I’ve been gorging on whiteness my entire life, so the gentle reminder of that from an Oak Park church doesn’t bother me

Plus, meet Brandon Pope!

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4-14-2022 (issue No. 31)

The First United Church of Oak Park’s Lenten theme of “fasting from whiteness” has attracted international attention — much of it critical, mocking and, in some cases, so threatening that services are now online only.

The lighting-rod slogan reflects the church’s decision not to use music by white composers in services during the 40 days of Lent in order to “lift up the voices of Black people, Indigenous people and people of color” who are, after all, “the global majority of Christians,” as church pastor the Rev. John Edgerton told Religion Dispatches.

The idea of highlighting exclusively the liturgical compositions of nonwhite composers for nearly six weeks is excellent. Sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone to discover new artistic wonders, and the creation of artificial limits is a good way to deepen your explorations.

The idea of making a big deal about such an initiative rather than just quietly doing it is certainly defensible. When you’re selling the pleasures of diversity, it pays to advertise.

But the idea of branding the effort “fasting from whiteness” was peculiar and provocative to the point of trollish.

For one thing, a “fast” is a form of deprivation or sacrifice that’s meant to be somewhat uncomfortable if not painful. It’s not a “fast” when you replace one enjoyable thing with another enjoyable thing — I’m reminded of when the Father Guido Sarducci character on “Saturday Night Live” announced he was giving up menthol cigarettes for Lent — and the ostensible message from the church is that sacred music from nonwhite composers is not in the least painful, but it’s every bit as vibrant and moving as the sacred music from white composers.

“I cannot remember a time when our music has been better at church,” Edgerton said. Which is fabulous. But it’s not “fasting.”

And for another, white people, who make up most of the congregation in Oak Park, can’t simply abstain from being white for 40 days. They can’t not enjoy the advantages of white privilege that society has conferred upon them their entire lives.

“White privilege” is a term that infuriates many Caucasians who either don’t feel particularly privileged by the cards life has dealt them or who resent deeply the implication that they should feel guilty about and responsible for the toxic legacy of racism.

I get that “privilege” reads to some as “fortune,” and many white people consider themselves unfortunate. But all white people should ask themselves these questions:

“All other things being equal, would I have had it easier if I’d been born Black or brown? Would I be able to move through the world with the same comfort, respect and self-assuredness as I do now? Just for instance, would I have the same luck hailing a cab or talking my way out of a traffic ticket? Would the occasional compensations of diversity and affirmative-action initiatives really outweigh the daily stings of prejudice?”

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll answer no. You’ve benefited nearly every day of your life in large and small ways by being a white person in the United States. You can’t just give up those advantages, not even for 40 days. And no amount of exposure to other cultures can deprive you of them.

No need to feel guilty or get defensive, Bunky. No one can control the circumstances of their birth, and all of us have faced obstacles and challenges.

“Fasting from whiteness,” as clumsy, startling, off-kilter and incendiary it is as a slogan, in the end asks us only to be aware of the realities of life for people of color, to be a little more open, a little more understanding and a little more determined to minimize the undeniable effects of white privilege. If we’re somehow able to hear that message over the din of the backlash, the effort will have been a success.

Last week’s winning tweet

Melvin of York @MelvinofYork

It's funny how we say "a bug hit my windshield" when we are the ones going 70mph. I'll bet the bug's family describes it differently

By popular demand I also had a separate poll for politically themed tweets. The winner of that poll was “Being gay isn't a choice. But so what if it was? Sure beats the decision to be a hateful prick,” by @Home_Halfway, a former winner of my annual funniest person on Twitter designation who has recently (temporarily?) left the platform. This tweet finished a very close second:

Middle Age Riot @middleageriot

The Republican Party went from Abraham Lincoln to Marjorie Taylor Greene. No wonder they don’t believe in evolution.

Scroll down to read this week’s nominees or click here to vote in the new poll.

Meet the Rascals: Brandon Pope

TV and print journalist Brandon Pope, 30, is the host of “On The Block,” a local newsmagazine premiering Thursday at 7 p.m. on WCIU-Ch. 26. He entered “The Mincing Rascals” rotation in the spring of 2021. This narrative is an edited version of his answers to my questions, which began with “Who is Brandon Pope and how did he get into this racket?”

I was born in Cleveland, raised in Cincinnati and moved around the state of Ohio a lot as a kid, eventually ending up in Richmond, Indiana, just over the Ohio border. I have one sister who is two years younger than I am.

My father passed away when I was in kindergarten. He was an engineer. My mother raised us as a single parent. She was a very serious singer who toured and sang in shows — “The King and I,” “Les Miserables,” “Phantom of the Opera” and so on. But once I was born, as she explains it, that got put on the back burner. She made her living as a nurse but always emphasized to me the importance of following your passions and your dreams. 

I became interested in journalism through watching SportsCenter on ESPN, seeing anchor Stuart Scott and saying to myself, “Hey, here’s this cool black guy on TV and talking about stuff he loves, let me see if I can do the same thing.” 

 So at Richmond High School, I made a documentary about one of my good friends who had cerebral palsy but still was a mixed martial arts fighter. I won a Phantoscope High School Film Festival award for it -- Phantoscope is a juried competition for high school filmmakers in the United States and Canada. It was my first big honor, and I thought, OK, maybe this is a field I can get into. 

I went to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in 2010 planning to pursue sports journalism but realized quickly that my interest was in storytelling of all sorts.

To read the complete interview, click here.

Previously in Meet the Rascals: Austin Berg, Heather Cherone

News & Views

News: Page 146 of the 923-page revenue bill recently passed by the General Assembly says that, for the last six months of this year, gas stations will have to display on every pump an 8-inch by 4-inch sign that says "As of July 1, 2022, the State of Illinois has suspended the inflation adjustment to the motor fuel tax through December 31, 2022. The price on this pump should reflect the suspension of the tax increase” and threatens a fine of $500 a day on stations that don’t comply.

View: It’s grandstanding by politicians over the temporary suspension of a small scheduled rise in the state fuel tax of roughly 2 cents on the gallon. It’s not a price reduction but merely a delay in an automatic adjustment for inflation.

It’s hypocritical, since lawmakers didn’t require or even suggest pump signs when they doubled the state sales tax on gas to 38 cents a gallon in 2019 and implemented automatic annual increases indexed to inflation.

It’s possibly unconstitutional to penalize station owners for not amplifying government speech. Sure, the law can require businesses to post signs related to health, safety, labor laws and the like, but these signs are political propaganda. And Josh Sharp, CEO of the Illinois Fuel & Retail Association, says his organization is already drafting a lawsuit on behalf of any station owner who is fined.

It’s not without precedent. For six months in 2000, lawmakers in conjunction with Republican Gov. George Ryan imposed a similar sign mandate when they eliminated entirely the state’s sales tax on gasoline, then 19 cents, in order to combat rising fuel prices. The ostensible justification was to advise consumers so that stations didn’t keep prices high and pocket the extra 19 cents.

“Informing people of the gas tax relief mirrors the same exact effort that Republicans made in 2000,” said Emily Bittner, a spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

It’s inconsistent. Page 187 of the revenue bill requires grocery retailers to post similar signs or include notices on receipts that the state is eliminating the 1% sales tax on groceries for one year starting July 1. But the bill does not specify any penalty for those who don’t post signs or modify their register tapes.

It’s vulnerable to countermessaging. On “The Mincing Rascals” podcast Wednesday, Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute noted that the law specifies the size of the sign but not the size of the “bold print” that has to be used and that it doesn’t limit additional language on the sign. Berg said the IPI is therefore exploring the idea of making signs for fuel pumps that in large type blast Gov. Pritzker for signing a doubling of the gas tax three years ago and in small type relaying the boilerplate legalese.

Otherwise, gosh, it’s a swell idea.

News: Willie Wilson is running for mayor. Again.

View: Wilson is generous and has been remarkably successful in business, but his policy prescriptions are too shallow and his political leanings too conservative to make it likely this third bid for mayor will be the charm.

Heather Cherone’s WTTW-Ch. 11 story on his announcement noted, “Wilson declined to tell reporters who he voted for in the 2020 election for president, and did not answer when asked whether President Joe Biden was fairly and properly elected president.” He said, “I won’t answer if I don’t want to answer.”

The Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington reported, “During his 2016 presidential race, he tweeted: ‘I disagree with what I consider the Supreme Court’s reinterpretation of what constitutes marriage. Marriage has and should always be that sacred union between a man and a woman. Period.’”

Last year, Wilson donated $50,000 to Chicago first responders who lost pay for not obeying the city’s mandate to report their COVID-19 vaccination status.

But he’s rich, so I guess Chicago media is going to have to cover his latest ego trip for the next 10 months.

News: Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a law Tuesday making it a felony to perform an abortion except to save the life of the mother. The law also applies to physicians who dispense abortion medication.

View: I’ve long thought that severe rollbacks of abortion rights will be a disaster for Republicans at the polls. I’m no longer so sure about that. If, as expected, the Supreme Court overturns the decisions in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that guaranteed abortion rights in its upcoming ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, this country will be plunged into a bitter culture war that I’m no longer sure the Democrats will win.

What looks like hypocrisy in the Oklahoma law — punish the doctors but not the women who seek out, request and pay for abortion services — is likely just a tactical decision, part of a realization that we’re not ready — not yet — to level murder charges against those who obtain abortions the same way we would against someone who paid a contract killer to take the life of, say, a toddler.

But if you believe abortion is murder, as so many opponents say they do, then the reassurance “we see the woman as a victim, not a perpetrator” is merely a temporary and convenient lie. When Donald Trump was a candidate for president, he let it slip that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who obtain abortions, and he was roundly shushed by anti-abortion activists who know they have to move incrementally toward this step and that it’s a serious tactical error to admit it.

Last week, a 26-year-old woman was charged with murder in Rio Grande City, Texas, after she attempted a self-induced abortion that ended in a miscarriage. Prosecutors dropped the charges on Sunday, and the Washington Post is reporting the arrest was “a hasty error by a first-term Democratic district attorney.” Texas Right to Life hastily condemned the arrest, but, come on, the logic and language of opponents of abortion rights will inevitably lead to such prosecutions in the future.

News: The Sun-Times reports that third-party delivery-app fees as high as 30% are clobbering some local restaurants.

View: I’ve long said that delivery apps — Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats and the like — should be your last resort. Always call the restaurant first and pick up the food if they don’t have their own delivery team. I thought the Sun-Times buried the lead in this important story, waiting until the 21st paragraph to tell readers that if they order through a restaurant’s website, “the business loses only 7% of a meal’s cost rather than the 30% charged when an order is placed through (an) app.”

Land of Linkin’

• Attention, word nerds! Nancy Nall has an exquisite rant on the overuse and misuse of “iconic.” It means “something that stands in for something else. A religious icon is a rendering of a saint. An icon on your computer desktop stands for an application lurking within. But it doesn’t mean ‘famous,’ ‘beloved’ or even ‘long-lasting.’ And if we apply it to everything, soon it won’t mean anything at all.”

• Conservative students at the University of Chicago are patting themselves on the back for asking tough questions of panelists at the recent “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference. “The Chicago Thinker Staged a Media Regime Takedown This Week—Here’s How We Did It” is their version of events, and while their queries were relevant and interestingly pointed, I couldn’t help but wonder if these students hold Fox News and the right-wing media to similar standards. Did they refer to the Trump administration as "the regime"? Given their pearl clutching about Hunter Biden’s laptop, have they also been indignant about the sleazy doings of the Trump children?

• In “Are Columbus statues a free speech issue? Mayor’s concern over threats to police is not the best reason to keep them off city streets,” Neil Steinberg makes the interesting argument that when Mayor Lori Lightfoot had statues of Christopher Columbus removed to prevent a recurrence of violent protests calling for their removal, she was granting the mob a “heckler’s veto,” which is a lousy thing no matter how you feel about the legacy of Columbus.

• A March 31 Washington Post story headlined “Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough covid, study shows” reflected the paper’s decision to use trans- and nonbinary-inclusionary language. And judging by the voluminous and contemptuous response in the comment thread, that decision is not going over well.

• “‘Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet’ NFT Went on Sale for $48M. It Ended With a Top Bid of Just $280” at Coindesk.com is further proof to me that non-fungible tokens are such a fundamentally worthless scam that they’ll soon be simply a metaphor for human credulity and gullibility. Sina Estavi, who paid $2.9 million last year for what amounts to an imaginary handful of digital magic beans ought to be a laughingstock.

• Former “60 Minutes” correspondent Lara Logan is batcrap crazy now, in case you missed it. She frequently invokes “the Rothschilds” as a source of the world’s evils.

• Mona Charen, who is among the conservative columnists looking more and more sane by the day in comparison to the zealots in the GQP, writes that ranked-choice voting systems are the best antidote to the “lurch to extremism” infecting the body politic. “Not only does the ranked-choice system disempower party extremists, it also discourages candidates from savage personal attacks, the persistence of which arguably keeps some fine people out of politics altogether. Candidates are less likely to attack one another if they hope to be the second choice of the other person’s voters. The two-party system has not proven to be a solid foundation for democracy. Time to disarm the crazies.”

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Mondays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

FUD you, Congress! Stop bending the knee to lobbyists and let the IRS provide everyone with free tax prep software

These days leading up to the tax-filing deadline are the most FUD-iest time of the year.

FUD, as I wrote in a column last April, is a sales and marketing acronym for “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” sensations that can motivate customers to spend money and act rashly in order to alleviate their anxieties. And no industry is better at turning FUD into gold than online tax preparation services. These companies offer to take wary and confused filers by the digital hand with such programs as TurboTax and lead them through the forms and schedules. More from that column:

You may be so used to the drill by now that the utter absurdity of the process no longer strikes you. Think of it: You pay taxes in part to support a government collection system that’s so off-putting that most people have to pay a private company if they want a simplified online interface to fill out the forms.

Shouldn’t the Internal Revenue Service offer its own, user-friendly but free version of TurboTax? Maybe even one with many of the key dollar figures — which the government already has! — already entered for you? …

But “for more than 20 years, Intuit (which sells TurboTax) has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that,” according to a 2019 investigation on the industry by ProPublica, the independent, nonprofit journalism organization. …

Lobbyists have successfully beaten back every effort to get the IRS into the tax-prep business, generally by throwing up a lot of FUD about big government, conflicts of interest and even creeping socialism.

I will never not be mad about this, but I’m particularly irate this week.

What the well-dressed man is wearing

T-shirts celebrating valuable daily email news digests are all the rage in the fashion salons in Europe, or so Charlie Meyerson tells me. Order one here.

Mary Schmich: Every day is opening day

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts column-like thoughts most Tuesdays on Facebook. Here is this week’s offering:

When I heard on the radio Tuesday morning that the White Sox were having their season home opener today, I remembered a column I wrote about opening days a few years ago.

It was the official baseball opening day. I was feeling anxious. I had a column deadline and no column idea.

So I put one of my guiding principles into action, one that applies to journalism and the rest of life: When you don’t know what to do, when you’re anxious and confused, go outside.

So I went up to Wrigley Field, talked to a bunch of people and came home and wrote a column about opening days. I met—just barely—the deadline.

Here’s an excerpt. And now let’s all go outside!

Opening day.

If only every day were opening day.

The blank slate. The fresh buzz. Hope as sweet as a baby's burp.

Opening day.

All you have to do is say the words and you feel the shutters thrown wide, the room air out, the light pour in.

In baseball, no other day is so pure with possibility. No scores yet, no losses, no blame or disappointment. No hangover, at least until the game's over.

On opening day, the past is not proof of the future.

We need opening days, not only in baseball, but in the rest of life. They're the days we feel we're starting fresh. It's why we celebrate New Year's Day. It's the theme of Easter. It's the appeal of the first day of school or summer.

Opening day is any day when you can believe that the past doesn't count against you, that the future is yours to make.

The photo is of some flowers I saw poking out of the ground this morning. The colors of Ukraine. — Mary Schmich

Minced Words

On this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast, Austin Berg, Heather Cherone, host John Williams and I discuss Willie Wilson, casino sites, signage of all sorts and the plot twist at former Ald. Danny Solis’ court hearing Wednesday.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

I really liked a tweet that read, “Menards is what a pirate says when you kick him in the balls,” by @stevevsninjas, but I’m not including it in this week’s list of nominees because the poll is aimed at a national audience — we even get votes from overseas from time to time — and Menards is a Midwest chain of big-box hardware stores.

I did include the “petard” tweet even though to get it you have to be up on your Shakespeare.

Finalists:

• I think my wife is considering entering the transfer portal. —@RickAaron

• I didn't fall in love with you, I fell in love with an idealized version of you that didn't age well. — @MelvinofYork

• Welcome to middle age. Stop sucking in your stomach. No one cares anymore. — @sixfootcandy

• One person can change the world. Sadly, it won’t be you. — @EyalTweet

• Finally, a petard of my own. Someone is about to get hoisted, and it definitely won’t be me. — @pattymo

• The three most beautiful words in the English language are “you were right.” —@mxmclain

• Employer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Me: It was then I carried you. — @MidniteMadwoman

• I went to the bathroom without my phone, just like our ancestors used to do. — @AmishSuperModel

• Oh, your drawings we had on the fridge? Daddy threw them away. See, the house only has so much room, and let’s face it, you’re no Picasso. — @MelvinofYork

• To everyone who wrote “stay cool” in my middle school yearbook, I have some devastating news. — @Mr_DrEsquire

Click here to vote in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Words to remember

There is an aphorism that if you put a cup of soup in a bowl of garbage, it’s garbage. And if you put a cup of garbage in a bowl of soup, it’s garbage. Along those lines, if you inject politics into science, it’s politics. And if you inject science into politics, it’s politics. — Cory Franklin

Today’s Tune

Nothing particularly timely about this song, which everyone in my family knows and has been known to burst into unbidden when asked about their plans:

This isn’t a great version — I can’t find a YouTube link to the late-1950s performance by Sandy Paton that I first heard on WFMT-FM 98.7’s folk music program “The Midnight Special” many years ago. You can listen to that track, titled “I Never Go to Work,” here. They Might Be Giants has recorded a prettier but much longer version, and the Phoenix Chamber Choir put together a Zoom rendition a few months into the pandemic. Here’s how we sing it, chez Zorn:

On Monday I never goes to work,

On Tuesday, I stays at home,

On Wednesday, I’m not inclined,

Work is the last thing on my mind!

Thursday's a holiday,

And Fridays I detest.

It's too late to make a start on Saturday,

And Sunday is the day of rest.

The Picayune Sentinel is a reader-supported publication. Simply subscribe to receive new posts each Thursday. To support my work, receive bonus issues most Tuesdays and join the zesty commenting community, become a paid subscriber. A mighty tip of the cap to the first person in comments who identifies the P.G. Wodehouse joke in today’s Sentinel.

Thanks for reading!

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