I was fortunate enough to spend time with my parents this July 4th weekend when this video of protestors in Baltimore pulling down Christopher Columbus’s statue went viral. First, because it happened to be Spencer’s video, a good friend from high school ¹, and so it caught their attention, and second because they asked me why people were tearing down Columbus’s statue. What’s wrong with Columbus?

The thing is, my parents both have voted for democrats my entire life. Their politics have consistently been center-left. My fiancé is half Haitian. They should know about Columbus and how he treated the Taino on Hispaniola. They should, but they don’t. Because although I had classroom conversations about Christopher Columbus: Hero or Villain, they did not. When they were in school in the 60s and 70s, Columbus was a fully fictionalized, canonized, rehabilitated hero of American folklore. While controversy over Columbus’s legacy has shown up in campus newspapers, short local news stories, and opinions pieces each year in October, it’s easy to miss, forget, and ignore.

When we keep monuments to historical figures in every major city, the controversy is drowned out by the ubiquity. These monuments do not cause us to wrestle with history, they allow us to ignore it. We assume the presence of these celebrations are endorsements, and they make it seem as though the controversy is out of the mainstream and unimportant. We can live on with the folklore, because if things were really terrible, why would there be a statue in every city?

These statues must come down. There is no contextualization that will cause folks passing by to grapple with history when they see these bronzed men staring down from their pedestals. Tearing them down has already caused more conversation about the legacies of these individuals than the statues that dot this country.

Don’t mistake the statue for the history. The statues themselves are modern, and they don’t mark a significant history themselves. They are the constructed folklore of America constructed, a physical manifestation of an ahistorical narrative meant to build national, white pride. We can learn about the canonization of Columbus and the discrimination of Italian-Americans without maintaining public monuments throughout our cities. We can keep a few in a museum, and talk about Columbus not as some grand explorer who “discovered” an occupied land and started centuries of theft and slavery, but instead as a flawed man lifted from obscurity and shame to generate pride among another people who were being mistreated by the dominant white, protestant American nationalists.

The statues must come down. They celebrate a rebellion to maintain slavery. They were built not as monuments to shame, nor as monuments to history. These largely 20th century inventions are a justification for the South and the United States as a whole to continue to refuse to have any kind of truth and reconciliation or reparations for the sins of their nation. It was about not feeling the shame and defeat, but instead restoring pride in their actions to subjugate, past and present, black people.

We don’t need to celebrate these people. We don’t need to cling to imagined heroes that we created to reinforce narratives we need to shed. We don’t need these statues.

It’s Time To Abolish Single-Family Zoning

So, suburban governments, you won’t get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then.

It’s not surprising Charles Marohn (of Strong Town fame) wrote this, but I was a little surprised to find it in The American Conservative. But it turns out that Charles Marohn has been published there many times, mostly saying great things. It’s too bad the conservative audience has far too much self-interest in the suburban form.

Never forget:

The suburbs run on federal subsidies.

In April of 2018, Elsa and I visited Hong Kong for the first time. It now seems likely that this will be the last time we will have visited Hong Kong. It’s certainly true that if we ever return, we will be entering a very different place.

Visiting the Hong Kong Museum of History was an important experience. I better understood the brutal conditions of colonialism in Hong Kong and the complexity of reunification with China. But I remember even then having the sense that the political situation in Hong Kong was untenable– how can individuals invest so massively in a place whose future, in a thirty year timeframe, was so uncertain? Why wasn’t there more demand for democracy or for a longer term resolution on Hong Kong sovereignty? Are people really just going to wait it out?

I recognize that these were privileged, WEIRD thoughts, and I did feel the subtle complexities that challenged my more simple confusion.

I don’t feel prescient that things have escalated to the violent, authoritarian extreme that it has in Hong Kong so rapidly from then. I feel sad.

Read every word of Nikole Hannah Jone’s piece on reparations, but a few pull outs:

As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.

This is my answer, consistently, to the people I grew up with who were largely White, European immigrants to the US in this period.

Reparations should include a commitment to vigorously enforcing existing civil rights prohibitions against housing, educational and employment discrimination, as well as targeted investments in government-constructed segregated black communities and the segregated schools that serve a disproportionate number of black children. But critically, reparations must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap.

Too many folks focus on the cash payments, which should be made. But it’s important to realize that a large part of reparations is about race-conscious investment. For example, there’s no world in which Baltimore’s Red Line should have been cancelled in favor of the Purple Line, and a part of reparations should be the legal and policy structure to make the reverse decision.

Shortly after this constitution was written, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the C.S.A., offered a political manifesto for the slaveholders’ new republic. Training his sights on the eight upper-South states that were still refusing to secede, he offered a blunt assessment of the difference between the old Union and the new. The original American Union “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races,” he explained. But “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural … condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great … truth.” A statue of Alexander Stephens now stands in the U.S. Capitol; it is one of a group that includes Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, targeted for removal.

– From The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State by Stephanie McCurry

This great piece in the New York Times points out that banks are already requiring higher down payments on houses in coastal flood zones in anticipation of rising sea levels due to climate change. Even buyers are increasingly taking “interest only loans”, where they are a building 0 equity, presumably because they believe that the home will be worth nothing, shortly.

The changes are modest, but starting. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still backstopping these mortgages, under the guise that flood insurance is a sufficient protection, but the reality is many homes in the US, and therefore quite a bit of property value and household wealth, will be destroyed in the next 50 years.

What can we do from a policy perspective? With our politics utterly polarized on the belief of science, the government seems unable to begin to price in the costs of climate change to protect our economy and provide a true caveat emptor to homebuyers. I expect that the debate of the 2040 election might be which wealthy people get a bailout due to climate change destroying their homes and wealth.

I don’t expect to be sympathetic.

Now feels like a good time for cities to impose massive penalties on vacant properties and storefronts. They should ensure that no landlord has cause to believe property is worth more empty, waiting out higher rent.

That’s how we save what restaurants, cafes, and independent shops we have. That’s how we make sure those that don’t survive are more likely to be constructively replaced with new businesses and opportunities as we navigate a long recovery from the current recession.

If the result is that some properties lose tremendous value, well, these are properties whose value is tied to the urban fabric itself being valuable. The harm done to these specific developers and their specific banks and investors is far smaller and more just than the harm done to the future business owners, the residents of cities, and the future developers and bankers who are ready to put spaces to productive use.

The other side of this is a huge government problem in some cities– it can be incredibly hard to open a business in most cities. Taxes collected from vacancies should first and foremost go toward improving the systems– technical and bureaucratic– and process for filling these properties.

City councils should pass the new taxes/fees alongside reforms to remove onerous neighborhood notifications and other “veto” points toward opening a new business in a storefront. These changes should be universal, not just for vacant property. The Great Streamlining should include everything from getting a business license, to zoning reviews (and simplified zoning!), through construction permitting. The only “expediters” necessary should be city employees doing their jobs in the normal course of business. Anything less is a failure.

Crises are great clarifiers. Each one creates massive problems that need solving. Sometimes those problems are brand new and will require new thinking. But often crises serve to push hard on existing fault lines and pressure points that reformers and activists have pointed at for years as systemic failures. Many of our great cities have failed at being great places to do business and have failed to keep vacancies down as rent went up.

We don’t have to keep failing.

The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

The answer is clear. It can often feel like this is the case, and yet, our legal and moral institutions fail us, utterly.

Today at least, by 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court makes clear that employment discrimination of LGTBQ people is not permitted by federal law.

You should read Policing the Open Road and Suspect Citizens, but if you won’t you should at least read the conclusion from Suspect Citizens available for free at the link provided.

Here’s a choice, long excerpt about traffic stop data in North Carolina:

Today, after eighteen years of data collection have assembled over 20 million observations, we can report that a two-to-one disparity, far from being an aberration, is in fact the statewide average; many police agencies are much more disparate in their treatment of black motorists. And, as we showed in Chapter 7, these disparities are not limited to blacks; Hispanics are also much more likely to be searched and arrested than whites…

Another key element of our findings is that these tactics do not appear to have any readily apparent crime-fighting benefits. When contraband is discovered it is almost always in small amounts, so much so that the typical contraband “hit” does not even lead to an arrest. To boot, those demographic groups that are most likely to experience a search (young minority men) are actually less likely to be found with contraband. Hispanics in particular are much more likely to be subjected to “fruitless search” than whites or blacks. When we look at the behaviors associated with each police officer, we find no correlation between a propensity to search and the propensity to find contraband, suggesting that there are no overarching standards, that training does not produce a clear profile of when to search, and that it may well be an idiosyncratic guessing game, with each officer using his or her own judgment.

Traffic stops can certainly be a traffic safety tool, and we have shown that when officers focus on traffic safety, the racial disparities apparent in the outcomes of those stops are greatly reduced. Disparities are higher when officers use the rules of the road as a pretext to pull over those drivers who attract their attention for reasons unrelated to the safety of their driving.

In other words, traffic enforcement is all about the suspension of the Fourth Amendment, just as Policing the Open Road frames it. Cops are stopping people of color, using those stops as a pretext for searches that would be illegal in any other context, and those searches are failing to turn up much illegal activity. The reality is that traffic enforcement is not about safety, but instead about using state power to intimidate Black and Hispanic people.

The goals of traffic enforcement do not require police, and the actions of police do not support those goals. We need to decriminalize and remove policing from them. Departments of Transportation can handle traffic enforcement, using cameras and, when necessary, patrols of non-armed civil servants. We can end the threat of search or seizure or physical abuse on the roads entirely in favor of simple citations and providing assistance.

We should defund the police, and traffic enforcement is a great place to start.

Harvard SDP was kind enough to interview me about how districts and schools will handle the recession.

I’m glad they quoted me on process, and not just how the recession will impact revenues. Process is in the control of districts, revenue less so.

Shared ownership of decisions is vital when money comes off the table. Not only do you need the input of those on the front lines, but people throughout the community need to know the circumstances and context surrounding the tough decisions that ultimately are made. This will increase buy-in and agency during times of uncertainty.

Great article on how White Jews have become just White in America, benefiting from systemic and structural racism, especially in housing policy, over the 20th century.

My grandparents were poor in tenements in NYC, attending Black and Jewish schools. My grandmother always used to boast about attending the same high school around the same time as Colin Powell.

By my generation we attended white, wealthy schools in suburban NYC, split between New Jersey and Long Island.

Anti-semitism continues to ferment in the background and is alive and well among white supremacist movements in America, but that doesn’t mean that my family and I have not benefited tremendously from the privilege of becoming white.

Great overview of how our racist history has led to an anti-Black police force.

The effect of that is to produce yet another battery of crime statistics coming out of Northern cities that shows high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they’re being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity. It’s just remarkable.

We have so throughly criminalized human activity that all cops have to do is focus on Black people to generate the data that back’s up the belief that Black criminality is the problem.

In the 1890s. And again in the 1920s. And again in the 1960s. And again in the 1990s. And again today. These aren’t waves or events strung together by history. They are a single, constant, concerted effort to maintain the slavery that built our nation.

Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him… — Mattis denounces Trump

Today might have gone differently.

Greet a few friends with a hug as we arrive. Meander to the bar for a drink while we wait to get seated. Order a round of oysters. Get to our table, refresh our drinks, order more of our favorites from the oysters we had at the bar. Maybe a couple of recommended starters. We’ll figure out the rest later. On drink three we decide it’s worth ordering at least one or two entrées for the table to share. Another round of drinks. Struggle to share a dessert. A digestif to end the evening. No fuss about it being my birthday, but still a time with a few friends and great food.

This year I sat at home. We ordered in pizza. The world watched America demonstrate it is a white supremacist state. The police murder instead of protect. They conspire to remain blameless for all their actions, no matter what our own eyes can see. The white supremacist leadership of this country calls for violence against people of color protesting state-enabled murder. The white supremacist leadership claim to support non-violent protest, even after they made a spectacle of rejected non-violent protest. The liars lied about whether they lied about directly undermining US foreign policy.

We are sheltering in place. We are shattering in place.

If you’ve ever heard of the “white noose” here in Baltimore, here’s another great demonstration.

Pooling local revenue with Baltimore City’s two nearest neighbors results in $3,717 more funding per student for BCPSS students.

If we pooled the whole state, that increase grows to $4,963.

Without including wealthy DC suburbs or the Eastern Shore of Maryland, roughly 75% of the gap in funding for Baltimore City is covered just by stepping across a border designed for segregation.

75% of the gap.

That’s the legacy of state sponsored segregation. That’s what you choose when you live over the border.

Via Ed Build’s Clean Slate

I have been waiting for about 2 years for a coffee shop to open around the corner.

They’ll “open” for pickup only for the first time Wednesday.

It’s heartbreaking to think about someone pouring their savings and time into opening up shop only for a global pandemic to hit.

I don’t think we’ve come close to grappling with the lives lost, and we certainly haven’t understood the economic devastation caused by the twin diseases of COVID-19 and an utterly failed government.

It’s Memorial Day in the US. We are supposed to honor and grapple with the sacrifice of soldiers lost at war today. In reality, we celebrate their deaths with cookouts and sales. I can’t help but feel the parallelism in our failures to understand the cost of war and our failures to take seriously this pandemic. The numbers are too large to understand. The costs incalculable. Scale overwhelms and whites out our ability to perceive.

So I think about this coffee shop. It was someone’s dream. It was their big risk that they hoped would define their life. “I have decide to be a coffee shop owner.” Now, through no fault of their own, their grand opening will involve masks, gloves, and paper cups passing quietly across a door frame. Instead of hearing, for the first time, that glorious din of pen to paper, fingers on keys, friends talking, glasses clinking, milk steaming, and the cheery greetings between staff and regulars, they’ll open quietly.

They may not survive long enough to be what they hoped. Neither might we.

I used to be a heavy Google Reader user. Besides the joy of going one place and reading my whole internet, I took a lot of pleasure in sharing great things from around the web with friends. Some of this happened within Reader, but mostly I was a prolific emailer in college of interesting things.

I miss the correspondence my friends and I had over email about interesting block posts or stories or funny things I found all about the internet. It was one of the joys of email, and the joys of leisure time.

I continue this practice somewhat today— if you’re unfortunate enough to be a close friend you probably get some combination of iMessage, Twitter DMs, Instagram messages, or Slack messages about the things I find. But it’s all scattered and sent through highly disruptive mechanism.

I don’t really like to link blog because half the fun is curating who I send things to. And I miss spontaneous groupings of my friends who might like the same things.

I think within all this is an inkling of an idea for a web app/service only useful to me that I’d like to write. If I could collect interesting things in a queue almost like Buffer, and then at a set interval, empty that queue. It would send off a custom email to each person collating the items I selected to share with them. The result is almost a newsletter, but actually a collection of “fun things Jason thought you’d like or would love to talk with you about”.

I think I could maintain a lot more of my friendships with this package. In many ways, sharing the fun stuff I find on the web or debating a news article or blog with you, probably because I thought you’d have interesting things to say or it would challenge your thinking in some way, is my love language.

I missed it by a couple of days.

After years of conflicting advise and being bounced from specialist to specialist for keratoconus, I finally seemed to have found a set of doctors I trusted and who gave me a solid course of action.

The news was not great– the scarring on my left eye was fairly severe, dead center. My right now, now also presenting with keratoconus could not receive corneal cross-linking, a promising laser-based treatment to temper the progression of keratoconus, because my left eye vision was so poor the risks outweighed the benefits.

The hope? Improve the left eye, hopefully before summer, so that I could get corneal cross-linking before the right eye got as bad as the left. How would we do this? After years of not having corrected/correctable vision in that eye and all blur, it was time to take seriously my need for a partial corneal transplant. My hope had always been to avoid this, because I’m young, there are risks, they don’t last forever, and artificial corneas seem just years away.

This latest doctor though gave me some hope– they would be willing to do the partial transplant, but first they insisted I try scleral lenses. I had been offered lenses in the past, but with caveats. I was told they were expensive, that my keratoconus was so severe they’d need to order whole new fitting kits, and that the likelihood was I’d get only modest vision improvement. My new doctor said that she thought we’d have much better luck focusing through (around?) the scarring. That if she could get me to 20/40 vision with the lenses, we would have some options to do a “scrape” to try and remove the scar tissue instead of a full transplant.

This whole course of action was a bit time bound– we wanted to see if we can’t get to the crosslinking before the right eye got worse and risked scarring.

And of course, my follow up was the first week of quarantine.

Today, I got to go to that follow up appointment. And to my delight and surprise (and even to my doctor’s surprise), we did better than 20/40 with the scleral lens. For the first time in 5 years, not only could I make out shapes with my left eye, I achieved a “blurry 20/20”.

I’m frustrated. I have had doctor’s telling me about scleral lenses for years, but making clear that I should only expect modest improved vision and that it was a pain in the butt and expensive. They are expensive. And I don’t know yet how much of a pain in the ass they’ll be. But at least for now, I won’t need a transplant and starting in a few weeks, I’ll be using both of my eyes to see again.

First, this inexpensive stud finder works pretty great.

Second, this self-leveling laser makes the job easy once you find a stud. Just line up the cross hairs and you’re ready to go.

Finally, I’ve always sworn by Ook picture hangers. Super easy to install, never fails, easy to remove.