Beyond the White Gaze? The Women of Mr. Ghetto's Walmart Video have Agency and Speak For Themselves

I always try to allow folks their own agency and voice.

Question: is this style of "black" dancing proof of Herskovits's theories about the Africanisms at work in Black American culture?

Who gets to decide what is black popular culture? Must we always embrace the good and discard the bad? Or is the "black" in black popular culture something multivalenced, complex, at times enriching and artful, and in other moments, debased and grotesque?

One of the perils of the digital age is that black popular culture (and that of other communities) can be widely circulated, subverting the policing of borders and boundaries. Conversations that were once confined to barbershops and hair salons in the black counter-public are now a click away, available on Youtube, for any person with an Internet connection.The Black Superpublic is real--the gatekeepers are unable to contain access and argue for an "authentic" black voice.

The young women who are "getting their hustle" on by dancing in Mr. Ghetto's Walmart video have no shame in their game. I wonder if these "queens" understand that while their performance may be some type of "expressive culture" offered up by people who happen to be "black," (I would suggest) it is not in fact Black Popular Culture.

These are old arguments about the politics of black representation that go at least back to the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro, and Zora Neale Hurston. The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall masterfully outlined these complexities of the black in the black popular culture when he famously observed that:

However deformed, incorporated, and unauthentic are the forms in which black people and black communities and traditions appear and are represented in popular culture, we continue to see, in the figures and the repertoires on which popular culture draws, the experiences that stand behind them. In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech, in its inflections toward the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counternarratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different -- other forms of life, other traditions of representation...


It is this mark of difference inside forms of popular culture -- which are by definition contradictory and which therefore appear as impure, threatened by incorporation or exclusion -- that is carried by the signifier "black" in the term "black popular culture." It has come to signify the black community, where these traditions were kept, and whose struggles survive in the persistence of the black experience (the historical experience of black people in the diaspora), of the black aesthetic (the distinctive cultural repertoires out of which popular representations were made), and of the black counternarratives we have struggled to voice.

Here, black popular culture returns to the ground I defined earlier. "Good" black popular culture can pass the test of authenticity -- the reference to black experience and to black expressivity. These serve as the guarantees in the determination of which black popular culture is right on, which is ours, and which is not.

Black people ought not to always operate under the assumption and threat of the White Gaze. But, where is the critical intervention and reflection which suggests that Mr. Ghetto's world of culture and style may not be the best way to represent the black community? Or are matters of representation purely secondary to pleasure?

Chauncey DeVega's World of Ghetto Nerds: Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena as a Tale of Gay Obsessive Love

Something for my smart mark ghetto nerd wrestling fans.

I am very excited for this weekend's pay-per-view where John Cena and Brock Lesnar will finally get it on here in Chicago. The WWE has done a great job these last few months of finally, after all of these years, creating a "must watch" feeling on Monday nights. We will never return to the heyday of the Monday Night Wars. But, Raw's 3 hour special earlier this week was one of the best shows in recent memory--I have gotten into the habit of fast forwarding through the show--and was more than worth watching from beginning to end.

If I had the book Brock Lesnar would lose to John Cena this Sunday. After utterly beating the living life out of Cena, Lesnar would get distracted for a moment and get taken advantage of by Cena for a quick pin, and what was a decision aided by a sympathetic referee. The follow-up would then be that Brock actually had pity for poor old John. This angle could also play nicely off of Steve Austin's genius loss to Mikey Whipwreck back in ECW, where the former just got more over, and developed the "Stone Cold" character more fully, after such an improbable turn of events.

The build up to Cena-Lesnar also has another compelling dimension to it, one that many pro wrestling fans are likely loathe to admit. In much the same way that Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was an open love letter of gay obsession and slash fantasy in which Kirk and Khan can be imagined as star crossed lovers, there is something mighty obsessive and homoerotic about Lesnar's "desire" to "destroy" John Cena. Professional wrestling (as most male dominated sports) has always been homo-social: the angle between Brock and Cena is bordering on the transparently homoerotic and is a tale of same sex loving, destructive lust.

Popular culture is compelling precisely because of how audiences can reimagine and reinterpret texts for their own purposes, and on their own terms. To point, watch Lesnar's first promo and then compare it to the legendary "Booty Warrior" Fleece Johnson of Lock Up fame. You tell me, is there not something mighty similar between Lesnar and Fleece Johnson's energy here?



Doubling down, Lesnar's most recent interview is colored by wonderful, gay obsessive love. This is actually a complement to Brock Lesnar as he is channeling emotions that are utterly exaggerated and melodramatic...but nonetheless real. Brock is playing the leather daddy power top in this segment.

Priceless:

White Criminal(s) of the Week: White Man Pays Women to Have Sex with Children and Animals; White Children Savagely Beat Bus Driver and Elderly Aide

The white family is in crisis from the cradle to the grave. This week, we are highlighting two related incidents of white crime. As our motto suggests, if you see something, you should say something! White crime only flourishes when good people do nothing.

In Michigan City, Indiana two elementary school aged white children savagely beat and throttled the elderly bus monitor and driver who were given the sacred responsibility of safely transporting them to school. As is common with white crimes, the media has conspired to play down this incident, and is not showing the public pictures of these young criminals in training. 

These behaviors are learned at home; it is likely the parents were aware of their childrens' criminal nature and did nothing to intervene or correct it. The bus beat down is not new. White boys and teens habitually commit horrible violence in schools. They have a long track record of school shootings and mass murder including the infamous Columbine incident. White violence is infectious and has even corrupted good "model minorities" such as Korean-Americans (see the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 people and wounded scores more). 

Instead of demanding that white teen homicidal maniacs are imprisoned, the white community engages in "soul searching" as they try to "make sense" of how their little angels could commit such heinous deeds. This is evidence of a pathologically violent culture that has spawned serial killers, mass murderers, and domestic terrorists. 

Charles Edward Reese is our second white criminal of the week. He is a pervert of the first order. Because the family and home are the first spaces in which children are socialized, the criminal behavior of white young people should not be a surprise. White children are learning these anti-social values from their mothers and fathers. 

With the failure of white communities, and their moral decline as documented by Charles Murray in his new book Coming Apart, the behavior of white men such as Reese is increasingly common. At present, white people are the majority of child rapists and child murderers. They are also more likely to be pedophiles. Their dominance of these categories of wanton and predatory crime can only be expected to grow in the future.

Tragically, Charles Edward Reese is the tip of a pathological white sex culture that imperils all Americans. Be careful. Do not trust your children around white people--especially white men--as they are capable of anything.

The full story follows:

COVINGTON, La. (CBS Houston) – Federal authorities say a man is behind bars after he paid women to have sex with their children and animals.

Charles Edward Reese, the former chief financial officer of Champagne Beverage, is facing charges for the unlawful production of child pornography after paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to women who, in exchange, would provide Reese with sexual videos involving them with their own children.

According to the Slidell Sentry, Reese conned at least two women into sending him child pornography videos of an explicit and incestuous nature.

The money – amounting to over $750,000 – was reportedly sent to one Vidar, Texas, woman in exchange for videos that featured her children, ages 2 and 6, and her 9-year-old sister engaging in sex acts with her.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations became involved when the site hosting the video, Photobucket.com, became aware of the September 2011 video upload and alerted authorities. Similar videos from the same user were also found.

Reese would also send notes with his payments, some of them demanding the woman’s participation.

“If you don’t get online tomorrow morning with both of them and do what I want you to this will be the last time you ever hear from me no matter what your needs are,” a note sent with one $525 payment allegedly stated, according to the Sentry. “You have screwed me enough for a lifetime of misery.”

The woman is now deceased.

The FBI also found out that Reese sent a reported $2,500 to the woman’s adult sister, in an attempt to keep her quiet after she sent him messages about his actions, and another $7,900 to an unrelated second Texas mother.

The Beaumont Enterprise reports that the sister videotaped herself conducting “sexually explicit activities with animals.”

The second woman, who is currently incarcerated on child endangerment charges, told the FBI that she took sexual cell phone pictures of her daughter, who is less than 7 years old, and sent them to Reese.

In both cases, the women referred to Reese as “Chuck.”

Reese was reportedly booked at the St. Tammany Parish Jail, where he remained as of earlier this week. His employment at Champagne Beverage was also terminated as of early last month.

Featured Reader Comment: "To Take Ownership of My Whiteness is to Accept That Any Violence Done Unto Me is in Some Sense Deserved by My Complicity..."

The question of extremism seems an important one in evaluating the white racial frame. It is easy for me to feel swaths of heroism emanating from this white abolitionist, but I imagine being alive at the time, I would do little but hold a candle in my heart for such causes.

I think the thing that I do more often (as pretty much a cop-out for genuine political engagement) to take ownership of my whiteness is to accept that any violence done unto me is in some sense deserved by my complicity and engagement which enhance and encourage inequality in many ways. How do both white and black alike come to terms with these things? Changing the system from inside the system while benefiting from the system seems to be an insane perspective to take....

Do you have any perspective on all this kind of white guilt?

I take all readers' comments here on WARN seriously. If folks take the time to post a comment or email me, I always proceed with good faith. If someone is a "troll" I entertain their questions because although they may be in autopilot conversation derailing talking points mode, these people are still speaking for some part of our collective consciousness. Yes, I may dismiss their views as ideologically driven foolishness; however, trolls and the talking point commentariat are in fact channeling the deeply held beliefs of no small part of the American public. As such, they demand analysis--if not necessarily--full engagement.

By comparison, there are comments like those offered by Adam GH in response to my first post on the late Joel Olson. Adam's honesty about white guilt was very moving. It was also quite provocative and unsettling. Adam's sharing also deserves more conversation and processing. Thus, my bumping it up for discussion.

The expression of white guilt, especially from those who are legitimately invested in anti-racism and a struggle for shared humanity across the color line, is a common sentiment. I am troubled by white guilt for a variety of reasons. Empathy, even in its must honest and extreme forms, can lead to a moment of self-reflection and praxis. But, can it become crippling? Moreover, how does the language of "guilt"--which implies shame, responsibility, ownership, or culpability--problematically center the White subject in a critical conversation about race and racial ideologies? Ultimately, does "white guilt" do the the work of white privilege and sustain (an ironic type of) white supremacy?

Understanding one's relationship to the historical and contemporary structures, as well as individual level processes which create, sustain, and reproduce social inequalities along lines of gender, class, race, and sexuality, is key if we are to radically transform American society in the interests of the Common Good. For example, taking ownership over those moments when we choose to (or not) confront white supremacy is different from feeling guilty over how we may be situated as individuals relative to the lived realities of privilege and inequality.

Turning the gaze inward for a moment: I do not feel guilty for being a heterosexual man. I do however acknowledge how I benefit from sexist and homophobic social norms and arrangements of power. Should I feel guilt? Of course not. I have a choice regarding how I choose to intervene against heteronormativity and sexism. I am culpable to the degree that I act with cowardice and/or behave unethically in such moments where I actively (or through tacit consent) benefit from such disparate arrangements of social and political power.

To my eyes, white guilt is combustible and frightening. At its core is anger and rage, often internalized, waiting for a moment to spew forth. There is an odd parallelism here: white supremacists and their more polite conservative kin use appeals to white guilt in order to mobilize their race hatred and racial resentment for political ends; strident anti-racists, some of whom also happen to be liberal (white) racists, use white guilt as a type of self-flagellation. Through their self-abuse, white guilt becomes a way of recentering Whiteness (with its insecurities and guilt) as the default beginning of conversations about white racism.

In all, I would suggest that in our dialogue(s) about white guilt that we foreground the following premises:

1. White guilt is real for those who possess it. These are legitimate and real emotions that cannot be dismissed or disregarded if people of color want to have substantial and critical conversations about race and the reproduction of racial ideologies with our white brothers and sisters;
2.  White guilt is often a deflection deployed by whiteness, and those who possess/are invested in white privilege as a means to evade substantive conversations about white supremacy;
3. White guilt is a type of actualized white privilege;
4. White guilt should be processed and discussed; white guilt and managing the emotional hurt of white people should not be a central part of anti-racist discourse and practice;
5. White racism hurts white people; white guilt also hurts white people.

Du Bois talked about a "twoness" or sense of double consciousness in black folks that comes from living in a society which does not value your humanity. Although oriented differently, white guilt is a schism of the internal white self that comes from realizing that society over-values you, gives privileges, opportunities, and resources for no other reason than the arbitrary distinction that a given person happens to be categorized as "white" in this historical moment.

Here is a provocative thought: white guilt actually resembles a type of mass, borderline personality disorder which needs to be therapeutized.

There is much to mull over here. I want to thank Adam GH for having the honest courage to start this conversation with his open and vulnerable question.

Where do we go from here?

When "Political" Rap Goes Wrong: Please Stop! Mr. Ghetto's "Tribute" Video to Trayvon Martin Does More Harm Than Good

Capitalism is deftly adept at commodifying culture. It is a creative beast, a hungry octopus grabbing up anything from which it can make a profit. As such, the buzzards and carrion eaters are swirling around the public corpse that is the Trayvon Martin saga. I understand that brothers and sisters got to get their hustle on. Tragically, I do not think that the lumpen black proletariat embodied by "Mr. Ghetto" seem to understand that foolishness such as linking this video to Trayvon Martin's case--in an effort to get his song some attention--actually emboldens the supporters of George Zimmerman.

Some real talk for a moment. Frankly, who wouldn't shoot dead (metaphorically of course) the hooga mugga ign't wannabe thugs such as Mr. Ghetto and his kin (not the real folks, but rather the very idea and habitus they represent)...or at the very least get as far away from them as possible, praying that they do not get a Section 8 voucher and move in next door?

And yes, I know many black and brown strivers who would cosign that question.

Political art is so very difficult a craft and vocation. This is especially true in regards to commercial Southern New Age Race Minstrel "hip hop." Form and content work together to communicate meaning. Mr. Ghetto's "art" is an object lesson in why I prefer my MC's to talk about money, cash, hoes, and other assorted fantasies of the ghettocentric imagination. Folks should write about what they know: it is the first rule of being a successful author/singer/artist.

Unfortunately, Mr. Ghetto's talents as an MC are handicapped in this regard as well. It would seem that his creative gifts are rather limited:



Unless an MC is especially qualified, the spin control for the Trayvon Martin case should be left up to those more accomplished, articulate, and critically minded. Mr. Ghetto and his fans just need to stop. His "political art" and caricaturized blackness is better suited for Stormfront or Fox News than as an act of support and awareness-raising for the struggles facing black and underclass communities in America.

George Zimmerman's Non-Apology to Trayvon Martin's Family: I Am Sorry For Your Loss and That Your Son Ran Into a Bullet Which I Fired

George Zimmerman was quite the contrite killer during his bond hearing. In an act of great self-sacrifice and generosity he took the stand and offered up the following apology to the family of the murdered Trayvon Martin:

Zimmerman, 28, appeared in court in a dark suit and gray tie, and, in a surprising move, took the stand. There, in a voice verging on meek, he apologized to the family of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old he admits he shot—but only, he says, in self-defense. 

“I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son,” he said to the parents, who attended the hearing in the central Florida city of Sanford, where the shooting took place. “I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am, and I did not know if he was armed or not.”

As a student of language and semiotics, I would suggest that the latter part of Zimmerman's statement is particularly rich with meaning. Context is key to the analysis of language. Language also constructs meaning through unstated assumptions shared by speaker and audience; oftentimes a speaker--here being Zimmerman--can run into a crisis of communication when the listener does not share his unstated priors and worldview. 

Zimmerman is part of a collective consciousness that views all black people as adults regardless of their age. Because African Americans, especially men, have no right to self-defense in their person against White authority (it is rarely mentioned that Trayvon Martin had every right to "stand his ground") all bets are off. Zimmerman is working through this logic as he basically suggests that if Martin were younger, then the presumption of being armed and dangerous may not have applied. 

However, because common sense dictates that all black men are armed, at all times, and have the magical ability to transform harmless objects into guns or knives, Zimmerman was acting under a reasonable person's standard of behavior. Anyone approaching a black man would naturally assume that the latter was especially and uniquely capable of deadly force. Thus, Zimmerman's appeal to shared community norms is a basic one: anyone in his position would have reasonably and naturally assumed that a black teenager wearing a hooded sweatshirt in the rain and carrying a bag of candy is an imminent and deadly threat. 

Zimmerman's statement of "apology" to Trayvon Martin's family is one of the most honest and pronounced distillations of the White Gaze and its debased view of black humanity which we as a country have witnessed in many years. If one ever wondered about the existential dilemma faced by black masculinity in American society, or was searching for an object lesson in how black folks are "niggerized," look no farther than George Zimmerman's "apology" for committing murder.

Zimmerman can assault plain clothes cops, batter his fiancée, ignore police directives, stalk innocent people, carry a weapon in violation of his vaunted "black watch" rules, and shoot unarmed people without doubt or worry. Moreover, it takes a national uproar to even have him properly investigated and eventually arrested on suspicion of having committed murder. Let a black man do the same and see what happens. It does not take a leap of faith, or radical act of imagination, to understand how divergent the outcome would be.

Ultimately, Zimmerman is a murderous clown. As such, and in keeping with the national tragedy and three ring circus that is the color line in America, Zimmerman will find martyrdom as he is a stand-in for every white conservative ever accused of racism or racial bias. During the days and weeks to come, the script will be flipped as he becomes the object of a cause celebre. In this grotesque play, George Zimmerman is the good man done wrong by the system. Trayvon Martin is simply collateral damage.

Those blacks end up dead, in jail, or lying in the morgue for days unclaimed anyway. So what is the measure of a black man's life, one that is doomed to failure, against the shining star and bright future of "good" men like George Zimmerman?

Star Trek Politics: In the Eyes of Conservatives Barack Obama isn't a Vulcan; He is a Klingon

President Obama is an unapologetic ghetto nerd. He loves Spiderman, reads Conan the Barbarian, and has been featured in more than one graphic novel. I am also sure that the President has been blessed with some great swag and goodies such as a sneak preview of the movie Prometheus , or the unedited original Star Wars Trilogy on Blu-ray.

To this point in his tenure, my favorite "space coon," ghetto nerd, Commander in Chief, has been linked with Star Trek on several occasions. During the campaign, the pundits wondered if he was more Spock or Captain Kirk (the consensus was that the cerebral assassin was more a Vulcan; John McCain got to play the role of space cowboy and gun boat diplomat James T. Kirk). President Obama also hosted Nichelle Nichols at the White House and posed for a soon to be iconic photo with the actress who Dr. King persuaded to remain on classic Trek because she was a trailblazing role-model for young women of color.

President Obama's enemies on the Right must also be Star Trek fans. In their desperate muckraking, they have "discovered" that Barack Obama once ate dog as a child. Making matters worse, his father was apparently judged to be "anti-white" by immigration officials in the United States and the United Kingdom (my goodness, a black man who grows up in colonial Africa may have some issues with white folks? the horrors and surprises never cease...). 

In keeping with the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series, it would seem that the sins of the father are now the sins of the son for President Obama. Because Conservatives actually see President Obama as a Klingon (a perpetual outsider and Other), the deeds and (dis)honor of his father passes down several generations. Even Obama's children's children would not be spared this shame! 

Not content with voodoo beyond the grave zombie mind control Mau Mau politics where Obama's absent father controls him from the afterlife, they are channeling popular culture and the cinematic imagination to cook up foolishness in an effort to distract the mouth-breathing Right-wing populists from the Ayn Rand reality show which is the Tea Party GOP's check and mate for the American middle class. 

The spectacle is entertaining, if not bizarre, theater. In all, this charade is symbolic of a fractured and sick political culture. For example, during the past four years President Obama has been accused of hating white people, being controlled by ghosts, faking his grades at Columbia, being a Manchurian candidate who was not a U.S. citizen, using crack and having sex with male prostitutes, drinking 40's at the White House with dangerous "gangsta" rappers, is a secret Muslim, and also a closet Socialist controlled by an evil cabal of Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Saul Alisnky, James Cone, Derrick Bell, and Frances Fox Piven. These conspiracy theories are not even internally consistent or coherent--but that is the point of the paranoid style, is it not?

This is all good sport that does more to demonstrate how out of touch with reality the Right-wing echo chamber and its supplicants actually are. However, the sins of the father should be turned around on any Conservatives who dare to utter such balderdash. Mitt Romney should be queried about his lineage and how he was socialized into a religion and culture which until very recently claimed that people of color were not fit for heaven, and are in fact subhumans stained by the Curse of Ham, destined for perpetual slavery at the  end of the whip, and under the boots, of white people. Using the same logic, why was George W. Bush never asked about his grandfather, a man who helped finance the Nazi's rise to power?

Of course, the sins of the father for white folks specifically, and conservatives, in particular are not bound by rules of inter-generational culpability or guilt by association. White privilege is the freedom to be an individual, one unmoored both from history or the burdens of racial identity and group responsibility. Funny, this would seem to apply even to Star Trek and the Right's efforts to smear President Obama through the blood lineage of his father. 

But I think the joke is on them this time. As a ghetto nerd, President Obama is likely smiling as he looks at his photo of Nichelle Nichols, thinks about the long arch of history, and bears his teeth, channeling his inner Klingon. 

Moreover, as President Obama prepares for the 2012 election, he should heed the following proverb from his Klingon brethren: To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible.

Being a Klingon ain't too bad after all; for some of us it is actually preferred.

Kaplah! 

"The White Privilege Discourse is Missing an Important Element: Empathy and Compassion for the Oppressor"

This is one of a series of posts in honor of the late Joel Olson.

The research on white racial identity has evolved since coming to public prominence during the 1980's. At first, "Whiteness Studies" (as it was called at the time) was focused on the idea that White racial identity was a story of absence, typified by loss, and a parasitic relationship to blackness. This first wave was also derided by many conservatives, as well as more Left radical thinkers, as being merely a type of exploitative "white trash studies."

The anti-multiculturalism, dead white male crowd was hostile to any critical intervention that sought to highlight how questions of race and racial hierarchy were/are operative in American society. Forward thinking progressives and liberals were concerned that Whiteness Studies was simply another way of making white people central to conversations about racism. Consequently, Whiteness Studies did the work (however unintentional) of White Privilege even as it sought to problematize the concept.

Joel Olson was part of a second--or perhaps even third wave...depending on how one periodizes the genealogy--of scholars and students who worked to make a "critical" intervention against Whiteness. As a qualifier, "critical" is a much overused descriptor in academic writing. Oftentimes, critical is just a way of separating your own "original" contribution from those of other scholars. It has no real meaning beyond being an attention getter or flag that often signifies what are only minor differences in argument or content.

However, I would suggest that Critical Whiteness Studies was substantively different from earlier scholarship on the subject. The critical intervention here, a tradition I count myself part of, is that we now see Whiteness as not merely or only centered on absence. Rather, Whiteness has content, substance, and meaning. While Whiteness is still parasitic relative to blackness, it does have identifiable attributes, traits, contours, boundaries, characteristics, and substance.

In all, Whiteness is a type of property, privilege, normality, and invisibility. Whiteness is also something that its owners, and those who desire it, are deeply invested in protecting and maintaining. I would also add that Whiteness is a type of racial glue that masks and holds together other, often contentious and disparate identities, which white people as complex individuals possess.

Ultimately, the study of Whiteness, and the loose discipline we know as Critical Whiteness Studies, is about much more than white privilege. Yes, the latter is a foundational concept and useful entry point into the conversation for laypeople; white privilege is also a nice hook for those curious about what Whiteness means in American society on a day-to-day basis. But, it should be a beginning, and not an end, to the rigorous work that is exploring racial ideologies and their consequences for American society.

Psychology Today's "Between the Lines" is a column by Mikhail Lyubansky that explores the linkages between "race, culture, and community." Several of the pieces in that series have focused on White Privilege and how race continues to matter in "post-racial" America. The most recent entry is a nice complement to Joel Olson's work. There, Mikhail Lyubansky offers up a ten point list of what readers should know about White privilege.

Some of the suggestions are very useful for journeyman travelers (the idea that Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack is helpful, yet is just a beginning, and that reading McIntosh does not make you an expert on these matters; White Privilege is not to be minimized as a "historical" phenomenon, it is about the present; and the roots of the White Privilege discourse must be acknowledged as springing forth from the likes of Du Bois, James Baldwin, Harold Cruse, Gloria Anzaldua and Theodore Allen).

Mikhail Lyubansky's other observations are more inside baseball: anti-racism activities by whites can actually be paternalistic and reproduce many of the same dynamics which these same well-meaning white folks ostensibly desire to unsettle; what to do with white anti-racist activists who are now the face of advocacy on these issues, as they ironically make money off of white racism?

In keeping with the idea that Critical Whiteness Studies should be centered on rigorous inquiry in the service of theory building as we strive to more accurately model how race, power, and social relationships interact, there are two points in Mikhail Lyubansky's essay that are problematic.

First, he suggests that:

8. Racial-minority privilege exists and serves an important function. I'm not saying that it is equivalent to white privilege — the power differential alone makes that impossible — but there is such a thing as racial-minority privilege. In marginalized spaces (also called counter spaces), this means that people of color generally have the privilege of speaking about race without having their point of view challenged solely on the basis of their racial identity or racial appearance.

Mikhail Lyubansky offers up a thorough qualification of this claim and how it relates to colorism in black and brown communities, as well as issues of intersectionality. However, I am more interested in the first principle: how can racial minorities (and this holds for gays and lesbians, and also women) have any type of "privilege," be it relative or absolute, in a society and set of social institutions which are prefaced on white superiority and white domination? For example, black and brown people may have what are problematically called "safe spaces" on colleges and universities. But, these "safe spaces" are prefaced on the idea that their voices are not heard or listened to elsewhere. Of symbolic and practical import, these "safe spaces" are often ghettoized in the Office of Multicultural Affairs or Diversity Relations.

The second problematic is as follows:

9. The privilege discourse is missing an important element:empathy and compassion for the oppressor. Social justice activist, Kit Miller (a White woman), observes that empathy has a hard time flowing upstream. Few are more starved for empathy than those who have structural power, because they are often dehumanized on the basis of having that power. How many of us, for example, see police officers as individual human beings motivated by the same universal human needs (e.g., love, acceptance, contribution, mutuality) as the rest of us? How about the politicians belonging to the political party you dislike most?

In the context of race relations, this means that there is not much empathy coming to white folks from across the racial divide. This, of course, is perfectly logical. It is certainly not the responsibility of the oppressed and marginalized to take care of the oppressor's emotional needs. Suggesting otherwise would be, at best, an egregious expression of white privilege. Yet, it is also true that those who oppress others (and certainly those who do not perpetrate oppression themselves but stand by while others do so) have likely themselves experienced oppression and are themselves harmed by their own actions or lack of thereof.

While it certainly impacts people of color disproportionately and more negatively, racism (and racial color-blindness) hurts everyone, even those who are part of the majority group...

It is often not obvious, but to maintain their status, those who are in power must justify their behavior to themselves and that requires a partial loss of their humanity.

Mikhail Lyubansky's take here is very defensive. He is desperately trylng to avoid the smear known as "reverse racism." However, when one proceeds from an anxiety about a specious and disengenous concept such as reverse racism, your argument is flawed from its inception. The idea that those with power are starved for empathy also strikes me as the worst type of feel good tripe that is offered up in a moment when some white folks feel aggrieved, or their feelings hurt, when the institutional and personal power afforded by Whiteness is called out and made transparent.

Perhaps, on a cognitive and philosophical level I am incapable of understanding Mikhail Lyubansky's version of "the love principle." Moreover, Mikhail Lyubansky's social justice take--that one needs to show empathy for those who are deeply invested in maintaining their disproportionate power and control over society to the disadvantage of people of color in mass--as Whiteness works to maximize the life chances of its owners, participants, and allies (to the detriment of others), is simply a bridge too far.

Am I being unfair in these critiques? Is my critical project being handicapped by an inability to both empathize and relate to the perilous anxieties and fears of those who we call "White" in America? What is your critical take on these conversations?

Our White Criminal of the Week: White Man Commits 10 Felonies in 9 Hours!

The second honoree in WARN's series on white criminals is a good one. Quigonjin, one of our loyal crime stoppers, was kind enough to send in some information on this foul brigand highwayman. Always remember: if you see something you should say something! White crime only flourishes when we ignore their obviously suspicious behavior.

Given that white people have a particular propensity for cheating and subterfuge, as evidenced by the fact they are more likely to be financially rich, the behavior of William Todd should not be a surprise. White criminals are particularly earnest in their trade--be it looting the finances of millions of Americans in the fraud that precipitated the Great Recession--or committing 10 felonies in 9 hours.

People of color simply do not have it in them to commit crimes on such a scale, and with these high levels of speed and efficiency. Once more, white crime is especially pernicious, threatening, and loathsome. Responsible Americans everywhere should pay close to attention to the white men in their midst as these folks are capable of criminal deeds that astound the mind--and apparently they have a love of marking their turf with human feces.

Be scared, very scared by white men such as William Todd. Because they are pathological--and as such often quite skilled at hiding their predilections--many such men could be ticking time bombs, hiding as your "normal" children, neighbors, husbands, or coworkers. Whiteness is invisible. This trait only contributes to its owners ability to commit crimes as they escape without consequence or arrest.

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One man traveling through Tennessee allegedly completed a crime spree with such urgency that even local police say they'd never seen anything like it.

William Todd, 24, is accused of committing 10 felonies in just nine hours while going on a "terror" through Nashville.

"He was just on a terror. I've never seen anything like this before," Sgt. Tony Blackburn, told WSMV.

Todd is not even a native of Nashville. Police say he traveled there on a Greyhound bus from Kentucky before beginning his unprecedented crime spree. Upon arriving in Nashville, he allegedly broke into a local business called The Slaughterhouse, where he stole a Taser, revolver and shotgun. He then proceeded to steal a T-shirt from the Slaughterhouse before burning the business to the ground.

Todd then moved on to a local bar, where he held four patrons at gunpoint. He robbed all four individuals but not before using the Taser on one and pistol-whipping another.

Just five minutes later, Todd moved onto his next alleged felony, carjacking a taxi driver at gunpoint. After leaving the cab, he used the credit cards he had stolen from the bar patrons to buy food.

"He was able to find the Walmart on Nolensville. He goes there and purchased $199 worth of items," Sgt. Blackburn said.

And that was only the beginning.

In the early hours of the following morning, Todd then broke into a local hotel's law office. He not only vandalized the offices but also then defecated on a desk and smeared his feces on some of the framed law degrees.

Leaving the offices, Todd then reportedly robbed several of the hotel guests. He knocked on their door pretending to be a female housekeeper, then robbed them at gunpoint. He was also reportedly crying while doing so.

He then briefly paused for a change in personal appearance.

"We have him on video leaving the hotel with a shaved head," Sgt. Blackburn said.

After crashing his stolen cab into a local parking garage, Todd then quickly held another taxi driver at gunpoint. When police finally apprehended Todd, he was hiding atop Opryland, partially submerged in a water-cooling vat. The Metro Fire Department was brought in to assist in Todd's removal from the vat, using a bucket and ladder truck.His bond has reportedly been set at $180,000.

"He rode the Greyhound bus and had a layover, then left in blue lights," Sgt. Blackburn said. "There definitely could be more charges. We hope that there are no more victims."

Honoring the Late Dr. Joel Olson: "What does Whiteness Mean for White People?"

Joel Olson, a professor at Northern Arizona University whose work I have featured here on more than a few occasions, recently passed away. He was only 43 years old. Olson was the author of The Abolition of White Democracy. There he developed the idea of white racism as central to White (herrenvolk) democracy. Furthermore, Olson posited that blacks were a group of "anti-citizens" who white Americans engaged in mass violence against in order to 1) reinforce racist populist norms, and 2) where violence functioned as a type of social leveler for the imagined fraternity of White Men.

Olson's journal articles and popular writings were also very incisive. His great essay on race, white privilege, and the Occupy Movement will undoubtedly be included in a forthcoming collection of essays about that political moment.

I never met Dr. Olson. But, I would like to do right by his memory and the type of critical scholarship on whiteness which he was engaged in as an intellectual project. We rarely do "theme weeks" here on We Are Respectable Negroes. The loss of Joel calls for a bit of a tribute and reflection. To point, I will be posting a series of essays, found news items, and other pieces that take a critical perspective on Whiteness and white racial identity throughout the week.

There was always a bit of snark and sharpness operating in the spaces between the sentences of The Abolition of White Democracy. Hopefully, I can capture a bit of that energy in my honoring of its author.

As an entry point for Critical Whiteness Week, I offer up the following set of question(s): What does Whiteness mean for white people? What does Whiteness mean for those who are not white? And what does Whiteness mean in "post-racial" America?

More Smart People Talking About Race and Crime: Khalil Gibran Muhammad Breaks Down the Condemnation of Blackness

I have been at C2E2 here in Chicago and the con has been great fun. I did some networking and made some progress on the graphic novel which I have been trying to develop. As always, there are lots of great people here. The brother dressed up as Sho'nuff from The Last Dragon was a highlight and most certainly one of the most creative cosplayers here--got to give love to the ghetto nerds.

I also met Herbert Jefferson Jr., the original Boomer on the classic 1970s era Battlestar Galactica. I shook his hand and offered up a hearty thanks for what his role meant to many black and brown folks who were searching for people of color in the white racial frame of popular science fiction and space fantasy during the 1970s. Val Kilmer was also a magnetic and fun speaker.

After coming back from C2E2, I happened to discover the above interview with the newly appointed head of the Schomburg museum in New York and thought it appropriate to share with you all.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad's interview about his book The Condemnation of Blackness is a great follow-up to our conversation about W.E.B. Du Bois, black thuggery, and the politics of African American respectability. I have borrowed a few of Dr. Muhammad's ideas in previous posts--I am especially taken by his suggestion that African Americans have historically been treated as adults for purposes of criminalization and punishment, but are viewed as children in regards to citizenship. Consequently, I wanted to give him the shine he more than deserves.

Muhammad's assertions about the intellectual work done by sociologists (and others) to decriminalize white ethnics during the early 20th century (and to ensure that their deviant classes were viewed as individuals--as opposed to representative actors of a whole "race") is also very telling. Blackness as a necessary group identity, and whiteness as absolute individuality, is still with us in the year 2012: this is a governing meta-narrative for the discourse surrounding the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

Ultimately, when scientists, political elites, and intellectuals conspire to create new truths they generate new regimes of knowledge and "common sense."

Here is a thought for you: imagine if in the same moment that the knowledge workers who struggled to make sure that white ethnics could become massaged into the American tradition through "assimilation" also chose to include black Americans in the mix. What would our society and public life look like in the present? Would people of color be more or less free?

Yes, citizenship and blackness are intentionally constructed as juxtapositions to one another. But, we can still entertain the counter-factual of what could have been.

Diversity Games: Barack Obama and the Rise of "Multiculturalism Incorporated"

Racism is an instinctive tool to capture resources and deny them to competitor "species." This is why Obama is backed by the Wall Street bankers. To them, he is a tool to safeguard their fortunes against the rising tide of public resentment. They are excellent psychologists, and psychic abusers of the popular Black mind.

They know, through their experts in PR (advertising and the management of the public mind), how the popular Black mind pines for symbols of "hope," for action heros on basketball courts and on the big screen — Will Smith saving the fantasy worlds Hollywood conjures with smoke and mirrors. Any hero in any arena can be produced to distract and quell the masses, so long as it is not an actual hero in any arena of actual power...

Obama may have some decent intentions beyond his blatant careerism, but clearly the careerism is primary, and for that he must reassure his sponsors that he can quell the public. The job he is applying for is to keep public affairs calm enough so the same select businesses and the same select gamesters can continue to make the same government-backed mega-profits.

In business circles, this is called "maintaining a stable business environment." Obama says "change" but his sponsors know this to mean "stability." "Change" is what we’ll get from the billions we are forced to pay into taxes and inflated prices that profit all too few.

Populations that have histories of being oppressed are easily duped, because they are so desperate for "relief," for "salvation."

In one of our conversations earlier this week, Cnu offered up a link to a great essay at Counterpunch which worked through the relationship between President Obama, the overclass, and a symbolic politics of racial grievance which does little to challenge deleterious, systemic, institutional, macrolevel changes in American political economy.

While I most certainly believe in the power of aggrieved and subordinate groups to resist power and hegemony, and of course to force elite actors to respond to their justice claims, we must also concede how those at the top are adept at managing conflict as a means of serving their own narrow interests.

The election of Barack Obama is central to this story. It is clear that the colorline has been renegotiated in America since the time of the founding. However, it still remains. The Civil Rights Movement was successful as much because of peoples' activism and resistance, as for how elite actors realized that Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy was a national embarrassment in the context of the Cold War.


More broadly, the Racial State evolved over time because the type of personal, intimate, and directly violent exploitation of the plantation (with its old fashioned "dominative" racism) was not suited for a growing industrialism, or many years later, an economy that would evolve into a global, service based, information age set of international markets and actors. As Wendy Somerson notes, in this model "structural racism and sexism are thus denied through visual inclusion within corporate culture."

White supremacy in the United States (and Europe) had to "evolve" from the personal to the structural and institutional if it was to remain effective at allocating resources, and the gains of the in-group and its elites were to be preserved. By comparison, South Africa's herrenvolk society failed to adapt and was subsequently torn down. The genius of American racism is how it adapted in order to survive--all the while maintaining many of the same core inequalities and hierarchies of years and decades past.

The election of Barack Obama was the culmination of this transition. Multiculturalism incorporated won out. Diversity, even a type that is driven less by "justice" and more by profit maximization and the exploitation of human capital, is taken as a given. However, there is nothing at all radical about it. Ironically, I would suggest that the election of the country's first black President is the death knell for justice claims about racial equality and redistribution.

In a time when whiteness is perceived to be under siege, and the State has been drowned in the bathtub by the Right, the narrow and tenuous coalition of white Americans who were somewhat sympathetic to the idea that racial inequality ought to be addressed through robust policy interventions are now disinterested, and in many cases, hostile to such appeals.

Part of this dynamic is a function of crude self-interest and anxieties about scarce resources in the Great Recession. A second component is a cultivated type of white racial resentment and backlash against black and brown progress (seen in the 1960s and early 1970s with the anti-busing movement; in the 1980s with the "small government," "silent majority," and "California tax revolt;" and with the angry white men culture warriors of the late 1980s and early 1990s) which the Tea Part GOP White Nationalists have grown and nurtured in the Age of Obama.

To many Americans, the symbolism of a black man as President of the United States is an epitaph for racism's death--despite all of the available evidence which demonstrates how race impacts life chances in the present. In all, many across the colorline confuse an increasingly diversified class of (token black and brown) political elites, and a myth of an inclusively diverse America cooked up by the dream merchants on Madison Avenue, with a progressive vision and politics that actually empowers people of color by addressing hard questions about the maldistribution of resources in this country--inequalities that track very closely to the dividing lines of racial hierarchy and privilege.

As I often do, what follows is a particularly timely and telling passage from the great new book The Twilight of Equality. Here, Lisa Duggan is working through the rise of neoliberalism, the Culture Wars, and the power of conservative multiculturalism as a type of commonsense for "post racial" post civil rights America.

Could it be that the election of Barack Obama was the final act in the Black and Brown Freedom Struggle, as the Right can create a narrative that racism is dead--all the while mining white racial resentment and victimhood for electoral gains? Piling on, how has this moment been perverted by white racial resentment and faux Right populism into one where a corporatist center right Democrat is skewered as a "Socialist" for not being even more slavish to the financier class? Or more broadly, that the State and the social safety net must be destroyed in the name of "efficiency" and "small government" because it serves and protects minorities, the poor, women, "liberals," gays and queers, all to the disadvantage of "real Americans?"

From the Clinton Administrations's serious efforts to recruit racial minorities and women into high-level government service, and to reduce the range of exclusions of sexual minorities, to the G. W. Bush administration's more clearly token gestures of inclusion, the rhetoric of "official" neoliberal politics shifted during the 1990s from "culture wars" alliances, to a superficial "multiculturalism" compatible with the global aspirations of U.S. business interests.

"Culture Wars" attacks and alliances did not disappear, but they receded from the national political stage in favor of an emergent rhetorical commitment to diversity, and to a narrow, formal, nonredistributive form of "equality" politics for the new millennium.

...Some proponents of "equality politics" moved away from civil rights lobbies and identity politics organizations to advocate for the abandonment of progressive-left affiliations, and the adoption of a neoliberal brand of identity/equality politics. These organizations, activists, and writers promote "color-blind" and anti-affirmative action racial politics, conservative-libertarian "equality feminism," and gay "normality"...Such a realignment would rival the 1970's "Southern Strategy" that moved phalanxes of former Democratic voters out of the New Deal coalition and into the Republican columns, largely through "culture wars" racism.

What Would W.E.B. Du Bois Say? Black Brigands Waylay White Man in Saint Patrick's Day Attack

It would appear that our long George Zimmerman's national nightmare is about to be over continue. While in lockup, I know that there are many brothers who are eager to make Zimmerman's acquaintance and show him some "love."

The Trayvon Martin murder has encouraged many good white conservatives to come out of the woodwork and confess their love of black people. The former are now obsessed with "black on black" crime as they plead and prey for our salvation. They ask, "where are Al Sharpton and other such 'trouble-making' 'race hustlers' when white folks are attacked by black goons?" "What of fairness!" "Who is protecting us?"

In the theater of the racially absurd that was inaugurated by the election of the country's first black president, white people are now victims; as such, white conservative reactionaries cry and plead for black and brown allies who will stand in the breach with them against White Victimhood.

Of course, these White concerns about black crime, criminality, and intragroup violence are based on a specious and dishonest type of empathy and care. These voices are silent except when white racism is obvious as a motivation in the shooting down, murder--and lackadaisical investigation of such crime by the police--of black and brown people by Whites (and those who overly identify with them).

Moreover, "the black people need to look in the mirror before they talk about anti-black violence crowd" are also deeply invested in both White deflection and White denial of White racism as a social reality. Here, if they can find one example of bad behavior by blacks against long-suffering white folks, all claims of structural inequality and white privilege are rendered null and void. This is a very neat heuristic. It is also one that is shallow and anti-intellectual.

A few folks have asked me what I think about the Saint Patrick's day mob attack by a group of black teens and young adults on a white tourist in Baltimore, Maryland. I generally do not engage such questions because to do so risks legitimizing a narrative where appeals to black criminality are used as a means to avoid critically engaging structural White Supremacy. Outliers become immunizers; hate crimes become not a habit of whites against people of color, but rather a trend of white suffering and oppression. I try not to legitimate such foolishness with a response.

However, and especially given how there are many new readers to We Are Respectable Negroes, I will offer up an answer that is old hat for those who have been here from the beginning. One can be a critic of white supremacy and still be deeply invested in the politics of black respectability, dignity, and success. The street brigand troglodytes who attacked this innocent man deserve to be put under the jail.

By implication, how any fair or keen observer can seriously suggest that black folks tolerate the criminal classes, remains a mystery to me.

Apparently, those people who traffic in the fiction that the vast majority of African Americans love black hooligans, have not spend any time actually talking to us. And most certainly, these same dim types have not conversed across the color line, or sat in on our churches, mosques, barbershops, hair salons, dens, or living rooms, where during private moments the punishments for street urchin mouth breathers that we discuss would (likely) make Hammurabi shutter and look away.

More than a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois, one of America's greatest intellectuals, made the following observations about black crime. He was a historian, sociologist, political scientist, poet, science fiction writer, cultural critic, and activist. And lest we forget, elder god Du Bois was also a criminologist.

The street beast highwaymen make few distinctions about the color of their victims. They are not to be protected--as black folks often and reasonably did for some among the criminal classes during the reign of the lynching tree. Respectable negroes, the vast majority of black people, want black ign'ts imprisoned, just as we want killers like George Zimmerman to be treated fairly by the law when they shoot people dead in the street. Justice ought to be blind.

As the miner's canary, Black and Brown Americans only want the rules applied and enforced fairly across lines of race and class. We also want the causes of criminal behavior engaged and dealt with just as readily as the crimes themselves.

The Souls of Black Folks captures this perfectly:

So great an economic and social revolution as swept the South in '63 meant a weeding out among the Negroes of the incompetents and vicious, the beginning of a differentiation of social grades.

Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould. The appearance, therefore, of the Negro criminal was a phenomenon to be awaited; and while it causes anxiety, it should not occasion surprise...

Thus grew up a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination.

For, as I have said, the police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks.

It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man's conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of in- justice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.

When, now, the real Negro criminal appeared, and instead of petty stealing and vagrancy we began to have highway robbery, burglary, murder, and rape, there was a curious effect on both sides the color-line: the Negroes refused to believe the evidence of white witnesses or the fairness of white juries, so that the greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one's own social caste, was lost, and the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.

On the other hand, the whites, used to being careless as to the guilt or innocence of accused Negroes, were swept in moments of passion beyond law, reason, and decency. Such a situation is bound to increase crime, and has increased it. To natural viciousness and vagrancy are being daily added motives of revolt and revenge which stir up all the latent savagery of both races and make peaceful attention to economic development often impossible

But the chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.