M'lady protests too loudly...,

Identification with anything can make you forget yourself. To remember oneself it is necessary first of all not to identify.

Sleep is just one side of identification. It also stirs impulsiveness urgency, or frenzy. The degree and form of identification can range from apathy to efficiency, and from impatience to rage, and it can spill over at any time in a subtle or overt expression of negative emotions.

Was Joan reacting to Howe or to something inside herself?

Joan Rivers discussing race issues?

Who decided that would make a good show? Next: Jamie Fox on global warming, Carrot Top on the war in Iraq, and Marcel Marceau on international trade. Sheesh.

She didn't discuss.

And I LOVE how she called the white British lady a racist for seeing both sides of the discussion. I don't think it's a special thing with her, either. It's a mark of just how confused Americans are about white folks.

Yesterday, my husband and I saw a DWB outside our house at dusk.  Second one in under two weeks.  A middle-aged Black guy was pulled over in a BMW.  Like the belligerant attorney he is, my husband got a notepad and pen, stood about four feet from the police, and watched the whole thing while he copied down plate numbers and such.  One of the cops was vocally annoyed at my husband but didn't make any other moves in his direction.  They took off without ticketing the driver, same as last time we saw this kind of tete-a-tete.

He popped over to a local Lefty activist site to post the news (not the numbers, of course), and I swear, almost instantly, there were nearly a dozen messages from my fellow Causazoids insisting that there's no way to tell if "race had anything to do with the stop" and "I've been stopped before and I'm White," and--  ah, you know the drill.

Mind you, I'm not trying to claim that my husband and I are super-evolved on race issues.  Still, it's extraordinary sometimes to see how fast some White folks are to cut short any real dialogue by insisting that "race doesn't matter," and so on.  So many people put more effort into denying "the invisible knapsack" than it would take to unpack the damn thing, or at least look inside a spell.

Frankly, I've always found Rivers to be an ass.  But I have a big mouth myself, so perhaps I'm projecting. 

Back in the years, I was lucky enough to have a glimpse at the "Black Britain" movement through common friends, and what I saw and heard of it deserves nothing but respect. Any dub poetry connoisseur knows the name of Darcus Howe, the founder of Race Today, at least from ‘Man Free’, the song Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote about Howe’s arrest and imprisonment ("Darcus out a jeal"), in his first album, Dread Beat and Blood (when LKJ was ‘Poet and The Roots’):

Den im stand up in di court like a mighty lion

Den im stand up in di court like a man af i’on.

The description from that show sounds a bit like, say, Hugh Grant angrily lecturing Nelson Mandela about "reverse racism". I’m hardly surprised, though: color-blindness is a real disease in a society still so marked by racism (and I don’t only mean the USofA). The goal is not to blind oneself while things stay the same, it is to change things so that it doesn’t count anymore whether you see or not.

Take, for instance, the poster that hurt my eyes when I first saw it, full-size, during a walk in my good old Paris town (this was days after I mentioned Bamboozled in another thread). Now, I know that Clémentine Célarié was born in Dakar, Sénégal, and that she grew up among ‘locals’. While I am no fan of the movies she stars in, I heard her impassionately speak out against racism more than a few times on the radio. I also know that she has "biracial" children, and has had to face very nasty attacks because of that (the director of that first stand-up comedy show of hers is her son Abraham Diallo).

Yet I’m still deeply troubled. Would it have anything to do with race?

(And this other Alas transfuge is quite glad to see Alsis here.)

It doesn't sound like Joan was saying that race *doesn't* matter.  In an awkward way, she was trying to say that "race" shouldn't matter--we should all be able to respect each other simply because we are all human beings.  She simply did not realize that, at the same time, she was making the statement that “race doesn’t matter,” in the sense that she felt that it was an issue that was decided and no longer needed to be dealt with…

I think that both our unwillingness as a society to talk about the real damages done in the name of “race,” and our hesitation to recognize and celebrate those things about each other as members of various races, have contributed to a skewed and damaged perception of “race” for everyone—not just for “white” people like Joan Rivers…

Granted, Joan is wrong.  Her sin is one of ignorance, however, rather than of malice.  Joan’s misstep was compounded, however, by the host.  During the course of the conversation, it was the host who allowed Ms. Rivers to drift into unkind territory.  Yes, this is the fault of the host, and here is why.  The producers and host of the radio show certainly should be held accountable for knowing their guests beforehand, including Ms. Rivers and her particular brand of comment and commentary.  Given Ms. Rivers longevity and fame (or infamy, if you wish), one could hardly expect that the Ms. Rivers would be an unknown quantity to either the producers or the host of the radio broadcast.  As such, during the interview, the host should be diligent to anticipate and to diffuse unforeseen uncomfortable or increasingly agitated situations.  This is one of the most basic tasks with which a “host” is charged, and this is something which the host clearly did not do.

Much of the misunderstanding could have been avoided had the “host” attempted to clarify Ms. Rivers first comment, "I'm so bored with race."  Everyone involved might have gained some insight into what Ms. Rivers had indeed meant (and had not meant).