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

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?

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

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

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"?

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

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?

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?