Tuesday, May 27, 2025

The Return of the Native Son [1]

 

Cincinnati

Arrived in Cincinnati on May 12th. Who said you can never return home! In 2001, Timothy Thomas became the fifth African American male to die in Cincinnati Police custody in a six- month period. His killing ignited a racial rebellion centered in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood where it occurred. Five Black men had died in the custody of the Cincinnati police between October 2000 and April 2001. The next several times that I returned to the city every time I hit town the police had killed another Black man. And one time a Black man had killed a cop! You could almost cut the racial tension with a knife. Department of Justice intervention in the form of Consent Decrees had been ongoing since 1981, and after the 2001 conflagration the police force has diversified along race and sexual lines and steadily improved its community relations.

 

But as I arrived this year a Black teenager had been shot and killed by police as he and three others fled from a stolen car. The deceased had a gun, though he was fleeing and not aiming it at the police. The next day the dead kid’s dad drove his vehicle into the security detail at the University of Cincinnati’s graduation, killing a Hamilton County deputy sheriff. The father has been charged with first degree murder. His attorneys have waived a probable cause hearing and entered a not guilty plea. The defense cites the fact that the father had just seen the body camera video of his son’s killing that morning, and that, in irreconcilable grief, he committed the vehicular homicide of the deputy sheriff. What a rude reception for the return of the native son!

 

I mentioned in my last post how the southeast quadrant of Ohio is essentially Appalachia. Cincinnati, in the southwest corner of the state across the river from Kentucky, is “where Appalachia ends and the great midwestern prairie begins.” As such, it embodies a kind of heartland gumbo featuring mixtures of the southern and midwestern culture and politics. Long a city controlled by Republicans, Cincinnati has gone Blue since the campaigns of Barack Obama. I don’t recall any South Asians in the city when I grew up, but we now have a Democratic Indian American mayor, Aftab Pureval. The city also has a woman police chief and the county sheriff, elected by popular vote, is a lesbian: all of the trappings of a forward-looking coastal city.

 

But not so fast! Vice-President J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, grew up in Middletown, thirty miles north of Cincy. He is from the same stock as Appalachian Whites who migrated north during the same period as the more ballyhooed Black migrations from the deep south. Vance’s peeps are all over Cincinnati and he makes the city his home away from D.C. Now his half-brother, Cory Bowman, is running for mayor against Pureval. Bowman gives sermons at a nondenominational church and manages a local coffee shop. He is a longshot after getting just 13% of the vote in the primary, while Pureval garnered 82%.

 

Perhaps more threatening is the fac that former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy turns out to be an Ohioan too! After turning down Trump’s offer to co-manage the Department of Government Efficiency, Ramaswamy is running for Ohio Governor and has already received the state party central committee’s endorsement. The governor’s office has been controlled until now by moderate Republicans like current governor Mike Dewine and the previous one, John Kasich. But Vance’s Senate victory in 2022, and the victory of fellow MAGA man Bernie Moreno over Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown last fall don’t bode well for a Republican primary opponent, or a Democrat in the 2026 election.

 

On a more positive note, I’ve noticed the growing Latino presence in the city in my last few visits; also, not something I grew up with. I had the pleasure of attending a Latino Fest event on Fountain Square. There was a hot band playing Afro-Latin tunes and Salsa dance lessons were offered from the stage to a mass audience. I understand that Latin bands will be playing on Thursday nights on the square all summer.

 

Finally, the craft brewing movement, which started in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s has caught on nationally. Cincinnati is dominated by German immigrants who stopped their sojourns there, because the Ohio River Valley reminded them of the Rhineland. There has been a strong brewing tradition there since the 1850s. The old local brands (Moerlein, Schoenling, Hudepohl, etc.) have been resurrected, and new breweries have popped up everywhere. I stayed at an Airbnb operated by Fibonacci Brewery located near my mother’s residence. Now that’s my father’s Cincinnati! 

 

Reference

[1] The title borrows from the title of Thomas Hardy’s 19th century novel, Return of the Native, originally published in 1878 in installments in the British magazine Belgravia. 

 

Sunday, May 11, 2025

From Home to Homeland: Blue State to Red State

 

We are hunkering down in the trenches for the long-term siege raining down upon our Blue Nation by the forces of Trump and the Red Nation. My vantage point for thinking about the Trumpian offensive and our responses to it is from the cozy confines of Bellingham Washington in the Northwest (4th) corner of the lower 48 states. Closer to Vancouver, British Columbia than Seattle. Part of what’s sometimes called the ‘Left Coast’ (California, Oregon and Washington), I reside in and below our social democratic Canadian friends, I’m deep inside Blue territory.

I grew up in Ohio. Once the classic bellwether state in presidential elections, the person who won the presidency won Ohio in fourteen straight presidential elections from 1964 to 2016. But Trump has now won the state three times in a row, including 2020, when he lost to Biden by 4.5% points nationally, but won Ohio by 8 points --- a 12.5% divergence from the national outcomes.

While also qualifying as a classic rust belt state which once had considerable manufacturing might, the southeast quadrant of the state is Appalachia and has much in common with neighboring West Virginia and Kentucky.

Over eleven days I shall traverse from my hometown Cincinnati where my 101-year-old mother still resides, to Akron where I attended college, to Cleveland, where many of my homies from those college days live. I hope to come away with a better understanding of what’s driving that other ’Red’ America.

Before I go, I do want to give this week’s shout out to local activists in Vermont whose swift and decisive action probably prevented Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from ending up in prison someplace like Louisiana as so many others have. Mahdawi is a Columbia University student. He grew up in a refugee camp on the West Bank and was admitted to the US in 2014 and got a green card in 2015. He had been active over Palestinian rights on campus in 2023, but not last year when the encampments took place at Columbia.

Mr. Mahdawi was arrested while at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont for an interview on the course to getting citizenship. People from the immigrant rights community attended the meeting with him and videotaped him being handcuffed and taken away by officers who were hooded and masked. The video was quickly posted online and served to mobilize local concerned citizens. The realization that they were being videoed evidently slowed the ‘ICE Men’ who prefer to act in obscurity. That delayed them getting Mahdawi to the airport where he would have ended up in federal detention. He was held instead in a Vermont state prison until he could have his proper day in court.

At his federal court hearing on the 29th of April 300 people jammed the Vermont Statehouse and rallied calling for Mahdawi’s release. Several state legislators spoke. The next day Federal  District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford  ruled that as a green card holder who had not committed a crime Mahdawi had to be released. The action of Vermont Interfaith Action in rallying around Mr. Mahdawi was critical to his release. This was exemplary of the trench warfare the Blue Nation must conduct to defend the rights our constitution extends and to protect fellow humans whose rights Trump wants to take away.

Blue Vermonters refused to acquiesce to ICE thugs and implored elected reps and the judges in the institutional settings to uphold the constitution. Those institutional players do their jobs. Wherever you are you must mobilize the same kinds of networks to protect our immigrant friends!

Again I say 1) Don’t obey in advance! 2) Defend the institutions!