “not hesitate to file suit, if necessary,” to end such practices.

Unfortunately, Arpaio will likely continue to dismiss these serious charges – he claimed that it was actually he whose civil rights had been violated by the Justice Department by “calling him every kind of name” – under the cover of defenders like Poe.

Arpaio was quick to respond that the DOJ probe (which began under the Bush administration) was politically motivated. The man who made his name parading prisoners around in pink underwear and cramming them into inhumane outdoor “tent cities” complained that his own civil rights had been violated because DOJ called him names:

At the same time, the sheriff rejected as false all of the allegations concerning systemic civil-rights violations. He acknowledged isolated incidents of misconduct by deputies or detention officers, but he said those occurred during arrests of 7,000 suspected illegal immigrants and jail contact with 40,000 others.

“You’re bound, with 50,000, to get a few complaints,” Arpaio said.

Likewise, the sheriff denied unlawfully targeting critics for arrest during political protests. “We don’t go after anybody,” he said. “Actually, they go after me. They’re demonstrating in front of my building, calling me every kind of name. If you want to talk about civil-rights violations, what about that?“

Arpaio stalled the investigation for 17 months by refusing to turn over records to federal investigators, forcing officials to file an unprecedented lawsuit against him for breaking the law by not cooperating. And the man who relishes brutally enforcing the law is still acting as if it does not apply to him.

Defiant as ever, Arpaio is pledging to resist the Justice Department’s order that he reach an agreement to reform internal affairs and training and submit to independent monitoring. He said Friday that he will not agree to be “controlled by some federal monitor or something.”

(HT: Adam Serwer at Mother Jones)

A black tenant filed a discrimination complaint with the commission after Hein accused his teenage daughter of using chemicals in her hair that made the water “cloudy.” Days later, she posted the sign on the gate to the pool.

Hein has so far been unapologetic, and is asking the commission to reconsider their ruling. “If I have to stick up for my white rights, I have to stick up for my white rights,” she said. She recently defended her actions to ABC News, giving the curious excuse that the sign was merely “historical”:

An Ohio landlord accused of discriminating against an African-American girl with a “white only” sign at her swimming pool told ABCNews.com that the sign was an antique and a decoration.

“I’m not a bad person,” said Jamie Hein of Cincinnati. “I don’t have any problem with race at all. It’s a historical sign.”

The sign in question reads, “Public Swimming Pool, White Only.” It is dated 1931 and from Alabama.

Hein, 31, was unapologetic about the racist origins of the sign that she displayed at the entrance to her pool. She said she collects antiques and was given the sign as a gift. She also said that even though the sign seems to indicate that the pool is public, the pool is on her private property and “everybody has to ask before getting in my pool.”

Landlords and business owners are subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and Fair Housing Act, which prohibits them from discriminating against customers and tenants on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, handicap, familial status or national origin.

When David Stern imposed the league’s reductive dress code six years ago, all this role-playing, reinvention, and experimentation didn’t seem a likely outcome. We all feared Today’s Man. But the players — and the stylists — were being challenged to think creatively about dismantling Stern’s black-male stereotyping. The upside of all this intentionality is that these guys are trying stuff out to see what works. Which can be exciting. No sport has undergone such a radical shift of self-expression and self-understanding, wearing the clothes of both the boys it once mocked and the men it desires to be.

I’d actually be really curious to hear more about the stylists in these equations, the people who mediate between the league’s expectations of the men who are the key to their profits, and those men’s expectations of themselves. If the rise of Kanye West and nerd hip-hop hadn’t coincided with the ban, what might the prevailing riff on the code have looked like? What inspirations would they have turned to—and because fashion evolves, where might they turn next? Malcolm X wore himself some crisply-cut but patterned suits back in the day is all I’m saying.

I apologize for the delay in writing last week’s recap, but in a sense I’m glad I get to consider both of these episodes, in their predictability and very strong moments together. I also appreciate a chance to highlight Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent essay on Boardwalk Empire‘s misplaced priorities when it comes to gender, privileging fairly conventional if convoluted gangster stories over the richer domestic dramas that the show mostly uses as pretty window dressing.

Working backwards, I agree with him that Angela’s death at the hands of Manny Horvitz, who has arrived in Atlantic City intending to kill Jimmy and shoots Louise, stealing a clandestine night with Angela, instead, was emotionally striking. Manny’s shock, and his recovery via the intensely cold like, “Your husband did this to you,” was one of the more precisely-executed emotional moments of the season. And yet, I’m disgruntled by the decision on two levels. First, it’s the equivalent of J.K. Rowling killing Remus and Tonks in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a moment when a piece of art needs some deaths to winnow the cast and illustrate emotional costs, but its creators don’t have the guts to lower a truly devastating blow on the audience by killing a main character. Second, there’s something really distasteful about the show’s regression to the norms of the past, where gay relationships inevitably end in death. It’s of a piece, I suppose, with the show’s generally punitive attitude towards sex. But I resent both the specific decision to kill off Angela and with her, one of the show’s legitimately interesting avenues of social exploration, and the general decision to default to killing the depressed lesbian.

The decision to have one of Margaret’s daughters struck down by polio seems to come from a similarly vengeful place. Whether she needs to confess that she’s sheltering with the man who murdered the father of her children, or that she’s betraying Nucky, Margaret clearly believes her sin is responsible for her misfortune. But at least that plotline gives rise to a more interesting speculation: in living with Nucky, has Margaret lost not just the health of one child, but the moral direction of another? Teddy plays a cruel joke on her when he pretends he’s stricken, too, and earns himself a slapping for it, while a weeping Margaret tells Nucky, “God help me, but he has his father’s cruelty,” only to have Nucky insist that he just wants attention, and knowing that his sister’s hospitalized “isn’t the same as understanding” the true magnitude of what’s befallen his family. But on their father-son trip to New York, Nucky realizes that something deeper than genetics or the loneliness of a little boy may be at play when Teddy reveals that he witnessed Nucky burn his own father’s house down, a poisonous revelation that ends with a deceptively sweet, “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t tell.” Maybe Teddy’s just a child. But maybe in Nucky’s house, he’s learned that secrets are powerful, that there is something to be earned by keeping them.

The other fascinating moral evolution — even if it’s temporary — is that of Don Pernsley from Chalky White’s tormentor to his right-hand man in organizing the black strike on Atlantic City businesses. “What if we all say, we ain’t gonna eat this slop, we ain’t gonna work for this wage?” he asks his colleagues in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant, with their support telling the manager. “We want a raise. Every single last one of us. And a lunch you’d eat yourself.” In a moment before the Civil Rights movement, before the establishment of non-violence as a core principal and tactic, there’s something striking about the flying China in the restaurant, the beautiful color of the fruits and vegetables that go flying as the workers tear the kitchen apart. The attack on the picket lines is more in keeping with the established images we have of white repression of peaceful black protestors, and it presages a day when white power brokers wouldn’t be able to crack, as Jimmy’s cronies do, “These jigaboos think they’re Moses.” “Half of them are named that anyway.” Chalky and Don may not know how to shape a narrative to their national advantage yet, but they are trampling down a path that others will follow. And it remains to be seen if Don is in the movement for the chance to do right, or to inflict damage.

And there’s the prospect of another future in a pitch Jimmy isn’t smart enough to accept. “No bottles. No barrels. A million bucks in a suitcase,” one of his confederates tells him about heroin. “You got your artist types. People uptown.” Another chimes in: “That number’s small right now, but they’re very enthusiastic.” Al Capone may complain about Jimmy “moving Chink drugs now.” But Mr. Wu and Al Swearengen seem to have seen the future more clearly half a century earlier than their dapperer counterparts in Atlantic City.

1. Harriet Tubman: The Underground Railroad is one of the coolest things to happen in American history, and it’s only part of what makes Harriet Tubman awesome. Tubman made 13 runs on the Underground Railroad, an act of outrageous courage given the fate that would have awaited her as a conductor were she ever caught. She was the first woman to head up a Union military expedition—which involved guiding ships past a river Confederate forces had mined—during which she helped free more than 700 slaves. And she did all of this despite having seizures and headaches. And it might be fun to see Viola Davis cut loose a little bit post The Help, or to see C.C.H. Pounder deploy her glorious steeliness on an iconic portrayal of Tubman.

2. Ida Tarbell, Ida Wells and Nellie Bly: I’m a sucker for movies about journalists, and these three women are best in class. From Tarbell’s investigation of Standard Oil, which set the standard for document-based investigative journalism going forward; to Wells’ reporting on lynching in America; to Bly’s expose of the state of mental health treatment for the poor, all three were absolutely fearless, telling stories about bureaucracies and norms and prompting reform or efforts at reform. Too often, journalism movies and television shows have to gin up absolutely ridiculous plots to up the stakes—sorry, State of Play, I love you, but it’s true. But sometimes journalists go where the government won’t, even within our own country, at considerable risk to themselves. All three roles would be juicy, but I’d particularly like to see Kerry Washington, so wonderful in The Last King of Scotland, play Wells, who was just a few years younger than Washington is now when she gave her seminal speech on lynching.

3. William Howe and Abraham Hummel: Want a great portrait of Gilded Age New York? And a biopic that could actually be a fantastic dark comedy? A dual biopic of these notorious New York lawyers who represented everyone from free love advocate Victoria Woodhull (side note: the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial would also make a great movie) to notorious New York gang leader John Dolan, they were themselves somewhat shady figures who represented both the worst excesses and some of the most progressive impulses of the era. Ian McShane would kill as William Howe.

4. Frank Kameny and Bayard Rustin: Harvey Milk was an undeniably key figure, and a martyr to the cause of gay rights. But even if you don’t get to end their stories with an assassination as a high point, Kameny and Rustin lived big, forceful lives, often under difficult circumstances. Kameny was fired by the Army for being gay, but bucked tradition by refusing to go quietly. He became a leader in the Mattachine Society (a pet subject for me) and lived to see the federal government apologize to him, a tremendously moving occasion—I was lucky enough to be there to see it. Rustin learned non-violent resistance in India with Gandhi—he was regularly arrested both there and in Africa—but in his own country, his colleagues in the Civil Rights movement kept him behind the scenes because he was gay.

5. Leland Stanford: Not all subjects of biopics need to be heroes, something that’s forgotten all too often. Stanford fanned anti-Chinese sentiment in California even as he imported Chinese workers to labor on construction of his railroads, a story currently getting ignored in AMC’s Hell on Wheels, and his career as a robber baron and politician illustrate the dangers of an overly-cozy relationship between business and government. Plus, we’d get a scene of the dude rowing to his own inauguration as Governor of California through a natural disaster. Ron Swanson would be proud.

6. Lyndon Baines Johnson: Tragic, complex, abusive, and funny, Johnson may be the president since Teddy Roosevelt who would make the most intriguing biopic subject. I have no idea who would play him, but a movie about his decision not to run for reelection would make for a fascinating snapshot, as would a movie about him immediately in the wake of Kennedy’s assasination, though neither would fully reckon with his full domestic and international legacy.

During the interview in which Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom,” he told the British reporter, “He’s the other type of Negro, he’s not like me. There are two types of slaves. Frazier’s worse than you to me…. One day he might be like me, but for now he works for the enemy.”

It wasn’t just Ali. After Frazier beat The Champ in the Fight of the Century at Madison Square Garden in 1971, Boxing Illustrated posed a question to readers: “Is Joe Frazier a white champion in black skin?” By that time, Frazier had been alienated by much of America’s black community, seen by many exactly as Ali had painted him.

Joe Frazier, to be sure, wasn’t Muhammad Ali. But does that diminish Frazier’s accomplishments, either as an athlete or as the change agent he (perhaps unintentionally) was? It shouldn’t. Frazier’s career began when he fled the racism of the Jim Crow South, moved to Philadelphia, and learned to fight. Like Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph, and, incidentally, Ali before him, Frazier highlighted America’s racial injustice by winning a gold medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics while representing a country that didn’t represent him. A few years later, it was Frazier who lent money to Ali, who had been imprisoned and stripped of his title for dodging the Vietnam War draft. Frazier later petitioned President Richard Nixon to get Ali reinstated into boxing.

After his career, he started a charitable foundation and opened a Philadelphia gym to give troubled youth a place to go to ease their frustrations and learn to box, much as others had done for teens like Ali and Frazier years before. Well into his fifties, Frazier still fought charity bouts to raise money for troubled youth in communities across the country.

Plenty of black athletes, Ali included, used their platform to become outspoken activists for American racial injustice and inequality. Plenty of others, like Frazier, highlighted social injustice and inequality simply through their accomplishments, accolades, and acceptance by mainstream America. Perhaps none, however, was demonized by other black athletes quite the way Frazier was by Ali. Ali was flashy, bold and outspoken, and imprisoned for his beliefs, and his activism rightly endeared him to millions of people around the world both during his career and after.

“I don’t want to be no more than what I am,” Frazier once said. But while it may not be his enduring legacy — or, for all I know, the legacy he’d choose for himself — Smokin’ Joe Frazier played a positive role in the change of America’s racial norms during his lifetime. Just because he wasn’t Muhammad Ali shouldn’t diminish that.

A young Rep. John lewis (D-GA)

Incensed by the regressive trend, civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) put the Republican efforts into historical context. “In 2011, we should be ashamed,” he said Tuesday night on the House floor. “We should be making it easy, simple, and convenient to vote. Instead we’re creating barriers and making it more difficult.” Noting that “we cannot separate the dangerous trend across this nation from our history,” Lewis warned of our “step backward towards another dark time in our history.” Singling out the voter ID laws as a particular “threat,” Lewis reiterated, “Make no mistake, these voter ID laws are a poll tax. I know what I saw during the 60s“:

LEWIS: Each and every voter ID law is a real threat to voting rights in America. Make no mistake, these voter ID laws are a poll tax. I know what I saw during the 60s. I saw poll tax. And you cannot deny that these ID laws are another form of a poll tax. In an economy where people are already struggling to pay for the most basic necessities, there are too many citizens that would be unable to afford the fees and transportation costs involved in getting government issued photo Ids. Despite all the voter ID laws across the country, there’s no convincing evidence — no evidence at all — that voter fraud is a problem in our election problem.

The right to vote is precious — almost sacred — and one of the most important blessings of our democracy. Today, we must stand up and fight. The history of the right to vote in America is a history of conflict, of struggle, for that right. Many people died trying to protect that right. I was beaten and jailed because I stood up for it. For millions like me, the struggle for the right to vote is not mere history, it is experience.

Watch it:

Since he was 21 years old, Lewis has been a seminal leader in the non-violent struggle to achieve voter and racial equality in this country. He “endured brutal beatings by angry mobs and suffered a fractured skull,” and was nearly beaten to death to achieve a basic freedom that is once again being infringed upon today.

Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), who has been leading the House effort against voter ID restrictions, reflected on Lewis’ words: “Congressman Lewis has risked his life to ensure that every American has the right to vote. His bravery should stand as an inspiration to us all to continue the fight against Republican efforts to suppress voting. His perspective on this issue is invaluable.”

The report gave letter grades to states based on how well their state curriculum included the civil rights movement; in all, 35 states received an F. Alabama, Florida, and New York received an A, and eight of the 12 states that received an A, B, or C are southern states. “Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

But according to the New York Times, the SPLC report is just one of many that continue to show how few students are considered to be proficient in history:

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

The law center’s report noted that on that federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seniors were asked to read a brief excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, including the phrase, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Only 2 percent of the seniors were able to state that the ruling had been prompted by a school segregation case.

While presidential candidate former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) has blamed these weak history scores on a left-wing conspiracy, ThinkProgress has documented how conservatives are manipulating history textbooks and state curriculum in order to push their ideological agenda — especially in Texas. The state’s Board of Education rewrote the requirements to remove Thomas Jefferson, take out mentions of civil rights leaders, and prevent “gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions” in its textbooks.

Sadly, Texas’ slanted curriculum could easily spread to infect other states. Because of the state’s size, textbook manufacturers gear their textbooks to match Texas’ requirements rather than have to produce multiple copies to match multiple curricula for all of the states. And if students across the nation are learning about just what the right-wing wants them to know, then the large number of states failing to teach students about the civil rights movement is not likely to improve.

I should talk about the events of the season finale of True Blood, but before I do, I think it’s important to discuss something that didn’t happen. The most important — and most emotionally grounded — event that began this season was the brutal and repeated physical and sexual assault of Jason Stackhouse by the female werepanthers of Hotshot. The assaults themselves were tremendously uncomfortable to watch in a way I thought was powerful. The women involved, who are genetically and by means of acculturation effectively part of a patriarchal cult, were almost uniformly unaware that they were committing assault, with the exception of a young panther who helped him escape. The assault was set up to provide an interesting and useful gender-reversed set of issues, raising questions about Jason’s prior sexual reputation, the fact that men can respond physically even when they aren’t consenting to sex. And rather than dealing with it in any systemic way, the show essentially brushed it off with a scene where Jason decides God’s punishing him for sleeping around. Last night, rather than considering the lingering effects of the attack after Hoyt tells Jason there’s something fundamentally broken in him, the show just punted. Jason’s not a panther, so apparently, the lack of magical significance to his assault means it doesn’t have much emotional or human significance either.

You want a gratuitous and cheap treatment of rape in pop culture? To me, this certainly seems to qualify. The sight of Jason’s ravaged body is presented for our uncomfortable entertainment without any sustained consideration of what the attacks meant for his mind and soul. Or if it doesn’t mean anything, for the fact that his soul is either damageable or non-existent. There are ample opportunities for a discussion here, as Jason reckons with the fact that he’s been attacked, does some serious thinking about whether this is punishment — and then tries to begin a monogamous sexual relationship with a woman who doesn’t necessarily want to get serious. And now that he’s a lawman, something that’s supposed to be a major change in character for him that’s due in part to Sookie’s disappearance, shouldn’t Jason want some kind of justice, some sense of safety for his community? But the show just punted, junking up the season with wayward brothers and jaunts down Mexico way, rather than focusing on making any emotional arc coherent, particularly this one.

My vast issues with True Blood’s civil rights metaphors are well-documented, so in a way it was a relief that vampire politics didn’t play a major issue in the finale — at least not until Nan Flanagan got True Deathed into a pulp after breaking with her own organization and with The Authority, which apparently will be the Big Bad of next season but in which I have next to no investment. And there were some nice, nasty little digs, whether it was Arlene’s daughter announcing that she’s “Jenelle from Teen Mom 2,” or Pam, cast out from Eric’s orbit, shrieking that “I am so over Sookie and her precious fairy vagina and her unbelievably stupid name.” The problem with that last complaint is that by this point, I’m kind of sick of Sookie too, sick of her inexplicable magic powers and her dorky vampire threesomes with Eric and Bill in matching robes they clearly bought sometime in 1959. And I’ll admit I’m intrigued by the prospect that Terry was someone else, before the trauma and the crazy and the stability he’s found with Arlene.

But I’m less excited about the fact that instead of moving the story forward, the show’s looped backwards, bringing back Steve Newlin with fangs as jaunty as his pastel sweaters, breaking Russell Edgington out of concrete. And I think it’s a real problem for the show’s ability to develop characters that my main reaction to Tara’s violent end tonight was relief, then irritated assumption that it wasn’t really the end. I fully expect that Tara will be back, whether as a vampire or as something else, because as Arlene put it, “Zombies are the new vampires,” and just as incapable of making good decisions or avoiding being victimized as she was when she was human. A vamped and empowered Tara would be a lot of fun, but I don’t don’t trust that True Blood‘s writers understand that they’ve created a whipping post and that it would be rewarding for viewers to comment on that and move beyond it.

And finally, the endless departure of Marnie was just exhausting. There were glimmers of interest in that character, someone who we know from a line or two was mocked for her powers, someone who got a taste of power and wanted to keep it, but in a way that was so opaque to us as to feel simply asserted. For magic to be more than cheap-looking special effects, it needs to have real meaning. True Blood is brimming over with magical concepts. But they’ve never meant less.

If True Blood had no pretensions to political meaningfulness, it might be possible to enjoy it as a dopey, campy soap opera, to ignore some of the larger plausibility gaps (like the fact that Sookie just never got around to figuring out her faerie abilities since the writers appear to have forgotten about them) in favor of the pretty people. The problem is that Alan Ball appears to have some ambitions for the show. True Blood was, at one point, a decent little metaphor for gay rights and broader sexual liberation. But by shifting it into a riff on the African-American Civil Rights movement, the show’s gotten disastrous in a way that ought to cast doubt on the accepted narrative that Ball is an important and clear-thinking artist.

It’s one thing to do a story featuring several black characters, to have good intentions about it, and to handle it badly out of a lack of ability or sensibility. It’s entirely another to badly misappropriate the Civil Rights movement in the service of a shallow metaphor. If I thought last week’s episode of True Blood, in which two literally Magical Negroes worked together to bring peace to a white family, I might even be more offended by the crassness of the conversation between Bill and Nan this week after the massacre at the tolerance festival. “Remember the civil rights movement. Sweeping social change inevitably accompanied by violence and the appearance of chaos, yadda yadda,” Nan declares. “That’s the spin we’ll give it.” But Bill isn’t having any of it. “We are going after the Necromancer and we are taking her out,” he shoots back, pulling a weak white man’s ghost of Malcolm. “By any means necessary.”

There is a really important story, or stories, to be told about the way that movements have learned from each other, and the ways that the gay civil rights movement has failed to learn from the black civil rights movement — and the ways it couldn’t have replicated that movement. A story that was more tightly focused on Nan Flanagan and her efforts to build vampire narratives, networks, and allies, might be a way to explore that dynamic, which is an important one for American politics. Even a narrower focus on the witch-vampire storyline that took a broader look at anti-vampire sentiment and splits within the vampire community might be a powerful way to explore the tension in civil rights movements between separatists and assimilationists, to illustrate the broad-based roots of events like Jason and Jessica’s failed tryst, which leaves her walking away declaring, “I am not going to glamour you just because you don’t want to feel guilty. What about my guilt? Who’s going to make me forget? Fucking humans. I’m going to go find someone to eat.”

There is a way to make this metaphor work. This is not a function of vampires being tapped out as a topic. It’s a function of carelessness and lack of imagination, of blood and guts and sex trying to stand in for racial and sexual sensitivity. And it’s something that the folks involved ought to be embarrassed about.

Now he’s been caught on tape in South Carolina comparing the civil rights movement to the GOP’s fight for lower corporate taxes and deregulation. He could hardly have picked a worse day to fundamentally misunderstand and misrepresent the struggle for civil rights in America. Today marks the opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to commemorate the great civil rights leader who died marching for economic justice for poor communities. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, a reporter pointed out to Perry that this year also marks the 50th anniversary of a historic sit-in in the town:

QUESTION: And coming to the Old Town Bistro you’re actually visiting a very important place in Rock Hill and the nation’s civil rights history. This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Friendship Nine sit-in here. Care to comment on that?

PERRY: Listen, America’s gone a long way from the standpoint of civil rights and thank God we have. I mean we’ve gone from a country that made great strides in issues of civil rights. I think we all can be proud of that. And as we go forward, America needs to be about freedom. It needs to be about freedom from overtaxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. And Americans regardless of what their cultural or ethnic background is they need to know that they can come to America and you got a chance to have any dream come true because the economic climate is gonna be improved.

Watch it, courtesy of American Bridge:

To compare the “struggles” of corporations who often pay virtually nothing in taxes to the plight of black Americans in pre-Civil Rights America is remarkably ignorant, even for Perry. Martin Luther King Jr. argued that economic rights for the poor were as essential as political rights, and was a great advocate for unions and the very anti-poverty programs that Perry believes are unconstitutional. While King fought for a living wage and more welfare for the poor, Perry fights for more corporate welfare.

(HT: AmericaBlog)

I really hope this comes to fruition. We’ve see Martin Luther King Jr. biopics, including Paul Greengrass’s account of King’s support for the striking Memphis sanitation workers and his assassination getting pushed back repeatedly. And McQueen and Ejiofor were supposed to be working on a Fela biopic too, and it’s not clear what happened to that. But it would be so useful and powerful to tell a story like that that explains that the direction from slavery to freedom wasn’t always a one-way journey, that demonstrates the reaches of the vast jaws of the market for slaves, that situates bondage not just in a vanished, Spanish moss-draped Deep South, but on Mall in Washington, DC where we inaugurated the first black president.

There’s a white character in Northup’s story, the Canadian carpenter who smuggled Northup’s letters back to his wife so she’d know what happened to him. But if he comes into the story and departs it through Northup’s narrative, rather than having a movie that follows said white carpenter South and has him discover Northup, I think this movie can avoid a lot of The Help‘s problems. It’s not the existence of good white people in stories about black people that’s the problem. It’s the presumption that their goodness is the most important takeaway from anti-slavery and Civil Rights narratives.

Stockett’s novel presented a vision of segregation in service of a feel-good story, but the film version of The Help is even more distant from the virulence of American racism. Its villains, Junior League bigots who wear smart little suits to cover their scales, are so cartoonish that viewers won’t risk recognizing themselves or echoes of their behavior in them. The heroines—a privileged, liberal, white Mississippi woman named Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) and two black domestic workers, Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (a particularly good Octavia Spencer)—are much easier to identify with. The project that brings them together, a secret oral history of maids’ lives in Jackson, may spotlight the domestic side of racism. But other than a mention of unenforced minimum-wage laws and a scene of the aftermath of Medgar Evers’ murder, the movie is disengaged with the public legal framework that let white women treat their white servants dreadfully in private. In The Help, whether you’re black or white, liberation’s just a matter of improving your self-esteem…

Indeed, the movie, which necessarily sacrifices some character development in the name of space and speed, also conspicuously cuts out powerful illustrations of racial violence. While we get soft-hued flashbacks to Skeeter’s memories of Constantine, the black woman who raised her, there are no such flashbacks to the violent, unnecessary death of Aibileen’s son. In another scene, Yule May, one of Minny and Aibileen’s friends, is arrested for stealing a ring from her employer. The shot shows white police manhandling and cuffing her, but when they swing at her head with a baton, the impact of the weapon against her skull is cut out of the frame. An incident of racial violence that illustrates the cost of the main villain’s quest for separate bathrooms for African-American servants is left out of the movie entirely. Even a notably gory miscarriage scene from the book is reduced to a blood-soaked nightgown and an artfully smeared bathroom floor visible only for a moment.

I do think there’s value in exploring racism from a domestic perspective on out rather than from a movement level on down to the personal one. But I don’t actually think you can separate the individual practice of Jim Crow segregation from the legal framework and social norms that sustained it. One woman underpaying her maid and failing to pay employment taxes is a bad person — the systematic exclusion of black domestic workers from the minimum wage and Social Security systems that allows her to do it is horrifying. It’s much easier to grapple with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, or with the death of an individual black man in the South, than it is to accept that the rape and murder of black people in large parts of this country was, for a long time, essentially legal. But it’s the latter truth that’s important. We can say that people who mistreat the people who work for them, who are sexually coercive employers, and who commit individual murders are not us, that we would never do such things. Facing the actual structures that enforced and perpetuated racism, and that have impacts that are felt to this day, means admitting our own complicity.

I saw The Help last night (about which much more to come tomorrow) so I’m particularly in this space, but I would love to see a great-looking early ’60s period piece starring African-American characters as something other than than the soundtrack to or catalysts for white people’s moral awakenings. That’s not to say that white people didn’t play a role in the Civil Rights movement, or that they didn’t pay terrible costs for doing so. Of course they did. But at the end of a big struggle, there’s a difference between feeling good about yourself for participating, and being able to work, or eat, or take the bus wherever you’d like without fear of violent death. I’d just like to see something where a black character gets the makeover, the guy, the ’60s-ified soundtrack, and, if it’s that kind of story, credit for a civil rights victory.

But if it’s not, that’s OK too. It would be a mistake to tell a race-blind stories set in the ’60s, but that doesn’t mean that every single story about African-Americans at the time has to be primarily about the Civil Rights movement. I would love to see what Cee-Lo, who seems substantially invested in proving his period bona fides, did with some sort of mandate like this. OutKast’s bootlegger musical Idlewild was, I thought, an interesting but imperfect experiment. I’d like to see more people working in this space, trying to figure out how to tell different kinds of black stories — and, as a musical theater nerd, to keep pushing for hip-hop’s place in the musical world. Especially if it means more dancing Jaleel White.

Random drug testing is what is known as a “suspicion-less” search. Even without probable cause to believe the person required to pee in a cup has done anything wrong, he or she is forced to turn over bodily fluids for government inspection.

The Supreme Court has upheld the ability of government to mandate random drug tests in a few limited circumstances. The earliest cases held that people with sensitive government jobs in high-risk public safety environments, like railroad operators, or involving national security, like border and customs agents, could be required to submit to testing. The Court’s most expansive ruling allowed public high schools to randomly test student athletes, even though the public safety concerns weren’t nearly as apparent.

High school students, however, have historically enjoyed fewer constitutional protections than mature adults, and courts have generally frowned upon random drug testing of them. Indeed, courts have stuck down policies just like the ones put in place by Florida this week. (See, for example, here and here.)

Scott’s self-enriching drug testing plan is merely the latest example of Republicans ignoring the Constitution to push their own partisan agenda. Indeed, GOP attempts to rewrite the Constitution to achieve their own partisan objectives have become so common that Scott’s assault on the Fourth Amendment is almost passé:

• Child Labor: In three separate opinions, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas called for a return to a discredited theory of the Constitution that early 20th century justices used to declare federal child labor laws unconstitutional. Many GOP elected officials — including several sitting senators –have embraced rhetoric suggesting that they agree with Justice Thomas that child labor laws are unconstitutional. Thomas’ view of the Constitution also endangers other basic labor protections such as the minimum wage.

• Whites Only-Lunch Counters: In a now-infamous interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) claimed that there are constitutional problems with the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters. Justice Thomas’ pre-New Deal understanding of the Constitution also supports Paul’s view.

• Education: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) believes that all federal education programs — including Pell Grants and student loan assistance — are unconstitutional.  And he is far from alone among GOP members of Congress.

• Gender Discrimination: Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia recently expressed his view that the Constitution has nothing to say about discrimination against women.

• Ending Senate Elections: Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) recently claimed that the ratification of the 17th Amendment, which allows voters to elect their own senators, “was a mistake.” Scalia agrees.

• Social Security and Medicare: Even though the House GOP’s plan to eliminate Medicare has thrown the GOP’s poll numbers into a nose dive, several GOP senators want to repeal Medicare and Social Security by having them declared unconstitutional.

Scott, however, may win a prize as the first GOPer to sign an unconstitutional law that may be designed to increase his own already massive fortune.