PENULTIMATE OBIT

Jimmy Carter embodies the ‘road not taken’ by many White evangelical Christians


President Jimmy Carter bows during a prayer service for the hostages being held in Iran on November 15, 1979, at the National Cathedral in Washington.

Diana Walker/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Analysis by John Blake, CNN
Sun March 5, 2023

CNN —

Long before he was called a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a humanitarian and the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter was known as something else: a “Goddamn n***er lover.”

That’s the racial slur a White classmate of Carter’s at the US Naval Academy assigned to him right after World War II when the future president befriended the academy’s only Black midshipman.

Carter was called the same racial epithet when he took over his family’s peanut farm in South Georgia during the Jim Crow era. He repeatedly refused to join a segregationist group called the White Citizens’ Council despite threats to boycott his peanut business. A delegation representing the council confronted Carter at his warehouse one day, with one member even offering to pay his five-dollar membership fee.

“As one of his biographers has noted, Carter was so angry that he walked over to his cash register, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and declared: “I’ll take this and flush it down the toilet, but I am not going to join the White Citizens’ Council.”

Many people are sharing similar stories about Carter since the 98-year-old former president recently entered hospice care. As tributes to Carter pour in from around the globe, certain themes have emerged: his Christian faith, his childhood friendships with African Americans that shaped his views on race, and the founding of his Carter Center, which has cemented his post-presidency role as a peacemaker and ally of the poor.

But there’s another source of inspiration for Carter that’s been overlooked in many of the tributes – his distinctive brand of White evangelical Christianity, which remains hidden from most Americans.

Carter is a progressive White evangelical Christian. That may seem like an oxymoron, but it shouldn’t. Progressive White evangelicalism was once what one historian called “the ascendent strain of evangelicalism in America.”

Today White evangelical Christians are associated, rightly or wrongly, with a conservative set of theological and political stances. Those include opposition to abortion, being the most enthusiastic supporters of a brand of Christian nationalism that seeks to turn the US into a White Christian nation, and championing a former president who boasted about sexually assaulting women.

Yet there were periods in the 19th and early 20th century when White evangelical leaders led campaigns against slavery, fought for women’s rights and became leaders in an array of social justice reform movements.

Carter represents a religious tradition where a White evangelical could credibly claim to be a Bible-believing, “I’ve been saved by the blood of Jesus” Christian — and still be politically progressive, says Randall Balmer, author of “Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter.”

Former President Jimmy Carter with his wife Rosalynn after teaching Sunday school class on December 13, 2015, at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.Branden Camp/AP

“He had no problem being identified as a progressive evangelical,” says Balmer, who in his book recounts the story about Carter’s defense of a Black Naval Academy classmate and his refusal to join a White supremacist group.

“At one time, there was a strong element within the (Southern Baptist) Convention that would be identified as progressive evangelicalism, but now that’s pretty much been obliterated,” Balmer says.

Evangelicals are loosely defined as Christians who often share a “born-again” dramatic personal conversion, believe they’re supposed to spread their faith to others, and in Balmer’s words, either take the Bible “seriously or literally.”

To understand how and why Carter represents what one commentator calls the “road not taken” by many contemporary White evangelists, it’s helpful to look at two aspects of the former president’s religious beliefs.
He’s split with many evangelicals by speaking up for women’s equality

Less than a week after Carter entered hospice care, the Southern Baptist Convention decided to expel one of its largest and most prominent churches because it installed a woman as pastor. The church was founded by Rick Warren, author of the best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life.”

To critics, the group’s decision offered further evidence that many White evangelicals do not believe in women’s equality. The convention is the largest Protestant denomination and has nearly 14 million members. It has often been described as a “bellwether for conservative Christianity.”

Many evangelical churches cite scriptures such as 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”) Critics also cite many White evangelicals’ opposition to abortion rights as reflective of a theology that does not respect a woman’s body or mind. Many White evangelicals counter that by saying abortion is the murder of an unborn child.

Carter’s progressive evangelism represents another view.

Carter, who spent decades as a Sunday school teacher, has said that the Bible permits women pastors and deacons. He also says Jesus treated women as equals and that women played a central role in the church’s early formation, including being the first to spread the news of the resurrection.

President Jimmy Carter raises his fist as he stands with his wife, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, after addressing the 118th annual National Education Association (NEA) Convention in Los Angeles on July 3, 1980.NewsBase/AP

His views on abortion have been more nuanced. He has said he’s personally opposed to abortion, but did not campaign to overturn Roe vs. Wade and opposed a proposed Constitutional amendment to invalidate the Roe decision.

His actions as president offered more concrete evidence of his belief in women’s equality.

Balmer says Carter was a feminist who appointed more women to his administration than any other president before him. Carter supported the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed change to the Constitution that would have guaranteed legal equality to women. Former President Ronald Reagan, a White evangelical hero, opposed the amendment, which eventually failed.

Carter’s respect for women’s equality also could be seen in his relationship with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, some of his biographers say. When he was president, she sat in on his cabinet meetings and major briefings. By many accounts, she was his most trusted political adviser.

Elizabeth Kurylo, who extensively covered Carter during his post-presidency as he traveled the world on peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, says Carter valued the opinion of his wife.

“He views her as his partner – period. That is genuine,” says Kurylo, a former reporter with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “She was his partner with him on every trip, and in the room with him on every trip. She doesn’t always agree with him – even though I never saw a disagreement, I know she would tell him what she thought.”

In 2000, Carter’s differences with contemporary White evangelicalism became so acute that he cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after it barred women pastors and publicly declared that a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership.

“I personally feel the Bible says all people are equal in the eyes of God,” he said at the time. “I personally feel that women should play an absolutely equal role in service of Christ in the church.”

Yet the most profound source for Carter’s belief in women’s equality was non-religious. It was his mother, Lillian Carter.

Jimmy Carter gets a hug from his mother Lillian Carter, as he arrives home in Plains, Georgia, on January 20, 1981 -- the day Ronald Reagan succeeded him as president.Joe Holloway Jr./AP

She was a blunt, outspoken woman who stood up for Black people so much during the Jim Crow era in South Georgia that she was also called a n***er lover and her car was covered with racial slurs. She joined the Peace Corps at 68 and went to India to serve the poor.

Carter has called his mother the most influential woman in his life.

“I think more than any other person that I’ve ever known, my mother exemplified what is best about this country,” Carter said in a 2008 interview. “My mother was a registered nurse and … she treated African Americans exactly the same as she did White people and she was unique, perhaps among the 30,000 people that lived in our county, in doing that. I was filled with admiration for my mother.”
He embodies a brand of faith that once led the way on social justice

In October of 1978, Newsweek magazine put an illustration of Carter flashing his famous toothy grin on its cover with the headline: “Born Again!”

Today it’s common to hear White evangelical leaders take political positions and solemnly bow their heads with political leaders in prayer. But for much of the 20th century, White evangelicals zealously refrained from getting involved in politics by quoting scriptures such as Jesus saying his kingdom was “not of this world.”

It was Carter, though, who is arguably more responsible than any modern politician for rousing White evangelicals from their political hibernation. When he successfully ran for president in 1976, he introduced evangelical terms like “born again” into political discourse and talked openly about his faith in a way that no modern politician had before.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., left, President Jimmy Carter and Coretta Scott King pray at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on January 14, 1979. Carter that day was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize.Jim Wells/AP

No other president had talked openly about his “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” confessed in a famous magazine interview that “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times,” and vowed that he would never lie to the American people.

Carter won the presidency in part because of support from White evangelicals who were delighted to see someone who looked and talked like them enter the Oval Office. Televangelist Pat Robertson claimed to have “done everything this side of breaking FCC regulations” to elect Carter in 1976, Balmer recounts in his book.

Images of Carter on his peanut farm, wearing jeans and an Allman Brothers Band T-shirt and quoting scripture, appealed to White evangelicals, says Nancy T. Ammerman, a sociologist and author of “Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention.”

“The notion that this ordinary, church-going, non-coastal elite kind of guy could be president was exciting to people,” Ammerman says.

Yet Carter quickly fell out with many White evangelicals over issues that have come to define evangelical culture today: public stances on racism, homosexuality, abortion and the separation of church and state. To varying degrees, Carter disagreed with conservative White evangelicals on all those issues.

During Carter’s presidency, the Internal Revenue Service sought to enforce anti-discrimination laws at all-White Christian schools that many evangelicals had built to defy the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Balmer says.

To enforce the Brown decision, the IRS refused to grant tax-except status to schools like Bob Jones University in South Carolina that practiced racial discrimination, a move that White evangelical leaders unfairly blamed on Carter, Balmer says.

It was White evangelical opposition to racial integration, not abortion, that originally motivated many evangelicals to get involved in politics in the 1970s, Balmer says.

“They decided then to appoint Ronald Reagan as their political messiah,” Balmer says.

President Jimmy Carter shakes hands with Republican opponent Ronald Reagan after their debate on October 28, 1980, in Cleveland, Ohio. White evangelicals, after supporting Carter in 1976, drifted to Reagan in the 1980 campaign.Madeline Drexler/AP

Unlike former President Bill Clinton, another progressive White evangelical, Carter refused to “triangulate,” or adjust his beliefs to win favor with evangelicals.

“As other evangelicals drifted to the religious right, Carter advocated universal health care, proposed cuts in military spending and denounced the tax code as ‘a welfare program for the rich,’” wrote Betsy Shirley, an editor of Sojourners magazine, in a review of Carter’s book, “Faith.”

Walter Mondale, who served as vice president under Carter, recalled in an interview that when advisers told Carter to temper his policies to preserve his popularity, he refused.

“Many times the one argument that I would find would ruin a person’s case is when he’d say, ‘This is good for you politically,’” Mondale said. “He didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want to think that way and he didn’t want his staff to think that way. He wanted to know what’s right.”

Carter would pay a political price for his idealism. White conservative evangelicals voted decisively for Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. These voters didn’t just turn away from Carter – they turned away from part of their own tradition, historians say.

That’s because during the 19th century, White evangelicals led the way on social justice issues. Evangelical leaders like Charles Finney fought against slavery, were active in prison reform, led peace crusades and were crucial in forming public schools to help less affluent children gain social mobility.

Former President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn work on building a house in Maryland in 2010 as part of a nationwide project with Habitat for Humanity.Amy Davis/The Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

“They were also active in women’s equality, including voting rights, which was a radical idea in the 19th century,” Balmer says.

Those strands of progressive evangelicals survived well into the 20th century. During the 1960s and ’70s, Southern Baptists started to ordain women, passed resolutions supporting moderate pro-abortion stances and many members participated in the civil rights movement, Ammerman says.

Much of that progressive momentum dissipated, though, when conservatives gained control of the group in 1979 and the large White evangelical community aligned with the Republican Party. White conservative evangelicals eventually gained so much power that their dominance convinced many Americans that the only true evangelicals were conservative. Many forget that progressive White evangelists existed.

“He (Carter) does represent the road not taken by the denomination,” Ammerman says. “Through the ’60s and the ‘70s, the (Southern Baptist) denomination had been moving into a more progressive direction.”
He will leave behind a looming battle over the future of White evangelism

The road Carter took in his post-presidency has been more celebrated than his time in office. He has been called the most successful former US president, someone who built houses for the poor and traveled the world brokering peace.

“The world is a better place because of him,” says Kurylo, the former reporter who spent years traveling with and writing about Carter.

As the ex-president enters his last days, Kurylo says she doesn’t want to dwell on the end of Carter’s life.

Former President Carter speaks to the congregation at Maranatha Baptist Church before teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, on April 28, 2019. Carter taught Sunday school at the church on a regular basis since leaving the White House in 1981.Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto/Getty Images

“I chose to celebrate the impact that his remarkable life has had on the people in the world who will never know him,” she says. “What a remarkable life he’s had, and how wonderful it is that I got to observe it for 10 years.”

Part of what Carter will leave behind is the White evangelical subculture that nurtured him – and a looming battle over its direction. White Southern evangelicals, like other denominations, are leaving their churches in droves.

Some religious leaders now say that White evangelicals gained political power but lost their souls by aligning themselves too closely to a political party.

But Carter’s life may offer one final lesson.

He may have lost political power when he refused to curry favor with White conservative evangelicals while he was in the White House.

But perhaps he had another agenda: staying true to his faith.

The road Carter took proved to be the right one for him, and the innumerable people he helped along the way.

John Blake is the author of the forthcoming “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”

ITALY 

Deadly Shipwreck: How it Happened, and Unanswered Questions

March 5, 2023

By Associated Press

A view of part of the wreckage of a capsized boat that was washed
ashore at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy, Monday, Feb. 27, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Luigi Navarra, File)

STECCATO DI CUTRO, Italy — “Italy here we come!” cheered the young men, in Urdu and Pashto, as they filmed themselves standing on a boat sailing in bright blue waters.

They were among around 180 migrants — Afghans, Pakistanis, Syrians, Iranians, Palestinians, Somalis and others — who left Turkey hoping for a better, or simply safer, life in Europe.

Days later, dozens of them were dead. So far, 70 bodies have been recovered from the Feb. 26 shipwreck near the small beach town of Steccato di Cutro, but only 80 survivors have been found, indicating that the death toll was higher, some of the victims’ bodies lost in the Ionian Sea.

The tragedy has highlighted the lesser-known migration route from Turkey to Italy. It also brought into focus hardening Italian and European migration policies, which have since 2015 shifted away from search and rescue, prioritizing instead border surveillance. Questions are also being asked of the Italian government about why the coast guard wasn’t deployed until it was too late.

Based on court documents, testimony from survivors and relatives and statements by authorities, the AP has reconstructed what is known of the events that led to the shipwreck and the questions left unanswered.

Rescuers recover a body at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy,

 after a migrant boat broke apart in rough seas on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Giuseppe Pipita, File)

___

THE FATEFUL JOURNEY

In the early hours of Wednesday, Feb. 22, the migrants — including dozens of families with small children — boarded a leisure boat on a beach near Izmir following a truck journey from Istanbul and a forest crossing by foot.

They set out from the shore. But just three hours into their voyage, the vessel suffered an engine failure. Still in high seas, an old wooden gulet — a traditional Turkish style of boat — arrived as a replacement.

The smugglers and their assistants told the migrants to hide below deck as they continued on their journey west. Without life vests or seats, they crammed on the floor, going out for air, or to relieve themselves, only briefly. Survivors said the second boat also had engine problems, stopping several times along the way.

Three days later, on Saturday, Feb. 25, at 10:26 p.m. a European Union Border and Coast Guard plane patrolling the Ionian sea spotted a boat heading toward the Italian coast. The agency, known as Frontex, said the vessel “showed no signs of distress” and was navigating at 6 knots, with “good” buoyancy.

Frontex sent an email to Italian authorities at 11:03 p.m. reporting one person on the upper deck and possibly more people below, detected by thermal cameras. No lifejackets could be seen. The email also mentioned that a satellite phone call had been made from the boat to Turkey.

In response to the Frontex sighting, the case was classified as an “activity of the maritime police”. Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, or financial police, which also has a border and customs role, dispatched two patrols to “intercept the vessel.”

Firefighters search among debris washed ashore by sea at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy, Monday, Feb. 27, 2023. (Giovanni Isolino/LaPresse via AP, File)

As the Turkish boat approached Italy’s Calabrian coast on Saturday evening, some of the migrants on the boat were allowed to message family, to inform them of their imminent arrival and release the 8,000-euro fee that had been agreed upon with the smugglers.

The men navigating the boat told the anxious passengers they needed to wait a few more hours for disembarkation, to avoid getting caught, according to survivors’ testimony to investigators.

At 3:48 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 26, the financial police vessels returned to base, without having reached the boat due to bad weather. The police contacted the coast guard to ask if they had any vessels out at sea “in case there was a critical situation” according to communication obtained by the Italian ANSA agency and confirmed by AP. The coast guard replied they did not. “OK, it was just to inform you,” a police officer said before hanging up.

Just minutes later, at around 4 a.m., local fishermen on Italy’s southern coast spotted lights in the darkness. People were waving their cell phone flashlights desperately from atop a boat stuck on a sand bank.

The suspected smugglers grabbed black tubes, possibly life jackets, and jumped into the water to save themselves, according to survivors. Waves continued smashing into the vessel until it suddenly ripped apart. The sound was similar to that of an explosion, survivors said. People fell into the frigid water, trying to grab onto anything they could. Many could not swim.

Italian police arrived on the scene at 4:30 a.m., the same time that the coast guard says it received the first emergency calls related to the boat. It took the coast guard another hour to get there. By then, bodies were already being pulled out of the water with people screaming for help while others attempted to resuscitate the victims.

___

THE YOUNG VICTIMS

There were dozens of young children on board the boat. Almost none survived. The body of a 3-year-old was recovered Saturday.

Among those who lived was a Syrian father and his eldest child, but his wife and three other children did not. The body of his youngest, age 5, was still missing four days later.

One Afghan man drove down from Germany, searching for his 15-year-old nephew who had contacted family saying he was in Italy. But the boy also died before setting foot on land.

The uncle asked that his name, and that of his nephew not be published as he had yet to inform the boy’s father.

The baby-faced teenager had shared a video with his family during his sea voyage, with apparently good weather.

His mother had died two years ago, and with the return of the Taliban to power, the family fled to Iran. The boy later continued to Turkey from where he tried multiple times to cross into the EU.

“Europe is the only place where at least you can be respected as a human being,” he said. Everyone knows that it is 100% dangerous, but they gamble with their lives because they know if they make it they might be able to live.”

___

THE AFTERMATH

Prosecutors have launched two investigations — one into the suspected smugglers and another looking at whether there were delays by Italian authorities in responding to the migrant boat.

A Turkish man and two Pakistani men, among the 80 survivors, have been detained, suspected of being smugglers or their accomplices. A fourth suspect, a Turkish national, is on the run.

Particular attention has been focused on why the coast guard was never sent to check on the boat.

A day after the shipwreck, Frontex told AP it had spotted a “heavily overcrowded” boat and reported it to Italian authorities. In a second statement, though, Frontex clarified that only one person had been visible on deck but that its thermal cameras — “and other signs” — indicated there could be more people below.

In an interview with AP, retired coast guard admiral Vittorio Alessandro said the coast guard’s boats are made to withstand rough seas and that they should have gone out. “If not to rescue, at least to check whether the boat needed any assistance.”

Rescuers recover a body at a beach near Cutro, southern Italy, after a migrant boat broke apart in rough seas, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Giuseppe Pipita, File)

Alessandro added that the photos released by Frontex showed the water level was high, suggesting the boat was heavy.

The coast guard said Frontex alerted Italian authorities in charge of “law enforcement,” copying the Italian Coast Guard “for their awareness” only. Frontex said it is up to national authorities to classify events as search and rescue.

“The issue is simple in its tragic nature: No emergency communication from Frontex reached our authorities. We were not warned that this boat was in danger of sinking,” Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni said on Saturday.

“I wonder if there is anyone in this nation who honestly believes that the government deliberately let over 60 people die, including some children,” she added.

Alessandro, however, lamented how over the years the coast guard’s activities — which previously occurred even far out in international waters — have been progressively curtailed by successive governments.

“Rescue operations at sea should not be replaced by police operations. Rescue must prevail,” he said.

In an interview with AP, Eugenio Ambrosi, chief of staff at the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration, stressed the need for a more proactive search and rescue strategy, on a European level.

“We can look and debate whether the (boat) was spotted, not spotted, whether the authorities were called and didn’t respond,” he said. “But we wouldn’t be asking this question if there was a mechanism of search and rescue in the Mediterranean.”

PLANTATION POLITICS

How Buckhead’s Secession From Atlanta Would Destabilize the Entire State

A renewed effort to sever the whitest and wealthiest area of Atlanta from the rest of the city would have sent the region into a financial tailspin.


Luxury homes in the Buckhead area of Atlanta, which is reviving its efforts to secede from the city. Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg

By Brentin Mock
March 2, 2023 
Brentin Mock is a writer and editor for CityLab in Pittsburgh, focused on issues of racial equity, economic inequities, and environment/climate justice.

A group of Georgia lawmakers has revived efforts to sever the tony, upscale neighborhoods of Atlanta’s Buckhead from the rest of the city — a move that city leaders say could end up financially ruining the entire Atlanta metro region, if not the whole state.

On Monday, a state senate committee passed two bills that would allow for residents of the wealthiest and whitest areas in Atlanta to vote in November 2024 to secede from the city and create a new municipality called Buckhead City. However, the full state senate rejected the legislation Thursday evening with 33 senators voting against it. Still, the movement isn't going anywhere: Proponents pledged to continue supporting secession in future legislative sessions.

Governor Brian Kemp’s administration had expressed constitutional concerns earlier in the week. A Feb. 28 letter to lawmakers from Kemp’s Executive Counsel David B. Dove asks lawmakers to settle dozens of questions related to how municipal bond debt will be handled, where Buckhead City students would attend school if taken out of Atlanta’s public school system, how the water and sewage system would be divided up and other uncertainties concerning parks and policing.

“Without thoughtful consideration, these bills, together, may retailor the cloth of governance for Georgia’s municipalities in ways that will ripple into a future of unforeseen outcomes,” reads Dove’s letter.

It’s worth unraveling what that kind of retailoring looks like, and Atlanta officials are already anticipating years of expensive litigation if the secession were to happen. Atlanta’s fate is tied to that of dozens of surrounding suburban towns and cities through various tax revenue-sharing and bond programs, and a departure of a significant share of Atlanta’s population and property could send the region into a financial tailspin, city officials worry.

The Kemp administration’s letter asks state lawmakers how Atlanta’s debt would be impacted if the city lost what’s estimated as 20% of its population and nearly 40% of its properties and tax revenue to the new Buckhead City.

The Buckhead City Committee, the organization behind the push for cityhood, responded to Dove’s letter in an email that debt agreements would be unaffected because a special taxing district within the would-be Buckhead City would continue to make debt payments and honor contractual obligations.

The city of Atlanta is currently embroiled in several massive economic development projects, including the BeltLine and the ambitious Centennial Yards project, slated to bring hundreds of apartments, houses, hotels, retail and restaurants in redeveloping its south downtown quarters. The city is also committed to $750 million in infrastructure projects it has proposed to complete over the next five years.

All of these ventures are funded in large part through sales taxes collected from various cities and counties and distributed by municipal revenue sharing programs.

How breaking apart Georgia’s largest city and creating a new one using Atlanta’s heaviest revenue-generating properties would impact these programs is anybody’s guess given the unprecedented nature of the plan. But the guesses don’t sound good. Credit and bond rating agencies forecasted financial doom and ruin for Georgia cities if this kind of de-annexation were to occur when they weighed in on a smaller secession attempt in 2018: the failed de-annexation plot tried by a wealthy enclave from the city of Stockbridge, in metro Atlanta’s southern quarters.

In response to Dove’s inquiry about what impacts this legislation would have on municipal bond ratings and further de-annexation, the Buckhead City Committee responded in its email that ratings agencies, bondholders and “numerous industry professionals” have been consulted to ensure that there would be no adverse impacts due to the secession.

Atlanta city leaders are unconvinced, though. Bloomberg CityLab spoke with Courtney English, the senior advisor to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, about how these tax and bond programs are set up, and how a possible Buckhead divorce could end up destabilizing not just Atlanta, but cities throughout the entire metro Atlanta region. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Atlanta is currently involved in several huge economic development projects, including the BeltLine, expansion of the airport, and redevelopment of the Gulch. How would a Buckhead secession impact those projects?

It certainly slows, if not stops many of them, in part because the city of Atlanta has the highest municipal bond rating possible and over $250 million dollars in reserves. And what this effectively would mean is that up to 40% of the underlying revenues that support those bonds that ultimately go to support those projects will be gone.

And so bondholders will likely do a capital call. Somebody has to make up for this loss of revenue and so that would be devastating for Atlanta and the residents of Buckhead because we're talking not millions of dollars, we're talking billions of dollars that have to be accounted for with the creation of the city.

What this could potentially mean is that the de-annexation of Buckhead City could potentially also mean a tax increase imposed by those cities who lost their revenue.

We're talking about decades of water and sewer improvements. We're talking about the world's busiest and most efficient airport. We're talking about a $2.5 billion redevelopment project in the Atlanta BeltLine. We're talking about a $750 million infrastructure package. We're talking about the schools and the debt that they owe and their outstanding debt on their facilities. And the list goes on.

And so any of those projects whether it’s the school construction, whether it's the BeltLine, whether it's proposed MARTA rail projects. But all of those projects candidly come into question because the underlying revenue stream is called into question now. Moreover, not just for the city of Atlanta, but every single municipality in the state. So if you are a municipality in Valdosta, Savannah, or Albany, Georgia, and you're looking to build anything using municipal financing, the bottom line is going to say, well, because this legislation authorizes the de-annexation of any city, any municipality in the state of Georgia, I would wager that the interest rates will skyrocket on all municipalities throughout the state of Georgia.

There are several Atlanta-owned properties that are currently being financed by taxpayers, including the proposed new public safety training center, that could be affected by a secession. Could you provide insight on how that would be impacted?

The legislation contemplates essentially that areas that are not in the city of Atlanta limits, but the city owns — those assets would automatically get subdivided and sold off. And the proceeds from that sale would be divided among the city of Buckhead and the city of Atlanta on a pro rata basis. And so that calls into question that any asset that the city owns but is not in the confines of the city is put at risk, and that includes a significant portion, if not all of the Atlanta airport, for example.

The legislation also calls on Atlanta to sell city-owned land within Buckhead limits, such as parks and firehouses, to Buckhead City at far below market rates. Given that there’s no real precedent for those kinds of arrangements, do you foresee loads of litigation over how to settle those kinds of matters?

It's going to be a lawyer's dream. But effectively, I think that our cities will suffer. Atlanta and residents of Buckhead and people throughout the region are going to suffer, and lawyers are going to get rich because we will be tied up in litigation for years

What this legislation contemplates is selling city of Atlanta assets for pennies on the dollar, literally. Tens of millions of dollars in real estate would be sold for $100 an acre. That's just one example. Fire stations, water, and sewer components will be sold again for pennies on the dollar. And so what this ultimately means is that citizens who have paid into these systems for years would be losing those assets and access to those assets for next to nothing. So I would envision years of litigation about compensation. This legislation doesn't contemplate how you divide a sewer system, for example; it just says that they would pay somewhere around $200,000 for it. Well, our sewer system is almost a $7 billion a year entity. I don't know how you subdivide those pipes, which are connected to a station that will still be owned by the city of Atlanta. And so it raises tons of legal questions about assets that certainly would lend [themselves to] litigation.

Explain the tax-sharing programs and how an Atlanta secession would impact that, especially in terms of how metro suburbs would be affected.

Payments that accumulate from the sales tax go into this large pot that the county collects and then divides amongst cities based on that negotiated agreement that they landed on in December. And so it is primarily used for a variety of things, to support general fund services — and that’s everything from fire support, infrastructure projects, sidewalks, roads and so forth. A majority of the smaller cities throughout the region use that money to support fire and police services.

These tax-sharing arrangements have to be renegotiated every certain number of years, and this past year, in December, our mayor led the renegotiation for how sales tax dollars get divided between cities and the county of Fulton County. And essentially they arrived at an agreement that we think was equitable, but what a creation of a new city would mean is that, one, you have to open up that negotiation again. But two, and probably more importantly, because you're creating a new city, it would further divide the sales tax — and that was not contemplated in that negotiation.

(Updated with the result of the state senate vote against the secession legislation.)

The Humanities are in the Midst of a Historic Paradigm Shift

As new ideas, concepts, and terminologies circulate, the humanities evolve. Our challenge is to convince a broad public that the next generation humanities speak to their interests and concerns.

Steven Mintz
March 5, 2023

The conservative Manhattan Institute recently published a report that argues that the promotion of Social Justice ideology in K-12 schools and colleges is having a measurable impact on students’ political views and partisan leanings. The report claims that 93 percent of 18-to-20 year olds have been exposed to various Critical Justice Ideology concepts at school, including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” and the idea that the United States was founded on stolen land and that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex – and that the more that students are exposed to these ideas, the more likely they are to lean Democratic and support affirmative action and other progressive causes.

The report’s authors are, of course, intentionally confusing exposure to important ideas and concepts with indoctrination, propagandizing, and brainwashing. Except in a few isolated classrooms, that’s certainly not what’s taking place. Nor do the authors acknowledge that aggressive proselytizing of liberal and progressive pieties can sometimes push students to the right.

What we are witnessing instead is a culture-wide shift in discourse. New ideas and terminology are clearly in the air, much as a very different set of ideas and vocabulary (largely from the Frankfurt School and scholars including Erik Erikson, Cliifford Geertz, and Erving Goffman) was circulating when I attended college decades ago. As the Manhattan Institute report suggests, these concepts are no more inescapable, at least on a college campus, than terms like culture or total institutions or identity crisis were during my undergraduate days.

I think it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a historic paradigm shift within the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. Often described in pejorative terms – as an embrace of wokeness or Critical Race Theory or Social Justice ideology – I think it is better understood as a shift in focus and language. The shift is most apparent in various studies programs – American studies, animal studies, Black studies, cultural studies (and critical cultural studies and comparative cultural studies), disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, Latino/a studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies – but it is leaving an imprint on older departments as well, most obviously in English but also in anthropology, art history, ethnohistory, history, philosophy, and religion.

This paradigm shift did not take place overnight. It is in part an outgrowth of the cultural, linguistic, and affective turns that began to take root in the later 1970s, nearly half a century ago, when many of the concepts that roil today’s culture wars, including intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, arose.

What has changed over the past decade is that:

1. Partly as a result of generational and demographic shifts within universities, concepts and perspectives that existed at the academy’s margins moved increasingly to the center of campus conversations.

2. A growing body of highly influential scholarship embodied and disseminated the new perspectives.

3. Ideas and language previously confined to campuses started to percolate into the broader culture.

4. Social movements that invoked these ideas and terminology gained in visibility and influence.

Much as Enlightenment ideas spread across the late 18th century Atlantic world with the help of pamphlets, printed books, magazines, and political songs and through literary salons, scientific academies, fraternal lodges, and coffeehouses, we, too, have witnessed the circulation of new ideas and perspectives.

I recently read a sorely neglected book that came out shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that helps to illustrate how this paradigm shift occurred. Timothy W. Luke’s Museum Politics urged his fellow political scientists to take museums seriously as sites of cultural contestation. This book asked why, in the 1980s and 1990s, many of society’s most bitter battles involved museum exhibitions.

As I’m sure many of you will recall, many culture war clashes of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton era involved art and photographs -- like those by Andres Serrano, Sally Mann, and Robert Mapplethorpe -- that conservative activists, clergy, and politicians deemed pornographic or blasphemous. But other skirmishes involved history, like the conflict that erupted over the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum’s proposed exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, which was to center on the detonation of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay.

Luke’s essential claim (which echoes arguments advanced somewhat earlier by the historian Edward T. Linenthal and the sociologist James Davison Hunter) is that museums, as contemporary American society’s cathedrals of culture, history, science, technology, and natural history, serve as ground zero for political fights over national identity, the portrayal of the past, and public understanding of science, technology, and natural environment. No longer were museums regarded simply as vehicles of uplift, reflection, inspiration, or edification and as repositories of priceless artifacts and artworks. Issues previously regarded as apolitical, such as how museums should interpret history or natural history or technology, had become politically contentious.

True to its title, Luke’s book uncovers and critiques museum’s cultural politics. He argues, for example, that the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance’s audience engagement strategies undercut their purported mission of helping audiences understand the contexts and ideologies that contribute to genocide and the reasons why the United States’ failed to take effective steps to save more refugees.

In a later chapter, he argues that Los Angeles’ Autry Museum distorts popular understanding of the settlement and development of the Southwest through its intermixture of the mythic, the cinematic, and the historic. Somewhat similarly, Luke raises questions about Phoenix’s Heard Museum’s efforts to allow indigenous people to tell their story through words, art, and artifacts, noting that the gift shop contained more items than were actually on display.

He also points to the incongruity of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Victorian and Japanese gardens adjacent to south St. Louis sprawling railway yards, decrepit industrial factories, and rundown houses, and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s efforts to preserve a desertscape that is being disrupted by Tucson’s rapid growth. A particularly poignant chapter examines the now shuttered Newseum’s efforts to treat newspapers as authoritative, unbiased sources of information, just before the Internet undercut the industry’s business model and undermined public trust in mainstream journalism.

Luke’s book was, of course, part of a broader Foucault-esque turn across the humanities and the interpretive social sciences to understand how power is mediated through culture, how cultural institutions shape collective values and social understanding, and how cultural power is challenged, critiqued, and contested.

As I look back upon the past four decades in the academy, I am struck by the degree to which Luke’s book’s emphasis on cultural politics, identity, power, resistance, and agency, has become a fixture in the humanities, institutionalized in various interdisciplinary studies programs but also increasingly implanted within many traditional departments. Again, we should view that not as wokeness triumphant but, rather, as a broader shift in scholarly focus.

This shift is, of course, partial and contested. It’s no secret that a significant number of colleagues in my department and elsewhere consider the cultural studies approach “theory-obsessed,” “jargon ridden,” “willfully obscure,” “simplistic and trendy,” and lacking in “rigor” and “depth.”

Yet it is also the case that even the most empirical and atheoretical humanities scholars have felt the influence of the cultural and linguistic turn. As Raymond Williams put it, there was a “a larger intellectual and cultural shift … from immediate experience to mediated forms of representation; from agency to discourse; from social history to cultural history; from recuperation to critique; from modernism to postmodernism; or, more broadly, from freedom to necessity.”

It is a tragedy that much of the public is largely unaware of many of the exciting new areas of inquiry pursued by humanists and their social science partners-in-arms: affect studies animal studies, childhood studies, disabilities studies, museum studies, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and the business, digital, environmental, legal, medical, and technology humanities. To be sure, part of the problem is ideologues’ success in vilifying and caricaturing humanities scholarship as faddish, impractical, and politically-motivated claptrap.

But, I daresay, we also need to look at ourselves. We mustn’t abandon humanity’s great questions – about beauty, divinity, equality, evil, justice, meaning, and the nature of the good life. We must also make our scholarship accessible and engaging, and the popularity of recent books on the cultural history of food – of baguettes, beer, bread, chocolate, coffee, curry, gin, pickles, potatoes, rice, sugar, and tea -- demonstrates that this can indeed be done.

I myself find the humanities’ heightened emphasis on culture – including cultural diffusion, cultural appropriation, hybridities, syncretisms, cultural power, cultural contestation, and cultural resistance – enormously stimulating. Ditto for the intense focus on identity – and the historical, political, social, and cultural processes of identity formation, and the impact of intersectional categories of class, ethnicity and race, gender, physical abilities, and sexual orientation on the nature, reproduction, and persistence of inequalities and structures of domination, power, and privilege.

The humanities have never been static, and the field’s future does not lie in its past. Resistance to change and innovation is, without a doubt, the path to stagnation and irrelevance. The vision put forward by number of my junior colleagues – a conception of the humanities that is more self-consciously political, more activist, more presentist, more attentive to issues of power and inequality, more focused on the voices and agency of the marginalized, and more committed to community outreach – may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But the efforts to broaden the humanities, to encompass new subjects, to reach out more assertively and determinedly, and think more comparatively and internationally, strike me as exactly right. That way lies the future.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Changing Your Gender Identity Is a Pain—Even in San Francisco

Written by Astrid Kane

Published Mar. 05, 2023

Astrid Kane poses for a portrait at City Hall on Friday, March 3, 2023. | Benjamin Fanjoy for The Standard

The letter from San Francisco Superior Court was hand-addressed to “A.U. Kane,” which was how I knew it was good news. My man was out of town when I checked the mail, but I called him so we could experience some semblance of togetherness while I opened the envelope. Inside were three certified copies of a decree granting me a change of name and gender identity.

In the eyes of the government, I’m officially a nonbinary person, Mx. Astrid Urania Kane.

Considering how indifferent I’ve always been to state recognition of my long-term relationship—we’ve been together 12 years, but we’re not married—I’m taken aback by how important this is to me. My gender marker is X, which will never not sound cool.

The day after I got the letter, I updated my byline. Somehow, the most public part of my life was the easiest to change.

Astrid Kane gets a passport picture taken at a Walgreens in San Francisco on March 3, 2023. | Benjamin Fanjoy for The Standard

I already changed it once, in 2020, hyphenating my given name and my chosen name because the boy-girl dichotomy telegraphed to readers that I’m a nonbinary journalist. But “Peter-Astrid” proved unwieldy, and as time went on, I realized, “I’m Astrid, dammit!” So Astrid I am.

Aside from some idyllic ancient culture that revered gender nonconforming people as intermediaries with the divine, there’s never been a better time and place to be trans or nonbinary than early 21st century California. But even here and even today—a decade after Laverne Cox graced the cover of Time, gender-neutral bathrooms started proliferating and they/them pronouns escaped academia—willing oneself into existence remains an ordeal.

For starters, that court order cost $556, including three certified copies at $50 each. For a minimum-wage earner in San Francisco, that’s almost four full days of pretax wages. 

California’s form is also notoriously confounding. In fact, I got it all wrong until a kind clerk whipped out her highlighter and showed me the way.

Even after overcoming that monster hurdle, it becomes clear just how much state and federal agencies are nonoverlapping fiefdoms that do not talk to one another. A surprising number of trans people don’t even bother trying to deal with it all.

It’s a binary world, too, so transitioning from male to female is slightly tidier than going from M to X. 

Kane is applying for a new passport after recently changing their name. | Benjamin Fanjoy for The Standard

Take the Social Security Administration. I need a new Social Security card to update my driver’s license (which already has an X, but under my birth name) and renew my expired passport. Nonbinary markers have been available on passports since April 2022, but Social Security’s forms recognize male and female only. The clerk at the Valencia Street office was genuinely apologetic, but ultimately unhelpful. I rolled my eyes and went with F, for “female” as much as for “fucking federal form, I’m not going backward now.”

I am not female, which means I lied to the feds as a matter of personal principle. When we’re not depicted as outright sociopaths, transfeminine people are often portrayed as deceitful and conniving. But the world can force these lies at the very moments one is pushing to live in the truth.

Even if all government bodies could harmonize into a one-stop, no-lies shop, that would have no effect on the private sector—or on the out-of-state political candidates texting my deadname to chip in five bucks. The New Yorker, the ACLU, Walgreens, the gym: I gotta do ’em all, one by one. And Twitter won’t let me change my handle without paying for that checkmark.

I sweet-talked my credit union into updating my debit card with nothing beyond a pinky-swear to provide my new driver’s license once I get it. That leeway would never have happened a decade ago! Credit cards are the most important thing, but amending one requires extra documentation, so that’ll be the last domino to fall. 

Plenty of servers, bartenders and baristas are LGBTQ+. But because hospitality almost universally enforces a contrived, yes-sir/yes-ma’am politeness, queer people are going to keep calling me “Mr. Kane” with a smile until I fix this.

A partially completed passport application, with an X gender marker, is seen on a computer monitor on April 11, 2022. | Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Roughly half the states recognize a nonbinary identity in some fashion, but California may be the keeper of the fewest gates. Navigating these bureaucracies used to be a much lonelier road. At every step, I’ve been in awe of the people who charted this course 25 years ago when you usually had to first prove you’ve had certain surgeries—let alone in the 1960s, when I could have been arrested for dressing like I do, even in SF. Those generations made the world exponentially better.

Yet the backlash is brewing, from Nashville to the New York Times. 

In the months since I submitted my paperwork, several states have banned gender-affirming books, prohibited health care for young trans people and outlawed drag. It’s clear to most trans folks that the endgame is our annihilation. I admit my defiance is tempered a little by the fear that some future president’s paramilitary goons may liquidate me as a gender traitor.

Overall, though, my space-pagan name and I are very happy. The impostor syndrome of feeling “not trans enough” has disappeared, and even better, I move through the world without the pervasive, low-level disorientation I used to carry. 

Regarding my byline, the trans friend I came out to first, and who has shown me immeasurable generosity of spirit, told me: “You’re really out there, now.” He said it with a sense of mutual respect that left me dizzy. 

But he’s right—I am. And if you read what I write from now on, you’ll know it’s really me who wrote it.

Astrid Kane can be reached at astrid@sfstandard.com