White Like Who?

2012-01-23T10:09:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I sent the following letter to the editors of the Times Picayune, in response to this cartoon from Mike Martinez which they published on Saturday's op-ed page:

As a Southern newspaper well-versed in our troubled racial history, the Times Picayune should recognize racial "dogwhistles" when they are being blown. Saturday's political cartoon from Mike Ramirez was an example of just such a dogwhistle, and you chose to dignify it with publication.

Ever since Ronald Reagan's 1980 speeches about "strapping young bucks" driving Cadillacs and "welfare queens" buying steaks with food stamps, the conflation of food stamps and other types of welfare with the African-American community has been a staple of GOP rhetoric, particularly here in the South. The fact that it is based upon an absolute lie never seems to stop anyone from repeating it. After all, the vast majority of recipients of governmental aid are not African-American, they are white. But the lie helps to feed into white resentment, so it is useful to the GOP (which cheerfully absorbed all of the former Dixiecrats like Thurmond and Helms into its ranks). Referring to President Obama as the "food stamp president" is obviously an extension of this tired, racist trope.

The Martinez cartoon, showing a "food stamp" with Obama's face on it in the upper-right corner of a "Letter of Intent" from the "Nation of Achievement" at 100 Main Street, America, USA to the "Nation of Entitlement" at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, is part of that same sad tradition. Ignoring the fact that President Obama is himself a strong example of personal effort and achievement, having woken up at four a.m. each morning as a child to do his school work and then worked his way into Columbia and Harvard Law School, followed by the U.S. Senate and ultimately the White House, Martinez claims that Mr. Obama represents the "Nation of Entitlement", not achievement. Further, Martinez ignores the fact that discretionary entitlement spending has not been increased under President Obama, certainly not to nearly the extent it was increased under his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who signed into law Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of federal benefits since LBJ. He ignores the billions of dollars in entitlement spending cuts that President Obama has proposed. No, for Martinez and his rightwing cohorts, Obama = black = food stamps.

The question I must ask of you, as the daily newspaper that serves a majority-black city, is why are you willing to help spread such a false and malicious message? As a native of New Orleans, I understand full well that we are surrounded by communities that are considerably more conservative (and, yes, more white) than our own, and you have papers to sell in those parishes. But surely in your ongoing quest to appeal to the hinterlands you have some standards that you seek to uphold? Surely a bare modicum of factual basis should be demanded of the opinions you publish? Or has the Times Picayune decided to simply become part of the rightwing echo chamber? If that's the case, go ahead and fire your reporters and opinion writers. It will be cheaper to simply run bylines from Newsmax and the Washington Times, and perhaps more agreeable for your non-New Orleans customer base.

Somehow, I rather doubt they'll be publishing it. Dailies like the Times Picayune show just how ridiculous the notion of the "Liberal Media" really is. Papers that serve conservative customer bases are going to willingly provide red-meat for their constituency, because that's where the money is. This is true regardless of whatever personal beliefs the editors of the paper may have.

"New Rules" (In Response to Gene Marks)

2011-12-16T23:23:00.004-06:00

1) Before you presume to lecture poor black kids, you first have to know some poor black kids personally. And not in a "that kid delivers my newspaper" kind of way, actual friendship.

2) Before you tell poor black kids that it's okay that their schools are failing, as long as they work hard, you have to send YOUR kids to one of those failing schools. When it's your flesh and blood on the line, then you can accept the quality of those schools.

3) Before you start telling poor black kids that all it takes is smarts, hard work, and a little luck, you'd better be able to honestly look at your own situation and consider whether you had to be exceptional to get there, or whether just "being you" worked out pretty well for you. And you'd better be able to admit that "a little luck" in the case of an American white person includes having been born into the wealthiest society in human history, one whose wealth originates, to an enormous extent, with the bondage of other human beings.

4) Before you post an article about poor black kids on a website aimed at rich white guys, you need to ask yourself: "Will writing this make me look like an enormous douchebag?"

NOTE: While this post is a response to another person's writing, to which I'd normally link, I'm not going to link to Gene Marks' "If I Were a Poor Black Kid" article on Forbes.com, because from what I hear he gets money for page-views, and I don't want to drive up his traffic. Bad enough I read the piece and gave him $.000001 for his efforts...

Racism As Evolutionary Check On Humanity?

2011-04-21T10:40:00.001-05:00

Reposted:
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With this post, I am thinking out loud as I write. The ideas I am about to discuss are still developing.

There is no doubt that humanity is the dominant life form on Earth. There are no longer any predators that pose a true threat to us, if we are properly equipped (meaning, a bear can kill you, but not if you have a big enough gun). We do not have any real food shortages. The shortages we have are created by political circumstances, by conscious choices regarding the allocation and distribution of resources.

In nature, when an animal reaches a point where it has an abundant food supply and no natural predators nearby, you will usually see a population boom for that animal. This will continue until that animal puts such a strain on the local environment that the environment becomes inhospitable, frequently through food or water shortages. Then that animal will experience a sharp population decline. If one looks at the ecosystem as a self-sustaining structure (which it appears to be, according to current science), these cycles of surplus followed by scarcity can be seen as a natural method for preventing one animal's population from getting so large that it threatens the viability of other animals.

Man, because of our particular evolutionary advantages, is no longer subject to the surplus/scarcity cycle, at least not as it is imposed by nature. We have a global system of communication and transportation that can end any localized food shortage in a matter of days, if not hours. So, in one sense, nature can no longer hold us in check. We hold ourselves in check.

When I speak of our evolutionary advantages, I am thinking primarily of our ability to form complex, enduring social structures. It is not our individual intelligence that has allowed us to assume the dominant position. Several of the higher primates, including chimpanzees and gorillas, are capable of displaying intelligence that is very near human level (and may, in fact, be every bit equal to ours, but not perceived as such because of communications barriers). What put us at the apex of the pyramid is twofold: 1) our ability to collectively build upon the knowledge and insights of individuals; and 2) our ability to leverage the economies of scale.

With regard to that first point, think about two of the first major leaps for mankind: the development of speech, and the development of the written word. With speech, we gained the ability to convey knowledge from person to another, and eventually the ability to convey knowledge from generation to generation. The epic poems, the myths, all of the folklore of ancient times was a means of aggregating and distributing accumulated knowledge. With the written word, the complexity of the ideas that we could preserve and build upon increased exponentially. It was no longer necessary for each generation to repeat the intellectual achievements of its predecessors, because those achievements were stored in written form, and could be used as the leaping-off point for new achievements.

As to the second point, we see it first with the transition from solitary hunter-gatherers to hunting parties. One man, alone, can only fend off so many predators, can only kill so much prey and carry so much meat and gathered food (berries, nuts, etc.). A group of men, acting in concert, dramatically increases the ability to survive against predators, the number of prey that can be killed, and the amount that can be carried. Add in such primitive tools as liters, and that increase is more than just a linear increase in capacity. It's an early example of the advantages that come from the economies of scale.

Look then to the development of agriculture. Again, one man alone can only cultivate and maintain so much land. Two men can do more, and a group of men can do significantly more. Long-term, sustained agriculture developed as much through early economies of scale as through the invention of the plow. Stable agriculture was possible only with the usage of spoken language (how else to convey what needed to be done, and when?), and tremendously enhanced by the written word (storing accumulated knowledge about growing seasons and times, cultivation methods, etc.)

It was the development of sustained agriculture that allowed us to create permanent cities, and allowed the advent of a new "leisure" class: scholars. When our living conditions were more uncertain, so much time had to go to hunting, gathering, and preparing food, there was little time for anyone to sit down and think abstractly. There certainly wasn't time to do so as one's primary activity. The efficiencies of mass agriculture, plus the added safety of city dwelling, made it possible for some people that would otherwise have been out hunting to divert themselves away from daily survival activities and focus on purely intellectual pursuits. This in turn allowed for the technological growth of mankind. When food is no longer your most pressing concern every day, you can devote yourself to invention and innovation.

With technology came our eventual disconnection from natural cycles of surplus and scarcity. This development was gradual, to be sure, and did not reach its apex until we had the ability to communicate with one another over great distances and the ability to quickly move foodstocks between far-flung locations. But think about it: people in Ireland did not starve during the potato famine because of the localized food shortage. They starved because other human beings decided not to re-allocate food resources to the area of greatest scarcity. It was within humanity's technical capabilities to severely mitigate, if not outright solve the famine. Yet we did not do so.

Why? As much because of tribalistic tensions between the Irish and their nearest neighbors the Scottish and English as for any other reason. To the people who had enough food, and the means to move it if they wanted to, the Irish were "other", part of "them" instead of "us." And so the famine continued, localized scarcity causing local population depletion just as you see with a herd of deer that has grown to large and eaten all of the nearby vegetation. Only it wasn't "nature" as an external force that caused this, it was the human tendency to subdivide and differentiate ourselves, to be loyal to kin and tribe, all others be damned.

This is why I believe that in some senses racism, which is another variant of the same tribalism described above, may be an evolutionary check on humanity. If we did not keep ourselves separated on the basis of race, our ability to cooperate, and to collectively achieve our goals, would logically increase to a significant degree. Too much cooperation, too much efficiency in how we allocate resources, could, ironically enough, lead to a population boom that would be truly unsustainable. There are no natural predators who can keep us in check anymore, and the forces of natural calamity do not (so far) threaten our viability as a species (the loss of 250,000 in the 2004 tsunami was devastating locally but did not threaten mankind as a species).

Perhaps our tendencies to resist cooperation, to balk at collective action, to define ourselves in narrow group terms and view other groups with suspicion, are a natural deterrent against us truly going too far as a species. If you look at the industrial revolution and its child the computer revolution as examples of high-order cooperative thinking and action (requiring both the accumulation and disbursement of knowledge and significant economies of scale), and you observe the fact that the bulk of the environmental harm we have done as a species is connected to those two revolutions, you can see how it is possible for our own ability to collectively build upon knowledge and labor can become a threat to our survival. Absent a large asteroid striking the planet, the only foreseeable threat to our survival is our technology getting to the point where it makes the Earth uninhabitable for humans (it would remain habitable for a great many other species, e.g. cockroaches).

Obviously, I am not writing this as an endorsement of or defense of racism or tribalism. This whole train of thought was the result of my trying to figure out why it is that our species seems almost as hard-wired for conflict as it is for cooperation. Who knows...maybe, just maybe, if mankind ever really did the "Kumbaya" thing, bought the world a Coke and taught it to sing in perfect harmony, we would be so unfettered by natural restraints we would ultimately end up destroying ourselves with our own progress

Cry Havok, and Let Loose the Dogs of War

2011-04-21T10:37:00.001-05:00

Repost, circa late October 2008:

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For so many months, the far right has been trying to convince America that Obama is secretly an angry radical, that Michelle holds a racial grudge against white people, that Rev. Wright hates America. How bitterly ironic, then, and how desperately sad it is that the real rage, the radicalism, the animosity...is coming from the right's supporters.

McCain's public rallies have descended into cries that Obama is a terrorist, and calls for his head to be cut off. McCain himself said nothing to correct an audience member who referred to Obama as a socialist and a hooligan. One of McCain's senior advisers referred to Obama as "some guy off the street." What we are seeing is the early stages of a blood frenzy. Old, old anxieties and resentments are being stoked, and directed against Obama the "other" as a convenient scapegoat for what ails the audience member. The (so far) sporadic calls for violence are going un-checked, which is, in itself, a form of tacit encouragement.

The country is on fire, and McCain is pissing gasoline.

Coming from the South, and being a student of her history, I can tell you that these are forces that cannot easily be contained, once unleashed. The old stories of blacks usurping white power during Reconstruction have not gone away, nor have the tales of black violence during the most tumultuous phase of the Civil Rights Movement. These resentments have been out there, covered by a thin coat of anti-welfare rhetoric (and now the effort to blame the mortgage crisis on poor black people who had the nerve to buy houses).

They never went away, they just became the subtext for much of our political discourse. Only now, they are less and less a matter of subtext. They are being brought to the forefront, and inflamed. To all those thinking that somehow America had "transcended race" via Obama's nomination, here is your undenaible proof that no such transcendance has taken place. For all of the Benetton ads, Cosby Shows, and "Yes We Can" videos, we have not excised the emotional cancer of our collective past. At most, it has only ever been in remission, waiting for the chance to grow again.

In a way, I think that Ta-Nehisi may be a little too kind in his appraisal of McCain's actions:

I've been thinking about this McCain-Palin Obama "palling around with terrorist" idea more lately. The saddest thing about many Republicans isn't just that they disagree with liberals on race--it's they are largely ignorant on race. When the McCain campaign cast the spell of diabolical jingoism, they have no idea of the forces they are toying with. We remember Martin Luther King's murder as a sad and tragic event. Less remembered is the fact that ground-work for King's murder was seeded, not simply by rank white supremacy, but by people who slandered King as a communist.

They have no idea of the forces they are toying with? With respect to TC, there's just no way that the Republicans don't know what they're doing. The Dixiecrats, after all, became closely intertwined with the core power structure of the GOP when they switched over from being Democrats. If any group of people has collective knowledge about the nature of these emotional forces, it's the Dixiecrats. For most of their period of ascendancy in the South (from the Tilden-Hayes Compromise onward), the Dixiecrats' hold on power was predicated on manipulating those exact emotions. There is no credible basis to assume that somehow the rest of the GOP remained ignorant of these things after they welcomed the Dixiecrats with open arms.

No, the Republicans know. They know, and they continue. There is nothing innocent in their conduct. The road that the GOP has put themselves on, the road that they want the rest of us to take, leads directly to black preachers bleeding out on hotel balconies, to small chidren blown to pieces in their own church, to presidential candidates dying in hotel kitchens. The road to Hell is paved with political intentions.

Do They No Know Who Obama Is...Or Do They Just Not Know Black People?

2011-04-21T10:36:00.001-05:00

Reposted:

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Obama's been running for President since early 2007, and he's been under near-constant medai scrutiny for at least the last year. He's been interviewed by everyone from Newsweek to Mountainbiker Magazine, he's appeared in a slew of debates and made endless television appearances.

Yet the GOP folks keep claiming that we don't really know who Obama is. On the one hand, there's no reason to take the GOP at face value: they know damned well who Obama is, which is why he scares them, and why they keep trying to present him to the voters as some mysterious, unknown (therefore dangerous) quantity.

For all of the GOP's insencerity in pushing the claim, I do think there's a fairly good sized chunk of the electorate that honestly doesn't feel as if they know Obama. At least, I believe that's how they explain those feelings to themselves. I think Obama is merely the focal point, however. What they really don't know, still can't understand, is black people.

In those parts of the country with few, if any, actual black people, the only exposure to black people comes from television, movies, and music (I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most residents of lily-white regions aren't snagging this month's Ebony magazine in the checkout line). We all know how narrow and distorted the depiction of black folks is in the media. If somebody isn't doing the Mantan Shuffle, they're slanging rocks and riding on 20-inch rims. Or maybe, just maybe, they're lucky enough to be that magical, "soulful" black person who saves an uptight white person (see Bagger Vance, Legend Of; Bullworth). Where does Obama fit in all of that? He doesn't.

That, I think, is the root of the strange debate among white folks regarding whether Obama is "black enough" or "too black" to be President. They have a certain paradigm in mind for black people, and Obama isn't it. So they start thinking he's not black "enough" to win. But then he daps up his wife on national television, and talks about Jay-Z and Ludacris, so maybe he's "too black" for the White House. What box to put him in? What box?

I think that there are plenty of people smart enough to realize that what they know about black people from the media is either incomplete or wrong (actually, it's both). As this campaign has gone on, I think a lot of these people may have started to realize just how little they know about black people. Hopefully, some of them are starting to wake up. Because here's the thing: just as was the case with the Cosby Show, the only way you can be surprised by the emergence of Barack Obama is if you don't know the black community.

For decades there have been black teachers, black lawyers, black doctors. During segregation, the only people who could (or would) provide such services to the black community were other black people. There were entire economies within the larger black enclaves like Harlem: restaurants, shops, offices. Black owners, black workers, black customers. When people were forbidden from going outside the community to get what they needed, the community developed, internally, the ability to provide the necessities. If you know that black lawyers have been around for 100 years, along with black doctors and black teachers (probably even further, actually), the sight of an educated, articulate black man is nothing new or surprising.

Note, I'm not waxing romantic about the days of segregation. I'm merely observing that there has been a black professional class for some time now. But that professional class has been largely invisible to the white community. That's why Claire Huxtable the lawyer and Cliff Huxtable the doctor were so noteworthy when The Cosby Show premiered. I remember distinctly people talking about how unrealistic the show was, both because of Claire and Cliff being professionals, but also because of the range of skin tones within the family. Those two observations could only ever have been made by white folks, because black folks knew better.

Some people have a hard time believing this, but I was moving up in social class when I married my wife. In my family, I'm the first and only lawyer, from the first generation where everyone went to college. Only one of my grandparents even finished high school. We're maybe 40 years out from the tennant farm and the dockyards of the Mississippi River. My wife's family, by contrast, has had doctors and lawyers for generations. That fact is no surprise to people familiar with the Creole community in New Orleans. But for people who don't know much about black folks? They can't quite wrap their heads around it. It seems strangely ironic for them, the notion that the white person in an interracial couple would be the one moving up the ladder.

My greatest hope for Obama as a leader doesn't really have to do with his economic plans, or what he will do about the war in Iraq. No, what I most want to see from him is quiet, daily evidence of how perfectly natural it is for a black man to be that intelligent, that educated, that thoughtful. He doesn't ever have to say "You see? A black man can do all of this!" He says that by doing.

It's a message that America is long overdue in hearing.

Regarding Whether McCain Was "Actually" Racist, Or Just Tolerated Racism

2011-04-21T10:31:00.003-05:00

Another Too Sense repost:

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As McCain's and Palin's rallies have gotten uglier and uglier, and McCain's overall strategy has gotten more aggressive and more negative, one of the questions that keeps coming up, at least among commentators, is whether McCain's heart is really in this negative stuff. Does he really believe that Obama pals around with terrorists? Does he really think Obama is dangerous, or radical? My response: does it really matter whether he does or not?

Let's say for the sake of argument that McCain is no racist. Let's say he doesn't see Obama as some terrorist-befriending leftist radical who is going to destroy America. If that's true, how is it relevant, given the fact that McCain, Palin, their surrogates, and their supporters have been using those very arguments to support their campaign? As Rachel Dawes said in Batman Begins, "It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you."

Put another way: would anything change for you if you found out that deep in his heart of hearts Jeffrey Dahmer longed to be a meek, harmless vegetarian?

2011-04-21T10:28:00.001-05:00

Another repost from Too Sense:

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Okay, that's it. I'm done. I've officially had it.

You know how kids can sue to have themselves emancipated from their parents? Go off on their own, legally independent, et cetera? I'm gonna sue to emancipate myself from these kinds of white people. It's gonna be tricky to draw up the right language, because I'm not looking to sever associations with all of my white brothers and sisters. But those motherfuckers in the video? Those have got to go.

I'm gonna do the white version of Chris Rock's famous "niggas vs black people" routine. Just substitute...well, see, there isn't a true white equivalent for the n-word. Cracker, redneck, PWT, et cetera can carry similar meanings, but they don't have the same weight. When you hear black folks talking about regular black folks versus "niggas" you know exactly what kind of people are being discussed. Refer to crackers or rednecks, you could have a pretty wide range of meanings.

Terminology aside, in the immortal words of Hillary Clinton, I reject and denounce those jackasses. I am so sick of this being the face of "real, hard-working white America", like there aren't any salt-of-the-Earth white folks who aren't also psychotic, virulent racists, ignorant xenophobes, or religious whack-jobs.

It's people like this that give the white working-class and lower-class a bad reputation. Some of us actually prize knowledge, and education. Some of us read books...for fun. Some of us work our way up from modest means to try to go further in life. Some of us are perfectly fine with people from other races, religions, cultures, what have you. Some of us are fully capable of loving ourselves, our history, and our culture, without hating everything and everybody else. And we don't need these cousin-lovin' pig-fuckers dragging us down, see?

Point being...I ain't responsible for those people in the video, they don't speak for me, they ain't related to me, no blood, no culture, not a motherfucking thing. They can kiss my hairy white ass until it bleeds.

H/T: TNC

2011-04-21T10:20:00.002-05:00

This is a repost from Too Sense. That blog is inactive, and password-locked, so I can't just throw up a link. It dates to the last days of the 2008 election (I stepped away from blogging right after the election). But I still feel that many of the issues discussed are relevant, hence this repost.

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I have a new acronym that I'd like to introduce to the world: WAWP...short for Whinin' Ass White People (or person, depending on context). It specifically refers to those white people who claim to be victimized by accusations of racism.

The current honorary King of the WAWP: Rick Davis of the McCain Campaign.

"Look, John McCain has told us a long time ago before this campaign ever got started, back in May, I think, that from his perspective, he was not going to have his campaign actively involved in using Jeremiah Wright as a wedge in this campaign," he said late last week. "Now since then, I must say, when Congressman Lewis calls John McCain and Sarah Palin and his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we're all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time, you know, that you've got to rethink all these things. And so I think we're in the process of looking at how we're going to close this campaign. We've got 19 days, and we're taking serious all these issues."

First of all, that's not even close to what Lewis said. Here is the key passage from Jonathan Martin's original story about Lewis' comments:

Civil rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis is accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of stoking hate, likening the atmosphere at Republican campaign events to those featuring George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. McCain's campaign has responded with a statement in the candidate's name, urging Barack Obama to repudiate Lewis's comments.

"What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history," Lewis said in a statement issued today for Politico's Arena forum. "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."

Lewis didn't accuse McCain of imitating Wallace, but suggested there were similarities.

"George Wallace never threw a bomb," Lewis noted. "He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."
...
[McCain's response:] "I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track," the GOP nominee said in a statement this afternoon.

Nothing in Lewis' statements makes any reference to the people turning out to support McCain, much less any blanket statements about those people. But McCain has responded as if the honor of his poor, downtrodden supporters has been smeared. He even went so far as to offer the following defense of Veterans With Hats:

“Whenever you get a large rally of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people, you're going to have some fringe peoples,” McCain said.

“But to somehow say that group of young women who said, 'Military wives for McCain' are somehow saying anything derogatory about you . . . and those veterans that wear those hats that say 'World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq,' I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation, and they're great citizens.”

I'm already on record agreeing with Lewis' comments. Well, more accurately, I made some very similar observations a couple of days before Lewis did:

...[T]here's just no way that the Republicans don't know what they're doing. The Dixiecrats, after all, became closely intertwined with the core power structure of the GOP when they switched over from being Democrats. If any group of people has collective knowledge about the nature of these emotional forces, it's the Dixiecrats. For most of their period of ascendancy in the South (from the Tilden-Hayes Compromise onward), the Dixiecrats' hold on power was predicated on manipulating those exact emotions. There is no credible basis to assume that somehow the rest of the GOP remained ignorant of these things after they welcomed the Dixiecrats with open arms.

No, the Republicans know. They know, and they continue. There is nothing innocent in their conduct. The road that the GOP has put themselves on, the road that they want the rest of us to take, leads directly to black preachers bleeding out on hotel balconies, to small chidren blown to pieces in their own church, to presidential candidates dying in hotel kitchens. The road to Hell is paved with political intentions.

So...was I attacking McCain and "his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we're all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time"? In a word? No.

I know quite a few perfectly sane, reasonable, non-hateful McCain supporters. Most of the ones I know support the GOP for fiscal reasons first and foremost (hey, I'm a civil defense litigator, we're not the most liberal crowd in the world). Obviously, not all of McCain's supporters are borderline-homicidal nutjobs. But given the tenor of recent McCain/Palin events, it is becoming more and more clear that at least some of them have the potential to be exactly that.

Davis is engaged in one of the most annoying political tactics, at least as far as I am concerned: playing up alleged white victimhood. "Oh, woe is us! We poor, hard-working white Americans can't catch a fair break! All we want to do is accuse Obama of being a terrorist-sympathizer, a crypto-Muslim, a Manchurian Candidate, a traitor and a socialist...and because of that people call us racist! When will the oppression of white political speech end?"

Memo to my white brothers and sisters: we own 95% of the fucking country, you morons! We have the best jobs; the best land; the best schools; the most tax breaks; and generations of accumulated material wealth. All but two Supreme Court Justices have been white, and every single President so far has been white. The vast majority of elected officials in this country have been and are white. The vast majority of media figures are white. Almost every wealthy person in this country is white (seriously, take away Oprah and Bob Johnson, what's left?) HOW THE FUCK IS ANYONE SUPPOSED TO BE OPPRESSING US WHEN WE OWN EVERYTHING?

Stop whining, white folks. There's nothing worse than a WAWP. White people whining is exactly like those spoiled little girls on "My Sweet Sixteen" screaming because daddy only got them a Hummer instead of a Lexus. It's not just disingenuous, it's obscene.

We're not victims, we're not oppressed, we're not disadvantaged. Nobody is holding us back from anything because of our race. We're in the catbird seat. We won the wars, the toys are ours. We have nothing, absolutely nothing, to justify crying in our beer. Individually, a lot of us are hurting because of the state of the economy. But collectively? We have the cow, the milk, and the cream. So shut the fuck up about being victims, okay?

Memo to Neo-Confederates: Kiss My White, Southern Ass

2008-06-05T23:07:00.004-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

I am a Southern White Male. Granted, the whole "white" thing is a bullshit notion in and of itself, but that's a different fight for a different day.

I'm Southern. My entire family is Southern, going back to the first poor bastard unlucky enough to get kicked off of a boat in South Carolina, through the various ancestors who made their way across Georgia (keep moving, damn it), Alabama (farther, please), Arkansas (anywhere but here!) and eventually Louisiana (still fucked up, but at least we have New Orleans). Half of my mother's people still live in south Alabama. You can't really look at my Cajun or Spanish relatives in North-South terms, but needless to say the Cajuns in the family have been in the South since the Brits exiled them from Nova Scotia.

This ain't comin' from a Yankee, folks.

I have a message for the Neo-Confederates out there: Y'all can all kiss my white, Southern ass. You don't speak for Southerners as a whole, you don't speak for Southern white men, and you don't speak for me. The only folks you speak for are knuckle-draggin', no-history-readin', wannabe-slave-ownin' losers.

Haystack over at Red Bait, er, Red State writes the following:

The Confederate flag might be an outstanding mechanism for folks to look towards in reminding the younger generations of a time and place in American history where dumb redneck hicks from the South considered themselves God-like, or above the natural laws of things, but what you never hear from these Democrat demagogues is what the Confederacy brought to America that has LONG since been lost in the short list of things that matter when it comes to being an American.

Like, say...slavery...and the hypocritical ability to talk about "all men are created equal" while holding other men in permanent bondage...and the creation of a poisonous racial regime that continues to pollute our culture...and the intentional practice of destroying families (selling off slave family members to different plantations), destroying culture (forbidding the use of any African languages, forbidding anyone from educating slaves), and destroying lives (beating, torturing and/or murdering uncooperative or escaped slaves)...and the perversion of the Christian faith ("cursed be Canaan" my ass)...just for starters.

Yeah, thanks for that...motherfuckers.

Our man Haystack continues:

As a down-line Confederate, I know of a reverence for God, a deep-rooted respect for my elders, a conviction that a Government is only as good as the independent and strong-willed people who fight FOR her, and a belief that the Federal Government is BEST that governs States the LEAST - this being emblematic of a Republic that was founded with the intention of ensuring as much for her citizens.

Meaning, of course, her white citizens. As Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens said: "(Jefferson's) ideas . . . were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition." Of all of the skull-fuckingly-stupid arguments that the Neo-Confederates make, the notion that the South seceded over anything other than slavery is the worst.

Back to Haystack:

What I ALSO know, is that anyone that believes such things today are considered racist, or worse. Look, I am derived from Confederates who often-times found themselves indentured servants, so it's not like there's any anti black mentality in my blood-we had as much to lose as anyone else...but we DID appreciate the meaning and value of fighting for what what we believed in-black, white, green, yellow or anything in between...the difference here is
that the Democrats want you to believe any who might question such platitudes now must therefore be deemed rednecks. My ancestors, and yours, are rolling in their graves.

Yeah, because we all know that indentured servitude, with its limited time period and its lack of racial stigma, was entirely the same thing as slavery. And we all know that having been poor and white in the Confederacy means that you just loved black people. Why, those black codes that eviscerated the rights of even free blacks, they had nothing to do with preserving some small sliver of superior status for the Poor White Trash.

The Confederate flag might have flown over some dark days of this republic, but that's not to suggest that the ideals of the Confederacy, beyond the darkness of slavery, should be lost in the translation.

There were no ideals of the Confederacy other than slavery. Period.

That flag flew to represent an America that stood up for a people and a belief that a Federal Government had no place in deciding the business of the States' right to
determine their futures. Millions of dead later, the ideals are unchanged - do
with that what you will.

The states' rights to do....what? Oh, I know! Own slaves! And, yes, for a lot of people, the ideals that coincide with slave ownership are very much alive and well.

As a Southern White Male, I have one further message for my fellow Southerners: The South was wrong. The South started the war, the South lost the war, the South deserved to lose the war. The Lost Cause is dead and gone, so get the fuck over it already.

Glad we could clear that up.

PS: I notice that over at Too Sense a fellow by the name of "USMCRebel" made the following comment regarding this post:

You are an absolute moron and a disgrace to your country!

Why, thank you sir! Coming from someone patently stupid enough to try to combine the United States Marine Corps with the Rebels, that's a real compliment. Just which color do you think the USMC would have been wearing during your beloved War of Northern Aggression? BTW, I made that post back on February 19, and your comment was added on May 13. Took you that long to read the post, eh?

"White" Like Who?

2008-06-05T22:53:00.004-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

The intent of this post is to try to explain, as best I can, where I am coming from, racially speaking. As a matter of ancestry, I fall into the category generally described as "white." My genetics are one thing. My culture is quite another, which is part of why I thought this post was needed.

First, a few things that I am not: 1) I am not at all confused about my heritage, meaning I know full well that hanging with brothers and being married to a sista does not make me black (duh!); 2) I am not a "wigger" or other wannabe-brother, trying to assume certain "black" mannerisms in order to be hip, cool, or different; 3) I am not one of those dreadlocked white boys with the patchouli and the Bob Marley fixation (okay, Bob rules all Reggae, but you know what I mean), nor do I own a hackysack; 4) I am not a sociology major beset with White Man's Guilt; and 5) I am not...white.

Okay, I know I've already referred to myself as white. So bear with me for a second.

When I go out in the world, people look at me and (usually) see just another white guy, unless I'm getting on an airplane in which case I have about a 30%-40% chance of being taken for some kind of Arabic/Mediterranean person and subjected to some extra-search lovin'. Guess I have to blame my Spanish ancestors for getting intermingled with the Moors. At any rate, I go about my daily business, and people who have the typical American mindset, e.g. one that accepts the notion of "white", "black" and "other", generally put me in the white category. I can only assume that there have been times when I have received some sort of privilege for being "white", given that the concept of whiteness itself is about reserving status and privileges for the one group while denying the same for other groups. By the world's definitions, I am "white." But all of that is external, how the world perceives me.

Internally, in my subjective self-image, I don't see myself as "white", again not because I am dumb enough to think that after dapping up "x" number of brothers and pop-locking "x" number of times I have become "down" enough to achieve blackness. What I mean is that I am not subjectively "white" because I do not agree with or accept the validity of whiteness itself. Let me be very clear: I am not saying that I do not accept anglos, caucasians, or whatever other group or groups are referred to as "white", nor am I saying that I hate or even dislike white people or that I reject my own heritage. It is the concept itself that I reject, the political construct that is implicit in assuming the label of "white".

In order for me to be white, I have to accept that I am the majority, the norm, the average, and that others who are "not white" are something other than the norm. There's the white "us" and the everybody-else "them". When you look at the history of different non-English immigrants to America, be it the Irish, the Italians, Eastern Europeans, or Jews, there's a common narrative arc: when they first arrived, they weren't considered "white", e.g. "us". They were "them."

The "no Irish need apply" signs were hardly rare when large numbers of Irish started coming over. There's a reason why other than black people the majority of the labor for several major canal systems was Irish: because the job was deadly dangerous, and the Irish were expendable. It took decades for the Irish to be part of the Great White Us. It was the same for Italians. They came over and found themselves discriminated against in hiring and housing, and in politics, until they had somehow assimilated enough to "ascend" to co-equal white status. Poles, Czechs, same pattern. How many surnames in America are Anglicized versions of ethnic Polish names, or Czech names, or Russian, et cetera? The same thing happened with the Jews.

"Whiteness" is the notion that what is good and normal and virtuous belongs to one group. It is the notion that the only way to achieve status, to be worthy of a seat at the table, is to assimilate with the cultural habits of that one group. Don't be too ethnic with your name, don't go around asking for your strange food in eateries, don't stand out. Blend. Disappear. Surrender.

In some ways, the notion of "whiteness" has been very destructive for my family. My grandfather was Cajun, but we could never call him that. He saw it as a perjorative, an insult like "coon-ass", his version of the "n" word. He was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9 after his mother died. Up to that point he had spoken only Cajun French. At the orphanage, they forbade him and his siblings from speaking in Cajun. They would literally get beaten for using their native tongue.

To be Cajun was to be trash, permanent underclass. The Irish Catholic nuns at that orphanage forced assimilation upon my grandfather, and as far as I know he never spoke French again until he was on his deathbed, talking to one of his deceased brothers. When he married my grandmother, who was from south Alabama, he stopped pronouncing his name in the French manner, and instead adopted the Alabama version. My mother and her sisters were raised to have no accent at all. They watched midwestern network newscasters every night. That was the way to speak. In short, they were raised to be "white" at the expense of having no connection with their French heritage. The language is almost entirely lost in my family.

My father's mother also grew up speaking Cajun French, and for a long time we just assumed that she was Cajun. Like a lot of Cajuns, she moved to the city and abandoned her native language. It turns out that she was almost 100% Spanish by blood, but because she grew up in a Cajun town, that was what they spoke. It's one of those "you know you're from south Louisiana when" kind of things. She assimilated, married a white man from north Louisiana, and raised my father and his brothers as completely "white", again with no concept of their other heritage.

That is the "whiteness" that I reject, that overwhelming, Borg-like cultural mass to which all others must bow down in order to succeed. Dilute what you are enough, and you too can become white. Unless you're black.

I don't accept what it means to be white, because I refuse to accept the corollary, what it means to be black. I don't accept the idea that there is a permanent wall between whiteness and blackness, one that cannot be crossed over, the notion that black people can never ascend to be the same kind of "us" that the Irish and the Italians eventually became. I don't accept the notion that one's "pure" heritage can somehow be altered or "tainted" by African blood (hence my entirely ironic handle on this site). I don't accept that slavery was morally defensible because Africans were not people in the same way that the slaveowners were (and therefore not entitlted to Constitutional rights). I don't accept the notion that everything I have I have supposedly "earned", while a black man in my position must have been given a "preference" through affirmative action.

Whiteness as a concept is about absolution for unforgivable sins. Slavery was acceptable, because the slaves were not white. To the minds of the slaveowners, they were committing no sin, because it had been biblically ordained that blacks be the slaves of whites ("cursed be Canaan" and all that jazz). Their blood was "pure", the slaves were not (and mulattoes remained slaves because their white blood had been "tainted" by black blood, therefore they were lifelong property). So long as the slaveowners were white, they could not be guilty of oppression, because there were no "people" to be oppressed. It was only blacks. Jim Crow was acceptable, because, again, there was no denial of rights to "people" or "citizens." To be white was to be an American, with full civil rights, while to be black was outside of the scope of citizenship, beyond the protections of the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment. Whiteness is the lie that America told itself in order to sleep at night, unburdened by the contradiction between "all men are created equal" and the enslavement of others.

Most of all, I don't accept whiteness because I don't accept the idea that my wife and my children have one heritage, while I have another. I don't accept the idea that my wife and children are fundamentally different from me because they have African ancestors. I am part of a "we", not part of a "me" and "them". There is no separation, there is no boundary. There is only unity. In order for that to be true, there can be no "whiteness".

You want to know when racism will end in this country? When the idea of "whiteness" is dead and gone. Whiteness in itself is all about white supremacy. The very meaning of "race" as a concept is racism. To accept that term, that definition, that identity, is to accept all that comes with it. No one has to abandon their heritage in order to abandon "whiteness." You can be Anglo-American and accept that you are only part of the larger whole, not entitled to any special treatment because of your English blood. Whiteness is not about heritage or pride in oneself. Whiteness is about control, barriers between the norm and the other.

The only way for those barriers to fall is for the people that erected them and maintain them to let them fall. Abandon the ramparts. Open the Bastille. Let go of unearned privilege, and undue power. Set down the false crown of racial purity.

So...with all that being said, I have some episodes of the Boondocks that need watching.

Peace, y'all.

Talk of "Transcending Race" is Racist In Itself

2008-06-05T22:48:00.002-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

I've written before about Obama's "authenticity" issue vis a vis his "blackness," the way that some people (largely white people) expect a black man to come from a certain background, have a certain personal history, and speak a certain way.

There's a corollary to the "authenticity" problem, namely all of this talk about Obama "transcending race." Why, he's not just black, he transcends race. In other words, he transcends blackness. He's beyond the state of blackness, he's something "better", different in the same way that John Turturro's character in "Do the Right Thing" described Michael Jordan. Voters can be comfortable with Obama because voting for him wouldn't be like voting for one of "those" black guys that everyone is scared of in downtown New York, or on the Southside of Chicago.

Saying that Obama transcends race reaffirms the notion that blackness is a liability, a condition that has to be overcome before one can succeed. Similar statements have been made about Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. They aren't Scary Negroes, they're safe. They overcame their disability, like Corky from Life Goes On, running for Class President. In achieving their success, somehow they are perceived as having left blackness behind.

Let me tell you something: you can't get any blacker than having one of your friends blown up at church by some Klan psychopath because civil rights groups have been meeting in that church. Dr. Rice once said the following about that day:

"I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed."

Condoleezza Rice has gone far, she has achieved a position that only one other woman and one other black person have held (and no other black women). But don't think for one minute that she stopped being black when she reached those lofty heights of power.

People like Dr. Rice, General Powell, and Senator Obama do not transcend blackness at all, they affirm blackness, they stand as proof that blackness can be expressed powerfully, eloquently, intellectually. They haven't overcome the "burden" of being black, they have lived up to the potential of being black. To think that they have transcended blackness is to accept all of the racist stereotypes, to go along with the old way of looking at black people.

What needs to be transcended is not blackness. What needs to be transcended is the racist, false assumptions that people have about the nature and meaning of blackness.

Multi-Racial and Bi-Racial People Prove that "Race" is a Fallacy

2008-06-05T22:45:00.002-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

Quick thought:

The concept of "race" is predicated on human beings falling into certain rigid, genetically defined categories. This one over here, his genes put him in the "white" race. That one over there is part of the "black" race by virtue of genetics.

Well, that's all just BS, straight up. And the proof of that point is simple: if "race" actually existed, there would be no such thing as "biracial" or "multiracial" people. Because race means, in itself, that there are no blends, there are distinct groups. Invisible walls of chromosones, dividing us all. Bulwarks of melanin. Biracial/multiracial people are living, breathing proof that the concept of "race" isn't merely wrong, it is impossible as a matter of simple genetics. There are no biological walls. There are no people who could accurately be called "pure" anything. Every group has, at some point in its history, intermingled with some other (supposedly) disparate group.

If you don't believe me, just ask my blue-eyed, blonde-haired daughter, who is "black" according to the legal definition of "race".

If Obama Wins, Is The Civil Rights Struggle "Over"?

2008-06-05T22:39:00.002-05:00

Originally Posted at Too Sense:

You've probably figured this out by now, but for the clarity of this post I need to say outright that I am an Obama supporter. I see in him something very different from the normal, accepted political order. Even if he loses, his candidacy is a significant milestone. I never thought I would see the day when a candidate for the American presidency was criticized for not being black enough.

With that being said, I am troubled by some of the potential implications of an Obama presidency. Specifically, I think that there is a fair chance that certain people will try to use the fact that Obama reached the White House as an opportunity to declare that the struggle for civil rights is over. I can see people patting themselves on the back, feeling good about America's progress in race relations, and proceeding to assume that everything that the civil rights movement fought for has been achieved.

Affirmative action? What do you need that for, Obama is President! Isn't that enough?

Reform the drug laws? Obivously the system isn't biased like you say it is, there's a black man in the White House!

Voting Rights Act enforcement? The election system must be working for you, there's a black President!

What more could you people possibly want? We put one of you in the White House!

I hope I'm wrong about this. I hope that an Obama presidency does not become an excuse to shirk off the very difficult work that America still has to do with regard to race relations. I hope it stands as an incentive to do more, not as a rationale to do less.

But I know American history. And let's just say it doesn't make me optimistic.

The Modern Civil Rights Struggle: Why We Fight

2008-06-05T22:34:00.001-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

hen people talk about the Civil Rights Movement, they are almost always referring to the 1940s-1970s struggle for African American equality. Yes, the push for equal rights goes back farther than that, and continues to this day, but the most active period of time, with the most significant developments, is from the 40s to the 70s. There is a specific generation of African American leaders that most people have in mind when discussing the Civil Rights Movement, people like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, and Andrew Young. These same people always seem to refer to the Civil Rights Movement in the past tense, as something that ended way back in the 70s (if not the 60s).

Here's the thing: the movement never ended, it just fell out of the public eye. What was once seen as a broad struggle for equality nowadays tends to get reduced to fights about affirmative action (even school bussing has largely fallen by the wayside). Further, once we had a national holiday to honor MLK, a black history month, and umpteen streets named after Dr. King, plenty of folks thought that we were "done," that some kind of victory had been achieved.

The Civil Rights Movement brought about tremendous change in America, forcing the government and the private citizenry to do much more to live up to the mantra of "all men are created equal." Many avenues in life that had been absolutely closed off for African Americans were opened up. Great progress was made.

But it wasn't "victory."

Schools and neighborhoods remain segregated today, only now it's de facto segregation brought on by white flight, rather than de jure segregation enforced by racist, unconstitutional statutes. There is still tremendous disparity in the funding and support that majority-white schools receive and what majority-minority schools receive. It's no longer an official "separate but equal" policy, but it is separate, and it's not equal. There are still significant disparities between the pay that whites and non-whites receive for equivalent work. And the criminal laws, particularly at the federal level, have a much greater impact upon black defendants because of the sentencing guidlines for crack-related crimes of possession and distribution. So, yes, progress. But not victory, not yet.

Today, I believe the Civil Rights movement needs to be seen as part of a larger movement. Not only a struggle for equal rights for African Americans, but also for Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic minorities; a struggle for equal rights for women; and a struggle for equal rights for our gay brothers and sisters.

Yes, I went there.

There's been a fair bit of controversy in recent years concerning gay-rights activists comparing their movement to the African Americans' Civil Rights Movement. A great number of people are uncomfortable with such a comparison, if not outright hostile to the idea (and plenty are just plain hostile). The discomfort is largely connected with religion, as many a black preacher will get up on Sunday and condemn homosexuals as violators of God's laws. But it's not just ministers saying these things. There is a huge amount of homophobia in black music and entertainment (how many hip-hop artists freely use "faggot" as a dis?). So I know a lot of people are going to read this and either get mad at me for talking about gay equal rights, disregard it altogether, or purse their lips and shake their head at the crazy white boy.

You can be uncomfortable with gays. You can disagree with their "lifestyle" (as if there's a gay way to wash your dishes, and a straight way). But what you cannot do, if you look at objective facts, is deny that homosexuals are the last minority against which it's acceptable to discriminate. One can't deny someone an apartment because they're black, but in lots of places one can deny them an apartment if they're gay. Many states not only refuse to provide any civil rights protection for gays, they outright ban any of their constituent cities from providing such rights. One can't get up on t.v. and talk about blacks or latinos being "aberrant," "against nature," or "abominations unto the Lord." But one can say it about gays. Gays are the most-hated and least-protected minority in this country.

What's that you say? Gays are different? It's a choice? Let me ask you: who the hell would voluntarily join the one group that can be freely discriminated against, oppressed, and outright assaulted if not killed? How would that thinking go: "Hey, you know I like sex with women and all, but what I really want is to start having sex with men, so that I can lose all my marital rights, lose my right to bequeath property to my spouse, lose my right to freely adopt children, possibly lose my apartment and my job, and maybe get my ass kicked by a couple of rednecks if I'm lucky!" Yeah, there's just so much incentive to intentionally relegate oneself to the openly despised fringe of American society and politics.

I'm not saying any of this because I'm gay. I'm married with four kids. I'm saying this because I have had, and continue to have, very good friends in the gay community. I support the gay community for the same reasons that I originally supported the African-American community: because to do otherwise would be to turn my back on my friends. It would be emphasizing group identity over individuals. It would be...wrong. I support the gay community for the same reasons that I support women's equality. Not because I myself would gain any new rights or protections, but because I believe that the same rights that I enjoy should be extended to everyone in America, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex or sexuality. That's what "all men are created equal" means to me.

For me, at least, the modern struggle for civil rights has to encompass everyone who has been denied their rights and their equality because of status, because of who they are instead of what they do or do not do. This is a fight against limitations on mobility, against the idea that if you are born as one kind of person you have a certain "place" in society, that you shouldn't "get uppity" or try to inject yourself into the realms of high politics and finance because of some accident of birth. It's a fight against the notion that you have to give up who you are in order to join the mainstream, rather than behaving in a manner consistent with the mainstream while still retaining awareness of and pride in yourself. A fight against the notion that any of us can be reduced to some asinine label: the black guy, the angry feminist, the queer. All of us are more than that, both individually and collectively.

It's about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. There's no such equality within the white community: some prosper, while many, many more fall into the lower ranks of socioeconomy. So racial equality and gender equality won't mean that every black man becomes a CEO, or every woman becomes governor or president. It means that those goals won't be sealed off to anyone because they're black, or because they're a woman, or because they're gay.

Those goals have not been achieved yet, so the struggle must go on. We've made great progress, but the Promised Land has not been reached, not yet. So the struggle must go on. But it is a struggle that can be won, and is being won day by day. And victory won't mean victory for African Americans, victory for other minorities, victory for women or victory for gays. It will be victory for America itself, because it will mean that, at long last, the promise of America's founding documents has been fulfilled.

Why is Anyone Surprised at the Existence of Angry Black Folks?

2008-06-05T22:29:00.002-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

I'm not trying to be simple-minded here. Hell, I'm trying to be rational. But I don't get it. I just don't get it. Why are so many white folks surprised about the existence of black anger against white people

Let's do a thought experiment. Whatever group you descend from, whichever community you were raised in, pretend that the following facts are true:

1) people from your community have a much, much higher chance of dying violently than the members of other communities;

2) people from your community have a much, much higher chance of being imprisoned than do people from other communities;

3) one of the main reasons for that rate of imprisonment is because a particular crime that is considerably more common in your community is subject to prison terms that are orders of magnitude higher than an equivalent crime that is more common in another community;

4) the women of your community are the fastest-growing segment of new HIV infections;

5) statistically, working people from your community will make 30-40% less money than a person from another community doing the exact same work;

6) public schools in your community receive less funding, have worse facilities, and less experienced and/or less qualified teachers than the schools in another community, but your schools have to meet the same performance standards;

7) odds are very, very good that several generations of your ancestors were held in slavery;

8) odds are very, very good that your ancestors' families were victimized by members being sold off to different places, and that your ancestors could not legally marry;

9) your grandparents can remember not being able to drink from certain fountains, not being able to use certain bathrooms, not being able to eat at certain restaurants, not being allowed to attend certain schools, and not being able to vote because of the community that they were part of; and

10) whenever you bring up any of the facts above, people tell you to "get over it" and to "stop being such a victim."

Okay, assuming that all of the above facts are true...ARE YOU PISSED OFF YET?

Regarding the "Double Standard" of Who Gets to Use the "N-Word"

2008-06-05T22:24:00.002-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

The supposed double-standard that surrounds the usage of the word "nigger" is an issue that has been coming up more frequently in recent times. I have some very vivid memories about this topic, and now seems like a good time to share them.

As I've mentioned before, I went to Francis W. Gregory Jr. High in New Orleans, a school that was roughly 99% black at the time. There were about 1,100 students total, from 7th to 9th grade, and only 9 or 10 of us were white. Prior to attending Gregory, I had never heard anyone use "nigger" in any kind of a positive or affectionate context. Make no mistake, I had heard that word many, many times before, but only from racist whites talking about black people. Racist whites like my paternal grandfather, who used to keep a machete under the seat of his truck "in case any damned nigger sticks his arm inside my window." My parents raised me to never use the word, and to see it as the most vile and repulsive insult imaginable (how you go from my grandfather using "nigger" as a daily invective to my father forbidding its usage I'm still trying to understand...but, thanks, Dad). So between my parents' lessons and my grandfather's very direct example of how hateful the word was, I treated "nigger" like plutonium.

My elementary school had plenty of black students, probably 55-60% of the total. But I'd never heard any of them call anyone a nigger, or refer to themselves as niggers. At Gregory, it was different. Instead of a word that was never used, "nigger" was a universal catch-all, second only to "fuck," which remains possibly the most versatile word in the English language. Dumb nigga; smart nigga; punk nigga; bitch nigga; ignant nigga; crazy nigga; nigga, please; nigga, you must be jokin'; nigga, I know you didn't say that shit to me; nigga, don't play; my nigga; for real, nigga; holla, nigga; hold on, nigga; nigga, fuck you; nigga, back the fuck up; nigga, don't hold me back. I never knew it meant so much, in so many different contexts.

And I'd never been called one, either, much less called anybody one.

So I was in the locker room before P.E. class, dressing out for my daily suffering (our coach liked to do things like hum heavy brass key-rings at our heads, or yell out "what the fuck did you say?!?" when she heard some student curse). I was talking to this kid I knew, not really a friend but someone I had a handful of classes with. He was throwing "nigger" around the way some people do, talking about that crazy nigga over there, that nigga that needed some god-damned Speed Stick, the usual. But one thing was different: he was using the term on me, too. Things like "Damn, nigga, you dress slow" and, even better, "Damn, nigga, you are so white. You need some sun." (No shit, really?)

That's when I did it, made the worst mistake any white kid in a room full of fifty brothers can make: I said "Nigga, please."

You know how in the movies sometimes you'll have a scene where someone says something and all of the sudden you hear the sound of a record needle scratching across vinyl, followed by total silence? Yeah, it was like that. Only it wasn't silent for long. The kid I was talking to ran to get the coach, and everybody else started surrounding me. My life started flashing before my eyes, which doesn't take long for a thirteen-year-old. Then the coach came and grabbed me, yanking me into her office.

She read me the riot act, yelling about how that word made her blood boil, and how dare I call somebody a nigger (like most teachers at Gregory, she was black). I tried to explain that I wasn't calling him a nigger like she thought I was, I was just saying "nigga, please." I tried telling her that the kid had just called me a nigger several times mere seconds before I said it. None of that made any difference. The other kids were lined up outside of her office, listening to the tirade, but at the same time chanting "white meat, white meat." I think I wound up in the principal's office, but honestly I'm not too sure. Things get hazy after the "white meat" chant started up.

Needless to say, I was terrified. Scared that as soon as I left the coach's office, I was going to be splattered like a bug underneath somebody's shoe. Or several somebodies. Many, many somebodies. But more than that, more than mortal fear, I was ashamed. Mortified. I knew that I had crossed the ultimate racial and social line, even though I didn't intend to. I knew that I had branded myself as a racist, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. And I was sick to my stomach because of it. I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid.

Was it fair, the situation I found myself in? No. And at the time I knew that. I knew it made no sense that someone else could call me a word that I couldn't use in return. But I also knew that fair didn't have a damned thing to do with it. I knew that the brothers in that locker room had just heard a white kid call another brother "nigger", and I knew that my coach had just been told that a white student of hers had called someone a nigger. I knew that that was all that mattered to them, all that really could matter to them at the moment. I knew that because I knew how my grandfather used the word, and that any time a white person uses it he's evoking people just like my grandfather, or worse. I knew that somehow, even if it didn't make any sense, if I got totally smacked down, I had earned it. Some things you just don't do, even if you think in all fairness you ought to be able to

I survived the incident, but I didn't stay at that school for much longer. When I was attending Gregory, prior to my super-sized fuck-up, racial tensions against white students were bad and had been getting worse by the day. There was a lot of violence, and even more verbal hostility. Pieces of my saxophone were routinely jacked from out of its case, because I was the only white kid in the band. my best friend, who was black, got snuck in the back of his head with a padlock because he had a white friend. My sister and her friend were groped just about every day, called all kinds of "white bitch." At one point (prior to "Locker-Gate"), my sister and I complained to the principal, and he told us we were imagining things. He basically said there's no such thing as reverse racism (bull.....shiiiiiiiiit!) I left Gregory in the middle of eighth grade, because things had gotten too volatile. That locker-room incident probably made things worse for me, but the truth is they were dangerous enough before that and were already getting worse. After I left, the racial situation went further downhill, to the point that the students had decided to segregate the water fountains, giving the broken fountain to the white kids and beating the hell out of any white kid drinking from the "black" fountain. One kid got his face smashed into the fountain's metal fixture, cutting him up pretty bad.

The next year, I heard that a group of white students were planning to sue the school board for reverse discrimination. I knew what I had been through (separate from the "nigga, please" incident), what my sister had been through, and how little the school administration had done in response. So I went to a meeting about the potential lawsuit. I knew all of the kids who wanted to sue, and had even dated one of the girls in that group for a while. They seemed like okay kids to me. During the meeting with the lawyers, the stories they told were very similar to my own, and to my sister's. It seemed legit. But then we took a break, and the lawyers and the other adults left the room. All of the sudden, several of the kids started talking about those "damned niggers" at Gregory, how they couldn't stand them, how they were going to get back at them.

I got up and asked them if they'd ever fucking heard of Custer. I told those kids that if they were dumb enough to go around calling people "nigger" when they were out-numbered 100-to-1 by black folks, they deserved whatever beat-downs they got. And I left the office. I wasn't about to help a bunch of racists get money for being the victims of racism. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. I had applied the same standard to myself in the aftermath of the locker-room incident. Yes, I argued to try to keep my ass out of trouble, just like any thirteen-year-old would have. But I knew that if it really came down to some majorly bad shit, it was my own damned fault. If the only reverse-racism I had experienced had been related to that incident, I never would have considered joining in the white kids' lawsuit.

I'll try to post some more expansive thoughts on the rule against whites using "nigger" later today. For now, let me just say that the basic rule is this: you have the right to own whatever epithet can be used to hold you down. If you're subject to being called a "coon-ass", you get to own that phrase, and use it as you see fit. I know lots of Cajuns who do, though in my family it was absolutely forbidden (my Cajun grandfather saw the word as every bit as hateful as "nigger.") If you are liable to being called a "queer" or a "queen" in public, it's yours to control. Gay men get to call each other "girlfriend" whenever they like. Lesbians can refer to themselves as "big old dykes" with impunity. Just like if you're Irish you get to talk about Irish drunks if you so choose (lots of my family is Irish, but we were tee-totaling Baptists by the time I came along). People have the right to assert control over the terms that would otherwise be used against them. If the term can't own you, can't be turned against you, you don't have the right to own the term.

So, to all my white brothers and sisters, unless there's a real chance that someone is going to call you a "nigger" as you walk down the street today, and use that term against you with the same force and consequences it would have if used against its normal targets (black folks), you need to just accept the fact that the word does not belong to you. You can use it, but only in its negative, racist context, only the same way David Duke or Bull Connor would. Those other layers of meaning, those other contexts, those aren't for you. That's just the way it is, folks. Deal with it.

Thanks to our man Kwame up in Detroit, the old stereotype about black politicians being more corrup

2008-06-05T22:19:00.002-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

Thanks to our man Kwame up in Detroit, the old stereotype about black politicians being more corrupt than their white counterparts is making yet another appearance (that shit comes back like Herpes). Before I get into this, let me say right out that I know zip about Detroit politics, or about Kwame in particular. I can't say he's guilty, because I don't know, but I'm sure as hell not saying he's innocent. This isn't really about him individually, though.

Being from New Orleans, I feel like I have just a little experience with corrupt politics. Kind of like a catfish is a little bit familiar with water. New Orleans didn't elect its first black mayor until Dutch Morial won the office in 1978. Now, it's pretty well accepted that Dutch was, well, crooked like two motherfuckers stuck in a pretzel machine. But he didn't invent corruption in New Orleans politics, not by a loooooooong shot. This...is...New Orleans we're talking about. Shit's so crooked around here, our politicians eat soup with corkscrews instead of spoons. And that goes back to...well, the beginning of Louisiana itself.

French Louisiana was founded by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville ("Iberville), with significant assistance from his younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ("Bienville"). When Iberville left Louisiana for France, he did so under a cloud of accusations that he had misappropriated the colony's supplies in order to increase his personal wealth. For those of you playing at home, Iberville was...wait for it...white. First governor, first corrupt governor, white guy. Louisiana in a nutshell.

I don't have time to walk through the entire sordid history of crooked shit in Louisiana and/or New Orleans that didn't involve black politicians. Hell, the Internet itself may not have the storage capacity for that much information. But suffice it to say that Louisiana started out corrupt under the French, stayed corrupt under the Spanish, and kept right on with the corruption gig under the Americans (as a colonial possession, we've been passed around more than a whore at a biker rally, with about the same results). And let's not even pretend that corruption is somehow a Louisiana thing, while politics in the rest of the USA is pure as the driven snow. Just to name a few really, really easy examples, you have New York's Tammany Hall, the Teapot Dome scandal, the Chicago Machine, the Abramhoff Scandal, and, well, the Bush Administration (I know, I know, fish + barrel, couldn't resist the shot).

So where does this myth of black political corruption come in? Note, I'm not saying that there aren't black politicians who are corrupt (yes, "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, I'm talking about your crooked ass). Hell, no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the notion that black politicians are somehow corrupt in ways that exceed the dirty tricks of their white colleagues is, historically, bullshit. And it's bullshit that largely starts with the Reconstruction Era in the South.

During Reconstruction, the Republicans took control of every state government in the South, and this process included the election or appointment of numerous black people to state and national offices or other positions of power. For the South, it was bad enough to live under the domination of the Yankees (a good deal of the Republicans who took power during Reconstruction originally hailed from the North), but suddenly having black people not only free from slavery, not only allowed to vote, but actually wielding power? That's some serious culture shock.

The white "Redemption" of the South was the political response to the ascension of the blacks and the Republicans. It was a combination of traditional political campaigning, dirty tricks, and outright terrorism between 1868 and 1877 that eventually led to the Union army being withdrawn from the South (as part of the Tilden-Hayes Compromise of 1877), Republicans being driven from office throughout the South, and blacks being completely disenfranchised. It also lead directly to Jim Crow.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction and Redemption, Southern whites set out almost immediately to create a new conventional wisdom, a mythology, really, that held that black voters and black office holders were merely dupes for the Carpetbaggers(Yankees who moved South to take advantage of Reconstruction opportunities) and the Scalawags (native-born Southerners who supported the Republicans). They story was that qualified white office-holders had been removed in favor of unqualified blacks, at the behest of the real power-brokers, the Yankee elites. Sound familiar yet?

The sad thing is, this racist narrative wasn't purely a creation of the Southerners. It was widely advocated, and accepted, in the elite circles of Northern academia. Indeed, that entire historical school of analysis, the Dunning School, is named for Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning. It comes out of the Ivy League itself (I got yer "Liberal Elite" right here). Dunning's theory of Reconstruction contended that the Freedmen proved incapable of self-government and had themselves made segregation necessary, and he believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been "a serious error". That view of Reconstruction was dominant in historical circles until the 1960s

When you started to see black politicians taking control of major urban centers like Detroit and New Orleans in the 1970s and 1980s, the complaints about black political corruption followed almost immediately. And they were virtually identical to the claims made by the Southern Redeemers and by the Dunning School. You can't let blacks have power, because look at what they do. They're replacing qualified white leaders with incompetent black ones. On and on, ad infinitum.

Again, I'm not taking issue with the idea that some black politicians can be, have been, or are corrupt. Politics in and of itself generates corruption, and a great many politicians seek office exactly because of the opportunities for personal gain. That's not a racial thing, it's a political thing. The Minions of Wingnuttery would love for you to believe that somehow Detroit's black mayor being corrupt is connected to his blackness, and is an indictment of black leaders as a whole, but the corruption of Randy Cunningham is an isolated thing, in no way connected to or poorly reflective of his race.

Not to get all uber-geeky around here, but a quote from the modern "Battlestar Galactica" keeps popping into my head when I think about this situation:

"All this has happened before. All this will happen again."

Obama and the "Authenticity" Paradox

2008-06-05T22:02:00.002-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

Not once during the entire 2008 election cycle has any writer or commentator asked whether John Edwards is "white enough." Mike Huckabee has not been placed under the "authenticity" microscope to see if he is "really" white, or...something else. And Mitt Romney? Well, as noted before, he is possibly the Whitest Man Alive. No questions as to his identity.

Barack Obama gets an entirely different treatment. For him, in the eyes of the press and the punditocracy, his skin tone is not enough to prove his identity. He...looks black...but is he black enough? Is he really black?

According to Salon's Debra Dickerson, "'Black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." Well, yes. Frequently that's true. But not always. There are black people who descend not from slaves but from free persons of color. There are even black people whose ancestors owned slaves. It's not as simple as Dickerson, and others, want to put it.

Slavery has had and continues to have a greater impact on the black community than any other single historical fact. The assumptions that people make about black folks, and their attitudes towards black folks, are inevitably affected by the legacy of slavery. But those assumptions are often applied to, and those attitudes expressed towards, people who are visually taken for "black" whether or not they descend from slaves. Sad to say, appearance still matters in this country. To look black is to be black, at least in the eyes of the white community (and many non-white communities). As Obama himself has said, he's plenty black enough for a New York cabbie to refuse to pick him up.

What exactly are the people who doubt Obama's authenticity asking of him? Is there some requirement that he have suffered directly from the oppressive racism that many black people have experienced? If that's the case, there are a fair few middle-class and upper-middle-class black people (particularly those in their 20s and 30s) who fail the test. For the generation born and raised after the end of legal segregation, first-hand experience with racism is not a foregone conclusion. Does Obama need to have grown up impoverished in an urban ghetto in order to "really" be black? Again, if that's true all of the black folks who grew up in suburbia had better start looking for a new racial identity. Surely Obama is not being asked to talk "black", is he? If speaking urban slang is a litmus test now, Kobe Bryant has some explaining to do.

All of the differences between Obama and the "average" black person don't mean that Obama isn't black. What Obama proves is that the definition of "blackness" is necessarily a fluid thing. There is too much diversity of experience, and too much diversity of heritage, to assume that "blackness" means one thing and one thing only.

"Both" Versus "Other" Versus "Neither"

2008-06-05T21:47:00.000-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

As my kids have gotten older, we've had more frequent family discussions about race. When my oldest daughter was born, I sincerely thought I could just raise her without any labels, never calling us "black" or "white" since I consider both terms to be invalid. I gradually realized that the world's continued reliance on those terms would make it impossible to raise my kids without any reference to them, and I further realized that if I tried to do that I would be denying them the chance to learn about who they are and from where they come.

That conclusion was partly based upon my own experience growing up: two of my grandparents grew up speaking Cajun French (my mother's father and my father's mother), yet they raised their kids completely without that language, and they in turn raised my generation as completely Anglo, culturally speaking. My siblings, my cousins and I have no connection at all to that part of our heritage, other than the clinical knowledge that it exists, somewhere back there in the mists of time.

In the 80s we learned that my grandmother, who grew up speaking French, was actually almost 100% Spanish by heritage (which actually happened quite a bit in Cajun-speaking areas, people just adapted to the majority language). The fact that that came as any kind of surprise tells you what kind of cultural disconnect exists in my family. We honestly had no idea where we came from, which is particularly ironic because my father and I look so very Spanish. I always used to think my dad looked like Desi Arnaz when he was younger (he had that Club Babaloo haircut going on back in the 50s), I just never knew it was because we have a similar background to Arnaz (our family came to America through Cuba and the Island of Hispaniola during the Spanish colonial era). When I've traveled to Mexico, I've been able to blend in as long as I keep my mouth shut (I only speak enough Spanish to politely order food).

When we learned about my grandmother's real heritage, I didn't feel any kind of confusion. More to the point, I did not feel like I was suddenly less Anglo, or less anything. I felt like I was more, in the sense that my family had a richer history than I knew, a more complex story. Of course, telling any of my Honduran friends that I was actually Hispanic, in the literal sense of the word, got nothing but laughter from them. I'm just way too culturally Anglo to be able to claim Hispanic heritage, even if it's mine by blood.

I have been trying to learn more about my own background, because the older I get the more of a sense of loss I feel at the extent to which the family has assimilated into purely Anglo culture. I can feel a personal connection to the English, Irish, and Scotish parts of my heritage, because I speak the language and was educated in that literary tradition. Shakespeare is a hell of a cultural marker to be able to claim, as are Milton, Chaucer, etc. I have no desire to "lose" any of those aspects of myself. Yet I wish that I could feel that same personal connection to our Spanish heritage, or our French heritage.

I have none of the language, and none of the customs, no personal frame of reference. It is a matter of history, not something that I can incorporate into my identity. We were more than Anglo, we have a larger cultural tradition that we could have claimed as our own (not larger in comparison to Anglo culture, but larger in the sense of being an addition to the known Anglo culture). Yet we cannot make that claim, cannot feel that connection, because of the assimilation that took place in my granparents' generation.

As much as I can, I want to prevent my kids from ever feeling that disconnected from their heritage. I cannot give them their French and their Spanish cultural legacies, because I do not have them myself. And I cannot "give" them their Creole heritage (which is where their being "black" comes from), because that is not mine to give. The most that I can do is to make sure that they know who they are and where they come from, and to expose them to that side of the family as much as I can, so that they will always know, firsthand, just how diverse the family is. That Cosby Show rainbow family is pretty much my wife and her cousins in a nutshell: all different hues, all different features, but one common heritage.

When I talk to my kids about race I always tell them that they are both white and black. They can claim whiteness both because I am white and because my wife has a great deal of European ancestry (probably the majority, to be honest). And they can claim blackness because my wife has African ancestry. We very specifically do not tell our children that they are one thing or the other. That is a false choice, because one does not lose white heritage by the fact that one's heritage is also black, any more than one loses black heritage by the fact that one is also white. The two do not subtract from one another or diminish one another. They add to one another.

Now, I'm sure that there are a good number of people who would disagree with the notion that white heritage and black heritage add to and complement one another. Some of them are relatives of mine. But consider this: if a person says that they are both French and Spanish by heritage, no one is going to argue that they have to be one or the other, that somehow French lineage cancels out Spanish blood, or vice versa. Similarly, if someone says that they are English, Scottish, and Irish, that statement is not going to be challenged. The three are not seen as being mutually exclusive.

I specifically chose the European examples that I did because they reflect intermingling between groups with a great degree of historical animosity. The French and the Spanish have been at war numerous times, often with quite bloody results. Similarly, the English have been fighting with the Scots and the Irish for control over the British Isles for hundreds of years. Yet we do not think of these groups as having heritages that are so different as to be somehow incompatible. The person with French and Spanish blood is never asked (in America, at least) to "pick" one of "choose a side" between France and Spain. The person with English and Irish blood is not asked to decide which one to claim on a census. The history of conflict does not lead to the conclusion that mixing of these particular blood lines somehow introduces an impurity into one or the other

That being the case, there is absolutely no basis to argue that somehow white and black heritage nullify each other, or that one takes precedence over the other. American history is deeply polluted with the conflict between white and black, or rather the legacy of white oppression of black people. There is no running from or denying that history, it simply is what it is. However, if the bloody history between the French and the Spanish does not mean that Spanish blood "taints" French blood, and the recurrent fights between the English and the Irish, or the English and the Scots do not mean that Irish blood somehow "weakens" English blood, then America's own sordid history of relations between whites and blacks cannot mean that a mixture of the two heritages somehow leads to one lineage or the other being diluted.

The current election obviously implicates this issue. The press has to describe Obama as being black, as if his African heritage is the dominant heritage, and his European heritage has been sidelined. Questions of whether Obama is "black enough" still subscribe to this worldview, this notion that he is by definition "black" because of his African father. Obama, who is equally white and black, still has to be placed into a category because our mainstream culture expects him to fit into such a box. That expectation of easy categorization is fundamentally ignorant, and incorrect. Defining Obama as one or the other reinforces the false choice, the idea that one half or the other half of Obama's heritage must be the more significant one, the one that he claims.

When I've talked to my daughters about this election, I've tried to tell them how Obama is just like our family in the sense that he is both white and black. He cannot choose one side or the other in an argument about race, because both are part of him. And I tell my kids that we cannot choose one "side" or the other, we have to choose both, because both are a part of us. I include myself in that statement, not because I have any African heritage (of which I'm aware, at least) but because by the act of marrying a black woman, I have loyalty to the black community that I must consider when "debates" about race crop up (not to mention the fact that almost all of my closest friends are black). I cannot make a choice that denies my wife, or denies my children, or my friends. And I cannot make a choice that denies my own heritage. Thus, no picking of sides

What I find very interesting is that my girls are completely comfortable with the notion that they are both white and black. We've never asked them to choose, because we have explained that there is no choice to make. As such, they do not have any inner conflict about their identities, at least none that I can detect (and I make it a point to discuss these things with them). Granted, my youngest daughter, who is so blonde and blue she could have posed for a Hitler Youth propoganda poster, was extremely skeptical the first time I tried to explain to her that her mother is black. When I told her that, her response was "you mean I'm black too?", to which I answered "yes." That prompted her to say "Come on, daddy, look at me." I explained to her that being black just means you have African ancestry, not that you necessarily look like other black people. I'm not sure she buys it even now, she may be playing along to humor me

I don't think that calling oneself "both" black and white is to somehow remove oneself from these cultures. If you are aware of your white roots, and you embrace and accept that history and participate in that culture, it is yours to claim. The same applies to black roots, at least it should. I don't buy into the notion that claiming both heritages and cultures means that one is less authentically a member of either culture. If I accept that, I accept the false idea that blackness and whiteness are really alien to one another, that there is some fundamental difference between us that goes down into the core of our very beings.

The people who built up this entire racial fiction of ours did not, I think, do so because they actually believed that there was such a divide. Why do I say this? Because a real divide between the races would not have had to be enforced by laws against intermarriage, or laws that define how much African blood was necessary to make one legally black. You don't create laws to stop from happening things which are impossible in the first place. There are no laws defining how much canine blood is necessary for a person of mixed human and canine heritage to be considered a dog, because the distinction between dog and man actually exists. There is no possibility that the two are going to intermingle and have children together. There was always intermingling between Europeans and Africans, whether through masters raping their slaves, through semi-coercive systems like plaisage, or through voluntary inter-marriage between whites and free blacks (which did happen). If there was no system built up to impede these unions, to deligitamize this intermixture, it would logically have not only continued but increased in frequency as the number of Africans in America increased

Had the groups been allowed to freely intermingle, without societal interference, the slave economy could not have been reconciled with "All men are created equal." Blackness would have become closer to whiteness, and vice versa, and the sole justification for allowing slavery to continue would have been eroded. That justification, of course, was the notion that Africans were inherently different from their European counterparts, that enslavement by Europeans was their natural condition. Remove the African from the definition of "men" and you escape the "are created equal" part of the problem. Such removal could not be sustained if the groups were mingled. Thus the fallacy of the "one drop," and the different treatment of people with mixed European heritages and people whose heritage mixed European with African

Those of us who are part of these interracial unions today, or who are the products of such unions, cannot be compelled to accept the racist terminology, the racist world-view of the past. We did not create the system that seeks to force us to choose between one heritage and the other. We have given no consent to be bound by that thought-structure. No government or institution has the power to compel us to do so. We have the right to claim, and to embrace, both cultures and both histories at the same time, and to do so without any divided loyalty.

This is the basic power of self-determination, and self-identification, the power to declare which labels we will and will not allow to define us. Ownership of one's heritage, one's history, is fundamental. If your heritage is left to the whims of others, so is your identity. One who can name your history, without your consent, can categorize you however they see fit. One who can categorize you can ultimately control you, by saying that this category is allowed to do "x", but that category can only do "y." I will not allow anyone or anything to have that kind of power over my children's lives, and I will teach them not to submit to that power being in someone else's hands.

There is no choice to be made. There is no "one" or "the other." There is only "both."

"Talking About Race" in America

2008-06-05T21:39:00.000-05:00

Originally posted at Too Sense:

According to Lou Dobbs, we have no problem talking about race in America, it's just that people don't do it because they're afraid of being attacked for saying unpleasant or un-P.C. things. What we have here is a coded language problem: for many American white people, "talking about race" is actually code for "saying nasty things about black people." These people who claim not to be free to express themselves think that any "honest" discussion about race has to include "certain ugly truths" such as "black people have babies out of wedlock," "black people are on welfare," "it's the blacks that are killing each other," and "affirmative action is racist." Those are just a few examples

These poor, oppressed souls know, they just know, that there are certain facts that America is not willing to accept. If only they could get America to accept those facts, get people to wake up and "see the world for what it really is," all of these racial issues could be put to rest. It just so happens, as a matter of purest coincidence, I'm sure, that all of the "facts" that these people refer to as being forbidden in conversation are blatantly racist negative stereotypes about black people and/or other minorities. The problem, you see, is that America just won't admit to the racists that they've been right all along, that everything started going downhill with Emancipation, got worse when Truman integrated the armed forces, and just went all to hell with Brown v. Board.

Well, I say let these folks make whatever statements they want, in every newspaper and on every network. Bring them out into public view, let them spew as much ignorant bile as they have stored up in their wormy little guts. And then, when they've had their say, demolish their argument. Show how ignorant and small they are, how little they know about the world, how much they have been consumed by hate and superstition. The facts, whether historical or present-day, are against the racists, and an open debate would show as much

I have no problem dealing with the David Dukes of the world, because they are out there in broad daylight saying foolish things, falling back on old myths and fantasies, and generally showing their bright red asses wherever they go. We're not "done" with civil rights in America, but we have made enough progress that someone with views like David Duke's is going to be seen as at best an ignorant fool and at worst a hateful demagogue (Duke is both wrapped up in one). David Duke we can handle, because he is exposed in the public arena and people can (and have and will) engage him and defeat him simply on the merits.

No, the ones you have to watch and be concerned about are the ones in the suit and tie who play the "polite company" game, never saying anything racist in public, but quietly believing all the racist lies, and supporting racist policies, while never being exposed as a racist. These are the folks who get most indignant at the suggestion that America is a "racist" country, because they know damned well that it's true and they want everyone to look away from that fact so that things can continue as they are. If we don't talk about racism and identify it as such, we won't correct it, and the racists can continue going about their merry business.

They don't need public laws to enforce segregation, because suburban flight and a lack of mass transit from major urban hubs out into the suburbs does that for them. And this sub-prime mess is going to make things even easier for them, because now all they have to do is strictly enforce lending standards for credit-worthiness. Statistically, the number of minorities buying into the middle-class and affluent 'burbs is going to drop significantly, and it won't take any racist laws to do it. They don't have to segregate schools officially, all they have to do is put the good schools in the areas where minorities will have little or no access to them, and continue to let urban schools go under (a simple matter of keeping property taxes from affluent districts targeted at the schools in those districts rather than applying any such revenues to poorer school districts). None of this is inherently racist, but it serves the racists' purposes, and all of it will continue without any real examination of racial impact as long as we keep avoiding a genuine conversation about race.