Ramblin' with Roger

Lazy racism

“welfare queens”

There is a lazy racism that takes place in the United States in periods of plenty, but especially in periods of difficulty. The poster above is from postbellum America, almost certainly during the term of President Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), at war with the so-called “Radical” Republicans in Congress.

Redlining started in the 1930s or earlier and continued in post-World War II America, when many black veterans couldn’t take full advantage of the GI Bill.

A recent example, as laid out by Renée Graham in the Boston Globe (paywall likely) in early November 2025, about how FOTUS’s “government shutdown is fueling anti-Black propaganda.”

The subhead: “Under the boot of an administration that would rather foment racism than end its manufactured crisis, the authoritarian president is willing to let millions of real people — regardless of race — starve.”

Early in the shutdown, “social media was suddenly inundated with AI slop, videos generated by artificial intelligence, depicting Black people complaining about the loss of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

“Of course, the short clips on TikTok and Instagram evoked the ‘welfare queen’ stereotypes that Ronald Reagan first conjured nearly 50 years ago during his first race-baiting run for president in 1976.”

“A Fox News contributor… showed a slew of AI slop… introduced by saying that the clips would show ‘exactly why the welfare system needs to be completely overhauled because the entitlement in these videos … is certifiably insane.'”

The influencer “either didn’t know — or didn’t care — that some of the videos… are phony… The clips served their intended purpose of villainizing Black people, particularly Black women, as lazy, greedy, duplicitous, and a burden to hard-working and honest (white) Americans.” The misogynoir is strong.

“Them”

Then there’s this story from the same time period about “a viral chart [that] claimed to show the majority of the nation’s food stamp recipients are non-white and noncitizens.

“The chart, titled Food Stamps by Ethnicity, listed 36 groups of people and said it showed the “percentage of US households receiving SNAP benefits.”

However, according to “the most recent USDA data available, from 2023, white people are the largest racial group receiving SNAP benefits, at 35.4 percent. African Americans are next, making up 25.7 percent of recipients, then Hispanic people at 15.6 percent, Asian people at 3.9 percent, Native Americans at 1.3 percent, and multiracial people at 1 percent. The race of 17 percent of participants is unknown.”

“The same report found that 89.4 percent of SNAP recipients were U.S.-born citizens, meaning less than 11 percent of SNAP participants were foreign-born. Of the latter figure, 6.2 percent were naturalised citizens, 1.1 percent were refugees, and 3.3 percent were other noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents and other eligible noncitizens.”

In periods of stress, blaming the “other” for the difficulties seems to be the fallback position.

Power

Read Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It. “In a perverse kind of trickle-down racism, his attack on Black Lives Matter became a permission structure for increased on-the-ground bigotry. White influencers proudly wore blackface for Halloween. Politico exposed a Young Republicans’ chat where they gleefully traded racist comments.

“Black comedian W. Kamau Bell has painted a portrait of a right-wing shift in standup performances in which anti-trans jokes and anti-Black slurs have become commonplace. This is not a series of isolated events: FBI statistics on anti-Black hate crime, consistently the most common form of hate crime, spiked during his two terms.”

Mail delivery three days a week?

Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act (?!)

The intrepid Arthur wrote a series of posts, going back to January 2013, about how New Zealand Post had proposed reducing mail delivery to as little as three days a week starting in 2015 to cope with falling volumes.” He noted. “I get most of my former mail—bills, statements, newsletters, etc.—by email. Hardly anyone I know sends greeting cards anymore, and no one sends personal letters. I don’t, either. I also don’t subscribe to any paper magazines (though I have subscriptions to a couple electronic versions). We pay all our bills online one way or another.”

I got a taste of that recently. My subscription for USPS Informed Delivery told me we would get 14 pieces of mail on Friday, January 23. We should have gotten 8 pieces each on Saturday, the 24th, and Monday, the 26th, but we got NONE. Instead, we got 17 pieces on Tuesday, the 27th, including the 3 due that day. None of the 10 pieces arrived on Wednesday, the 28th, but they came, along with the 6 for Thursday, on the 29th.

Part of the volume is that my mother-in-law moved to a new facility, which does not include mail delivery. So her mail comes to our house. In fact, most days, her items outnumber the pieces for my wife, my daughter, and me combined.

Voting

One of Arthur’s concerns in 2024 was whether his ballot would be counted. Americans in this country have new reason to worry. “House Republicans are rolling out a massive election overhaul package ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, including new voter ID requirements as well as limitations on how and when votes are cast.

“The Committee on House Administration is unveiling new legislation on Thursday called the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, which would impose new federal standards on national elections across the U.S.”

From The Hill: “The bill would require mail-in ballots to be received by the close of polls on election day to be counted, making an exception for members of military stations overseas. Several states currently allow mail-in ballots to be counted if received up to a certain point after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day — often leading to delays in determining election winners in states like California, where the vast majority of ballots are cast by mail.”

So, if the mail is delayed by bad weather or cuts to the Postal Service, there is a very real possibility of disenfranchising citizens.

“Nationalizing” the vote

“In addition to requiring photo ID when casting a ballot and citizenship verification upon voter registration, the bill implements restrictions on how states administer and maintain their election systems — some of which became flashpoints in the 2020 election, fueling [FOTUS’s] claims of election fraud.”

There are other worrisome franchise issues. FBI searches Fulton County elections office in Georgia. AG Pam Bondi’s letter to MN Gov. Tim Walz (D) called on the state to provide the DOJ with access to unredacted voter rolls, which contain identifying information such as driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

And now, the DOJ is suing more than 20 states in a bid to open voter rolls to federal challenges aimed at purges. And he said it out loud, declaring that the Republican Party should “nationalize the voting” in the US and take away individual states’ power to administer their elections. They want to steal the 2026 election if we let them.

Negro History Week centennial

Black History Month

“On Feb. 7, 1926, Carter G. Woodson initiated the first celebration of Negro History Week, which led to Black History Month, to extend and deepen the study and scholarship on African American history, all year long.”

Daryl Michael Scott writes: “Carter G. Woodson chose February for Negro History Week for reasons of tradition and reform. It is commonly said that Woodson selected February to encompass the birthdays of two great Americans who played a prominent role in shaping Black history, namely Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose birthdays are the 12th and the 14th, respectively.” Here’s a short video about him.

In 1976, fifty years after Woodson’s innovation, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Being a sucker for anniversaries, I decided several years ago to emphasize the centennial. But then, the FOTUS Executive Orders. Still, “Equal opportunity and antidiscrimination obligations are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and our federal civil rights laws. The EOs do not and cannot change that [and they] do not change the reality that the American Dream is not equally available to all… These racial inequities hurt the American economy as a whole: A 2020 study by Citi estimates that the United States’ aggregate economic output would have been $16 trillion dollars higher since 2000 if we had closed racial gaps in wages, access to higher education, lending, and mortgage access.”

BHO

Naturally, I blame Obama. It seemed as though, if a Black person-okay, a Black MAN-could be elected, then the perception that “we HAVE overcome” became the narrative, even as, from the very start of his first administration, the Tea Party and its allies were invigorated to stop him from succeeding.

“On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a devastating decision, Shelby County v. Holder, which dealt a significant blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” This was another “we have overcome” moment. In reality, the “decision swung open the door for states to enact restrictive voting laws, making it harder for people of color to vote.”

In 2025, there had been efforts to erase black history, which you can read about here, here, and here, among many other places.

Retrograde

Then, per Heather Cox Richardson, and just before the centennial month of Woodson’s action: “As the fiftieth observance of Black History Month begins, government officials under the [regime] have just removed an exhibit on enslavement from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The exhibit acknowledged nine people enslaved at the President’s House Site when President George Washington lived there.

“Curators intended the exhibit to examine ‘the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation,’ but it conflicted with the March 2025 order that national historic sites should ‘focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.’ In his order, [he] called out Independence National Historical Park for promoting ‘corrosive ideology,’ teaching visitors that ‘America is purportedly racist.'”

So I feel obliged to keep lifting up these stories. As I’ve said in the past, there were plenty of narratives that I never knew about until well into my adulthood, people like Claudette Colvin, Oscar Micheaux, Charles Hamilton Houston, Lloyd Gaines, and Harriet Elizabeth Brown; events such as those shown in Slavery By Another Name and The song Strange Fruit, and lynching in America. And these were only some of the ones I wrote about from 2010 to 2015.

Keeping score in bowling

cognitive prosthesis

I wrote about my mother four years ago on the broad topic, but this will focus on keeping score in bowling. My sisters remember that she was in a league for at least a decade while in Binghamton, NY, and for about five years in Charlotte, NC. Recently, I learned from one of my sisters that my mother got her bank job in Charlotte because she had been the captain of her bowling team, which showed that she displayed leadership qualities! I did not know that!

In Binghamton, she bowled with her good friend Pat Fink, later Jones. But my sisters say she was also on a team with Pat Whitfield Jones, a woman from our church who was a daughter of my godparents; my parents were her son Walter’s godparents.

I don’t specifically remember where my mom and her friends bowled. But I’m sure I went to some of her league games with her.

Keeping score

Moreover, as noted, I learned to keep score in bowling from my mother and/or her friends. But with the current lanes, scoring is automatic. I was mildly saddened when I first experienced this “new” thing.

Here’s a real sidebar, where Cory Doctorow alluded to a phenomenon: “I used to walk around with a hundred phone numbers in my head. Now I remember two, maybe three on a good day. Which is fine!…

“Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there’s always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get…

“Versions of this continue to play out. When I was a kid, there was a moral panic that pocket calculators would make us all innumerate (an argument advanced by people who know so little about mathematics that they think it’s the same thing as arithmetic).

“Now I keep hearing about millennials who can’t read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.” [I’m not sure I agree with the analog clock analogy, but whatever.]

Yet I still can keep scoring in bowling, which has value to me. I love that my mother taught me something of what is now of limited applicability precisely because it links us not only to the task but also to a specific timeframe. My childhood memory is remarkably spotty, so I embrace whatever connection exists.

Family

My father and my sisters would occasionally bowl, but my sisters said they weren’t very good at it. This was before bowling establishments installed barriers to prevent people from throwing gutter balls. I was pretty competent in my few years in a league. I assume the years of my mother’s play made her a decent bowler.

So this was Roger and his mom again, which is cool. Gertrude Elizabeth (Trudy) Green, nee Williams, died on this date in 2011.

Sunday Stealing: Old School Meme

genealogy

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week’s questions come Kwizgiver, who was invited to play by a blogging buddy named Paula. Now you’re invited to play along, too.

The Old School Blogging Meme

I am passionate about …

Pop music from roughly 1955 to 1995. There are earlier and later pieces I like. Just yesterday, one of my sisters started singing, “Dizzy, my head is spinning, and I instantly said, “by Tommy Roe,” because I knew virtually all of the songs on the charts in 1969.

2) Information literacy, a curse of a librarian

3) Making sure that people don’t take American Christian nationalism as the standard for most US Christians, and certainly not my value system

4) Accessibility

5) Apparently, this blog

I’d like to learn …

It hasn’t changed. I want to know who my mother’s father’s mother’s parents, almost certainly from Ireland, were. Margaret Collins Williams died in 1931.

2) Who is my father’s mother’s father’s parents? Samuel Walker, I still remember, as he died in 1963 at the age of 90.

3) Where was John Olin, who came to what is now the United States in the latter third of the 17th century from Great Britain, born, and when?

4) American Sign Language, though the rudimentary lessons I’ve taken didn’t stick

5) Better time management, or failing that, the ability to say ‘NO’ more often.

Words

Things I say a lot …

Words I intentionally mispronounce. Some of it I find funny, like refrigigator.

2) But others I say because their spelling would suggest a different pronunciation. Epitome is ep-i-tome, facetitious is face-tee-us

3) M-m-m-maybe

4) Math is everywhere

5) A seven-letter word beginning with A, usually while watching the news.

Places I’d like to travel to …

There are so many, and relatively so little time. The places I’d like to go in the US would have to include the Grand Canyon.

2) There are almost 20 states I’ve never been to. I’ll pick Oregon, for no particular reason.

3) Ireland – I have relatives that I don’t even know who they are

4) Nigeria – ditto

5) New Zealand, because

Oh, the picture. It is the remains of my old K-9 school, Daniel S. Dickinson, which they sadly tore down in the early 1970s. Apropos of little, Steely Dan.

I’m rooting for the Seattle Seahawks over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX on Sunday, February 8, because the Pats have been in a record 11 games, winning 6. The ‘Hawks have been in 3 games, winning 1. New England beat Seattle in SB XLIX, 28-24, in February 2015.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.