She saved me from being so defined by patriarchy that I lost who I was, from buying into the sexist labels applied to “girls like me” so much that I denied my own gifts, and from being so affected by misogyny that I hated myself.

She offered me an alternative view of the world, one in which women’s gifts were as valued as were men’s, where women’s ideas and bodies mattered as much as men’s, and where women could work anywhere and try anything, just as a man could.

And I needed all this more than I knew.

In 1964 I was beginning my senior year at Permian High School in Odessa. I was a good student, working on the school newspaper and the school yearbook. I wanted to be a journalist. Like Gloria Steinem.

I was more innocent than people can imagine these days, especially about sex and my own body – a situation I shared with many girls my age. Given that both my parents were medical professionals, that seems hard to believe, but they were Catholic, and the Church feared if you taught kids about sex, they would want to do it.

Seriously.

So when the boy I was dating and I “got carried away” it is no wonder I was shocked to find out I was pregnant. Then I was further shocked to find out it was all my fault.

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He wrote it in 1975, clearly inspired by the women authors exploring feminity through the lens of the New Women’s Movement. The back cover, says, “This pioneering book proposes a new definition of masculinity. ‘Men’s liberation’ means freedom from destructive competition, from the fear of being called effeminate, from the terror of sexual failure, from the nervousness that inhibits male friendship — from all the cultural straitjackets and mental stereotypes that warm men’s attitudes and behavior.”

It asks these questions:

• Why are men afraid to be gentle, caring, loving, sharing?

• Why are males taught to avoi certain thoughts and activities?

• Why, since the advent of women’s liberation, has there been a startling documented increase in male impotency?

• What has men’s traditional “toughness” done to society and to politics?

• Why should men be passive as well as active?

And the best part about this book? It was written by a gay man.

And the least surprising part about this book? It was written by a gay man.

Because in 1975, no straight man would have dared THINK those questions, much less write them down for their bro buds to see.

Nichols was a gay rights pioneer whose courage is awe-inspiring, as is made evident in his NYTimes obituary from 2005. Remember, homosexual acts were outlawed in all states, and even “identifying oneself in public as gay posed serious risks.” You could be jailed or institutionalized for being homosexual.

He is described as “just about the most visible gay person in the country, if we go back to the mid-1960's.” He “successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to rescind its definition of homosexuality as a form of mental illness,” and led a the first gay rights march on the White House in 1965 — the year I graduated from high school!!

He literally risked his freedom, and yes, his life, for gay rights. So writing Men’s Lib was most likely simply writing what was to him the most obvious things that screwed up straight men and created problems for gay men. Plus, there is evidence that he enjoyed the heck out of poking at “masculinism” and the American male of the 1970s version of it. He had fun writing this serious book.

It is fascinating, because it is so right on target. Nichols coined the phrase “masculinist mystique,” deliberately echoing feminist Betty Friedan “who, in 1963, had coined the term ‘feminine mystique’ to describe the deep sense of emptiness that could afflict suburban housewives.” The masculine version, he wrote, kept men in “an endless cycle of competition and one-upmanship.”

And the most depressing thing?

It is still so damn timely.

NOTHING HAS CHANGED with men and masculinity. In fact, in the Trump years it has gotten so much worse, with Christian Nationalist trying to force their version of Biblical Patriarchy down everyone’s throats.

Queer people are under serious attack, with Republicans working to undo all the gains of the last few decades, targeting Trans people especially. The President of the United States said in an interview on August 30 that if Republicans keep control of Congress that trans people “will end.”

Women are under attack, with their legal rights, including the right to vote, targeted by Republican candidates and right wing pastors.

Nichols was serious about his purpose: “I hope the following pages will open throughful men to the kind of self-examination that brings new insight into their roles, their leisure, their work, their emotions, their sexuality, and their relationships with children, friends, parents, and their own bodies. I hope too that these pages will suggest new values for political activity, optimism for relationships between the sexes, and visionary alternatives for future living patterns that each man can freely choose for hiself.”

It is something I wish for daily, as I watch way too many of today’s males sinking into the worst aspects of patriarchal masculinity, to the detriment of women, children, LGBTQIA+ folk — in short anyone who is not a straight rich white male.

Nichols believed we can do better. And I do too.

It begins with voting Republicans out of office. So register to vote. If you are already registered, check to make sure it is still valid.

And then vote.

My parish, St. Luke’s in the Meadow, worships in a gym. We have no columbarium or memorial garden within which to put ashes of those we love. So when it came time to finally put a man who died of AIDS to rest, St. Martin’s offered a safe beautiful space.

And to my astonishment, several St. Martin’s parishioners showed up at the committal.

Here’s some of his story, in the remarks I made at the service:

—-

We are here today to do something that should have been done thirty-nine years ago: to lay Reading Way to rest with his name spoken, his life honored, and someone who cared about him standing beside him.

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Reading died on December 27, 1987. He was one of 13,468 people who died of AIDS that year in this country — a number so large it starts to sound like weather, like something that just happened, rather than nearly 14,000 individuals who each had a favorite song, a way of laughing, a life that mattered. Reading was not a statistic. He was a man who liked James Bond novels and made a face when he didn’t care for a piece of music.

I was a reporter writing about the AIDs Crisis then, in Fort Worth and nationally. It is hard for us today to remember what that time was like.

That era was defined by abandonment on almost every level — medical, familial, social, governmental — happening simultaneously and reinforcing each other. A diagnosis was essentially a death sentence, often within one to two years. Some hospitals refused to admit patients; some doctors and dentists refused to treat them at all. Texas still had a sodomy law on the books (struck down only in 2003 with Lawrence v. Texas), which shaped how police, employers, and landlords treated gay men — HIV status could be legally used against you in ways that had nothing to do with public health.

Employers fired people once their status became known. Landlords evicted tenants. Insurers denied or dropped coverage. Children were barred from schools. The fear was disproportionate to the actual transmission risk, but it was pervasive.

Men who had been closeted to their families were often outed by their diagnosis, and many parents chose rejection over care. Partners had no legal standing: no hospital visitation rights, no medical decision-making authority, sometimes no right even to attend the funeral if the family took control of arrangements. Funeral homes frequently refused to embalm or handle bodies.

In 1975 I wrote about this Episcopal priest, Gayland Pool, when he was the Canterbury chaplain at TCU. He had invited one of the eleven women ordained irregularly in Philadelphia to Fort Worth, and I did a story about it. Then 12 years later, I discovered this same Episcopal priest was the only priest in Fort Worth then who would do funerals for people who died of AIDs. So, at his invitation, I began following him around as he engaged with people, mostly men, who had AIDS.

And that’s how I met Reading. And got way more involved than reporters are supposed to do.

So I want to tell you what I know about him, because it is less than I wish I knew, and every piece of it is precious for that reason.

By the time Gayland introduced me to him, Reading was very ill, with painful mouth and throat ulcers that made it difficult to talk. We didn’t get the luxury of long conversations, of hearing his whole story the way you’d hope to know someone. What we got instead was smaller and, I’ve come to believe, no less true. We got to know him the way you know someone at the end — through what made him lean in, and what made him turn away.

He loved Mozart. I would play records for him, and he’d nod if a piece pleased him, and screw up his face if it didn’t. We had real fun with that — it became a kind of game between us, one of the only games left to play. He loved adventure shows and travel programs on television, and musicals. I read to him when he had the strength to listen. I brought him books on tape, because that he could manage himself — click it on, click it off, on his own terms, which mattered more than I think we understood at the time. He loved mysteries. He loved spy novels. He loved James Bond most of all.

He would smile — actually smile — at Gayland’s terrible jokes. And he liked to say Morning Prayer. He had been baptized as a boy in the Baptist church, a church he stopped attending after his own parents told him he embarrassed them. His family walked away from him for being who he was and never came back — not even at the end.

That is the story of so many men in those years. Fear and shame did what should have been unthinkable: they made families leave their own sons to die among strangers. Reading was not left among strangers. He had Gayland, and he had me. But he should have had so much more, and I have carried that unfinished math with me for a long time, as did Gayland.

When Gayland died in 2017, he still had the ashes of four men whose families we had never been able to find. I made it my work to find those families and found three -- people I trusted to receive their sons and brothers with the dignity they deserved. Reading was the one I could never place. So today, I am doing the only thing left that I can do for him: I am seeing him home myself.

Reading, you were not forgotten. You were not, in the end, alone. Go in peace. Rest in the music you loved, in the good jokes, in the company of every mystery finally solved, wrapped in the arms of the God who always loved you.

Amen.

Here’s the video, in case you have been on the moon for the last few days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/golf/comments/1vuqjqv/anyone_see_this_ad_by_good_good_a…

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It tells the story of the birth of Moses, whose name you recognize, and his mother, whose name is Jochebed, by the way. Also …

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For instance, Tamir Rice.

On November 22, 2014, Tamir E. Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old white patrolman with the Cleveland Division of Police. Rice was playing with a toy gun; Loehmann shot him with no warning, before the police car had even finished rolling to a stop. The officers then tackled his sister Tajai to the ground before handcuffing and putting her in the back of the patrol car. They then waited several minutes before rendering aid to Tamir.Needless to say, barely a month later it was determined that no charges would be brought against the police officer for killing a child because the toy “looked real to the officer,” even though he never bothered to investigate before shooting. He — of course — “feared for his life.”

Tamir haunts me. As does Fort Worth’s own Atatiana Jefferson, killed for daring to defend her home and her 8-year-old nephew; George Floyd and his”drug problem”; Sonya Massey’s “dangerous pot of hot water;” and, of course, Emmitt Till supposedly whistling at a white woman. All White Lies that excused the deaths of Black people

But now the White Lies are enveloping white people.

Within minutes of a white woman and white man being murdered in Minneapolis by ICE officers in full view of hundreds of phones videotaping the events, our white supremacist Christian Nationalist administration started lying about how their deaths were their own fault because they didn’t comply.

You know— just shut up and get in the damn boxcar. And within minutes this George Orwell quote from his dystopian 1984 was popping up everywhere: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Black Americans — and all of our non-white siblings — are intimately acquainted with White Lies, because they have always been part of the very air they breathe in our country.

One of the MANY White Lies told to control Black enslaved people is that Black men are intrinsically dangerous to white people, especially white women. So murders of Black men by police are always news worthy because it helps to keep instilling this lie in our white consciousnesses. Police lie about these encounters so casually that they often are surprised to be held accountable in any way in the wake of a Black man’s murder-by-cop.

I am ashamed that it took me longer than it should have to realize the number of Black women who are killed by police, usually with no repercussions. It was outraged Black women coining the term “Say Her Name,” that finally got my full attention, because the white media certainly had moved on, if it even bothered to pause for the death of a Black woman.

In July 2015 a group of Black women produced Say Her Name, Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women. It “sheds light on Black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all Black lives equally,” they said of their effort. The publication is copyrited by the African American PolicyForum and the Center for lntersectionality and Social Policy Studies

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20160712/105175/HHRG-114-JU00-20160712-SD004.pdf

Their introduction says, “None of these killings of Black women, nor the lack of accountability for them, have been widely elevated as exemplars of the systemic police brutality that is currently the focal point of mass protest and policy reform efforts. The failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades, including Eleanor Bumpurs, Tyisha Miller, LaTanya Haggerty, Margaret Mitchell, Kayla Moore, and Tarika Wilson, to name just a few among scores, leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence.”

Among the horrors they bring to our view are Marlene Pinnock, pummeled in the face by a California Highway Patrol Officer; Keyarika Diggles, beaten in a Texas police precinct; Dejerria Becton, an unarmed Black teenage girl at a pool party, being pinned down by a police officer in McKinney, TX as she sobbed and asked for her mother — this last one of the few I actually had heard of and been horrified by.

The authors make it clear that they weren’t trying to produce a comprehensive list — indeed it would be an impossible task, given the historic erasure of Black women from white consciousness. As they say, “there is currently no accurate data collection on police killings nationwide, no readily available database compiling a complete list of Black women’s lives lost at the hands of police, and no data collection on sexual or other forms of gender- and sexuality-based police violence. “

“Given these limitations, our goal is simply to illustrate the reality that Black women are killed and violated by police with alarming regularity. Equally important, our hope is to call attention to the ways in which this reality is erased from our demonstrations, our discourse, and our demands to broaden our vision of social justice.”

“The erasure of Black women is not purely a matter of missing facts. Even where women and girls are present in the data, narratives framing police profiling and lethal force as exclusively male experiences lead researchers, the media, and advocates to exclude them. For example, although racial profiling data are rarely, if ever, disaggregated by gender and race, when race and gender are considered together, researchers find that “for both men and women there is an identical pattern of stops by race/ ethnicity.”

One of their charts shows that in 2013, of all the men stopped by police in New York, 55.7% were Black men, compared to 10.9 white and 23.9 Latino. Of all the women stopped by police in New York, 53.5% were Black women, compared to 13.4% white women and 27.5% Latina.

. . . we hope that this document will be used by the media and policymakers, advocates and organizers, to begin to break the silence around Black women’s experiences of police violence. But the first step in breaking this silence is within reach now. We need only answer the simple call to #SayHerName.

In short, they want to stop the White Lies that inform so much of the white media’s news decisions, stop the White Lies that provide cover for corrupt and racist police work, stop the White Lies that attempt to transform authoritarian white supremacist Christian Nationalist ideology into policy.

They want us to understand the intersectionality of state sanctioned violence, something that is increasingly urgent as our own government turns against its citizens — INCLUDING ITS WHITE CITIZENS who are finally seeing the results of centuries of White Lies being inflicted on our privileged selves.

In order to comprehend the root causes and full scope of state violence against Black communities, we must consider and illuminate a// the ways in which Black people in the US are routinely targeted for state violence. Acknowledging and analyzing the connections between anti-Black violence against Black men, women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people reveals systemic realities that go unnoticed when the focus is limited exclusively to cases involving Black non-transgender men.¹²

They assert accurately that “centering the lives of all segments of our communities will permit us to step away from the idea that to address police violence we must ‘fix’ individual Black men and bad police officers” — another White Lie.

And most importantly, “If our collective outrage is meant to warn the state that its agents cannot kill Black men and boys with impunity, then our silence around the killing of Black women and girls sends the message that their deaths are acceptable and do not merit repercussions.”

Read that again — their deaths are acceptable and do not merit repercussions.

That’s another White Lie that started with white people enslaving Black human beings. The deaths of enslaved people didn’t matter, except if they could be used as a warning to other Black people to comply, do as they are told.

Sound familiar? These are the tactics that fascinated the Nazis enough that they studied Jim Crow laws of the South as they shaped their Third Reich.

At long last, white people in the United States are no longer able to outrun our own history. Sadly, it is taking deaths of innocent white people for us to learn that.

Say Her Name s an enormously important piece of work, and a huge gift to white people. Please pay attention to it.

And also, please reserve the phrase " Say Her Name” for Black women. They coined it. They own it. Respect that.

For instance, our Republican state leadership is fine with ICE kidnapping and disappearing Texans into concentration camps all over the state, and apparently is OK with ICE murdering people while in a camp.

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/01/21/texas-el-paso-immigrant-death-ice-custody-homicide/

They apparently also are just fine with Texans freezing to death in an ice storm, as they were when Winter Storm Uri dumped record amounts of snow on Texas in 2021, with the frigid temperatures and severe weather impacting all 254 counties. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power, some for several days. At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis, according to multiple news sites.

Because the Texas Power Grid failed.

And why did it fail? Because our Republican leaders decided a long time ago that they work for billionaire energy overlords, not the now more than 31 million human beings living here. And because— counter intuitively - they prefer a state-controlled Grid rather than one operated by market forces. In this instance, the Rs have jettisoned capitalism for state control of the market.

Here is what Forbes said in December 2024: “Texas has spent years tweaking its electric grid, but it’s still not fixed. How do we know this? ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, projects an 80% likelihood of rolling blackouts if a storm the magnitude of Winter Storm Uri hits the state this winter. Prior to Uri in February 2021, the probability of rolling blackouts was only 5%. A weaker storm—equivalent to 2022’s Winter Storm Elliott—has a 50% probability of triggering rolling blackouts. And there is no assurance that rolling blackouts can be executed, risking a widescale grid failure. So, by ERCOT’s own projections, the grid is more fragile than it was four years ago.

“Why? In 2002, Texas dispensed with a reliable end-to-end electricity supply chain that the consumer could count on in the heat of summer and cold of winter. It has been replaced by a 100% government operated grid under which consumers pay more, get less, and no one can be held accountable.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2024/12/09/after-4-years-and-billions-of-dollars-the-texas-grid-is-not-fixed/

“In 2021, both The Wall Street Journal and KPRC-2 television in Houston reported that ERCOT consumers had paid $28 billion more than they would have been expected to pay had the market remained a cost-of-service plus allowable return on investment for the utilities—a system that allowed power generators to be paid for investing in maintenance and new generating capacity. Instead, the system encourages generators to hold back power from the grid until tight conditions force wholesale prices to rise, sometimes dramatically, with consumers paying the price. During the five-day February 2021 freeze, spiraling wholesale prices led ERCOT to overcharge its customers by more than $4.2 billion. In 2023, the ERCOT Independent Market Monitor stated that ERCOT overcharged the consumer side of the market by $12 billion from June through December, 2023. No new power plants have been built in exchange for this $12 billion. That money went to executive bonuses and stock buybacks.”

There was an avalanche of lawsuits after Snowmageddon, and the Texas Supreme Court ruled ERCOT was immune from being sued because it is “an arm of the state.”

Forbes goes on, “Utilities and power plant owners have been dismissed as defendants after arguing that ERCOT failed, or that other power plants failed, or that natural gas supplies failed, and that because the state manages everything about the ERCOT grid, these individual utilities and power plant owners bore no responsibility. It was an easy argument. None of the generators are responsible to individual customers because they only provide electricity to ERCOT. If the electricity was not delivered to consumers, therefore, it was the fault of the state of Texas.

“The Third Court of Appeals overturned the February 2021 overcharge. But, in a move that has never happened anywhere else in the United States, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, PUCT, at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott, went to court to make sure that consumers had to pay the overcharge.”

Got that? Our Republican governor went to court to make sure Texans essentially paid for the Grid failure that killed many of us.

The population of Texas grows daily, and our Republican leaders invite in power-sucking data centers and bitcoin mining (Texas is poised to be the largest site for such centers in the nation in the next two years), so demand for power grows continuously.

The ERCOT market is 100% operated by the state. It is the one buyer in the wholesale market AND the one seller in the wholesale market, “raking its fees off the top, and billing retailers for electricity daily.”

In the old days, Forbes explains, “a consumer bought electricity from a vertically integrated utility, and the PUCT made sure that the utility had the electricity generation capacity available to meet the demands of new customers. The utility and the PUCT worked together to make sure that the utility was making the necessary investments.”

These days, you and I have to buy our electricity through retailers licensed by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT).

These retailers do NOT have power plants and they are NOT required by the PUCT to have electricity supplies guaranteed to provide the service for which they are charging their customers.

Forbes described it as “selling empty promises. They are running a Ponzi scheme because they can do so without any consequences. If they come up short like they did in 2021, the state will bail them out. Read that as private profit and socialized costs.

“Apart from selling something they don’t own, the retailers also make money by offering a confusing myriad of plans in full view of their competitors (see the PUCT’s website PowerToChoose.org). They publish their prices much like the airlines do on reservation services or gasoline stations along the road. While some may call this competition, it is remarkably easy for them to collude.”

Obviously after the 2021 debacle, we needed more power generated. But our Republican leadership “turned down offers from Berkshire Hathaway Energy and Starwood Energy Capital that, for approximately $10 billion, would have added up to 10,000 megawatts of new capacity—not for free of course, the companies asked for a 9 percent rate of return. Those power plants would have been operating today.”

There is another fix called a systemwide demand response program, in which customers reduce electricity use during times of peak demand.

“ERCOT already does this for cryptocurrency miners, paying them to reduce power use when the grid is strained. But regular Texans have had smart meters in their homes and businesses for more than 10 years. The technology is proven. . .

“Why has the Texas government not adopted demand response for consumers after all this time? Doing so would lessen the wild volatility in electricity prices, which range as high as $5 per kilowatt hour wholesale. It also would cut into profitability for generators and commodities traders who play against consumers during tight supply days. Millions of Texans could save billions on their electric bills if just a few hundred thousand customers opt out during peak demand for cheap side payments.”

Yes, we have wind and solar farms in Texas, but until we build out transmission facilities to move that power to where it’s needed, they are not as much a benefit as they might be. Billy Bob Thornton even explained it in an episode of Landman in the first season.

And even though ERCOT assures us our Grid is stronger and better insulated, etc these days, it is beyond obvious that Texans don’t trust it — or the word of their Republican leaders. Just look at the outpouring of survival advice as this latest winter storm approaches. The news media, social media, social service agencies, individuals are full of survival advice for us — BECAUSE NO ONE TRUSTS OUR REPUBLICAN LEADERS NOT TO TRY TO KILL US AGAIN.

Sit with that for awhile.

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Now THERE are two names that raise the blood pressure of white businessmen in Dallas, and for all the right reasons. Both these men — one white, one Black — speak truth to power, and power never likes that, as we are seeing in the United States right now with not only newscasters but decent ordinary people losing their jobs for daring to voice an opinion contrary to Trump’s about the death of a certain sycophant.

Schutze is a legendary reporter/writer who makes Good Trouble, and Price, well, JWP was elected as the first African American to the Dallas County Commissioner’s Court in 1984, in an era when that should have been impossible, and has served for more than 40 years. And he’s still fighting for “inclusion among institutions that traditionally resist minority participation,” in short, nearly all of them.

I urge you to read this book, one, because rich white Dallas doesn’t want us to, and two, because it will help you understand not only Dallas history, but also Fort Worth’s, and what is happening in the United States right now.

It also should make all white people wonder why our Black neighbors haven't just wiped us out. Their restraint is epic in the face of our historic incredibly bad treatment of them.

Price begins his Foreword by pointing out that a May 2015 article by Peter Simek in D Magazine about this book entitled "The Most Dangerous Book in Dallas" pretty much summed up Price's feelings about The Accommodation.

"In his book, Schutze argues that the civil rights movement largely passed over Dallas, resulting in a kind of tacit political arrangement that has ensured Black leaders remain reliant on Dallas' white leadership. Just before the book's scheduled publication, in 1986, Schutze's publisher abruptly dropped it, citing poor pre-sales. But a New York Times article connected the decision to pressure from the white leadership and a city with a ‘historical antipathy toward self-criticism.’"

My experience is that most cities have a antipathy toward self-criticism, especially criticism coming from people historically on the margins, but after reading The Accommodation, I agree that Dallas is exceptional in this regard.

Price acknowledges that Schutze has performed a service for the Black citizens of Dallas, because in Dallas, like all of the United States, “Sadly, we still need respectable White folks to validate our story before it finally becomes something other than ‘fake news.’”

Price also points out accurately that “Jim is respected for his performance, purity, and his world-class ability to piss people off.”

I have always believed that if reporters aren’t pissing people off, they aren’t doing their job. By this measure, Schutze is doing his job very well.

His summation of how the White power structure in Dallas worked historically and its impact on the Dallas of today is scarily on target, not just about Dallas, but about the current Trumpian oligarchs running our country.

“Perhaps nothing says as much about the mentality of the old power structure as its insistence now that representative democratic government cannot work, that it is incapable of generating ‘policy,’ that it is inherently divisive, corrupting, and will lead to vagrancy. What all of this would mean, if we took it seriously, is that the United States is doomed. It is a mindset still so separated from the assumptions that drive the nation that we are reminded of it by the old Dallas Morning News editorials of the early 1960s accusing President Kennedy of something very like treason.”

A white person writing about powerful white people behaving badly is always unpopular with powerful white people, but Dallas even takes that to new levels, the attempted and for a white successful suppression of this book being a prime example. The utter contempt of most of the white business leaders of Dallas for their Black neighbors is shocking, and while it is probably no worse than the racism generally in Texas at that time, the unrepentant boldness of the raw racism is proof of how none of them believed they would ever be held accountable, and certainly not by the Black people they considered barely human. Suffering Black people to simply live in their city was painful for them.

It sounds strikingly like the raw unfiltered racism we are seeing emerging from the Trump camp these days.

The Accommodation story ends in the 1980s, but the racist dynamics continue. Price is still trying to make coalitions that will get things done for the Black Community, Black leaders are still trying to help their community acquire capital, not just jobs; to get the financial independence that will allow them to achieve “a position of unfettered power, power for which they owe white people nothing.”

Only then can Black people achieve “true coalition, rather than accommodation and dependency.”

A goal worth working for indeed, and one that scares some white people so much they are willing to destroy our Democracy to make sure it doesn’t happen.

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