The Best of Prometheus 6

This is a container for those random posts I 'm fairly pleased with.

Where we stand

I have been something of a Black partisan for most of my life. My understanding of things comes from many years of independent study and I find myself explaining my political positions because my observations are rather standard but what I see as the repercussions of those observations differ greatly from what I hear day to day. It's difficult to explain a couple of decades of thought in a single conversation, and extended conversations aren't always possible so I have a few books I recommend that hew closely to my understanding of things.
A book I regularly recommend is The Shaping of Black America by Lerone Bennett, Jr. It's the story of the United States of America…as opposed to a history…told from the perspective of the Africans in America and the African Americans they became.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine was asked in a Black history course she was teaching how the construct of race came into existence. In response I suggested chapter three of The Shaping of Black America, titled "The Road Not Taken." It documents the reasoning behind enslaving Africans as opposed to Amerinds or European indentured servants, and the steps taken to make it legally and socially acceptable. Recently I added the chapter as a permanent piece of my web site for discussion and documentation purposes. It's an important chapter because it documents how legitimizing slavery damaged both Africans and Europeans in ways that survive to this day.

The reasoning behind the institution of slavery tends to be ignored or misrepresented by historians. From The Shaping of Black America:

Most historians avoid the subject by positing a natural or cultural bias in the European psyche. But this maneuver fails to explain why this natural or cultural bias manifested itself in one way in 1619 and another way in 1819 or why it developed in one way in Maryland, another way in Massachusetts, and a third way in Brazil. Nor is it possible, from the traditional standpoint, to explain why the laws against blacks became progressively worse and differed significantly in different demographic and economic situations. From time to time, some historians admit, in so many words, that the traditional view is untenable. Stanley Elkins, for example, who has advanced a fanciful theory of slavery, said that "the interests of white servants and blacks were systematically driven apart." After reading the same evidence, the Handlins said that "the emerging difference in treatment [of blacks and whites] was calculated to create a real division of interest between Negroes on the one hand and whites on the other." [My emphasis]

Until the advent of African slavery. At that point a society was built that automatically enforced and invisibly rewarded differences which, up until that time, were seen as purely cosmetic. Even religion was turned to this purpose. So now we are the recipients of over 350 years of programming. Again, from The Shaping of Black America (emphasis added):

What we are concerned to emphasize here is that the laws were the heart and center of a massive public education campaign. The best evidence in favor of this point is the extraordinary letter Governor William Ceech wrote to the English government, which had demanded explanation of a Virginia law denying the suffrage to free blacks. Governor Ceech wrote:

[The] Assembly thought it necessary, not only to make the Meetings of Slaves very penal, but to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negroes and Mulattos by excluding them from the great Privilege of a Freeman, well knowing they always did, and ever will, adhere to and favour the Slaves. And, likewise said to have been done with design, which I must think a good one, to make the free Negroes sensible that a distinction ought to be made between their offspring and the Descendants of an Englishman, with whom they never were to be Accounted Equal. This, I confess, may Seem to carry an Air of Severity to such as are unacquainted with the Nature of Negroes, and Pride of a manumitted Slave, who looks on himself immediately On his Acquiring his freedom to be as good a Man as the best of his Neighbours, but especially if he is descended of a white Father or Mother, lett them be of what mean Condition soever; and as most of them are the Bastards of some of the worst of our imported Servants and Convicts, it seems no ways Impolitic, as well for discouraging that kind of Copulation, as to preserve a decent Distinction between them and their Betters, to leave this mark on them, until time and Education has changed the Indication of their spurious Extraction and made some Alteration in their morals.

This is a significant document that has been too often ignored by historians. We don't have to speculate on the motives of the men who created the American race problem. They tell us clearly what they were doing and why they were doing it.

They were passing laws to preserve a decent Distinction between blacks and whites.

They were passing laws to fix a perpetual Brand upon blacks.

They were passing laws with design to make free blacks sensible that a distinction should be made between their children and the children of Englishmen.

They were passing laws to break the Pride of blacks.

They were passing laws to leave this mark on them.

And it can be said, by inverting this language, that the laws were also passed to leave a mark on whites, who were instructed, under pain of punishment, how to act in relation to blacks. Under these laws whites of all classes were penalized for expressing human impulses. It therefore became very expensive for a white person to like black people or to love them. This was not, it should be emphasized, a matter of hints and vague threats. The laws were quite explicit. Symptomatic of this were the laws passed to punish whites who befriended blacks or ran away with them.

Masters were also disciplined. The right of the master to free his slave was curbed and finally eliminated. The master was also forbidden to teach his slaves or to permit them to gather in large assemblies.

It is critical for Black people and White people to recognize this, that it is not natural for us to be divided. It is not natural for us to consider our differences to be more than cosmetic. A society was built that trained us to see these differences as significant. The result of that training is ugly.

Now Black people aspire to become all that White people are…never understanding that White people are no more what they should have been than Black people are.

Black people have only been free for two generations. White people have only had free people of other races around them for two generations. Neither group has mastered their situation yet, and who can blame either? Because this society still gives racialized feedback so clearly and strongly that the honorable efforts made by many on both sides of the veil are simply overwhelmed. Consider this (posted at Crooked Timber by Kieran Healy):

Devah Pager has won this year�s Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association. (I wrote about her work last year. It�s worth mentioning again.) Devah studies the effect of incarceration on labor market outcomes. Her approach was to conduct an audit study of employers, sending in applications for real jobs using vitas for matched pairs of black and white men. The abstract of a working paper from the study says, in part:

With over 2 million individuals currently incarcerated, and over half a million prisoners released each year, the large and growing numbers of men being processed through the [U.S.] criminal justice system raises important questions about the consequences of this massive institutional intervention. This paper focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white job seekers. � By using matched pairs of individuals to apply for real entry- level jobs, it becomes possible to directly measure the extent to which a criminal record in the absence of other disqualifying characteristics serves as a barrier to employment among equally qualified applicants. I find that a criminal record is associated with a 50 percent reduction in employment opportunities for whites and a 64 percent reduction for blacks.

Pager found that blacks "are less than half as likely to receive consideration by employers relative to their white counterparts, and black non-offenders fall behind even whites with prior felony convictions.� In other words, even though being black and having served time both negatively affect one�s employment opportunities, controlling for education and skills you are better off being a white male with a felony conviction than a black male with no criminal record.

And there are many, many White people who consciously attempt to bridge the gap. But because they believe the problem is one of individual belief their efforts are flawed. Seeing Black people are still angry and wondering why their openness has no effect, they naturally take the rejection of their personal gestures as a personal rejection…it's almost impossible for a person not to.

So this is where we stand, Black and White folks. At the dawn of an age neither has been prepared for, believing in a society geared to change people into exactly that which we all declare we don't want to be.

I don't have the final answer. I don't think anyone does. But I do know this much—both sides must remember that we were all broken by this. Though the normal assumption is that Black folks alone were the ones that were broken, in fact White people in general were just as programmed as Black people. We were broken in different ways though, and therefore need different messages…we all need to understand that trying to get Black folks to where White folks are isn't going to work any more than getting White folks to where Black folks are will. We all need to get to a new place.

The Promethean Position Paper or As Much as Necessary, But No More

The other day I said the short story on my political outlook would place me slightly left of center-left. I believe it might be a good thing to go into the long story. Not all the way in; the complexity of "slightly left of center-left" is a clue that might take a while.

One reason I decided to write about this is that recently my daughter told me I'm a libertarian. I said something about a thought I had, and not talking about it out loud because people might think I'm a libertarian and she calmly said, "But you are a libertarian."

This is the second time in my life I was told this, and it's not true. I'm not a libertarian, I'm just not. Even though stuff like this:

In praising the troops, President Bush implied as much: "Operation Iraqi Freedom was carried out with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect and the world had not seen before … You have shown the world the skill and the might of the American armed forces &hellip Wherever you go, you carry a message of hope."

Hope! In the same speech, he mentioned faith and charity too, thus showing how all the virtues taught by God Incarnate are embodied in the act of blowing things up and killing people in distant lands. Now, this kind of language can be dismissed as boilerplate, but in fact it has repercussions in domestic policy. The advocates of big government seize on this to make the case for government to actively intervene in all aspects of life. If the armed forces really bring a message of hope wherever they go, maybe they should come to your town. If the world can be shown the might and skill of the American military, why shouldn't it be shown to America as well?

I also favor eliminating laws against victimless crimes. Sex and drugs have occupied a major portion of humanity's time since there was a humanity. People who want to get high or feel up girls in dark corners of the topless bar can do so pretty freely. Sure you risk your health, but if you take yourself out of the gene pool I have no problem with that. I don't like it when someone else takes you out of it. And by making them illegal you make them so profitable that you can fund wars, will shoot up the block, beat someone down for standing on "my corner."

Basically, I don't want the Procrustean Problem, where you have to make yourself fit in the bed you MUST lie in, even if it means losing fragments of yourself. The cookie-cutter Conservatism rampant in the national government has this effect, and sadly a lot of people are loving the hell out of giving up the outer edges of their nature because it makes them fit in so snugly.

Glen Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan have recently discovered the limits of the bed they've been laying in. Now, I'm neither a fan or a big consumer of either man's writing. They were, of course, among the first bloggers I ran across and among the first I left behind as ideologically incompatible with me (this is pretty typical of my reaction). Sullivan, in particular, I found confusing. I find ALL Log Cabin Republicans confusing, even more so than Black Republicans. I mean, aren't these the guys that contributed money to the Dole campaign and he returned it? Aren't Republicans the guys who owe so much to the Religious Right^TM, which group thinks they are an evil influence, a threat to our bodily fluids and damned to perdition for all eternity? I can't read the work of so deeply deluded a person. It makes my head hurt.

But you couldn't avoid noticing the reports that Reynolds and Sullivan got savaged by Freepers for suggesting Bush's theatrics aboard the Abraham Lincoln this weekend were ever so slightly beyond the pale. Even as I couldn't help noticing a bit of an I-told-you-so attitude by many who posted that amazing statement of Sullivan's:

But what amazes me is the vituperative tone, and how many then accuse me of being anti-war, anti-Bush and anti-American. Me? Are politics so polarized that you have to either engage in hagiography or hatred of our leaders? Is there nothing permissible in between?

Speak as much as necessary … but no more.

This sort of behavior repulses the libertarian aspect of my political soul.

I'm not a full libertarian though, because I do not believe the government is the enemy. I believe the government is a very stupid, clumsy, sometimes overzealous friend, sort of like Marmaduke. There are collective needs that should be addressed collectively, and a government is the requisite instrument to do so. There are services needed, materials required to be a full participant in what the society can offer and I think a government is the means to establish the standard. Yes there should be a ground floor that no one should be able to fall through. Yes, it sounds like socialism, yes it's expensive, but 15% of our military budget is spend on outdated technology and plans that military experts say can be scrapped with no loss to our national security. TrueMajority suggests that vast sum be spent on:

Provide basic health and food to the world's poor: $12 billion
Rebuild America's public schools over 10 years: $12 billion
Reduce class size for grades 1-3 to 15 students per class: $11 billion
Reduce debts of impoverished nations: $10 billion
Provide health insurance to all uninsured American kids: $6 billion
Increase federal funding for clean energy and energy efficiency: $6 billion
Public financing of all federal elections: $1 billion
Fully fund Head Start: $2 billion

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

that

And right now, coasting on the rhetoric of the Contract on America, the Libertarian Party (and because of them, individual libertarians) are aligned for the most part with
the fully-co-opted Republican party.

That's why I'm so dead set against being called a Libertarian^TM. Just as dead set as against being called Republican^TM, Conservative^TM or a Fundamentalist^TM. That's why I'm liberal, and changing my party affiliation from independent (meaning no party, not the Independent Party^TM) to Democratic^TM.

But notice the trademark sign is next to the Democratic Party's name too. I haven't forgotten what the party has been. I still feel the pangs of neglect. I am at the point of accepting "there are only permanent interests." I'll ride the tiger … but I'll have a knife at it's throat.

posted by Prometheus 6 at 5/4/2003 01:14:21 PM |

An email conversation with my daughter

We really talk like this. It's sick.

Her:

Okay, so recently I asked a bunch of people what they think their flaws and strengths are in writing, and I have noticed something (which I always knew, actually, but this time for some reason I thought about it more.) Specifically, I have noticed that the good, talented writers tend to have these very long lists of bitches about their own work and much shorter lists of things they actually like, whereas the crappy writers tend to have the reverse.

Further, the good writers tend to have deeper concerns: they write about how bad their characterization, dialogue, plotting, structure, etc is, whereas the notsogreat writers tend to say things like "I use too many commas" or "I'm weak on my research."

Now, what I'm wondering is this: Is it that the better writers are better because they perceive their own flaws whereas the others are kinda clueless? Or is it that the better writers perceive their own flaws because they're better, whereas the others don't have the skill to recognize the flaws? And what about talent? Does having a natural talent for writing tend to make you notice your own flaws more than someone who doesn't have that instinct?

At the moment, I'm tending toward the latter (they see the flaws because they're better) and "yes, it does." I'm thinking that people who are less talented don't have a knack for noticing the problems in their writing, therefore they cannot improve because they don't see what's wrong to begin with?

Me:

Here's the deal. If you are aware of things like theme and rhythm of the voice in your head when you read (that's poetry concerns, but you get the drift) you will hone them and learn and get better at it as you focus on it. Like any skill, right? Now, some folks do have an easier time with perceiving patterns in specific materials. But if a person can be taught to recognize the patterns and convinced of their importance suddenly they are a talented beginner. But conferring talent on someone is hard because you have to do it backward-they have to be convinced the patterns are important before they can learn to recognize them. And the person who sees into the material directly has a huge head start...but if they slop off they can be surpassed.

Going against type (two): The 0w3n3rship S0ci3ty

The discussion of Class War Strategies on The NewsHour feature an economist and a salesman posing as an economist.

William Spriggs is an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute here in Washington. And Brian Wesbury is the chief economist at Griffin, Kubik, Stephens and Thompson, an investment bank in Chicago.

Long term readers know I refer to these professions as Type One and Type Two Economists, respectively. And they know I have no respect for Type Two economics pronouncements, and that I love folks that come to the same conclusions I have.

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I think there are some things that we would like to see people have greater ownership of. We certainly want to see home ownership increase in this country. But there are a lot of things that the government does today, which are in place because the market is not a good allocator of resources or because what the government is really doing is serving as an insurer; and in that role the government does best when we include everyone, and that's best done as a government program.

So the president talked about health insurance as an example. And we see from our current system of health insurance that that doesn't work when you make it an ownership society, because if I want to sell you health insurance, then I want to have the low risk population. I'd love to sell health insurance to a work force that's 20 something and very healthy. I don't want to sell insurance to people who are low income, more likely to be ill, and we see that there are gaps in who has health insurance because of that.

The thing you must remember is, the market is a system that determines the allocation of goods and services exclusively on the basis of wealth. People would like to think wealth is based on the value one produces, but being born in a position to inherit wealth, or to get wealth by maintaining the entropy puts the lie to that thought.

BRIAN WESBURY: Well, I think the ownership society is a very good thing. We have to remember that the more people have a skin in the game, have a stake in society, have assets built up over time, the less difficulty society will have withstanding bad times.

Bullshit, of course. Or, more precisely, salesmanship.

Every person in the country already has a stake in society. We live here, we depend on society for survival the same way an antelope depends on the savannah.

You also should keep in mind what it means to own something. It doesn't mean you can use something so much as that you can prevent others from using it.

And I believe what this does is it allows the government's spending to be put toward a use that will build assets and build ownership and build personal responsibility over time

Two things: the government doing what it is allowed to do rather than what it contracted to do is the problem, and "personal responsibility" means "your grief is your problem, regardless of its cause."

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I think Social Security is a key example. And again the example of what happens in an insurance system like health insurance where we see that's just falling apart; it doesn't work. In the case of Social Security, we know that if you let individuals assess the risk of the economy and then start saving, when they think things are going to go bad, we get the behavior we don't want. We get reinforcing and exacerbating business cycles so people will think that the economy is more risky when it starts to turn down. They'll save more and we learned from the Great Depression, that's not a good thing.

Not all of us learned, apparently.

So we socialize these risks. And in the case of Social Security, what we're doing is we are insuring everybody from the three things which will happen to you as a worker. You may, God forbid, become disabled and can't continue to support your family. You may die young and your family again needs some support or God willing, you'll live a long life and you'll need to retire because you are not competitive in the labor market. And so by having it universal, you have a risk pool which ensures that the program will hold together to ensure against those risks. When people talk about the retirement program, that's not what Social Security is. It really is an insurance against these downturns.

Hey, didn't say something like that the other day?

Going against type (two): Deciding who to tax

That other stuff wasn't the only nonsense spouted by our economic salesman Brian Wesbury.

And then one last point about that and it is that these systems are in trouble; the Social Security system is under funded by $10 trillion. Taxes have to go up to pay for it or benefits have to be cut to make it work. Something has to be done. And what the president is trying to do is say look, let's not raise taxes. Let's not cut benefits, let's find a third way, a way through this hole that allows people to build ownership, build a stake in the economy, to build a cushion for their future, and so that we don't have to change the system as it exists for those people that are in retirement or very close to it but gives the youth of America a way to build assets, a way to become owners and a way to become more personally responsible in the future.

Can we kill this "personally responsible" incantation? What the hell has it to do with the discussion?

Mr. Wesbury is as full of it as those who want to claim the output of pharmaceutical companies' opportunity cost calculations are to be added in when accounting for the cost of developing a new drug…and for the same reason.

Right now, Social Security is not in debt. At all.

THE GREENSPAN BAIT-AND-SWITCH:
In 1983, as chairman of the bipartisan Social Security commission, Greenspan said that the way to ensure that Social Security remains on sound financial footing in the future is to make baby boomers pay their benefits in advance. That is why, to this day, people pay more in Social Security taxes than is paid to beneficiaries – 50 percent more in 2004. But, in large part to make up the shortfall caused by the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, this money (more than $1.8 trillion) has been used to finance other aspects of government. In other words, Social Security has been transformed from a retirement
program to a regressive income redistribution program. Lower- and middle-class workers are not paying for their retirement benefits in advance, they are paying for tax cuts for those making more than $300,000. For more, read this American Progress column by Harry J. Holzer.

There seems to be a limit to Wesbury's mendacity though. He says you must raise taxes or cut benefits, but BUSH says math doesn't matter. Nowhere does he say he believes Bush's third way exists.

And when Mr. Spriggs applies a corrective dose of reality:

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, it is not going to achieve the goal. We've already seen his economic stimulus in place for these four years. We still have fewer people employed today than when he took office and when he gets sworn in in January, we will have fewer people than when he got sworn in, in January four years ago. So the direction in which he has put the tax cuts have not been the stimulus the economy needed, not from the perspective of the American worker.

But in the case of Social Security, again, what you see is now the president has created this own problem himself. His tax cuts have made permanent are far bigger than the problem that we face in Social Security. If we just said we are not going to make the tax cut to the top 1 percent of the country permanent, that solves the whole Social Security program as it is currently conceived. You could say you are going to keep the benefits. You are going to keep everything the way it is, just say we are not going to make permanent that top 1 percent, so he has created his own problem. He exacerbates it because if you want to privatize, you are going to take money out of the system, which exacerbates the need to have money put into the system.

And many people who talk about privatization of course really don't put together how are you going to not cut benefits if you are not going to raise taxes? It doesn't solve itself simply through privatization. And you can't really privatize the risk of a disability and the insurance program which are integral to the program. And it is a family-based program. It is not an individual program at the moment.

Wesbury's response is basically, "You lost so shut up."

BRIAN WESBURY: Right. Right. Well, I personally think that's a real good idea. Let me go back one step here and just remind Mr. Spriggs that the election is over, the president won. The debate on the tax cut is done. People do not want higher taxes. That's not going to happen. In fact, we are going to be debating making these tax cuts permanent and tax reform in the future....

GWEN IFILL: Excuse me. Were you advocating higher taxes, Mr. Spriggs?

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: I was saying that we shouldn't make a tax cut permanent which is not necessarily higher taxes.

GWEN IFILL: We don't want to really re-debate that issue. We should get back to legal reform --

BRIAN WESBURY: That's my whole point. It's over.

Notice this statement:

The debate on the tax cut is done.

and this one

In fact, we are going to be debating making these tax cuts permanent and tax reform in the future....

were made without so much as a breath taken in between.

Going against type (two): Typecasting

Type Two: The salesman

BRIAN WESBURY: The tort reform issue... the whole idea about creating more growth in the economy is that we always need to lower risk and increase rewards in the economy and that's the way you encourage more entrepreneurial activity.

Risk is tied to reward isn't it? This is a fantasy, not an economic plan.

And to lower risk and raise rewards you have to attack a number of things. Number one: Taxes are a punishment to those who are successful very often. So what we have to do is move to lower after tax - or, excuse me higher after tax returns. And I think that's what the tax cut last year did.

Interesting. Taxes aren't the means of funding collective needs and obligation. They are punishment to the wealthy.

I wonder if this is the guy who wrote that "Lucky Duckies" tripe in the Wall Street Journal.

We need to lower risks for investors, part of that is fighting the war on terror and making the world a safer place.

WHAT THE FUCK??

But another part of that is reforming the tort system, the litigious society we have because there are so many risks to businesses in this country coming from the legal sector, which raises costs and lowers returns and I think that becomes an important part of making sure this economy stays strong for the long run.

So we are lowering the risk of getting sued if you screw up.

WILLIAM SPRIGGS: Well, I would say this, that we have set up a system in which litigation plays a role in correcting bad behavior for businesses because the cost of their errors are not borne by the company itself. So if you think of tobacco and what damage that did to our economy in terms of needless people-- needless numbers of people dying from tuberculosis, from lung cancer, et cetera.

So if you think about that and then look at the recent withdrawal of an arthritis pain reliever, because the company understood that they were going to face litigation, meaning that we wouldn't have needless doubts in that case, but tax reform has to be fair. We heard that word before about making it fairer. The economy has worked the way the president wanted it and that is that the returns of all of the growth in the economy has been to capital income, not to American workers. To shift the tax burden further on to the American worker means that we are putting even more burden on the American worker.

At The Niggerati Network

The Racism Series
The Reparations Series
The Shaping of Black America, Ch. 3

I guess it's time to get Juliette angry at me again

Throwing Away The Crutches

What have Republicans/conservatives done for black Americans? I hear that question constantly when I disclose that I am a conservative Republican. Often I will provide the usual facts that seem to be missing from the historical lexicon these days: freed the slaves, were 90%+ in the majority in the votes for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, something about the question sets steel to my nerves and I’ve been meaning to articulate the reasons for it here for some time now.

Implied in the question is that a political party must “do something” for blacks. Not merely the usual “something” that a government entity does for all of its constituents, e.g. provide utilities, regulate commerce, etc., but something special.

That word ‘special’ has taken on a new meaning in recent years and I think that it applies to the special items that liberals/leftists believe that the government should provide for the ‘special’ people, the “congenitally retarded” folk.

Yes, we ‘special’ people--with ‘special’ needs--require special handling: special education and special employment. You can’t expect black people to live up to the standards of ‘normal’ people. Like paraplegics or the blind or the deaf or those afflicted with Down’s syndrome, singular accommodations must be made for the great handicap of being born with black skin. To liberals/leftists, black people are a crippled class that can never be made whole just as long as they can never be made not-black. What’s this notion called?

And if anyone tries to treat us as full, competent adults, the liberals/leftists will scream in righteous anger and protest about the unfairness of it all. And if some of us ‘handicapped’ verbally express the desire to be treated like full, competent adults and act in a manner that demonstrates that desire, we are deemed as traitors by those who share the same racial makeup, but buy into the ‘handicap’ philosophy. Yes, we are “traitors,” because if some of us refuse to take advantage of the special needs offered and succeed anyway, the vast majority of America will begin to think that we don’t really require the “handicap slot.”

You have to go back 40 years to find something "Republicans" have done for Black folks. And "Republican" is in quotes because the party is as different now from what it was then as the NBA is now from what it was in 1965. Let's not even talk about going back to Reconstruction…especially since Republicans oversaw the rape of the Freedmens Bank.

All this empty crap sets steel to MY nerves. So I'm just going to repeat myself.

Black people have ALWAYS wanted integration, ALWAYS wanted to be full citizens, ALWAYS wanted to to the right thing.

Think. Why was the first executive order directing the government to act affirmatively to bring Black Americans into the economy issued? What was the order intended to accomplish?

It was intended to change the behavior of white Americans.

You see, at the time there were plenty of educated Black folks, college degreed janitors, because of racism. It certainly wasn't because Black folks didn't want the work. The order was intended to override white racism.

The response to the order was along the lines of, "I'd love to hire a niggra if I could find a qualified one." And when the underemployed college graduates stepped up, it because, "Oh, but he didn't got to THAT college like HE did. HE is more qualified that the niggra." And the niggra takes a lesser position because he's more qualified than any white person willing to take a job on that level.

Or the response was to just hire a colored person and show him as proof they were integrated.

Or the response was to drop someone into a slot totally unprepared and shake your head sadly when he fails.

Or a lawsuit, almost all of which were settled out of court, all such settlements saying there's no admission of guilt it's cheaper to buy you off.

And to set aside record numbers of civil rights complaints, so you can be rewarded with a federal judgeship…and who knows where that could take you…

And scapegoating.

And every time a Black person mentions there's still racism to be dealt with, he's reminded of how many Blacks are in the middle class, how much closer we've gotten to equal pay for equal work, like white people had a damn thing to do with it. Collectively, I mean. Some of y'all individually are da bomb. Most of you ain't bad and I really feel most of you mean no harm. But collectively "White People" have fought tooth and nail against leveling the playing field and everyone has been too fucking polite to just say it like that, to put the pattern together under everyone's nose.

And you want to know the truth, I'm tired of all the denial and all the weak-ass excuses folks make for it.

Broadening my base

As of this writing I have three right interesting comments from (I assume) regulars at Baldilocks. I don't want them all conflated with the original discussion I'm going to present and respond to them in separate posts.

Al Barger of Culpepper Log

Due to the length of this one, I'm inserting my comments in his.

Al Barger of Culpepper Log

People, people can't we all just get along?

P6, I suspect that I'm merely volunteering for some abuse here, but you seem to be a dozen kinds of twisted up in determination to find reasons to be crappy with whitey. "white folks' race issue is they don't want to be held responsible for racism." It's not that I don't want to be held responsible, but that I am not and will not be held liable for the crimes or perceived crimes of other people's ancestors.

Based on the link you inserted to begin your comment I would have to agree with you. You are volunteering for some abuse.

You are not being held personally liable. The institution, The United States of America, took specific, directed actions to obstruct and damage the social and economic infrastructure of the Black communities. The various state and local governments did the same to varying degrees in addition to complying with federally mandated obstructions. We were actively prevented from participating in the subsidization of economic growth provided "The Greatest Generation". And we still suffer the effects of this exclusion. The most recent proof can be had by considering Alan Greenspan's statement that the increased value of homeowner's equity made the recent economic downturn bearable. Black folks on the whole, largely because they were shunted to housing projects at the same time white Americans were having their home ownership subsidized, did not have that benefit.

That is the source of the liability. That is the group of entities that must respond. If you identify so strongly with any of them that you feel personally attacked, well, consider yourself personally attacked.

Further, guilting white folks is getting more and more difficult as we get generations past Jim Crow. That stuff was ugly, and a lot of white folks have - largely deservedly - felt great guilt for the ill treatment of blacks. However, no one below about the age of 45 or 50 has even childhood memories of Jim Crow.

http://www.prometheus6.org/archives/000198.html

Thus, very few 20 or 30 year old white guys have EVER oppressed a black man. I know I've never been mean to someone for being black, or insisted on a black person moving to the back of the bus. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone in my family.

In short, I for one am innocent, and simply refuse to accept a package of unearned guilt.

There's no such thing as a "level playing field." In the classic words of Tom Petty, "everybody's had to fight to be free."

In fact, we've pretty well dismantled institutional racism in America, and the big majority of people are trying to do right.

However, y'all got to meet us halfway. Recognize that some of the problems come from your side of the aisle. For example, I'm sympathetic to the classic complaint about black guys having trouble getting a taxi, but do you expect taxi drivers not to notice or take into account that young black men in this country have far higher crime rates than about any other group? Do you expect them to ignore reality in front of their faces and their own physical security?

This stuff has been addressed so many times by so many people I see no reason to do more than note in passing you said it.

I gently suggest that at this point black folks are most often their own worst enemies. I hasten to add that I am probably my own worst enemy.

I have not found much noticeable advantage in being white. The one real main benefit of being a heterosexual white male really seems to be that we are more held to standards. When I screw the pooch, I don't get to blame it on anyone else.

There is no advantage to being white. Being Black carries a social penalty.

The question should not be what the Republicans are doing for you, but what the Democrats are doing to you. Left wingers have spent many decades infantilizing minority groups, particularly black folks. They seem to have convinced a lot of people that they are weak and helpless, incapable of doing for themselves without the benificient help of the Democrat Party to stop the evil white man conspiracy against them.

This stuff has been addressed so many times by so many people I see no reason to do more than note in passing you said it.

"If white folks collectively can simply decide they have no responsibility for the racial problems we face then we are going to live with them forever."

Not necessarily. Those what are are screwing up can straighten up and fly right. Whitey CAN'T solve the problems of the black man.

And what is the race problem YOU have? Can Black people solve it? That's what is being put on us.

'if I have to take responsibility for the ills of the Black "race"'

Well, no, you, P6 do not have to take responsibility for the ills of all black people - just your own.

That's kind of you to say. You are in disagreement with the majority of society, though

By the way, what exactly would I, Al Barger, need to do or say in order be judged clean and not-racist?

And here we come to the crux of the matter.

The short answer is, if you don't know there may be nothing you can do.

Finally, a few words in defense of the lovely and fierce Miss Juliette: The issue shouldn't be how any words she says might be used, but whether her words are correct.

Juliette needs no defense. And her words are correct in the same way one can say that alcohol is wet and still know better than to throw a bucket of it on an open flame.

You're attributing FAR too much power to the opinions of whitey. The success or failure of a black man trying to break out of poverty will be largely based on their own actions, and will have little to do with what Al Barger or any other white guy thinks. Further, their success will have NOTHING to do with what whitey thinks about what Baldilocks thinks.

I attribute power to the actions whitey takes under the influence of whitey's opinions. You, by attributing NO power to whitey's opinion, are categorically wrong.

Um, you ARE saying whitey has no power, right? That racism among white people can not obstruct us, has no impact on us at all, right?

Let us conclude this evening's seminar on racial reconciliation by reciting together as one the wise words of Aunt Eller from "The Farmer and the Cowman"

I'm not saying that I'm better than anybody else
But I'll be danged if I ain't just as good

King of Fools

King of Fools:

Although I disagree with much of it, this has been a helpful discussion to read - primarily because it helps show the perspective that each side is coming from. That understanding is paramount in hearing what each side is trying to convey.

Here is one point from an individual white guy. I'm not pretending that I speak for the entire race, but here is what I see and why.

This statement really got under my skin and it took a bit of thinking to figure out exactly why:

All Americans have a race issue. Basically, white folks' race issue is they don't want to be held responsible for racism. Black people's race issue is they don't want to experience racism.

For me, this is an offensive concept because I never consciously think of myself as part of the 'white race'. I'm just an individual person. I relate with other individual humans, who I also don't view as members of a specific race.

There are many factors which influence how I view an individual: character, respect, work-ethic. Race is such a broad and meaningless canvas that it has no value to me as far as predicting behavior or character.

From the statement quoted above, you (P6) obviously view things through the framework of race. You see your own identity as something you share with other blacks and classify me with all other whites. A racial offense against another black person becomes an offense against you - an assertion which you have every right to make. The logical flipside is that a racial offense from another white person becomes an offense from me - an assertion which I do not accept.

I'm not saying that your perspective is wrong and mine is right, I'm just observing how different our worldviews are and how that interferes with communication and relationship. If I tell you that I'm not racist, you take issue with that because you have experienced unfair treatment from other members of the group I belong to.

The above statement is true in that I do not want to be held responsible for racism. But it is not because I'm denying that racial injustice exists or that I'm endorsing it. It is because I don't see myself connected in any way with the small-minded people who mistreat others because of the color of their skin.

There's a difference between "view[ing] things through the framework of race" and understanding that one must take into account that the number of people you will encounter that do NOT do so is small enough to consider a statistical glitch.

Separate yourself from the issue for a moment.

There is no one who will deny that racism still exists, structurally and personally. Would it be intelligent of me to act as though it doesn't?

Stay separate a little longer.

Under the circumstances of extant racism, under what conditions may I safely assume I am free of it?

Bringing it back to your comment, there are two things I find interesting. You agree with the fact of my statement but dispute a reason you assume supports it. And if you didn't identify with white folks you couldn't be offended by the statement.

Sarah from trying to grok

P6, I came over from Juliette's blog, so I suppose I'm one of those white LGF people she's cavorting with. I just wanted to say that I was particularly struck by this line in your last comment:

All Americans have a race issue. Basically, white folks' race issue is they don't want to be held responsible for racism. Black people's race issue is they don't want to experience racism.

I think that's a really good way of defining the situation. However, I -- and I'm sure other white people -- sometimes feel frustrated when it seems black people claim to "experience racism" in instances where it just doesn't seem to be true.

I admit that many people do need to grow up, both black and white. But I assure you that we white people constantly walk on eggshells to try to avoid offending the black people we work with, for fear of saying something wrong and being charged with "racism". Do black people walk on any similar eggshells?

I see things through different eyes than you, but in 2004 I see white people walking on those eggshells and black people pointing a lot of fingers. That's what I see going on; perhaps you can shed some light from your point of view.

Similar eggshells? OH yeah. But we're on eggshells over the collective reactions…things like making sure the guy who's following you in the store knows you're not a shoplifter. (I actually have a story I think is pretty funny. As teenagers my brother and I were walking around the furniture section of Sears while waiting for my mom. A guy was following us everywhere and I was feeling cranky that day. But my brother handled it… he opened up his jacket quickly and grabbed the back of a recliner like he was going to shove it in there. The guard started for a second, paused, then walked away shaking his head.)

But here's the root of the problem, as I see it. Racism is a power relationship, and we think personal measures are the means of eliminating it…the "we" has no racial division in it but this one phenomenon manifests differently in Black folks and white folks because of our different starting points.

Because our issue is the experience, many Black people feel being held personally responsible for structural issues is simply the result of those same structural issues. Because your issue is the responsibility and you're convinced racism is a personal affair, you take responsibility (and feel the liberal guilt) for things that are not your personal fault.

Knowing this may not help with your eggshell situation. We are, unfortunately, living in the transition period. From a historical perspective it may look like a mere point on a time line. But the fall of the Mayan civilization is just such a point, and to the individual Mayans involved each day was really, really long.

I knew the Washington Post wouldn't publish it

George Will, Too, Is Unchanged By Welfare Reform
Copyright © 2004
Earl Dunovant

Let me get this out of the way. I’m a progressive, a liberal, whatever you want to call it. I’m one of those people that think about public policy. As such, I’ve had to find conservatives whose basic integrity I could respect. George Will has been in that group of representatives of the right for some time. Today, though, I find myself disheartened by his editorial, Unchanged by Welfare Reform. It purports to be about Jason DeParle's book, "American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare." He calls it a “riveting drama”…perhaps he got so engrossed in the drama of those everyday lives he missed the point of the book.

NPR presented two shows on this book, both available online. If you have the time, please listen to The Fresh Air broadcast of September 20, 2004…it’s about 30 minutes. Listen to Mr. DeParle describe his own work. Then listen to The Weekend Edition broadcast of December 4, 2004, a joint interview with DeParle and Angela Jobe, one of the women he writes about. You will come away with a far different picture of the book and Ms. Jobe than the one planted by Mr. Will.

Beyond the misrepresentation of the book, there are other disturbing things about the editorial. He writes:

After the liberalization of welfare in the mid-1960s, the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers reached 50 by 1976 (it is almost 70 today), and within a generation the welfare rolls quadrupled. But DeParle says people mistakenly thought people like Jobe were organizing their lives around having babies to get a check. Actually, he says, their lives were too disorganized for that.

You cannot read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr. Will is implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due to the increase in Black children born out of wedlock. If asked was this his intent I'm sure he would say no. And yet you cannot read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr. Will is implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due to the increase in Black children born out of wedlock. And Mr. Will is a skilled writer.

DeParle started his project with all the same assumptions Mr. Will’s editorial promotes and came away rather disillusioned with them. No planned parenthood. No sense of entitlement. Each projected benefit realized had serious trade-offs. And a major point of the book is that, even given an ideal candidate like Ms. Jobe, their situation improves only marginally, barely visibly.

I understand Conservatives feel welfare encourages dependency but as a graduate of the program I assure you it is not the lifestyle you aspire to as a child. But if the hardest working person you know is at 102% of the poverty level and you’re at 98%, what is your motivation? Consider the possibility the bottom is not so much attractive as sticky…that getting off the bottom when you’re poorly equipped is difficult enough to make one adapt in the name of efficiency. Or realism. Or fatalism.

In addition, what Mr. Will calls disorganization is a lack of resources. I understand his confusion; “people like Jobe” organize things differently than a person that is comfortably ensconced in the mainstream, to deal with things a person who has been essentially comfortable all their lives can't even see. I can imagine someone who has never lived such a life thinking, "What the hell is that about?"

Mr. Will also says:

What can help organize lives, at least those that are organizable, is work. The requirements of work -- mundane matters such as punctuality, politeness and hygiene -- are essential to the culture of freedom.

…which says a lot about what he thinks of “people like Jobe,” I would say. (Hygiene?)

And may explain why he so badly misrepresented the book.

Race Problems

In May 1997, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Randall Kennedy titled, "My Race Problem -- And Ours." In it he sought to explain why he feels the entire idea of racial solidarity is absurd.

WHAT is the proper role of race in determining how I, an American black, should feel toward others? One response is that although I should not dislike people because of their race, there is nothing wrong with having a special -- a racial -- affection for other black people. Indeed, many would go further and maintain that something would be wrong with me if I did not sense and express racial pride, racial kinship, racial patriotism, racial loyalty, racial solidarity -- synonyms for that amalgam of belief, intuition, and commitment that manifests itself when blacks treat blacks with more solicitude than they do those who are not black.

Some conduct animated by these sentiments has blended into the background of daily routine, as when blacks who are strangers nonetheless speak to each other -- "Hello," "Hey," "Yo" -- or hug or give each other a soul handshake or refer to each other as "brother" or "sister." Other manifestations are more dramatic. For example, the Million Man March, which brought at least 500,000 black men to Washington, D.C., in 1995, was a demonstration predicated on the notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society.

At the time I was active on their discussion board, and the article generated quite a bit of talk. Professor Kennedy was to join the forum. I posted the following in response to his article and he never showed up…can't say whether or not there's a connection there.

I am a Black partisan--one of those people that actively choose to accept racial kinship. My position is simple and straightforward-every event that affects Black people affects me. Therefore there is a connection between myself and other Black people that I must respond to in some fashion. What the mainstream thinks of Black people in general becomes my starting point in any new situation. My feelings of kinship with Black folks represents my recognition that my fate is linked to that of everyone else of visible African descent and my feelings of loyalty represents my recognition that the fate of everyone else of visible African descent is linked to mine.

In mainstream examinations of African-American issues, I expect to see the "-American" part acknowledged and the "African" part downplayed, or given a curt nod at best. This is a distinct improvement from the days where Black people lost their lives for trying to claim a small part of the "-American," but still frustrating at times. So when I saw Randall Kennedy's article "My Race Problem-And Ours", I approached it with what I hope was an open mind. I hoped a Yale law professor would be able, at last, to coherently explain to the mainstream the what and why of Black people's recent tendency to aggregate.

In a way I was impressed with the article. The message of the article, far more than the weak justification for his position, demonstrated in an almost self-referential way that he does indeed eschew pride in, and reject kinship with Black people. Unfortunately, for the Black people under discussion he misses the point entirely. Also, I don't find his argument rigorous enough.
The first problem is the critical one. Mr. Kennedy says:

"Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally or politically satisfactory."

1. physiological
2. security and safety
3. love and feelings of belonging
4. competence, prestige, and esteem
5. self-fulfillment

According to Maslow, one must be substantially secure in each stage in order to successfully begin work on the next because each stage builds on the previous one. I submit that the quest for intellectual, moral or political satisfaction is a stage four motivation that one can only indulge in after achieving a certain amount of physical and psychological security. Getting past level three is difficult for everyone, but Black people get stuck more frequently due to the emotional impact of environmental factors. When you're the Black person everyone is surprised to see, when your mere presence makes folks nervous, each startled expression can chip away at your feelings of belonging.

The current social attitude toward Black people, translated into Maslow's terms, seems to be "If you embrace America as it is, you'll have your stage three needs satisfied and can move on to stage four." The problem with this is that feelings of belonging are not self generated-America would have to embrace Black people back. Until America is ready to do this, it is fruitless at best and foolish at worst to expect Black people to release the things that do embrace them. At any rate, this missing of the point was the first strike against my personally accepting his argument as valid.

Mr. Kennedy also says:

"I eschew racial pride because of my conception of what should properly be the object of pride for an individual"

I confess that my reaction to his invoking Frederick Douglass in this way was a bit emotional, as Douglass is among my personal heroes. Still, it is as difficult for me to imagine someone familiar with his life and work doubting Frederick Douglass' pride in what and who he was, as it is to imagine Dr. King as a mere dreamer of peace.

His next point, that inherited status is often a substitute for personal achievement, is unfortunately positioned--in the midst of an article about the attitude that Black people should take toward each other, the jibe strikes one as specifically targeting Black people. However, judicious reading shows that he makes reference to "people" without racial delimiters. Therefore the implied insult to those that "made inherited group status an honorific credential" applies as well to The Daughters of the Confederacy, B'nai B'rith, the snobby country club set, everyone who ever wanted their daughter to marry someone of the same religion and/or ethnic background, any college admission board that gives any benefit whatsoever to children of alumni, every participant in a St. Patrick's Day or Columbus Day parade, and everyone survives off inherited wealth. At any rate, I enjoyed reading the paragraph, even though as an unnecessary aside it did nothing to advance to point of the article. It showed the brother can still play the dozens.

Unfortunately, by attempting in the last paragraph of the section to justify his eschewal of racial pride, Mr. Kennedy returns it to the realm of things one must judge rather than simply accept. He says he recognizes "an important virtue in this assertion of the value of black life," but cannot support it because:

"within some of the forms this assertiveness has taken are important vices-including the belief that because of racial kinship blacks ought to value blacks more highly than others."

I must also weigh vice against virtue, and let me be clear that it will be a partisan judgment. America is, and always has been, a pastiche of cultures. Assuming Black people's pride, kinship and loyalty caused them to aggregate in the fashion of other ethnics, America should survive. Black people are dealt with in that fashion now anyway. For Black people in particular, it makes it simpler to resolve stage four issues (competence, prestige, and esteem) if positive ideas are associated with the group through which they resolve our stage three issues. Though my judgment will change if conditions change, on balance I must judge racial pride to be less damaging to Black people, and therefore to America, than the lack of it. Strike two.

Mr. Kennedy begins the section "Racial Kinship" with:

"I reject the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim… the unencumbered self."

As a Black man I can certainly feel the attraction of this unencumbered self. It is a goal in keeping with the American worship of the individual. However, as a rational man, I must question the possibility of the self so described. Humans… or at least the bodies we live in… are social animals. As such, we must have socially defined aims and attractions, no matter what our personal desires on the issue. And as a practical matter as long as one lives in a society, what one chooses, not to mention what one chooses from, is largely determined by culture and tradition. Sadly, I must relegate the unencumbered self to the same category as the unicorn-a fabulous beast with magical powers that looks like it ought to be able to exist.

It is true that often we receive unexpected gain from attempting the impossible, so perhaps pursuit of the unencumbered self could result in some benefit. I find it difficult, however, to be sanguine about freedom from "moral ties antecedent to choice." When you choose your morality, on what is the choice based? If choice is made based on desire (which it must be, as needs are not optional and therefore not a choice) and given freedom from "moral ties antecedent to choice," I can see no way of avoiding the conclusion that fulfilling one's desire is the highest moral act possible. All your morals will be bent to that end. That idea flies in the face of almost every religious and philosophical teaching in human history… though it's totally in keeping with the market philosophy at the heart of American (hence, world) culture.

Therefore, I do not need to further defend my feelings of racial kinship because of Mr. Kennedy's analysis. Instead, I find on rational grounds that rejecting racial kinship does not achieve the goal Mr. Kennedy set forth. Only one of Mr. Kennedy's two stated requirements (personal absolution from the burdens such kinship brings) is achieved, as the other goal (the unencumbered self) is impossible for a social animal to attain. I also reject it on visceral grounds: my distaste for the necessary elevation of desire over morality to which the unencumbered self must lead. Strike three.

I will not, however, comment on the moral judgments Mr. Kennedy uses to rout the subsequent array of straw men without knowing the nature of the desire that led him to this morality. I am willing to suspend moral judgment on those conclusions because in the end Mr. Kennedy seems quite the reasonable man. He makes a number of fair observations. For instance, the fact that "black problems" are actually "our problems" is a message that needs to be heard correctly by everyone who suddenly found themselves included when we changed "black" to "our". The behaviors he models based on his principles are quite acceptable in their net effect, so far as they go. The problem is that a person that rejects morality antecedent to choice cannot logically object to any choice on moral grounds.

I suspect Mr. Kennedy, a self-avowed liberal intellectual, of noble intentions in writing the article. I believe he intended to build a case for a viewpoint that does not specify race yet renders racial justice. But to suggest Black people should actually hold these positions is, I believe, a bad idea… telling people that Black folks need to do something no other ethnic group has been called on to do, i.e., become a nation of unencumbered selves, is not the way to convince them Black people are just like them, only darker.

In the final section of the article, "Beyond Racial Loyalty," Mr. Kennedy anticipates in response to his position a statement that Black people must stand together because all the other ethnic groups are doing so. And rightly so, as he conceded earlier in the article:

"currently the dominant form of racial kinship in American life, the racial kinship that has been the best organized and most destructive, is the racial kinship mobilized in behalf of whites"

his fear of a stultifying effect within the race (as, by his observation, racial pride tends to stunt intellectual development). The calls for loyalty made by Black nationalists (and he names Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan) implies to him a threat of punishment against those Blacks who don't toe the line. Yet I don't think a single case of either these men or their organizations initiating violence can be documented. And the hyperbole of Mr. Kennedy's phrasing not withstanding, all groups have the concept of group loyalty. Though one may object to the reason these groups assembled, logically one can not object to their acting like all other groups once they have assembled. Finally, as a point of personal curiosity, I would like to know which white purveyors of racial pride he would point out as stunted intellects.
his observation that the most admirable efforts to overcome racial oppression in the United States did not "merely" seek the advancement of a particular group. Assuming he is correct, that does not mean that the most effective efforts to overcome racial oppression in the United States did not "merely" seek the advancement of a particular group. By way of example, I direct your attention to the Irish, the Jewish and Chinese peoples. It also disregards the tremendous efforts of Black people before the Civil War to secure their own freedom, to buy the freedom of their spouses and relatives, to escape, to write and teach and explain the evils of slavery, often at the risk of identifying themselves well enough that they could legally be pressed back into slavery.

Since the response Mr. Kennedy anticipates is the starting point from which his argument was unable to dissuade me, I too will close with a simple statement of faith based on several observations. He made two observations and one statement of faith; I will make four observations and two statements of faith:

In the USofA, one has power to the extent that one has a constituency (Ralph Reed has discovered both edges of that particular sword).
Among self-identified social groups, only Black people have inoffensiveness and support of other social groups as a requirement for official representatives of the group.
As long as Africans and their descendants have been on this continent, all they have ever sought was freedom to join the cultural and political body of the mainstream. They have never sought to take that which others claimed, but merely to participate in decisions that affect their property and seek their own destiny unobstructed.
So far, every time an identifiable group of Black people has made significant progress toward that goal, there was a backlash from some other group.

Revisiting an old topic

This is going to be long, because I'm prefacing the actual post with a previous posts. I need you to encounter a few concepts first so it was this or post things backward. Please note that all text contained within the brown borders is quoted, and not originally written by me. The links are still live, so you can read them in their original context if you wish

… and white people can't be n-----s

Turn down your verbal sensitivities for a minute. I'm gonna use some bad words. You have been warned.

Ampersand at Alas, A Blog, still in deep conversation over the question of Can Men Be Feminists? quotes a comment (whew!)

Men can be affected by prejudice against because they are male. This is not sexism.

Similarly, white people can be affected by prejudice against because they are white. This is not racism.

Sexism and racism are more than individual actions -- they are systemic. Without the systemic aspect, it is not sexism or racism, it is prejudice.

I do not support prejudice in any of it's manifestations -- but I do and will recognize the difference between individual prejudice and systemic sexism/racism.

and comments himself:

I'd prefer to say "both people of color and whites are sometimes victims of individual racism, but only people of color experience systematic racism." I think the important distinction to be made isn't between "prejudice" and "racism," but between things that happen on a individual level and things that happen on a systematic level.

and

Bean and I don't disagree on substance here - merely on which words to use. In my experience - and maybe Bean has found otherwise - my wording is more useful for explaining feminist and anti-racist positions in everyday life. Most people - especially people who have never taken a women's studies class - will find it easier to understand the distinction between "individual-level racism" and "systematic racism," but will resist making the distinction Bean suggests between "prejudice" and "racism."

(Why do people resist it? Because no one likes being told they don't know what everyday words mean. To ask people to distinguish between "individual racism" and "systematic racism" isn't asking them to accept new definitions for words they already know. But to tell someone that someone who says "all white people are stupid and shouldn't be allowed to breed" isn't a racist is to tell them that they don't know what the word "racist" means. And that bugs people, understandably.)

Now, I refered to this discussion before, just to say I was feeling the original comment. And I was willing to let it go at that.

But you know, it does bug people to be told they don't know what racism is. It really, really does. Especially if you see it, oh, at least three days out of the week (yes, brothers and sisters, I know … I'm being charitable, though). You may not feel it directed at you everyday, but you see it. You DO feel it on occasion, no matter what your class or social standing.

And I guarantee you, you best-est, closest Black friend who grew up down the block from you, when fresh (read: within five days) from one of those racist encounters, has to fight down the urge to pimp-slap you when you say "Are you suuuuuure?" or "You're being oversensitive."

Ampersand made a critically important statement: "Bean and I don't disagree on substance here - merely on which words to use." Having this level of understanding make it possible to cut through the fog and find allies. But to be clear, there is a reason for the disagreement on terminology.

Um, here come the bad words.

There's no such thing as a Black racist, any more that there's any white niggers. You can use the terms those ways as a figure of speech, a metaphor about symbols. But each term is specific to its respective race. See, "nigger" was created especially for Black folks in the particular condition our people were in. It is historically associated with us and represents a condition and set of expectations we desperately avoid association with, or succumb to. Then you have racist … not crakka, honky or any of that other weak shit. "Racist" was created especially for white folks in the particular condition they were in. It is historically associated with them and represents a condition and set of expectations they desperately avoid association with, or succumb to.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but "racist" is the only word that makes white people as crazy as "nigger" makes Black people. It makes them crazier. White people don't want to hear you talk about ANY white person being racist. They'll start telling you how many Black friends they have (I was going to quote an example from the net, but nevermind).

And lets look at how Black people have dealt with "nigger." We denied it. Said there ARE no niggers. Well, you see how well that worked… The we tried to intellectualize it away. I heard people say:

You dont have to be Black to be a nigger. A nigger is just a low class person. There's niggers in all races. There's white niggers, Porto Rican niggers, (that's how we used to say it back then, "porto.") Chinese niggers …

Then we embraced because we couldn't escape it.

So it has gone with "racist." White folks denied it. Said there ARE no racists. Well, you see how well that worked, (though they still working on it) … Then they tried to intellectualize it away. I heard people say:

You dont have to be white to be a racist. A racist is just a low class person. There's racists in all races. There's black racists , Poto Rikkin racists, Chinese racists …

The Republicans are in full embrace mode.

So let's recap. "Niggerism" is the degraded condition common to Black people in the USofA prior to the legal end of Jim Crow. It was forced upon the culture to make it fit the demands of a "racially" distorted economy and political system. Too many still suffer from it, and these people are called "niggers." Racism is the degraded condition common to white people in the USofA prior to the legal end of Jim Crow. It was forced upon the culture to make it fit the demands of a "racially" distorted economy and political system. Too many still suffer from it, and these people are called "racists."

You may now return to your accustomed level of racial sensitivity. Thank you.

Mac Diva's

rewrote it

LATER: I think I need to be clear. This is NOT a statement on race relations. There is NO statement on who hates or is capable of hating based on the rather ill-defined concept of race in any of this post, particularly not in the text that follows.

want

Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin [PDF]

Installing a negro in your head - Comments

one of these days we're going to have a terminology summit.

fyi, here are my terms.

whitefolks - average american who knows he's white and knows what it means.

blackfolks - average american who knows he's black and knows what it means.

institutional racism: pretty much equals what you call 'systemic
racism'. i prefer institutional because 'the system' is everything.
institutions can be isolated. clearly institutional racism at dennys
can't (and shouldn't) be cured the same way as institutional racism at
nationwide insurance. but they can be cured. you want to talk about
curing 'the system', where do you start? when do you finish?

individual racism: people believe in an idea or they don't. it's simple
enough to investigate that despite the fact that nobody ever does.
people generally don't bother to separate the idea from the act. so
when somebody says 'prejudiced' i say that's just soft pedalling
squishy language and excuse making. can you call somebody a nigger
without believing black people are inferior? of course. can you think
that black people are inferior without ever calling them a nigger? of
course. can you believe blackfolks are inferior without ever doing
anything racist? yes, yes, yes.

i say it's the idea that counts. it allows me to distinguish between intent and effect.

it's also possible to be a bigot because of institutional racism
without ever asking yourself hardball questions about whether or not
you are racist. i think this is the touchy area where a hell of a lot
of whitefolks are. they have no idea what questions to ask, are afraid
of the answers and won't dare ask anybody who's not white. so they
either go ass-backwards into discussions saying 'i know i'm the ofay
white racist but..' or start off with stupid shit like 'everybody is a
little racist...'. understandable, dumb, probably not excuseable,
especially since my answers have been on the net for as long as they
have.

again that's a lot of nuance for people who are generally just
interested in name-calling, or avoiding being name-called. but you and
i know the net and name-calling is where most people are at.

the term you are missing is 'white supremacy'. black people can be
white supremacists. that's exactly what an uncle tom is, a black person
(fits into blackfolks) that believes whitefolks are superior.
similarly, a 'banana' is an asian who wants to be white because she
believes whites to be superior. yes virginia there are coconuts too.

here you can demonstrate that millions more americans believe in
various forms of white supremacy than black supremacy (if that's the
point you want to make). furthermore, you make racism something that's
not 'owned' by blackfolks, which is an idea gets under everybody's
skin, especially mine.

i'm not sure i get your idea of reversing the races, or putting a negro
in whitefolks heads, so i won't say that i think it's not helpful until
i get it.

but my prej

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 5:14 am | #

my prejudice says it won't work. analogies don't work. role reversals don't work. just deal with the shit head on.

15% of the people who respond to my poll come out straight racist. not
just bigoted, but answering 'true' questions like: 'races are naturally
antagonistic' and 'each race has its unique message to the world'.

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 5:18 am

As usual commenting on your comment could become a whole post.

I'm assuming when you say it won't work you see the intent of this pot
as challenging racism or changing someone's mind. It's not. The intent
is to communicate a specific subjective experience. I admit that's
somewhat disingenuous…given the current state of discussion and the
nature of humans there's a pretty specific set of probable reactions
and responses a successful effort ould bring about. But my effort is
seriously to bring a new piece of data into the discussion.

To do this I only needed to isolate a couple of specific ideas, The
only difinitions in the repeated post that were mine were of nigger,
racist, niggerism and racism. Stated raw because we react to them raw.
All the elegant discussion is had a step back from the gut check we all
make when we're hip-deep in it.

A terminology summit is an interesting idea—I came close enough to
saying "amusing idea" that I needed to get this in here. For my part, I
generally find it easiest and best to understand and assume the
terminology of the folks I'm talking to. I'm pretty good at it and it
hands me my best tools and weapons. Ed "Darkstar" Brown knows me from
(what used to be) the Afroam-L mailing list and can confirm this.

Finally, for now, I note you find the subjective (idea) more important
than the objective (action) and use objective measures to gauge things.
I find the objective more important—more accurately, I don't give a
damn about the subjective as long as the objective is correct. The most
useful tool to give folks to keep their objective in check (most folks do want to) is a yardstick they can accurately use.

Prometheus 6

Where
do asians fit into all of this? Because there was a lot of talk about
black and white. But Asians also play a pivotal role in many of the
major "race" events in the last 25 years.

Look at the LA riots. Many white owned stores were passed by during the
riots while the Korean owned stores were torn apart. (Site: "Blue
Dreams" for more on relations between the africana, caucasian, and
asian communities of LA)

A lot of class reductionists use the Asian American situation as an
arguement for why we shouldn't talk about race but should only focus on
class. I strongly disagree with this, but i'm curious how you work
communities such as the Korean American community in LA into this
system?

I understand how koreans can't be racist towards whites. But would you
allow koreans to be racist towards african communities? And can
Africans be racist towards Koreans or is that out of bounds?

Also, I worry about using analogies for racism that involve amounts of
people. Because this lets people say "So once there is certain number
of black people in the US, racism will disappear" - which is completely
untrue. I think the most important points should be "Your bosses are
Black. Your kid's teachers are Black."

brian | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 11:20 am

I had to add the following to the post:

LATER: I think I need to be clear. This is NOT a statement on race relations. There is NO
statement on who hates or is capable of hating based on the rather
ill-defined concept of race in any of this post, but in particular not
in the text that follows.

What I'm doing is communicating the subjective experience of being
Black, independant of economic class. Being an actual countable
minority of the population is an integral part of that experience.

I can't speak to the subjective experience of being Korean or Asian in the USofA.

Prometheus 6 |

ok i get you. yes and i think putting a negro in the head of whitefolks helps to convey the subjective experience.

i tend to think that white supremacy is 80% of the problem and the
varying degrees by which all people buy into it determines the
relationships between people of color.

it's the same brand of racial prejudices. for example. i don't think
that koreans have come up with an entire new set of stereotypes to
apply to blackfolks. white supremacy says 'niggers steal'.
anti-semitism says 'kikes cheat'. koreans don't come up with new names
for blackfolks or jews and attach different values.

but in addition to this there is a layer which is specific ethnicity by
ethnicity. i would say that ethnic rivalries tend to be more specific
beefs. they don't translate nationally. for example, the blacks vs jews
conflict exemplified by the crown heights fights in new york city did
not resonate in los angeles. blacks and jews here in los angeles simply
don't have a negative history. but the issues between the lubavitchers
and black muslims is legendary there.

btw. darkstar and i go waaay back. we need to get him into the
blogosphere. actually, visioncircle.org is my multi-author blog. feel
welcome to put your more interesting and authoritative stuff there. if
things work out, it could be the subjective spot where negrophile is
the reporting. a long time ago several of us dreamed of this, we called
it 'higher ground'. it was lester kenyatta spence, ed brown, art mcgee,
michael r. hicks and myself. hell, i still have the logos. lester is
already posting regularly at visioncircle. i'm going to chase down the
other bros. thanks for reminding me.

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 2:16 pm

Gah!
Racism is prejudice or bias against anyone/any group by virtue of their
race -- which may also be directly related to their ethnicity and
country of origin.

I see it on ALL sides. Whites against peoples of ALL colors; peoples of all colors against whites and other peoples of color.

I've seen Koreans biased against anyone not Korean - pick another
race/ethnic group/country of origin, I've seen it. I've worked with
corporate-sponsored internal diversity groups as a consultant, watched
these groups compete against each other because of racism. GAH!!!

NO ONE GROUP HAS EXCLUSIVE DOMAIN OVER RACISM!!! YOU -- ALL YOU HUMANS -- ARE CAPABLE OF IT!!!

What we need to do is remove race/ethnicity/country of origin as
delimiters between people, see it for what it is -- physical responses
to environment (genetics) and arbitrary social constructs (memetics),
both of which are embedded in the smallest amount of human genetic and
memetic material. The question becomes, which genes and which memes
will rule this earth?

And then step back and take another look: the survival of all genetic
and memetic material (human and otherwise) requires the complete
co-operation of the entire human genome.

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 2:49 pm

Cobb:

You mentioned SCAA a while back, so I figured you knew Darkstar. Art is
administering the remains of Afroam-L, whose death was caused by a
pathogen I unwittingly unleashed years ago.

I believe I have Michael Hick's address around too. Last known as of
February this year. I just sent him email with our blog addresses.

Prometheus 6

Rayne:

Gah! Racism is prejudice or bias against anyone/any group by virtue
of their race -- which may also be directly related to their ethnicity
and country of origin.

I feel you, sis. And for purposes of constructive engagement, I'd work with you and your definition.

For purposes of this post, I'm taking that word, and the word "nigger,"
away from you and everyone else. Within this post, the thing you
describe is known as "race hatred." And it's not under descussion.

There is NO statement on who hates or is capable of hating based on the rather ill-defined concept of race in any of this post.

Neither is there a description of the problem nor prescription for its
solution. There is only the verbalization of a specific subjective
experience, the essential experience of being Black independant of
class, economic resources or any other quality.

Prometheus 6

So...the
"n-word" is a bad piece of memetic material, bad in that was
deliberately constructed from other bad memetics (racism). There are
other equally bad memetic material, like the negative words for Asian
and Hispanic/Latin peoples or peoples of non-Anglo origin (chink,
zipper-head, wetback, wop, and so on). Humans across the genome use
them against each other - period.

We who are not black cannot know exactly what the qualia of being black
is, any more than you can know the qualia of being Asian or female. The
common denominator here is that none of us can know exactly of the
qualia of other's lives, cannot share the same human experience with
any degree of certainty. That is the unifying trait of humanity.

You cannot know what it is to be the only woman walking into a board
room filled with male executives -- no matter the color of woman, no
matter the color of the board members. You can hazard a guess to the
relative qualia of discomfort. We all of us share that as humans.

We need to agree that we are all capable of sharing this discomfort,
and agreeing that certain memetic material is inherently bad -- highly
flawed, buggy social software -- that should belong to NO ONE. That one
person's/group's negative label(bad meme) can easily be used against
others.

As an example, let's use the MSBLaster virus; just because it only
strikes MS WinOS users doesn't make it right for Mac users to use the
label against them (say, "viral-loaded WinScum"), nor even for MS users
to use it against others or themselves. The virus is bad -- we need to
work to be rid of it. It could just as easily be turned against those
not affected; kill the viral meme, regardless of who is affected.

Same with all other bad memetic material. It works against the entire genome.

The question is, how do we purge bad memes without affecting good memes? How do people kill memes, the "n-word" among them?

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 5:02 pm

Okay, Rayne. I'll work in memes with you.

The common denominator here is that none of us can know exactly of
the qualia of other's lives, cannot share the same human experience
with any degree of certainty. That is the unifying trait of humanity.

You're wrong. We all share a single human experience. What this post
offers is a sharing of the Black experience, by using white experience.
I haven't asked anyone to give up their viewpoint. I've asked them to
insert their viewpoint into the situation Black people find themselves
in.

For instance, I DO know what it is to be the only Black
person in a board meeting full of white executives. It's a easy
parallel to you woman's example.

There's a huge difference between saying you don't
understand (which, due to lack of experience, is forgivable) and saying
you CAN'T understand. When you say we can't share experiences, you
actually declare there's a absolute difference between us. You can't
build unity that way, understand?

The question is, how do we purge bad memes without affecting good memes? How do people kill memes, the "n-word" among them?

You don't...you're asking for light without shadow, sis. The best you
can do is change the context in which they operate. Look at how the
"liberal" meme was changed. How, in fact, the "conservative" and
"libertarian" memes were changed.

In fact, initially there was only Black and White under consideration
when dealing in race and racism. Your definition of racism represents a
casting of the original meme into a wider context.

Those "bad memes" you mentioned are not the root memes, you see. They
are values assigned to "identity memes" (to coin a phrase on the fly).

What is needed is either a context where the values are not invoked,
one where the difference in identity memes are seen to have positive
value sufficiently compelling as to be universally accepted or a
framework that offsets the negative values sometimes attached to the
identity memes.

We still have gills, fer chrissake. They operate in a prenatal
environment and as our physical developmental context changes they
change into lungs. But we don't get rid of them.

Tha arrow of time points in one direction only. The goal you want to
accomplish can't be done by uncreating ideas. We must grow to the point
that the ideas are insignificant parts of the whole.

Prometheus 6

Earl, you wrote:

"I find the objective more important—more accurately, I don't give a
damn about the subjective as long as the objective is correct. The most
useful tool to give folks to keep their objective in check (most folks
do want to) is a yardstick they can accurately use."

I find this really interesting and would like it if you expanded on it.
What I hear you saying is that we can't control our gut responses to
one another, but we can control how we behave to one another. Is that
what you mean? Cause you know I am still working out my "liberal white
guilt" [said with tongue in cheek, but we know there's more than a
grain of truth in it] and I am wondering to what degree it is possible
to purge myself of those knee jerk split-second bursts of emotion at
the synapses.

Ibyx | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 10:41 pm

how do memetics and genetics and qualia translate into something that is tangible to the law and politics?

if these are tools to help us understand how the ideas flow and how to
rid them from our minds, that's all good. but my point about the belief
in ideas had everything to do with the fact that people will be
suseptible to particular political arguments and will act on those
ideas in what they percieve is their self-interest.

the racism inherent in jim crow was not a pervasive idea because of
memetics. it was a pervasive idea because it was the law, and police,
judges and elected officials enforced it. nobody bothered to map
genetics anything onto negroes, people knew one when they saw one.

i want to know how understanding memetics helps us make a uniform hate
crime standard across 50 states. if it cannot, then i have little use
for it. i want to know how thinking about the qualia of whitefolks
helps us turn around the politics of proposition 54 and why that way of
thinking about the problem makes better sense than the kind of writing wood is doing.

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.17.03 - 11:06 pm

ibyx:

What I hear you saying is that we can't control our gut responses to
one another, but we can control how we behave to one another. Is that
what you mean?

Nope. I'm saying I can't control other people's gut reaction so I focus
on their objective behavior. As Cobb said, a person can believe Black
people are inferior without ever performing a racist act. My position
is, as long as they don't perform a racist act I don't care what their
gut reaction is because it has no impact on me.

I may go into white liberal guilt later.

Prometheus 6

Cobb:

i want to know how understanding memetics helps us make a uniform
hate crime standard across 50 states. if it cannot, then i have little
use for it.

You're going to have little use for it, then.

You're looking to change the results within the current paradigm.
Memetics is an attempt to change the paradigm, to swap it out. As it
happens, I don't think it'll work for the majority of people…it's kind
of like expecting a kid to learn jazz saxaphone by studying musical
history. Which is not to say it's a useless field to study, but you
gotta learn to play the instruments before studying the various
stylings can help you expand your repetoire.

Prometheus 6

memetically speaking (i think) there's one tool i have found useful.

the idea is to defeat essentialism by making the distinction between
the look of race from the meaning of race. this is useful in the
instruction of pro-colorblind people to get over the myth that
'mentioning race just reinforces racism.' they suffer the cognitive
error of believing that one always means the same (putatively negative)
things when one says 'black'.

the instructive device is to sing 'amazing grace' to the tune of the theme to gilligan's island.

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.18.03 - 1:56 pm

this doesnt' get body one out of the ghetto, but it's always fun to do.

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.18.03 - 1:57 pm

Hmm. I see for Cobb a need for definitions.

Meme = a transferrable, replicable piece of knowledge, information, concept or idea

Memetics = the aggregate of memes and the study of the same

Think of genes as hardware, memes as software. Genes can be modified to
a degree, as can hardware, but there are design limitations. Memes
change modified and suppressed to a larger degree than genes because
they are intangibles.

A society's culture, its laws, its knowledge, even its religions are
all memetic. We learn them, and pass them on once acquired. We can
change memes, just as we've grown in knowledge over the centuries,
changed our laws accordingly, changed our worldviews.

Prometheus believes that memes, like genes, can only be suppressed and
not deleted. I'm not certain of that; I think of the ancient Egyptian
rulers who struck out the history of others who pissed them off
royally, literally removing them ("so let it be written, so let it be
done"). They are no longer part of our conscious history; we struggle
to know anything of them. Can we not do the same, refuse to own any
part of racism including sub-memes/meme-lets like racial epithets and
labels? Can we not excise them and leave our future heirs and assigns
struggling to piece it into the historic meme?

Think of bad memes like racism as a type of virus that is infectious;
it has certain limitations of infection, a fairly specific rate of
contagion. We have a lot of examples of "cures" or "healing"; cannot we
not get rid of this meme instead of just telling each other, "Hey, you
don't know what it's like inside this particular meat suit."

[Promotheus: my guess is if you and I both walk into a board room
filled with white male board members, none of them will expect YOU to
get coffee for them. You still have the advantage of capital that comes
with your gender. The single unifying theme is that every individual
human experience is different; we have the opportunity to learn from
each other to our mutual benefit if we learn to transcend and override
the negative social software someone else transferred to us.]

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.18.03 - 1:59 pm

the instructive device is to sing 'amazing grace' to the tune of the theme to gilligan's island.

THAT is about the funniest thing I've read all month.

I think of the ancient Egyptian rulers who struck out the history of
others who pissed them off royally, literally removing them ("so let it
be written, so let it be done"). They are no longer part of our
conscious history; we struggle to know anything of them. Can we not do
the same, refuse to own any part of racism including
sub-memes/meme-lets like racial epithets and labels?

If we were a command culture, like the Egyptians, a Deocracy, then the
God we worshiped could issue such a command. But that's still done out
of HIS self-interest, and still would take at least a generation to
accomplish. It would still have holes in it. And as long as a social
structure that implements the division existed…for instance some
pharoahs tried to eliminate the worship of other dieties only to have
them return after the pharoah's death…it will fail.

That's Cobb's point. Refusing to use the memes would have pretty much
the same effect as Proposition 54...racism would continue, unspoken of,
unreflected on because the social structure and mechanisms assume
racial division. You are at a strategic loss by refusing to recognize
those divisions are active.

my guess is if you and I both walk into a board room filled with
white male board members, none of them will expect YOU to get coffee
for them. You still have the advantage of capital that comes with your
gender.

And your "get the coffee mechanism" applies to me when I'm in a
department store. In what context do you find yourself rendered
invisible as I have been as a consultant in board meetings? I'm sure
you can find a parallel.

You say the only thing we share is that we can't share. You don't see a problem with that?

Prometheus 6

And THAT response is a PERFECT example of the inability of humans to have a Vulcan Mind Meld.

When I talk about the ancient Egyptian culture as an example of writing
out a meme, I'm talking about this specific act of writing out the meme
-- not the expansion of the example to mean that we, a modern
democratic (allegedly) society, should emulate Egyptian culture to a
"T". It's the specific act of using agency,
actively choosing the meme to use rather than allowing the meme to use
us, actively choosing to suppress a meme to the point of extinction. It
is this particular point of success which I look to, not the entire
culture. (Christ, next you'll think I'm into embalming and cat
worship...)

As for the example of humans' inability to share "qualia": I'll use Damali Ayo's exhibit flesh-tone series #1
as an example. A fairly random sampling of humans are used to interpret
the color of human flesh, with widely varying results. If the
interpretation of flesh-tones is this broad, what of anything else we
humans experience that is not a singular point of reference, what of
intangibles?

We have to agree to disagree -- and that in itself is a form of agreement, of contract, of sharing, communion.

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.18.03 - 3:28 pm

And THAT response is a PERFECT example of the inability of humans to have a Vulcan Mind Meld.

Be nice.

When I talk about the ancient Egyptian culture as an example of
writing out a meme, I'm talking about this specific act of writing out
the meme&helliplIt is this particular point of success which I look
to, not the entire culture. (Christ, next you'll think I'm into
embalming and cat worship...)

I haven't said you were suggesting we do it. You must receive if you wish to be received.

What I'm saying is the only way that will work is if we were a command
culture along the lines of Egypt. That or universal agreement, which
you will not get as long as a class of people benefit from the cultural
structures that assume racial division. More, the written isn't the
thought. Get rid of a specific word without getting rid of the thought
and we'll just make another word.

The fact is, this entire discussion of memes has nothing to do with the
original point of the post, which I stated. You fixate on memes, so
(hoping we'd get to a point where you were receptive) I chose to work
in your zone for a minute.

But let me ask you...how can you expect to deal in effective memes for
a viewpoint you have no experience with? You want to tell folks how to
get out of the house when you don't even want to examine the floorplan.

You CAN understand the subjective viewpoint of Black folks. I have
given you the instructions on how to see it…at which point you will be
no more able to describe it than I, which is why I didn't try to describe it.

When you have the means to understand, agreeing to disagree isn't a form of agreement, it's a form of avoidance.

Prometheus 6

as
soon as i checked ayo's site, i could smell the adrian piper in the
air. i basically skimmed everything until i had proof. and there it was
down near the bottom of the interview.

i think ayo's inspiration for 'postructuralist theorists' whomever they
may be can be useful for artists, especially for performance artists.
but i think such folks have painted themselves into the corner of
hating spike lee for the rest of their lives.

i like the idea that there are anti-racist and gender-bending themes in
the new forms of highbrow cultural production, and i appreciate the
cleverness and subtlety of such artists. but i despair of such
productions ever having the moral impact of an arthur miller play, and
i look forward to the day when dramatic performances can set the world
on fire as did lorraine hansberry in her day.

Cobb | Email | Homepage | 08.18.03 - 4:46 pm

R: And THAT response is a PERFECT example of the inability of humans to have a Vulcan Mind Meld.

P: Be nice.

I meant absolutely no disrepect in saying the above, Prometheus; that
you were not able to deduce that is the limitation of this medium. The
only way we can be absolutely certain of other's experience is through
what would be a "Vulcan Mind Meld" -- but that is not possible. We can
only approximate and agree that there will be gaps in our understanding
of each other's experience. (You and I won't even agree on the same
shades of green or red -- it's impossible.) Saying there is no gap,
that we won't understand fully each other's experience, is denial of
diversity. I expect you to be very different from me in a hundred+ ways
or more; hell, yeah. That's important in as many ways.

p: What I'm saying is the only way that will work is if we were a
command culture along the lines of Egypt. That or universal agreement,
which you will not get as long as a class of people benefit from the
cultural structures that assume racial division. More, the written
isn't the thought. Get rid of a specific word without getting rid of
the thought and we'll just make another word.

Getting rid of a word is only part of the meme, that is entirely true
and that is my point. But we do have to start somewhere -- like the
image of a burning cross. The burning cross in my mind has no other
connotation than a threat of violence against people on the basis of
their race. Remove that image long enough and the link to meaning may
be broken.

Do you want to permanently imbue the burning cross with meaning by
saying that YOU (black Americans) OWN IT? I don't think so if that
comes at the risk of permanently embuing its associated meme of racism
against black Americans.

Let me put it another way, perhaps in your own terms: if EVERYONE in
the U.S. was a n*gger, could be called such by anybody, would the word
continue to carry its original meaning? Is that one way of breaking not
only the ownership but the underlying meme to which it is attached?

If NOONE in the U.S. were a n*gger, could we also break the link?

Pick another word-become-symbol, like the negative words chink,
wetback, zipper-head, wop, so-on; what will it take to break any of
them as well? Are these not as ugly to the people at which they are
thrown? Should they want to OWN them at the risk of perpetuating them
and the meme that gave rise to them? Really, can you know what it is to
be a "gawddamned slanty-eyed yellow-skinned zipperhead"? Should an
Asian seek to OWN that because of their history, regardless of whether
you can get into that epithet? Or should the effort concentrate on
breaking the entire meme -- words-made-symbols representing the notion
of racism?

Much of this appears to be but an exercise in semantics and semiotics -- but human cult

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.19.03 - 1:20 pm

culture
is built on semantics and semiotics. Our perceptions of reality, our
consciousness, is reflected in semantics and semiotics. How do we
change reality -- change the input and output of our perceptions and
consciousness, to change the core of our culture? That is the question
here.

Damn, I just lost another two paragraphs because of the weird way
Haloscan is acting. I'll have to leave you with that much for now,
Promotheus.

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.19.03 - 1:42 pm

Cobb,
I frankly don't look beyond the artist's work or their own descriptions
of what went into the work or what the work means to them. I don't give
a rat's butt about anything more than that (including their source of
inspiration), because the creative spirit of the artist and the
interpretation of the beholder/participant requires extensive
individual internalization. Art is too subjective for me to care much
beyond a few degrees of contact (me and the artist; okay, maybe in case
of Monet it's me, him and the gardens).

In the case of Ayo's Flesh-tone series #1 I know I made different observations than she shared about her creative experience. I wrote of it: Fascinating,
really, that there were so many different reactions to her request and
even more interpretations of the color of her flesh. It’s as if this
were an experiment to document the range of differentiation in human
experience of qualia – which in turn may even influence our reactions
to other humans of all colors.

In what shade would you see me, I’m left to wonder? What shade of flesh do I see myself?

If there’s so many interpretations, why does it matter at all except as an expression of art?

Anybody's antipathy towards Spike Lee or Adrian Piper had nothing to do
with my observation or experience. Maybe we don't need an Arthur Miller
now either...

Rayne | Email | Homepage | 08.19.03 - 1:44 pm

Rayne:

Saying this:

And THAT response is a PERFECT example of the inability of humans to have a Vulcan Mind Meld.

followed by this:

(Christ, next you'll think I'm into embalming and cat worship...)

means that this:

I meant absolutely no disrepect in saying the above, Prometheus;
that you were not able to deduce that is the limitation of this medium

at best reflects a limitation in the USE of the medium, not the medium itself. At worst, it's a game to make your point.

I state this directly so you know how to deal going forward.

We can only approximate and agree that there will be gaps in our
understanding of each other's experience. (You and I won't even agree
on the same shades of green or red -- it's impossible.)

The same would apply to me and any other Black person. You can approach
it as closely as Cobb (who I only pick on because several others simply
haven't posted in these comments).

You say you cannot understand the subjective experience of being Black. I say you are wrong, and have given youthe tools to do so.

In the sidebar is a link to the Racism discussion. The first article
discusses how Black people are approaching this bottom-up, whereas the
mainstream is approaching it top-down. Give it a read.

culture is built on semantics and semiotics. Our perceptions of
reality, our consciousness, is reflected in semantics and semiotics.
How do we change reality -- change the input and output of our
perceptions and consciousness, to change the core of our culture? That
is the question here.

That is NOT the question here. That is NOT what this post was about. Do you recognize that? If not, go back and re-read it.

In addition, you must recognize there is a HUGE difference between
changing your perception of reality and changing reality. This was an
exercise in changing your perception of reality.

I'll give your meme approach a try when you convince the rest of the world to do so.

Prometheus 6

Art
is too subjective for me to care much beyond a few degrees of contact
(me and the artist; okay, maybe in case of Monet it's me, him and the
gardens).

And yet racial experience is ALL subjective. It's ALL an interpretation of a human filtered through the memes one has absorbed.

This is why you conclude one can't understand another's experience. You have to get subjective to do so, and you won't.

Prometheus 6

Shirley Chisolm has left the building

Normally I post a picture and give up a digital moment of silence. Many problems with that in this case.

The first problem is, the most appropriate picture I know of isn't a photograph

Second is, sister was too important. This from the Encyclopedia Britannica, via PBS's African American World Reference Room site:

Shirley Chisholm
(Born Nov. 30, 1924, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.)

American politician, the first black American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

Shirley St. Hill was the daughter of immigrants; her father was from British Guiana (now Guyana) and her mother from Barbados. She grew up in Barbados and in her native Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Brooklyn College (B.A., 1946). While teaching nursery school and serving as director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brooklyn, she studied elementary education at Columbia University (M.A., 1952) and married Conrad Q. Chisholm in 1949 (divorced 1977). An education consultant for New York City's day-care division, she was also active with community and political groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and her district's Unity Democratic Club. In 1964 68 she represented her Brooklyn district in the New York state legislature.

In 1968 Chisholm was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating the civil rights leader James Farmer. In Congress she quickly became known as a strong liberal who opposed weapons development and the war in Vietnam and favoured full-employment proposals. As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 1972, she won 152 delegates before withdrawing from the race.

Chisholm, a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, supported the Equal Rights Amendment and legalized abortions throughout her congressional career, which lasted from 1969 to 1983. She wrote the autobiographical works Unbought and Unbossed (1970) and The Good Fight (1973).

Check the quotes from Ms. Chisolm at About.com's Women's History site. A small selection:

I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

Of my two "handicaps" being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference.

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom profit that loses.

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

Ms. Chisolm's passing can't be marked with no more than a picture.

Can't thank you enough

That's because I don't know who you are.

But in the comments, Anonymous pointed out that a documentary on Shirley Chisolm's run for the Presidency will be run on PBS during (you guessed it) Black History month. The film's director, Shola Lynch, had a live chat today at the Washington Post, and an interview in September at blackfilm.com.

You know the deal with checking your local PBS station for scheduling.

And obviously I found a photograph of Ms. Chisolm I really like. It was at the blackfilms.com site; that's a thumbnail. You should check the full size one on the other side of the link.

And let me tell you what I like about it. It's recent.

When people pass away, folks go find a picture for the program that everyone recognizes and usually shows a person pretty close to their prime. In fact, you'll probably see a lot of this one.>>

Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with immortalizing their youth once they aren't with us anymore.

But time and life changes people. You wear your life's learning in your body. So though it's not wrong, I don't feel it memorializes the person's whole life.

Ms. Chisolm's picture up there...that would properly memorialize a life. My opinion, of course.

Since folks have so much trouble with "racist," why don't we try "bigot?"

Officials criticize commissioner's e-mail
Updated: 12/3/2004 7:47 AM
By: Lisa Reyes, News 14 Carolina

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A vehement e-mail from Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James has created a stir among local leaders and educators who said his criticism of the urban black community was racially insensitive.

James sent the e-mail Tuesday to 1,300 constituents and city leaders, writing:

"Most people know why CMS can't teach kids within the urban black community. They live in a moral sewer with parents who lack the desire to act properly. That immorality impacts negatively the lives of these children and creates an environment where education is considered 'acting white' and lack of education is a 'plus' in their world."
I do appreciate that folks would say anything about it at all, but it does bring to light the extraordinary lengths folks will go through to keep from calling a spade a spade (that's a joke).

Some of that dark evil

Blogcritics has a post titled Am I racist? that I almost missed (but caught yesterday). I want to share my reaction in the comments.

Mr. Saxton:

You know P6, that by painting all white people with such a broad stroke of the brush with statements such as the above, about their reactions to black people (guilt/defense)that you're being a bit of a racist yourself for pre-supposing & pre-judging people.

Nonsense. I'm not pre-supposing or pre-judging, I'm pre-paring. The broad brush is applying a base to the canvas on which details are applied.

Liberal guilt came as the first response to seeing on TV how truly fucked Black folks were under the Dixiecrat regime (and yes, the North had the same issues, but differently manifest--like a different tone being used for the base).

Our current political state is wholly a reaction of Conservative Anger (remember Angry White Men? all the rage against being constrained in [collective] your choice of terms used to refer to folks?)

Now we are all reacting to the reactions.

Mr. Manning:

You know, threads like this get interesting because some people get so touchy about the topic of race/racism that you begin to wonder if they've got something to hide.

I think you'll find I'm neither touchy nor hiding anything. Search for posts and comments I've made on Blogcritics.

But for all the talk about how we're all homo sapiens and need to get past our racist tendencies, this statement should be directed at everyone.

White folks are doing fine telling Black folks we are racist. You don't need my help there.

Similarly, I consider long term solutions because short term reactions don't work, even though that's all that gets discussed in our instant gratification culture.

It's not just whites who are guilty of harboring racist thoughts, so why do those who get their knickers in a twist about it pretend otherwise?

Long term, white folks geting[sic] correct has the greatest impact because (collective) white folks have all the social and cultural power in the USofA. Always has...as proven by the FACT that the "Conservative revolution" took exactly ONE election to change the entire direction of the country.

It's a figure-ground thing. Black folks' racism is figure, white folks' racism is ground.

White folks' racism is the texture on the canvas that the paint of Black folks' racism clings to.

Let's see how they come back.

The story so far

It started with Cecily at Formica, but I found it first at Lynne's diary. This is all of the posts in the Black Bloggers -> Blag Blogs -> Identity Blogging conversation, in roughly the order that I became aware of them.

Lynne d Johnson
Cecily
P6
Colorado Luis
P6
Cobb
Glenn
P6
dcthornton
Yvelle
Oliver Willis (not really, but...)
P6
Glenn
P6
Jason
P6
Candicissima
Yvelle
P6
Lauren
P6
Terry
Erica
P6
John Constantine
Greg
P6
Lauren
P6
Aldahlia
P6
Greg
alegna
astridiana
Mac Diva
Cecily
Luz Paz
Erica
Kim
Robin
S-Train
Phelps
P6

These posts alone are not the whole discussion. The comments are often excellent, and you can find links to related topics in them. And I can't guarantee having caught all of the discussion—in particular, any branches that exist in the Conservative side or the purely non-political-commentary side of BlogNet will probably have gone beneath my radar.

Trumping the race card

This is something I wrote for Open Source Politics last time Justice Brown got nominated. It's all still valid reasoning, and I present it as an example of how to deal with the inevitable race card.

Of course if you have no patience with that sort of thing you can use the short version:
Q: You mean a Black person isn't allowed to have a conservative viewpoint?
A: No, I mean you're an asshole. You personally.

You mean Justice Brown is Black?

California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown has been nominated for a U.S.Court of Appeals seat on the D.C Circuit. Her nomination is as widely opposed at that of William Pryor…whose confirmation was just defeated Thursday. According to the vast majority of Conservative spokesmen, the opposition to Pryor was obstructionist, a liberal plot, politically motivated. But the opposition to Brown, according to the vast majority of Conservative spokesmen, has a single reason.

She is being opposed because she is Black.

Normally, when someone plays the race card on me I just ignore them and toddle on my merry way. But sometimes it's played so clumsily that it demands comment.

I mean, have you actually looked at her record or have you relied on pundits? You've probably heard about her being the lone dissent numerous times, but….

In one she said racial slurs are protected speech, even when they rise to the level of harassment and discrimination. Don't you think liberals would oppose a white man who made such a ruling? (That the ruling went against U.S. Supreme Court precedent should worry Conservative opponents of judicial activism and legislation as well). I'm not asking if you agree with her, I'm asking if you recognize that that is a position civil rights organizations would oppose no matter who held it.

And drug testing. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a test must be made to determine its constitutionality in each situation, much as it has ruled as regards "affirmative action" programs. Beyond being established precedent, it just makes sense. If I ask you to make an apple pie from this bucket of fruit, your ability to do so depends on what kind of fruit is in the bucket. Just because it's all fruit doesn't mean it's all the same. Justice Brown's rulings would establish the right for any employer at all to do drug testing (you Libertarians better pay attention, because I know why you're a Libertarian).

Don't you think the ACLU would oppose a candidate who would accept the reduction in the right of privacy that they advocate?

Don't you think liberals (socialist bastards that we are) cringe at the thought of a person who called the increase of liberty we've seen since the 1940s "the triumph of our own socialist revolution" getting that Court of Appeals seat? Do you really think we wouldn't object if only it were a white guy we were talking about?

Isn't is obvious we are going to oppose any person of her record and beliefs?

So why are we being accused of opposing her only because she's Black and Conservative? Even Black Conservatives make that argument.

Read The Leadership Council on Civil Rights' fact sheet. Read the People For the American Way and NAACP joint fact sheet. Read the National Women's Law Center pdf on their position.Read them, not for agreement, but to see what they say. See if they object to her because of her race or because of her history.

And think carefully about who it was that you first heard or read discussing her race. Because THAT is who is playing the race card.

And it wasn't a liberal.

Yeah, it's a problem

At Negrophile, George linked to an op-ed in The Seattle Times, 'Be light to ourselves': Black America must look inward for solutions by Aaron Counts and Larry Evans which may influence me in the near future. I think the article worthy of a couple of posts

Over the course of the recent presidential campaign, we saw how each candidate tried to ingratiate himself with various voting groups. And while NASCAR dads and Latinos were a big focus this year, we continue to witness each major election year the efforts that the parties make to court the black vote.

It's less a wooing than a predictable arrangement, as office-seekers vie for the endorsement of one African-American organization or another by snuggling up to the heads of these groups.

A system of artificial leadership is thus perpetuated at the expense of the collective of black Americans, many of whom occupy the bottom rungs of America's socioeconomic ladder.

Black activist have been making this complaint for decades. They were disregarded for several reasons, primary of which is the civil rights leadership did come from the mainstream of the Black communities and do have broad acceptance. Those who noted the media's focus on specific folks tended to note it while complaining about the lack of attention they were getting.

Yet that leadership is growing ever more distant from those who most need their attention. And given the nature of humans it was inevitable. First of all there's the truth first mentioned by Frederick Nietzsche, that any organization formed for any purpose eventually stops serving that purpose and becomes a vehicle to power. Both our major political parties have made that transition and several minor parties exist because they couldn't get into one or the other vehicle. The other major reason, rooted in the nature of power relationships not race but as manifested in race relations, is well expressed in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a New York Times Magazine article titled Black Power Defined:

We have many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to each other. We are acutely conscious of the need, and sharply sensitive to the importance, of defending our own. Solidarity is a reality in Negro life, as it always has been among the oppressed.

On the other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, carping and, in an expression of self-hate, suspicious and intolerant of each other. A glaring weakness in Negro life is lack of sufficient mutual confidence and trust.

Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man's contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man's representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.

I quote this article a lot. And I don't quote this particular section to demonize those that have made the transition because as I said it's a human thing. You don't blame people for that. But you can do better than the reflexive reaction if you're conscious of the problem and possibility, which (again for human reasons) most are not.

So when I read

Underlying these stories about black leaders is the idea the black Americans are a people who need to be led, perpetuating the idea that we are less capable of thinking and acting for ourselves than members of other ethnic or racial groups, and that we can be placated simply by corporate heads and politicians cozying up to select individuals.

Messrs. Counts and Evans are wrong. As we speak the Religious Right is getting the same symbolic treatment. What is a speech at Bob Jones University but a placation by cozying up to select individuals? What is legislative pork but a placation by cozying up to select individuals?

We need not just to acknowledge issues exist, but to correctly identify their nature.

I said it was worth several posts

Let me say a little about leaders and leadership in general before getting back to that Seattle Times op-ed.

We are social animals, and thus hierarchical. Over the years I've heard you humans discussing possible ways of organizing socially as though you had no body…as though your physical nature had no constraining power over your plans.

We will have leaders.

A while back (never mind how long ago; according to Perseus Development I'm older than over 98% of bloggers and that's all you need to know) I was asked just what I thought a leader was anyway. I said they come in three models: sparks, channels and flames. Sparks ignite folks into action. Channels, which I would call wayfinders now, are the first ones, the ones that carve a path to a new destination. Flames shine a new light on things, bringing new knowledge and hence new possibilities.

None of which deals with the central fact that a leader is just someone who gets followed. It was more an efforts to help decide what sort of thing your ought follow.

Meanwhile to the mainstream, "leader," or more specifically "Black leader" means "gatekeeper." And we will have those kinds of "leaders" too. More accurately the mainstream will have those kinds of "leaders," because they exist in the mainstream's social hierarchy (Rev. Jackson has the additional benefit of a position in ours). Messrs. Counts and Evans were very correct in this:

In conversations with black family members or friends, you will rarely hear anyone speak of our "leaders." It is usually the media that bestow that title

Providing more evidence of my incipient decrepitude, I remember discussions I had with white folks during the run up to the Million Man March. I was told we can't support the march because all it would do is "validate Farrakhan as your leader."

I told him it would only validate something in white folks' minds. We all knew Farrakhan and those that would follow him already did. We know the good stuff he says and we know the nonsense, but the march was a symbol to most and I approved of what it symbolized. Has nothing to do with the immediate topic at hand, I just didn't want to leave you hanging.

Next installment will be about the healing Messrs. Counts and Evans say is necessary.

You gonna call me out like that?

Blogdiva at culturekitchen not only linked to Debra Dickerson's article at Salon, but had the NERVE to point it directly at me:

To Prometheus 6: You're not going to like this one, but sugar, you know how I stand on this race thing. It is and it ain't. To y'all, especially my white friends : Read the whole damn thing. It's awesome.

Racist Like Me - Why am I the only honest bigot? By Debra Dickerson

In a way, I'm arguing for class warfare to replace racial warfare. Class conflict makes sense; it keeps the powerful from riding roughshod over senior citizens who can't retire from manual labor in the hot sun. The truth is, I have far more in common with the rich white man than I do with that poor black grandfather (who would never dare to park on private property in this neighborhood). A world of perfect harmony would be lovely, but until the rapture comes I'd rather blue-collar types of all races faced off against us "suits" than one race against the other. There is nothing logical, natural, or beneficial about a world organized by race—the very concept is irrational. Any system divided along racial lines, implicitly or overtly, will be immoral, inefficient, and unstable. (Take, for example, poor whites' hatred of slaves, rather than of slavery, for depressing wages.)

You haven't read "Where We Stand."

Black people had to be broken to be slaves, and White people had to be broken to be masters. How else can you explain slave owners who allowed slaves to buy their own freedom when by law anything the slave owned already belonged to his master?

It is critical for Black people and White people to recognize this, that it is not natural for us to be divided. It is not natural for us to consider our differences to be more than cosmetic. A society was built that trained us to see these differences as significant. The result of that training is ugly.

Now Black people aspire to become all that White people are…never understanding that White people are no more what they should have been than Black people are.

Black people have only been free for two generations. White people have only had free people of other races around them for two generations. Neither group has mastered their situation yet, and who can blame either? Because this society still gives racialized feedback so clearly and strongly that the honorable efforts made by many on both sides of the veil are simply overwhelmed.

This is not going to be the standard P6 hyper-rationality.

I don't like the fact that I feel compelled to be a Black partisan because it shouldn't be necessary. But the FACT is, my family comes up short because of this shit.

Our national psyche is twisted because of race, and avoidance, and denial, and it's not like we don't have enough fucked up stuff to work on that we'd all be bored if we suddenly got real, grew up and dealt honestly with this crap.

It's not happening, though. Look around, tell me it's happening. You can't

So I speak, directly, honestly, make some of you madder than hell. I can't bring things to a close, but maybe I can start it up. And I'm on Black folks' side because dammit someone has to be. I don't lie about things, I don't exaggerate, I don't say anything I'll have to retract. Under those conditions, anyone who's unhappy with what I say can piss off.

But I hear the opposition too. I was going to say no one can claim otherwise, but of course that's not the case. I just got that email from an asshole blogger the other week that said "Why you hate Jews"…apparently he wrote something describing me as an anti-semite, like I give a fuck about anyone stupid enough to read his stuff. Heads bleed, walls don't.

Yeah, white folks don't want to know from racism. Tough. Black folks, well, I'll be coming at y'all in a little bit with all respect but no restraint…but anyone who knows me knows that. Anyone who reads here knows that.

I don't divide things along racial line. I live within a divided system, like all of you do. I'll never be foolish enough to disregard that fact. I live in a system that requires poor people to fuel the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Frankly, I feel the most disruptive thing that could happen in this society is establishment of justice.

But if a chance to help bring justice comes up, I'll jump right on it. Hell, I'm trying to figure out how to shepherd it along. Not for the sake of the disruption. And honestly, not for the sake of the abstract culture, but for the sake of my family.