We are respectable negroes

Brother Cornel West Brings the Ruckus at the "Remaking America: From Poverty to Prosperity" Conference

2012-01-27T03:00:00.001-05:00

I love a good performance. An admiration of a great performance does not take away from its meaning, weight, teaching, or importance.

Brother Cornel West brings it in this keynote address at the "Remaking America: From Poverty to Prosperity" conference.

Truly he does. Dr. West's lecture is sharp, enlightened, multi-leveled, nuanced, and entertaining. Make no mistake, Cornel's speech is well-practiced; yet, it proceeds forward by marshaling the illusion of improvisation and inspired spontaneity. Trust, his speech is practiced, deftly so, and repeated and refined (over and over and over again).

For lunch, I am going to eat a Quizno's sandwich, drink a Coke, and study up on what Cornel West pulls off here. I love great emcees; I admire great workers in professional wrestling; one day, years in the future, I would like to be able to channel a small percentage of Cornel West's oratory skill.

Entertainment can equal education. In combination, they are "edutainment." It is okay to indulge. Intellectual sugar highs are fine...if you follow them up with a trip to the archives and some deep reading to get to the root of the argument.

In all, Brother Cornel is hot on the set here.

Racism Chasing? Republican Mark Oxner's Campaign Ad Features a "Slave Ship" the USS Obamaboat

2012-01-26T18:12:00.004-05:00

I will let you all arbitrate the semiotics of this ad.

At least Mark Oxner's people had the good sense to make sure that the enslaved children on Obama's "ship of state" (with its upside down U.S. flag and crossed out "United States Constitution") were a diverse group. We can count that as a small measure of progress in the post-racial age.

In a political moment where campaign commercials have featured Islamic terrorists, demon sheep, and gangster rappers who penetrate white women with their guns, this ad is par for the course.

Is race an element here? I am not sure. This anti-Obama campaign commercial could be one more example of the "benign" myopia that is common to the white racial frame ("how could anyone be offended by a boat, an allusion to slavery, and a black captain whipping his crew? How shocking!). Alternatively, the race work done here could more sinister, as any reference to "white slavery" has historically done potent political work from the Revolutionary War to the present (with the Tea Party faithful using that very same phrase to oppose the Obama administration and play on white racial resentment and anxiety).

I am hoping that there will be an expert on naval history who is also a racism denier that will post a defense and explanation of Mark Oxner's ad. That could be good fun.

I will sit this one out and see if any of you want to put on the racism chasing shoes this evening. Who knows? Perhaps, the ghosts of Jack Johnson and the Barbary Pirates will show up and give us a real seminar on white slavery and poor Billy Budd.

Connecticut Keeps it Classy: Eat a Taco for Civil Rights; Marine Goes Free After Murdering Iraqis

2012-01-26T11:52:00.003-05:00

It is always a pleasure to see my home state featured in the national media.

There are many tragedies in America's long war. While some are upset about Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan (and of course are not asking the more important questions about the efficacy of the policy that put U.S. soldiers in harm's way, or if peeing on dead bodies is worse than incinerating innocent people with bombs), there are many other shameful moments that will eventually come to light from the long wars abroad.

To date, we have seen "dead pools," assassination squads, rapes of children, racially motivated fratricide, and all sorts of descents into madness by U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American people choose to either turn away, remain blissfully ignorant, or wrap themselves in childish nationalism as a defense mechanism. When blowback inevitably comes they can shake their heads and ask "why do they hate us so? Is it our values? The American way of life?" Some pandering politician will avoid all real talk and instead answer a resounding "yes" to all three questions.

Frank Wuterich, a United States Marine from Meriden, Connecticut has been found not guilt of murdering more than a dozen innocent non-combatants during a punitive raid in Iraq. His punishment? Nothing significant, he was slapped on the wrist for "dereliction of duty" and sent on his way. If Vietnam brought the barbarism of the Tiger Force, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to spit forth much fodder for books and movies that will make the Abu Ghraib scandal look like a resort town.

The mayor of East Haven, Connecticut also kept it classy this week. Following a series of civil rights abuses by his police, Joseph Maturo publicly announced that he would eat tacos as a way of supporting the Latino community--a group which has been subject to racial profiling and harassment in his city. Post-Civil Rights era race discourse has really reached a new level of sophistication has it not? Reparations through the gesture of taco eating. Priceless.

There is a deeper element here that is worth exploring. How do certain spaces, towns, and communities come to be hostile to "outsiders" who are not the "right" ethnic or racial group.

I grew up in New Haven and Hamden, Connecticut. As such, I am very familiar with East Haven. It had the greatest Toys R Us in the area, and every Sunday I would nag my mother to drive me up I-95 (or on the surface streets) to East Haven where upon arrival at the store I would grab the newest G.I. Joe or Transformer. Years later, I would also spend a good amount of time at East Haven's bowling alley--they had a great pro shop, really easy lane conditions, and lots of "action," i.e. money games between some of the best scratch players in the area.

Those spaces were very integrated. However, there was always this lingering white ethnic anxiety in the air as we black and brown folks knew not to hang around too late in the area as anything (harassment by the police, a fight with some locals who would drive by in their Monte Carlo SS's, Ford Thunderbirds, or Corvettes--watch Jersey Shore and you will get the joke--and yell "nigger" or "spic" at you for a cheap thrill) could jump off. If you were a brother dating a white woman, you most certainly knew not to take her to one of the late night diners in East Haven. "No shoes, no service" would be the least of your worries if some of the local "Itals" didn't like that one of "their" women was with one of "those people."

Like many other rustbelt suburbs and cities of the Northeast, in East Haven there was/is racial anxiety about lost economies, ethnic transition as a proxy for the wages of whiteness gained (for those who could move out to places like Branford, Cheshire, or northern Hamden) or lost (those Italians, Poles, Greeks, and others who couldn't because of financial or familial reasons leave the neighborhood), and nostalgia for the "good old days." These dynamics are difficult for many white ethnics of a certain generation to reconcile as formerly white spaces became black, and then Hispanic and Latino.

My adopted Scots-Irish grandfather would tell me stories about the neighborhood of his youth in New Haven. During the 1920s and 1930s Irish cops would ride on bicycles and hit kids in the head with a stick for sport, to put some fright in them, or to break up groups of "undesirables." Apparently, the latter was more common when the group was "mixed" than if one "kept to your own type."

My father grew up in the same area and would jokingly talk about the local neighborhood cliques that would in turn form the basis for the semi-pro football teams in New Haven county. He could "pass" if he so chose. Thus, my father had many white ethnic friends and could navigate the various Irish, Jewish, and Italian neighborhoods in relative safety if "he walked really fast and kept a hat on." Like my adopted grandfather, he too had stories about how space was bounded by either the police, or the gangs of young toughs who lingered on the borders of each ethnic and racial neighborhood. No one got killed. There would be tussles to keep everyone honest--fights more akin to The Wanderers than Boyz in the Hood. Over time you earned some respect, and eventually could earn a pass to either walk on certain streets, or go into certain stores.

The mayor of East Haven's epic fail is an entry point for thinking about local history and geography. Teach me a thing or two. How did East Haven become so hostile to Hispanics and Latinos, and non-whites more generally? Does anyone have an insight into the local history? What are the towns, cities, and areas where you know that as a black/brown/white person that you had best avoid? Sundown towns are no longer enforced by "law," yet they still exist.

Ultimately, are places like East Haven, and larger cities like Providence and Cranston, just experiencing metaphorical hangovers from white flight, deindustrialization, and realistic group conflict, dynamics that play themselves out through racial profiling and harassment?

Not All Slave Owners Were Rapine Beasts: Ron Paul's Musings on States' Rights and the "Tragedy" of the Civil War

2012-01-25T02:17:00.013-05:00

Over the last few days, I have watched this interview with Ron Paul several times. Something about his tone of voice just doesn't sit right with me, the detached indifference rubs me the wrong way.

It is easy to flatten history, in doing so to generate stories of evil men, barbarous and incomprehensible deeds, and frothing at the mouth villains. This is true when the history is personal and your people would have been the vanquished, the oppressed, the conquered, or the exiled. Ironically, the need to hold on to a fiction of two-dimensional monsters and evildoers is also true of those who are the present day descendants of the dominant, the winners, the exploiters, the "in-group," and the conquerors.

By painting "those people" into a box where only the most wicked were racist, prejudiced, genocidal, chauvinist or the like, a safe distance is created between the present and the past. Cartoon visions of history are very comforting for those on both sides of history's accounting sheet: nuance is a shared enemy for those seeking simple and validating stories.

For example, it is easy to imagine all white slave owners as rapine beasts who crawled into the beds of black women and girls, using them as their personal sex toys, where inevitably these same white men would either sell off their own mulatto sires for a profit, or throw them into the fields as "free" labor. Likewise, we can envision the babies of newly arrived African slaves being smashed on the ground, killed during the seasoning process that the human cargo of the slave ships endured upon arrival in the New World.

In black masculinity's shared collective memory there exist memories of wives and loved ones taken before our eyes, we being rendered powerless to intervene by the barrel of the gun or the edge of the blade, and where inevitably the lustful eyes of the white slave owner, his sons, and friends turn to us as objects to sate the wickedness of their reckless and violent libidos. This is a secret pain, one little discussed in the shared history of blacks and whites together in the Americas and elsewhere. And of course, every overseer was an evil debased man like Mr. Covey of Frederick Douglass' famed autobiography, a degenerate piece of poor white trash who, like many of his class, lived for nothing but the sadistic pleasures that came with "breaking" black slaves as he made them suffer under his whip, ax handle, cat of nine tales, scold's bridle, or branding iron.

But, what of the white slave owner who struggled to reconcile his "Christian faith" with the owning of human beings, and in a fit of guilt, convinced that he would go to hell because of his wickedness, freed his human property? How do we make sense of the white slave owner who manumitted the children of slaves on his plantation, or the feelings of loyalty and closeness that some slaves felt for their "white family?"

Perhaps, most troubling for a two dimensional version of American (and Atlantic) slavery is that plantations were run like factories. Of course, there were yeoman whites who owned one or two slaves, and lived in close intimacy with them, as privations were shared, and struggles (if not successes) were experienced in common across the colorline. But the plantations that occupy American memory, The Gone with the Wind version of history, were in reality, based on detached principles of labor efficiency. The owners of these business enterprises exchanged journals, notes, and theories about how to improve the yield of their crops. Therein, rubrics about the relationship between the ideal amount of punishment (the whip) and selective incentives in order to produce the maximum amount of productivity were divined and ciphered.

For the most profitable slave-owning whites, chattel slavery was a business. In many instances, it was a very impersonal one (where on some plantations the owner would never dispense punishment personally as it was a distasteful act and would make his slaves resent and fear him, while on other plantations it was only the head of the house who could wield the whip or the lash--overseers were not to be trusted to act judiciously or fairly). In all, African American bondsmen and bondswomen were entries on a ledger sheet; they were "workers" whose productivity had to be maximized by any means available.

There is an odd intimacy here. On one hand, slavery on the largest plantations was business and never personal. As a practical matter, slavery could never be anything but the latter.

It is not Ron Paul's piss poor understanding of the historical underpinnings of the Civil War and chattel slavery that is most disturbing. No, it is the idea that in his detached musings, I can hear in my ear the whisper of the assassin doing a hit, or a slave owner assessing the value of his latest purchase on the auction block, that this is "business, never personal," just before they pull the trigger or sign the check.

As we have seen in other moments throughout his campaign, there is an utter lack of human empathy (and sympathy) for black personhood in Paul's speech to his Redemptionist, white racist, Neo-Secessionist public that yearns for the states' rights narrative. This is the root of my disturbance.

Ron Paul's counter-factual about gradual or compensated manumission (where the freedom of blacks held in bondage was purchased as a means to end chattel slavery) is problematic on a number of levels. Primarily, it ignores the significant psychic wage that whites invested in the personal owning of black bodies, their attachment to a society that validated white superiority over people of color, and where even though a majority of whites did not have bloody hands from the direct business of chattel slavery, they could aspire to one day own slaves as a sign of upward mobility and success.

Ron Paul's musings about the civil war as an avoidable conflict, save for the desire of the North to impose its will on the poor South--and thus violating states' rights--is also ahistorical. We do not need to hypothesize about why such proposals as compensated manumission did not come to pass on a wide scale in the United States. It is not a mystery or puzzle. There is a rich historical record which details the many failings of such a scheme, and slave owners' rejections of it in the name of perpetual white supremacy.

In all, Ron Paul's desire to frame the Civil War as a tragedy for the South at the hands of a villainous North, a federal force that only wanted to take away the liberties of white people, is an ideal-typical example of libertarianism's failings on matters of race and justice. Ron Paul does not seem to identify slavery--the owning of black people by white people in perpetuity--as a de facto state of war and tyranny. If libertarians were to find a historic freedom struggle to claim as their own, one would think that abolition, accomplished by any means necessary, would be at the top of their list.

Second, Paul places his principle of "non-interference" over the rights of African Americans (and others) to be treated as full and equal citizens. Whites have the freedom to discriminate against, violate, and terrorize black people. The latter's liberty and freedom are secondary to those of the former. By virtue of that most basic standard, Ron Paul is a polite white supremacist who enables and supports a herrenvolk Apartheid America in theory, if not fully in practice.

The detached manner in which Ron Paul valorizes the Confederacy as "the victim" of federal tyranny, is to my eyes at least, one of the most frightening faces of contemporary, "color blind" white supremacy. Here, black people are secondary to his principles; slaves do not really enter into the calculus because as a privileged white man he cannot imagine himself as existing in such a state of existential duress and oppression.

In keeping with the universal "I" of whiteness, the "normal," the race-neutral "we," the African American held in bondage is secondary to Ron Paul's higher order principles. "We the people," and "the states' rights" apparently do not include the will of African Americans to not be held as human property. Ron Paul's whiteness is blinding, deafening, and utterly transparent in this regard. It is ugly. I dare say that there is something evil about it.

I thought long about that last statement of moral and existential judgement. I own it. I believe it.

Just as the plantation owner entered profits and losses, births and deaths, crops and yields, in his ledger, we can all take comfort in the fact that Ron Paul's particular version of white racism is "business, and never personal." That makes it okay, doesn't it?

Introducing Red Tails 2.0: The "Sassy Black Sistas Special Edition" Courtesy of George Lucas

2012-01-21T04:09:00.010-05:00

Red Tails, George Lucas' long awaited World War 2 love letter to the storied Tuskegee airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group has finally been released in theaters across the country. As I pointed out in my review some months back, the movie is a throwback to the golden age of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. For some viewers this makes for a good, old school, nostalgia heavy, and fun, movie going experience. The critics are a bit more negative, with their consensus being that Red Tails is a horrible disappointment.

There has been much talk about Red Tails online, with George Lucas receiving both praise and condemnation for his honest sharing about the difficulties of getting Hollywood to make a "black" film in which white actors are not central to the story. Across the black blogosphere, the upset at Red Tails has been at the apparent omission of black women from the Tuskegee airmen's story. Clutch Magazine for example, has featured a series of posts on this question, where the feeling is that the lack of black women in Red Tails is a reflection of their broader status as second class citizens.

In the digital age, there are no final edits. To point, George Lucas has a habit of tweaking with, fixing, and updating his films. The epic Star Wars trilogies have been continually updated by George Lucas. There is little reason to believe that Red Tails will not receive the same treatment. Readers of We Are Respectable Negroes know that I love to play script doctor. Given that popular films are a playground for the imagination, I am going to run with the concerns expressed by some in the black blogosphere about the role of African-American women in Red Tails.

As always, populism is both liberating and fun.

What follows are my casting choices for the inevitable update of Red Tails, what I am calling "Red Tails 2.0: The Sassy Black Sistas Special Edition":

Red Tails is pretty standard World War 2 action fare. It features masculine comradeship, fast machines, explosions, the obligatory prisoner of war scene, a foreign love interest, and a pretty linear and predictable plot where the Tuskegee airmen struggle against white racists, win the approval of their superiors (and white peers), and go on to triumph over unbelievable odds. Adding some roles for black women in keeping with the Hollywood tradition could open up some interesting possibilities. Let's free our minds and have some fun.

***

Red Tails needs more comic relief. The film could benefit from a motherly figure who has been in the U.S. Army for some time as either a Secretary or Stenographer (perhaps a Buffalo Soldier?). She is now a trusted adviser to the senior officers in the 332nd. This character doesn't take any back sass from the young lions in the unit who are cocksure and a bit overconfident. This character also dispenses folksy wisdom, as well as a shoulder to cry on when matters get too dire, and friends are lost in combat.

Tyler Perry's Madea fits the role perfectly.

The Tuskegee airmen could not win World War 2 alone. There were many support personnel, mechanics, and the like who kept the P-51 Mustangs, "the Cadillac of the sky," up and running at peak performance. This actress should be attractive, but also comfortable with machines and tools. It would be a bonus if she complicated gender stereotypes about black femininity. She is a "strong black woman." She is also vulnerable. Her body and habitus should suggest athleticism, confidence, and a no nonsense attitude balanced with a need to love someone--be they male or female. Queen Latifah (or perhaps the movie Pariah's Adepero Oduye) is a great choice for the part of Master Sergeant Mechanic for the 332nd airgroup:

Red Tails has been criticized because one of the Tuskegee airmen in the film has an Italian love interest. According to its critics, this is a slap in the face to black women. They offer the following: How come they cannot have a woman of color, either a wife or girlfriend at home (or one they meet overseas) who is the object of their affection? As a corrective, there are many possibilities from which to draw for the movie--and still remain historically grounded. My suggestion is that Red Tails should feature one of the many multiracial blacks who could be found throughout Europe during World War Two.

There were Afro-Germans, French, Italians, Russians, and other nationalities across the continent. One of the pilots in the Tuskegee airmen should have an intense relationship with a character who is the child of a Black Sicilian and a white Northern Italian woman.

Hauntingly beautiful, she would be marginalized by the French in the small town near where the Tuskegee airmen are based. One faithful night she meets one of the black American pilots outside of a segregated U.S. Army club. They then proceed to dance the night away in an alley where he sings jazz classics in her ear and she provides the chorus in Italian. There relationship is a whirlwind of sexual bliss and intense, immediate love. She becomes pregnant with their love child, only to have her lover killed during one of the Tuskegee airmen's final missions of the war.

There is only one choice here: Halle Berry.

Rosie the Riveter is an iconic image from World War Two. Women served throughout the U.S. military. While they were not allowed in "combat" positions, they took great personal risks flying aircraft across the Atlantic to Europe, towing planes for gunnery practice, as nurses and spies in Europe and Asia. In fact, one of the most noted aviators of the 20th century was Bessie Coleman, an African American woman, who in the dark days of Jim Crow, flew across the United States solo. If history does in fact echo, Red Tails should include many more women of color in its narrative.

Truth is fiction; fiction is truth. The Tuskegee airmen were facing difficult odds. The War Department, in realizing that it was foolish to hold back talented war fighters from the front lines, have called up an elite group of female aviators. "The Black Banshees" are assigned to the Italian theatre of World War Two, where they appear in the last thirty minutes of Red Tails in order to save the day after the 332nd suffers heavy casualties on a particularly harrowing and poorly planned mission. At first, their presence is resisted by the Tuskegee airmen. Inevitably, The Black Banshees win over the Tuskegee Airmen, and each woman pairs up with their opposite number among the 332nd. At first the mutual attraction is resisted, but eventually each member of The Black Banshees marries a Tuskegee airmen after retiring from the service, pregnant of course with future aviators, who just like mom and dad, will be the cavalry of the skies in the jet age.

Members of The Black Banshees include Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Missy Elliot, Jean Grea, and MC Lyte. Their flight leader is Angelina Jolie channeling her earlier role as Cleopatra.

War is hell. Blood is spilled. Bodies are broken. Nurses in wartime are sisters, mothers, confidantes, objects of unrequited love, and skilled technicians who put broken bodies back together again so that they can go out to fight (and be broken) again. There is something almost Freudian and Oedipal about nurses in many World War 2 movies: they are sister-mother-lover figures. The love is many times quite chaste...until it surrenders to desperation...and lust. Red Tails needs this actress to be compelling, pathos filled, and sincere. Gabrielle Sidibe, of Precious fame, is the perfect young actress to play the role. She is a member of the U.S. Army's nursing corps who is transferred from Atlanta, Georgia to the European theater in order to tend to the young and homesick men of the 332nd air group.

Red Tails is not a perfect movie, few are. But, Red Tails is an opportunity to self-indulge and spread our proverbial wings. True, viewers may not get exactly what they want; but, they should also be honest about the good that is there...and the hellish possibilities that could have otherwise been. This is not a soft-bigotry of low expectations as a decision rule and rubric for judging Red Tails; no, it is just real talk.

In that spirit, what other actresses would you add to Red Tails and why? And how would you cast the obligatory big budget black actress of the last few years, she who is Miss Beyonce (who I intentionally left out of my hypothetical casting game), in the film? Would you include a dance number where all of the black women in the movie break out in song Dreamgirls style?

The World is Now Made Less Interesting: Meteorologist Dr. Mel, from New Haven's WTNH, has Passed Away

2012-01-20T04:00:00.015-05:00

Dr. Mel passes away at 66: wtnh.com

This is for the folks who have cracked my secret identity, for those readers from New Haven and Hamden, Connecticut, and all people who have a beloved personal weatherman or weatherwoman.

Dr. Mel Goldstein has passed away. He fought a long and very public fight with cancer and it appears he finally succumbed. Dr. Mel didn't lose. Dr. Mel simply went on to another fight; he had to predict the weather for the elder gods on another plane of existence.

He was a quirky guy. Dr. Mel was very popular and a true populist: he would show up all over New Haven county and talk to people. From the rich to the poor, all of us--the black, brown, white, yellow, and red--we all trusted him. I am sure if Dr. Mel decided to run for Mayor he would have won in a landslide.

In fact, at the supermarket in the old Ames-Stop & Shop Plaza near The Strand Theater on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden, Connecticut ("back in the day" during the 1980s), I met Dr. Mel.

My dad, mom, and me? We were all overwhelmed. Dr. Mel was genuine, and it was as if he had know us for years as he talked to us for a good fifteen or so minutes. While my favorite celebrity encounter was getting Mr. Fuji's (of the then WWF's) autograph at Bradley's department store while he stood in line wearing a kimono and flip flops, my encounter with Dr. Mel is a close second.

Random factoid: I am named after a weatherman. Therefore, my highest complement is that Dr. Mel was THE DUDE that all of us trusted when it came to his predictions about closing school for a winter storm. If Dr. Mel said there would no school tomorrow, we were never disappointed. Those other folks, on those other networks? Not to be trusted.

You will be missed Dr. Mel. Your passing means that we are all a bit older. You will never, not ever, be replaced.

In the unique cadence of Master Yoda, "irreplaceable, you are."

Dr. Mel, you are real people. You are also a respectable negro. Do travel well.

Juan Williams is a Human Toilet and Chauncey DeVega is a Nasty Boy

2012-01-19T13:17:00.001-05:00

Juan Williams is in on this angle; in the language of professional wrestling the Gingrich-Williams fracas is a "worked shoot."

I left a little easter egg in my piece on Juan Williams and the Tea Party GOP's air raid siren politics of racial appeals to white conservatives. No one gave either a wink of approval or a moan of condemnation...until today.

The good folks at the Right-wing website Newsbusters have declared me a very nasty boy--one you don't bring home to mother. They picked up on my suggestion that Juan Williams, in his Stockholm-like loyalty to Fox News and the Tea Party GOP, is a political coprophagist. Hopefully, this allusion to Juan Williams' (and that of black conservatives more generally) role as a human receptacle for white racial resentment will resonate around the Right-wing echo chamber. It would be good fun.

And do check out the peanut gallery's reaction as well for a laugh.

Hearing oneself discussed in the third person is always great sport. Courtesy of Newsbusters:

While several media liberals have praised Juan Williams of Fox News for pushing around Newt Gingrich with the idea that his campaign rhetoric is at best insensitive to black Americans, Chauncey DeVega at the Daily Kos is sticking to the theory that Williams is a tool of racist Republicans: "Juan Williams is an object of abuse, a means to prove a point. Juan Williams is a paid pinata for white conservatives."

Or Williams is a toilet: "Juan Williams is/was a repository for the fecal matter of white conservative bigotry, and a need to maintain superiority over negroes who dare not to step off of the sidewalk when white folks pass." Or Williams is actually "coprophagic," he eats feces:

That in another life Juan Williams would be a critic of "negro agitators" during the Civil Rights movement is coincidental to his designated role on Fox News: he is exemplary of Joel Kovel's theories about white supremacy, and how it manifests as a White society which is collectively (and individually) stuck in the fecal phase of human psychological development -- it is all over his face. Juan Williams smiles while cashing his checks at the prospect of his political coprophagia at the ass end of conservative politics. He revels in playing the role of the human centipede.

Chauncey followed up his pinata line with this:

I do not know if he was legitimately hurt and surprised by their reaction to him, or if his pain was not feigned, and rather sincere and real. In understanding the logic of Republican racism and naked appeals beyond the dog whistle, Williams was the stand-in, the object of abuse through which to actualize rage and hostility. Barack Obama was not available. Any black body would do. The cheering, snide glee of Newt Gingrich dressing down uppity "Juan," and the audience's cheering of a "boy" being put in his place, would be missed by only the most in denial observer.

Let's just round up the crazy with this final brain-blast:

In 2012, Republican candidates are using overt signals, what are for all intents and purposes blaring air raid sirens and signal flares that race, whiteness, and American identity are deeply intertwined. The appeals to white racism by the Tea Party GOP during the primaries are not background rhythms or subdued choruses. They are the driving guitars of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," the chorus of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," the opening moments of the Notorious B.I.G's "Kick in the Door," or the flipped samples of Justice's "Stress". You feel it. You know it. To deny the obvious is to close one's ears to a driving drum line and cadence that travels up through your shoes...and to your bones.

How else can a fair observer excuse away Republican arguments that blacks are lazy parasites, whose children should live in work houses and pick up mops and brooms to learn a work ethic, that "illegal" immigrants should be killed by electric fences, or Muslim Americans should be subject to racial profiling, marked like the "Juden" of Nazi Germany?

[HT: Johnsey deFlagga]

Racial Air Raid Sirens: Newt Gingrich vs. the Uppity Negro vs. Boardwalk Empire vs. Speaking Lies in the Black Church

2012-01-19T01:49:00.009-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A Google search limited to the last seven days yields the following results:

282,000 returns for "Juan Williams" and "put in place."

23,400 returns for "Juan Williams" and "uppity."

It would seem that someone is getting the message about those negro rapscallions.

The video of a Gingrich supporter applauding his reinforcement of the colorline, and the "natural order of things" through a "moment of instruction" for Juan Williams, is priceless. How can you deny the obvious that all this "lazy negro mop carrier uppity negro talk" is precisely about race, when one of your own white racist supporters signals just such a thing, and you, the candidate, smile in acknowledgement of what is a not so inside joke?

Ultimately, Newt Gingrich is a master of talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Several days before a debate during which he would demagogue the lazy coloreds on a national stage for the delights of white racially reactionary conservative populists, Newt Gingrich campaigned before a black church assembly. Ironic (or perhaps fitting?) then, that the Great White Father who wrote his dissertation on King Leopold's vicious white supremacist colonial enterprise in the Congo would yearn to play the Great White Father to African Americans:

I am unsure if Newt Gingrich is closer to the Batman character Two-Face or He-Man's Man-E-Faces, but his practiced lies-as-truth speech mongering does most certainly remind me of Nucky on Boardwalk Empire--but with less sincerity, generosity, or pragmatic spirit:

An Air Raid Siren: Chris Matthews was Right About Republican Racism in South Carolina, But Wrong About "Dog Whistle" Politics

2012-01-18T03:17:00.017-05:00

On his MSNBC show Hardball, Chris Matthews called out Newt Gingrich and other Republicans for what he described as their "dog whistle" appeals to white racism during the South Carolina debate on Monday night.

He was correct in identifying the work that racism does for the Tea Party GOP and its candidates in their efforts to win over white conservative voters. However, Chris Matthews was too generous and kind. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and other Republican candidates are not engaging in subtle dog whistles to their faithful, where racism and white racial anxiety hides in the background, masked and hidden by other language.

Definitions matter: dog whistle politics are based on a signal or cue to the in-group, and one so subtle that those not in the know will overlook it as no more than quixotic background noise, a blip, a comment without context or meaning.

For example, during the 2004 election, President Bush's mention of the infamous Dredd Scott Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with African Americans and slavery. Rather, it was a wink to a rabidly anti-choice conservative Right-wing audience that Roe vs. Wade would be overturned by his administration.

In 2008, McCain-Palin featured a negative campaign ad which borrowed from the movie The Ten Commandments and suggested that Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ. If one was not part of the Left Behind Jesus Camp Christian Nationalist Dominionist crowd, the visuals and narrative of the commercial were odd, bizarre, utterly strange, and devoid of context. The ugliness of these symbols and metaphors were so covert, that they made sense for those outside of the targeted audience only after Time magazine thoroughly deconstructed the campaign ad and its malicious intent.

In 2012, Republican candidates are using overt signals, what are for all intents and purposes blaring air raid sirens and signal flares that race, whiteness, and American identity are deeply intertwined. The appeals to white racism by the Tea Party GOP during the primaries are not background rhythms or subdued choruses. They are the driving guitars of Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla," the chorus of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," the opening moments of the Notorious B.I.G's "Kick in the Door," or the flipped samples of Justice's "Stress". You feel it. You know it. To deny the obvious is to close one's ears to a driving drum line and cadence that travels up through your shoes...and to your bones.

How else can a fair observer excuse away Republican arguments that blacks are lazy parasites, whose children should live in work houses and pick up mops and brooms to learn a work ethic, that "illegal" immigrants should be killed by electric fences, or Muslim Americans should be subject to racial profiling, marked like the "Juden" of Nazi Germany?

In all, the Tea Party GOP's campaign for the presidency rests upon marshaling white anger and rage at The Usurper, a perpetual Other, and one not fit for the presidency by virtue of his birth and skin color--he who we know as President Barack Obama. If Birtherism is not based on this calculation, on what else does it rest?

Race matters to the Tea Party GOP. It matters overtly. And it matters to the white populists of the Republican Party without apology or subtlety. This leads to the following practical question: how do we separate the subtle dog whistle from blaring conservative racism? What are the elements of the racial appeal? How can we identify it so that reasonable folk can neuter and castrate it? Is this even possible?

Knowing is half the battle. As such, I highlight the following elements to the puzzle:

The speaker effect. Using one of the most gross examples, when Newt Gingrich talks about lazy blacks on welfare and food stamps who do not know the meaning of hard work he is mindful of his audience. Remember, politics is ultimately about the creation and reinforcement of imagined communities. Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, and Paul know exactly how to talk to their respective audiences in order to get a response. To point: white conservative populists have disdain for non-whites, see them as lazy, outside of the polity, and as rightful targets for appeals based on symbolic racism. In the eyes of the Right, "those people" are not "real Americans." They never can be.

The audience as a public who receives, internalizes, and circulates the Tea Party GOP message about race, white racial resentment, white oppression, and hostility to people of color. The folks in the audience and on the stage during the Republican primary debates "get" the terms of the conversation. In fact, they are deeply attuned to the language and rhetoric of the New Right, as anyone who either goes to one of these events, or votes in a primary election, are deeply invested in its outcome, and a return to white American normality. In all, they are chasing nostalgia and a Leave it to Beaver vision and lie of America. This audience is also "tuned in" to politics. Gingrich and his peers are sending signals to a group primed and ready for his racial appeals...without a need for explanation.

This reality speaks to why there should be no surprise when Republican audiences cheer the death penalty, dying people without insurance, or heckle soldiers who happen to be gay. There are unstated rules, a script, which govern social norms and behavior. The outliers who go to political debates are intimately familiar with this language. Like marks at a professional wrestling event they know when to boo and when to cheer.

Context matters. In isolation, perhaps it would be a more difficult case to suggest that Gingrich's appeals to white audiences about lazy blacks are predominantly and clearly about white racism. However, given that communities are created through speech, and that "discourse" is about a sense of shared meaning with unstated assumptions, any argument for conservative colorblindness is judged to be insincere.

In South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies, there was Rick Perry (a neo-Secessionist that wants a Civil War 2.0 and a renewed fight for states' rights); Ron Paul (a bigot whose newsletters continue to suggest that African Americans are ravenous, craven, criminal, stupid beasts); Rick Santorum (a man fascinated by bestiality and the idea that blacks are parasites who only want to live off of white people); and Newt Gingrich who sees all African-Americans and Latinos as being on welfare and the public dole until proven otherwise. In total, these candidates are a rogues gallery where white supremacist attitudes towards non-whites is a standing rule, one only to be disputed after the fact.

Juan Williams is an object of abuse, a means to prove a point. Juan Williams is a paid pinata for white conservatives. I do not know if he was legitimately hurt and surprised by their reaction to him, or if his pain was not feigned, and rather sincere and real. In understanding the logic of Republican racism and naked appeals beyond the dog whistle, Williams was the stand-in, the object of abuse through which to actualize rage and hostility. Barack Obama was not available. Any black body would do. The cheering, snide glee of Newt Gingrich dressing down uppity "Juan," and the audience's cheering of a "boy" being put in his place, would be missed by only the most in denial observer.

Juan Williams is/was a repository for the fecal matter of white conservative bigotry, and a need to maintain superiority over negroes who dare not to step off of the sidewalk when white folks pass. That in another life Juan Williams would be a critic of "negro agitators" during the Civil Rights movement is coincidental to his designated role on Fox News: he is exemplary of Joel Kovel's theories about white supremacy, and how it manifests as a White society which is collectively (and individually) stuck in the fecal phase of human psychological development--it is all over his face. Juan Williams smiles while cashing his checks at the prospect of his political coprophagia at the ass end of conservative politics. He revels in playing the role of the human centipede.

The excuse of ignorance and a lack of memory. One does not need to understand the root of a thing in order to buy into its power. White conservatives (and others) who traffic in racism do not necessarily need to be able to explain how blacks came to be associated in the White racist mind with apes. Likewise, those who hate Jews do not need to be able to give an exegesis on Nazi propaganda in order to be expert anti-Semites.

This is one of the greatest tools and defenses of the contemporary white racist--I didn't know that, you are being unfair!; You are "playing the race card" for calling out my association of the Obama with watermelons and apes as "racist"; I never associated blacks with welfare or crime, people like you are the real bigots for calling attention to how Republicans talk about such things, we are really all Americans!; stop talking about slavery, my family never owned black people!; (and of course) whites are oppressed in America by Barack Obama!

There is a collective reservoir of symbols, assumptions, and narratives that individuals borrow from in a given society in order to make sense of their world. Knowing the wellspring helps; it is not a requirement to perpetuate common sense understanding(s) of the world.

Ultimately, Chris Matthews was correct in the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. To defeat President Obama, the Republican Party is wallowing in white racism in order to win over racially and economically insecure white voters. However, Gingrich and company are doing this overtly. There is little subtlety. Looking forward, the 2012 Presidential season will make the infamous Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential election look like a celebration of Dr. King's birthday. The challenge for liberals, progressives, and reasonable conservatives, is how to make the Republican Party pay for their race baiting, and desperate reaching back to the Civil War, Redemption, and Birth of a Nation as playbooks in order to defeat the United States' first Black President.

Sadly, matters may be so dire that the white identity politics of years past are now "new school" rather than "old school." To marshal that fear, insecurity, and anger one does not need nuance, sophistication, or dog whistles. White conservatives can put such feelings on blast and gin up the psychological wages of white fear, white anxiety, and white rage to try to defeat Barack Obama.

As always, the past isn't even past. It is yesterday. Get ready folks. What occurred in South Carolina is only a warm up for what the Tea Party GOP is preparing to unleash in the months to come. What is coming to pass will be an ugly, wild ride.

For Folks Smarter than Me: Is Ron Paul a John Mearsheimer "Realist?"

2012-01-17T21:42:00.001-05:00

I do hope that Ron Paul stays in the Republican race, between another batch of racist newletters coming to light today, and his pain in the ass truth-telling about foreign policy as exemplified by his astonishing idea that common sense ought to have some influence on statecraft, he is mighty entertaining.

The audiences for the Republican primaries are more fun than the candidates themselves. Last night, the Tea Party GOP South Carolinian populists were in great form as they cheered Newt Gingrich putting uppity negroes back in their appropriate place, and booed Ron Paul's suggestion that the golden rule ought to have some impact on America's foreign policy calculus.

The latter moment was very telling. Years ago I believed, truly in my heart, that the United States was preordained for greatness and that she could do no wrong in the world. My thinking was tautological: America was great because it is great; America does good abroad because America is good; America is first among nations and by virtue of that fact she can do what she wants because she is the first among equals (and lessers).

I was also seven years old at the time.

Contemporary populist conservatives are mired in anti-intellectual authoritarianism. Their rabid brand of American exceptionalism is resistant to all empirical reality, fact, and nuance. The Tea Party GOP, in its appeal to nativism, and desire to court Fox News low information voters, encourages and reflects a profound amount of infantile thinking on the part of its public. When mated with a penchant for Christian Dominionism, and the hold that "faith" and the Culture Wars has over reason, the realpolitik of the Right naturally devolves into that of true believers, heretics, traitors, secret pledges, and the "paranoid style" of governance and politics.

The negative response to Ron Paul's damnable thought that America does not have carte blanche to act in the world without consequences or blowback is a symptom of this cultural-political sickness.

In watching Ron Paul work through the idea that states should think long-term and that no power is more "exceptional" than any other--thus freeing it from the consequences of its actions like some divine chosen one--I was called back to Robert Kaplan's recent Atlantic magazine piece on noted political scientist John Mearsheimer.

In Kaplan's profile on Dr. Mearsheimer's body of intellectual work (with an obligatory mention of the Israeli Lobby thesis), and the influence of "realism" on international relations theory, one passage seemed particularly relevant:

Such thinking is prologue to Mearsheimer’s admonition that a struggle with China awaits us. “The Chinese are good offensive realists, so they will seek hegemony in Asia,” he tells me, paraphrasing the conclusion to Tragedy. China is not a status quo power. It will seek to dominate the South China Sea as the U.S. has dominated the Greater Caribbean Basin. He continues: “An increasingly powerful China is likely to try to push the U.S. out of Asia, much the way the U.S. pushed European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Why should we expect China to act any differently than the United States did? Are they more principled than we are? More ethical? Less nationalistic?”

For the many folks smarter than I am on these matters, can you help a brother out? Is Ron Paul a type of realist--perhaps a "defensive" one? If not, what school of statecraft is Ron Paul an adherent to? Is he a pure isolationist?

I play in these waters at the child's end of the wading pool, and there is no way I could swim in said pool without two life preservers and a rope. Teach me a thing...or ten.

Juan Williams Plays the Black Pinata For Newt Gingrich and White Conservatives in South Carolina

2012-01-17T12:39:00.005-05:00

~~Boy you best know your place.~~

Juan Williams earned his several million dollar a year contract as Fox News' designated black whipping boy conservative last night...

There is racial progress in America: the Republican crowd for last night's South Carolina debate only booed Juan Williams for his uppity back sassing, whereas not too long ago they would have called up a lynching party.

Once more, my black conservative readers, can you please explain your affinity for a Republican party that consistently (and with glee) lies about and belittles African Americans? And which does so before a national audience--and even to one its "exceptional" pet negroes?

Ultimately, I do not know which was the more offensive aspect of the South Carolina Tea Party GOP debate: was it A) Rick Santorum's factually and sociologically challenged understanding of the relationship between poverty, marriage, and opportunity structures or B) Newt Gingrich's consistent insistence that black people are lazy bums who need to pick up mops, and are uniquely addicted to food stamps and welfare?

This one is yours folks.

Enjoy a Free Preview of the Documentary "All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert"

2012-01-16T15:38:00.008-05:00

It is great when you can still be surprised by life. Ignorance is bliss; discovery is joy.

Last week, I was forwarded the early link to the upcoming documentary, "All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert." Until that moment, I had never heard of Winfred Rembert. I wish I had known about this remarkable artist many years earlier.

My mom comes from a little town in the South that now has a population of only 300 or so. On that level, Rembert's story, and his work at chronicling a world disappeared, resonates with me. I promised her that we would go back to our family land; I intend to keep that pledge.

On Dr. King's holiday we can celebrate the slaying of Jim and Jane Crow, but we must also be honest about how the two Great Migrations, and racial integration, helped to put a nail in the coffin of the Black Metropolises (and other vibrant African-American communities across this country).

Those times were not to be idealized--the nightmare years of racial supremacy, white violence, and segregation are not to be yearned for despite the Utopian dreaming of some black nationalists and others--but they are an epoch which black folks ought not to ashamed of. In all, Winfred Rembert is a great model of cultural resistance through art and the everyday, quotidian politics of black life.

Here is the description for the documentary on his life and work. The film will be released during Black History Month, but you should take time to enjoy this preview courtesy of the good folks at SnagFilms.

With his intensely autobiographical paintings depicting the day-to-day existence of African Americans in the segregated South, Winfred Rembert has preserved an important, if often disturbing, chapter of American history. His indelible images of toiling in the cotton fields, singing in church, dancing in juke joints, or working on a chain gang are especially powerful, not just because he lived every moment, but because he experienced so much of the injustice and bigotry they show as recently as the 1960s and 70s.

Now in his sixties, Rembert has developed a growing following among collectors and connoisseurs, and enjoyed a number of tributes and exhibitions of his work. In "ALL ME: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert," the artist relives his turbulent life, abundantly visualized by his extensive paintings and, in a series of intimate reminiscences, shows us how even the most painful memories can be transformed into something meaningful and beautiful. A glowing portrait of how an artist—and his art—is made, "ALL ME" is also a triumphant saga of race in contemporary America.

The Obamas vs the Romneys: The Republican Mind and Visions of Whiteness and Race Suicide on Dr. King's Holiday

2012-01-16T04:38:00.007-05:00

The road to the world imagined by Dr. King remains long.

Some four decades after his murder, and the inauguration of the Southern Strategy, the sweet appeals of racial code words, and the succor offered by white racial resentment remain undeniable to the Republican Party. When Santorum, Gingrich, and Romney talk about lazy, parasitic African Americans who should pick up mops to learn about hard work, and where "the blacks'" exalted leader wants to turn America into a "Socialist-Communist-Fascist European welfare state," the signals to white racism are beyond dog whistles. They are blaring air raid sirens.

Dog whistles can also be subtle; they can be visual cues which speak to the faithful.

For example, some Americans see Mitt Romney's much publicized family photo as one of homogeneous whiteness and WASP glory.Whether in rust belt towns, gated communities, poor white rural America, or the nondescript suburbs, this is the America of "Nixonland" that so many yearn for. This is real America; the best of us; a country that they/we should die to protect.

Of course, this is a memory steeped in false nostalgia. It is whiteopian dreaming. Nevertheless, such illusions are both compelling and compulsive to many Americans of a certain age, hue, ideology, and experience.

Other folks see the family photo of Barack Obama and his kin as the future. Americans are a cosmopolitan people. While there exists a deep and historic nativist impulse, as well as a fear of the Other, the country's greatness has been its ability to include all folks that want to belong-- what is an all embracing sense of pluralism and "we the people" that is flexible, accommodating, and inclusive.

Citizens use heuristics, memes, cues, and slogans to make sense of politics, and to work through their own political decision-making. As such, for many, the photo of Mitt Romney's family is that of "real America," and to deviate from this approved model is hazardous to the Common Good, a decision that is perverse, and one that is "unAmerican."

By implication, for the collective consciousness of the white Tea Party GOP populist electorate--and although they may lack the vocabulary to express this cogently--there is something inherently wrong with the interracial, international, and "diverse" nature of Barack Obama's family. In all, the Obama way is "race suicide": it is a path of destruction for the United States, as to be American is to be quintessentially and unquestionably "white."

Folks like Pat Buchanan are honest enough to voice such sentiments, feelings which are the rotten, beating heart of the Tea Party GOP. Others who share Buchanan's anxieties and loyalties are not as courageous; they play around with his themes while not owning their substance.

Ironically, their need to couch such wickedness in race neutral talk is "progress." However, the concerns of reactionary white populists are centuries-old, near and dear to Whiteness and a country originated as a White Republic. For them the question remains unresolved (even in the year 2012): how much racial equality is "enough?"

The challenge here is that to be wholly inclusive, and to really create a radically democratic society, is to risk the privileges of Whiteness. It is to create a world in keeping with Brother King's vision where white people are forced to compete on an equal playing ground with people of color. Some of us are more than ready for that world.

Others, those White Dreamers, who foreground whiteness as "real and "idolized" America, are scared to death of a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic 21st century. Whiteness is such a valuable currency, one whose rewards have been outsized for so long, that to consider further reductions in its returns is terrifying to many White Americans.

On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, conservatives will mouth breath about his legacy as they spin an empty story of racial equality, racist Southern Democrats, and white victimhood in the Age of Obama. These contortions are to be expected. The joke is--and has long been--that the real Dr. King, the radical visionary and not the deracialized, apolitical panderer for gross consumerism and empty politics, would be hated by conservatives, Red State America, and many others fearful of his progressive vision, if he lived in the present.

This fact is a signal to Dr. King's greatness.

All Americans should be reflective on this day. Sadly, many conservatives, and others who hold a deep disdain for people of color, the poor, unions, the working class, immigrants, and the disadvantaged, will try to find a way to steal Dr. King's vision. The time is long past for such antics to be made obsolete. In the year 2012, those on the Right who bastardize and rape Dr. King's legacy, should finally stop such foolishness.

Brother Martin does not belong to you. Sorry. He belongs to us. It is about time that his legacy and vision were taken back--without apology--by those who would stand shoulder to shoulder with him in the present, and that are the offspring of his struggle and martyrdom.

And Tea Party U.S.A. is not part of that vision. They never were and could not possibly be today.

Football Theodicy? Tom Brady is to Tim Tebow as Stone Cold Steve Austin was to Jake the Snake Roberts

2012-01-14T22:48:00.007-05:00

Oh Mr. Tebow, I know that the faithful Christian Nationalist evangelical Dominionists who believe that you are favored by Providence--and that God intervenes in football games--will valorize your suffering as it is both epic and prophetic.

But, I simply could not resist: Tom Brady and the Patriots just kicked your ass.

This begs a question: does Tebow's humiliation introduce a theodicy problem for his zealous faithful? How do they reconcile an all knowing, all loving, omniscient and omnipotent god with the existence of football evil in the form of the unholy trinity that is Brady-McDaniels-Belichick?

Should Black Women Boycott Red Tails, George Lucas' Tuskegee Airmen Movie?

2012-01-14T14:17:00.007-05:00

While we wait for the epic sonning that Tom Brady, the Hooded One, and Josh McDaniels are about to put on Mr. Tebow this evening (that trio sounds like a country rock group, no?) here is something to pass the time.

There is a good conversation on Clutch magazine's website about the interracial gender politics of Red Tails, George Lucas' upcoming Tuskegee airmen movie. One of the primary tenets for those who study the politics of popular culture is that audiences (or "publics") receive, process, interpret, and circulate ideas on their own terms. Of course, there are any number of corollaries and complications to this argument. But, the basic idea is that populism "matters"; once a "text" is out among the public, part of our work as critics is understanding the "why's" and "how's" of their investment (or not) in it.

I reviewed Red Tails months ago. There, I made mention of one aspect of the story--the romance between a black airman and a white Italian woman--that I thought was superfluous to the plot and could easily be left on the cutting room floor. I did not read this plot point as subverting the overall story, or as being deeply symbolic of the state of the family and love relationships in the African American community in the twenty-first century. Moreover, there were many love and sexual relationships between black GI's and European women in all theaters of World War Two. Given the "historical" nature of Red Tails, a wink to this fact would not be out of order. Ultimately, my observation was based on efficiency in story telling. It was not some deep aversion to the idea that a young man far from home would find comfort in the arms of a beautiful woman.

Populism can be empowering. It can also be confusing, distracting, and lead to any number of interpretations--some of these are cogent and compelling, others much less so. What strikes me the most about the comments on Clutch magazine's site is not how some readers (in a vacuum not having seen the movie) are making impassioned claims, but how short the leap is from Red Tails the World War Two action film, to "black women in Hollywood are misrepresented all of the time and hated by the mass media," to "black woman are unloved by black men and Red Tails reinforces this fact," to "Red Tails should be boycotted because there are no black female love interests."

It would seem that there is much pain in parts of the black community, where the seemingly trivial and benign are interpreted as the significant, the poignant, and the meaningful.

Thus, I must ask: Are matters really this dire?

From the peanut gallery:

AJ JANUARY 10, 2012 AT 3:14 PM

Will definitely not be seeing it. Typical hollywood spin of BM with WW, never a BW/Bm love story made with real money. when they put a love story with a BW on the big screen as the main story, then maybe. until then – NOT. The majority of the tuskegee airmen had BW for wives/girlfriends – why can’t we see a high quality, big budget romance between them? Please. And Lucas being with Melony Hobson means nothing, since she is past child-bearing age (and he is too, imho).

Jess JANUARY 10, 2012 AT 8:05 PM

@PINK: I know just what AJ is talking about. How about you do more than look at trailer snippets, and find out what more the movie is supposed to be about? YES, this movie does feature an interracial relationship between one of the Airmen and a white woman. And YES, I agree with AJ – why the pattern of almost all movies focusing on romantic relationships between Black men (particularly those of integrity and character) with white women? Why can we not get big budget films made like this where the love a Black man (or any man) has for a Black woman be showcased? Why must the IR thing be shoved down our throats. Think about your daughters. Ifthey are going to watch a film celebrating Black achievements, why are they discounted and pushed to the sidelines always for someone white? I don’t buy it, and call bull...

@Jess – You nailed it! Every war movie *except* those with black soldiers show the soldiers fighting to come home to their women (of the same race). This is true for every white war movie from the black and white era, to “Saving Private Ryan” and right on down to “The Dirty Dozen.” When it comes to black soldiers, movie makers find ingenious ways of leaving black women out! This trend even touched “A Soldiers Story.”And now black women, who are once again NOT shown as women worth fighting for, are supposed to bear the burden of supporting “Red Tails.”

Otherwise, we risk seeming ungrateful to Hollywood, unsupportive of black male actors, close minded to interracial themes or just plain too ignorant to see period pieces or anything that doesn’t have Tyler Perry’s name on it. But they keep missing the point: Show us some love and we will do the same for you!

AJ JANUARY 13, 2012 AT 11:26 AM

And it’s all about what is pushed to our youth – Lucas’ relationship is not being pushed to millions. His movie, on the other hand will go to millions, in full CGI with emotions on display. So BM can continue to believe in the goodness and sweetness of WW and others instead of their own. The youth are being taught, again and again by Hollywood, to believe we BW are not worth saving or anything else positive. Other than to be helpers and sidekicks. If this movie doesn’t show how the Airmen loved Lena Horne, and how she stood up for them it is not worth any little money I have.

Sure Lucas will make millions, and our community will continue to be brainwashed into hating BW and girls.Money talks, bullshit walks. He put ALL the money up for this, its obviously a labor of love for him. He wants this story told, and he wants to practice his art in film at the same time.Yet, that’s just not good enough for some of you. You want to yap about him not being married to his black girlfriend, you want to whine that there are no women’s concerns “represented” in the movie, you don’t want an action movie, you want a romantic comedy, where are the movies about black history before slavery, why should we go see a movie made by “Massa” about black people, etc.?

How did we get so good at complaining? Like I said, I don’t know how good the movie is going to be. But it’s got to be better and send out a better message than the next low-nutrition meal from Tyler Perry (which I believe is called, “Medea Gets A New Wig” or something like that). That steaming load of empty calories will be served up soon enough at a theatre near you. Get a grip, everybody!

Vertigo Schtick JANUARY 14, 2012 AT 7:16 AM

@LemonNLime

Alright looking at IMDb has confirmed the character Sofia (playing by Portugal native Daniela Ruah), is the Italian love interest of a certain main character–perhaps Terrance Howard. So I can kind of see where the outrage is coming from. Still, I’m not going to bash the movie unless they make her the star of the movie. I am upset (given that they, the Airmen did not marry interracially) that this new twist was added. But I figure that’s just a way of marketing to all audiences, as no one is particularly interested in seeing a movie about black love besides black people. Not yet anyway.Sigh, one step forward, few steps back :/

YeahRight 2011 JANUARY 13, 2012 AT 2:34 AM

Pilot is pretty much on the money with his/her comment. George stated his purpose for making the film “to give teenage boys role models” paraphrasing and by in large I like he meant black teenage boys. End of story. If black women want a movie that does this for black girls than I suggest we hit up these black actresses, singers, and talk show personalities to invest in an idea that doesn’t show grown women in a constant state of depression and anger (not over racism or injustice but over a freaking man). Black women played a huge role in the history of this country, its our responsibility to tell it.

Tiff JANUARY 12, 2012 AT 8:33 PM

I was happy about this movie. God knows we are desperate need some positive black movies outside of Tyler Perry. I was going to support this film too. Not going to support it after Kola Boof said on her twitter page last night that the main love interest in this film is a white woman despite the fact all the Tuskegee airman was married to black women. She also had seen the movie in advance.

I could care less that none of the main actors in the movie are married or dating non-black woman but what is mess up is Hollywood once again trying to erase the existence of black women yet begging for black women to support them economically. George Lucas who is dating a dark skinned black woman ought to be shame of himself for allowing this to happen, he should at least know better but guess not, he is willing to throw black women under the bus just to prove something to Hollywood. I know he funded the movie but the screenwriter of this film is Aaron Mcgruder who wrote Boondocks and I am sure some black women has some issues with him.

AI JANUARY 14, 2012 AT 8:21 AM

I respect you ladies desire to boycott a movie that doesn’t have a Black female love interest to the Black men. However, I doing so will not send the message: “Continue doing big-budget Black movies, but do it with Black love interests.” Rather, it says “Black movies don’t make money.” Money talks first. When it comes to Black films, studios don’t take the time to sift through what worked and what didn’t. They just say eff it, and do another Perry film or a “feel good” movie like The Help. When you convince studios that you are talking money, THEN you have the financial leverage to get folks that care in casting. I don’t say this to convince you to change your mind, bc your principles are admirable and just. Just to caution you that it won’t be effective.

LemonNLime JANUARY 14, 2012 AT 6:56 AM@Vertigo Schtick

– I would love to know. I have heard 2 arguments 1. is that the cast is made up of several men who date or marry non-black women and therefore shouldn’t be in it and 2. the love plot that is in the story is based around one of the airmen and a white woman (comment from people who supposedly have already seen the movie). If it is reason 1, I could care less let people live their lives. If it is reason 2, I just ask that it is historically accurate for the time period, even if it is brutal because if people are seeing a movie about history they should see real history. I just have a hard time believing any film were actual Airmen help create and tell the story would have a white woman as the main love interest. But that is just me. Other than that I say it is best for people to calm down until we’ve actually seen it.

Laughter is Your Friend: Courtesy of Comedy Central, Do You Want to Win DVDs of Sinbad, Eddie Griffith and Patrice O'Neil?

2012-01-13T02:00:00.003-05:00

I promised to bring the readers of We Are Respectable Negroes more goodies in the year 2012. I generally pass on promotions, but this most recent offer from the good people at Comedy Central was too good to let slip by.

This Sunday will feature the debut of comedian Kevin Hart's special "Laugh at My Pain." Dude has gotten lots of great press and you should certainly check him out at 9pm EST.

As a nice incentive to spread the word about his show, Comedy Central is offering up the following DVDs to all of you: Patrice O’Neil's"Elephant in the room"; Sinbad's "Where you been?"; and Eddie Griffin's "You Can Tell ‘Em I Said It."

We have 3 sets of DVDs to give away, so there is much goodness to go around.

As is our habit here at WARN, you need to put in a little work to win this great set of prizes.

Here is what you need to do.

In keeping with my ghetto nerd roots, I would like you to imagine that space aliens have finally made first contact with Earth. If you had to choose one comedian, either living or dead, as humankind's ambassador to the universe, who would you send and why?

This contest will run until next Wednesday night. Get creative, be reflective, make your case, and win a prize. Pretty easy, no?

Jar Jar Mea Culpa? George Lucas Discusses His Tuskegee Airmen Movie "Red Tails" on The Daily Show

2012-01-12T19:44:00.011-05:00

George Lucas is making the rounds to promote his newest film Red Tails. I attended a screening of the movie several months ago and wrote my review here. On The Daily Show Lucas echoes my observation that Red Tails is a corny, over the top, jingoistic, 1940s era World War 2 movie--just one with black folks as the centerpiece of the story. In short, Red Tails is the World War 2 movie that The Tuskegee Airmen deserved and never received: it is their/our Flying Leathernecks.

I love Star Wars. I owe Lucas and his fantastic creation a great deal both personally and professionally. As such, I feel that I have earned the freedom to engage in some critical ghetto nerd talk about the prequels and Lucas' politics more generally. Dude is on the right side of so many issues, and his body of work signals to this fact, that (to my eyes at least) Red Tails makes up a bit of the ill will left over from the Jar Jar debacle that is the Prequels.

Lucas drops the shield with Stewart, engages in some self-deprecating humor, talks long term plans for the Red Tails franchise, and the reality that Hollywood will not finance black movies save for Tyler Perry's hot garbage new age race minstrelsy (notice how George bites his tongue, speaking very carefully about the coonery and buffoonery that are Madea and Meet the Browns).

I will see Red Tails again both to support the venture, and to see if the final edits improve on what was an already more than serviceable film.

Here is one of the real faces, the real voices, and real people who were the heroes known as The Tuskegee Airmen. This interview with Alexander Jefferson of the 332nd Fighter Group from the U.S. Army War College archives (an amazing resource by the way, one that I will be featuring more often) is worth a view.

Men like this are legends, elder gods:

An Inside Con Game? Why Would Cornel West Go On the Hannity Show?

2012-01-12T02:19:00.005-05:00

Last night, Brother Cornel West appeared on "Brother" Sean Hannity's TV show. Lord. "Brother" Sean Hannity? Save me now. I cannot stomach Fox News; only a few seconds of viewing leave me spent and exhausted--their lies and distortions are that burdensome.

In all, this an entertaining interview. But, it left me with many head-shaking moments, and a few questions.

One, why would Cornel West go on the Hannity Show? Fox viewers are not going to buy his books, they see him as a crazy negro intellectual leftie Commie, so what is the point? Is Brother Cornel just putting his head in the lion's mouth for a cheap thrill?

Two, why would Cornel walk back his observations about Herman Cain being on "the symbolic crack pipe?" You are on enemy territory, why not go hard and stick to principles? And yes, it was fun to hear Hannity mentioning some of my talking points on Herbie Cornbread Imagine There is No Pizza Cain (once more, I had a moment when I regretted not going on Fox News those months back). One day, I will get my metaphorical hands around the throats of Hannity and company, I just have to wait for the moment of my own choosing.

Three, are the talking heads all in bed with each other? Is this a big charade that the true believers, marks, and the low information voting public don't realize is a sham? Left and Right need a good fight, just like boxers who feign hatred for each other to build up the gate. Is this a dynamic present in the Cornel West Fox News interview?

Fourth, do Hannity and the Conservative Jesus Christ hates the poor and loves the rich Christian Nationalist Dominion crowd really believe the crap they spew? I am not a "Christian," but the Right-wing prosperity gospel war monger types have always been the object of much fascination on my part. What mental gymnastics do they use in their biblical hermeneutics? Can their pastors, ministers, and other oracles be brought up on charges of biblical malpractice?

Finally, who the hell are the "so-called" rich that Hannity defends as an oppressed and aggrieved public? What leaps of faith are necessary for listeners to sustain a belief in, and adherence to, such Orwellian fictions?

The lie isn't even that persuasive, even for the most superficial and dim of viewers. Why does it have any traction at all?

Do You Want To Win a Copy of the New Book The Obamas?

2012-01-11T22:28:00.009-05:00

I like giving folks goodies. To that end, I have been gifted with a few copies of Jodi Kantor's new book, The Obamas, to give away to the readers of We Are Respectable Negroes. Widely discussed in the press, a target of criticism by First Lady Michelle Obama, containing titillating gossip about Barack Obama's edict that a staffer must watch Barbershop 1 and 2 in order to learn about the sacred relationship between a black man and his barber, and with tales of ghetto nerd greatness such as an Alice in Wonderland themed party (with an appearance by Chewbacca) in the White House, The Obamas sounds more than intriguing.

Now, you all know that you got to earn your keep around here--no one gets a free ride from this respectable negro.

The election of Barack Obama was an amazing moment for the United States. We saw what was once thought impossible--a black man elected President in a country, where for a majority of its history, folks such as Barack Obama were held as human property. As I have written elsewhere, that moment, as well as the years which followed, were/are the stuff of science fiction. The unbelievable has now become mundane; but for many, there remains a warm glow surrounding the election of the United States' first black president.

Memories are malleable. They do not live like people do. For those of the Civil Rights generation, there is a tendency to exaggerate, lie, bend the truth, or simply "misremember" their role in The Movement. For example, my mother told a tall tale about being in the streets with Dr. King, staring down dogs, and marching for freedom. Moms maintained this lie for years. Under pressure, she later confessed that she had no taste for non-violence and would have gone to jail if a white cop had beat on her. Thus, no Dr. King marching and protesting for her. But, she held onto that creative reinterpretation of history because the story was "fun" (and it inspired her son).

In that spirit, tell me your personal story about the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

You can be creative and do a dry run of the myth which you will spin for your great grand kids when they ask, "where were you when Obama won? What did you do to help his campaign?"

Do you have a poignant story to tell, something so true that it must be shared for the benefit of all times? Or do you have a secret shame, one that you will need to change for the benefit of your legacy? Were you in jail? Indifferent? Overslept on election day or forgot to register? Secretly voted for McCain/Palin, but lied to everyone by telling them that you cast a ballot for then candidate Barack Obama? Did you engage in a post-election night of kinky rutting, one where you and your partner role-played as Barack and Michelle?

Unburden yourself. There is no judgment here--just a cool prize.

The two best submissions (as judged by me) will each receive one copy of The Obamas.

Have at it. The contest will run through Wednesday, January 18th, at which point I will announce our winners.

Good luck.

Melissa Harris-Perry on The Colbert Report is "the Strong Black Woman"

2012-01-10T20:47:00.011-05:00

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Damn right! Black women carry the burden for the absence of the black male in the African American community. We are indeed yetis. Some of us are even kinky koalas...inside joke.

The strength of the Colbert character is his honesty. He is so wonderfully flat and transparent that one can easily imagine that there are many such white male conservatives: they are self-entitled, narcissistic, and can't imagine a world outside of their own experiences. In all, they are not "bad" people. Rather, the Stephen Colbert's of the world are just ignorant of the great depths and magnanimity of their own ignorance.

[Talk about a turn of phrase.]

Melissa is good in this spot. Unlike some heavy hitters like the genius historian Nell Irvin Painter who crashed and burned on The Colbert Report, Dr. Perry plays the role nicely--she is not too serious and maintains a good sense of humor about the whole matter...while still keeping her game face on.

There is also a nice bit of self-deprecating humor as Melissa describes herself as a "strong black woman"--one who is black on most days.

In all this is some good stuff. And of course, congrats to Melissa on her new MSNBC show. She knows how to shine and get her hustle on. Melissa is also cool people who will most certainly bring some new voices (and faces) to the table at MSNBC.

I am looking forward to her debut. Are you?

Uncomfortable Worshipfulness Towards a Killer? Fox News Interviews Chris Kyle, Navy Seal Sniper With 160 Kills

2012-01-09T11:00:00.004-05:00

Is it just me, or is there is something profoundly uncomfortable and unsettling about this interview?

I am a bit of a grognard. In my teens, I was more interested in weapons, machines, and things that go boom. With age, I have gravitated more towards military strategy, and am increasingly fascinated by soldiers' individual accounts of combat.

When I was 12 years old I would have found former Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle's account exciting. I would have taken his deeds in Iraq (where he killed at least 160 people), as some great display of "manhood." Some years later, now knowing several former and active duty military personnel, I possess a different type of respect for their service.

To the one, all of them have upset the stereotypes of soldiers as video game, heroic warriors, worshiped as two dimensional cartoon characters by many in the American public. Almost all of these veterans, especially those back from Afghanistan and Iraq, are critical of the policies which put them and their comrades in harm's way on imperial misadventures.

Chris Kyle was feted by Bill O'Reilly last week: his deeds were recounted, and killing admired by the Fox News faithful. There is an odd homoeroticism (or is it homosocial worship?) in this interview, where O'Reilly as an archconservative is channeling a deep fascination with the "how" of death, and a type of hyper-masculinity that is the bleeding heart of Right-wing authoritarianism. Here, O'Reilly reminds the viewer of why straight men enjoy watching the freakishly large penises that dominate much of American pornography. Hero worship, with no small amount of projection, is, and remains, the thing--it is the means for a visceral thrill.

I have read many accounts of the personal killing that is done by snipers. They hunt people. The most dangerous prey is their quarry.

“After the first kill, the others come easy. I don’t have to psych myself up, or do anything mentally — I look through the scope, get the target in the cross hairs and kill my enemy before he kills one of my people,” Kyle writes in his new autobiography, “American Sniper.”

I wonder what the intimacy of death experienced by Chris Kyle has done to his soul. While many would not frame killing during combat in these terms, soldiers who have to take a life are often damaged by the deed. They become "victims" of a sort. To my eye, it is curious thing that Bill O'Reilly does not ask such an obvious question about his guest's interior life.

As Dave Grossman and others have painstakingly documented, killing is an unnatural act. Moreover, most soldiers are highly resistant to killing, and thus increasingly sophisticated training techniques have been developed to overcome their aversion. In fact, historically, a relatively small number of soldiers have accounted for a disproportionate percentage of kills on the battlefield. These people are "natural" warriors; they exhibit sociopathological tendencies such as low affect, low levels of empathy, and an ability to distance themselves from the act of taking another life. Predictably, these natural killers gravitate to the most elite military units where their particular "gifts" will be of most use--and they will be more likely to get a chance to ply their craft.

This is not a claim that elite soldiers such as the Navy Seals, the unit which Chris Kyle was a member of, are "crazy," sociopaths, or are especially prone to violence outside of a combat situation. It is however, an acknowledgement that there are bad and dangerous men who are born that way. The training sharpens the edge.

The son of a Sunday-school teacher and a church deacon, Kyle credits a higher authority for his longest kill.

From 2,100 yards away from a village just outside of Sadr City in 2008, he spied a man aiming a rocket launcher at an Army convoy and squeezed off one shot from his .338 Lapua Magnum rifle. Dead. From more than a mile away.

“God blew that bullet and hit him,” he said.

For Kyle, the enemy is a “savage” — there’s no room for gray, only black or white.

America is a militiarized society. Warfare and martial culture are at the heart of the country's economy and entertainment. Militarism is also central to America's political culture as well. For example, onservatives such as Gingrich, Romney, Bush, Santorum, Perry, and others play the tough guy as chicken hawks who swagger in a phallocentric game and performance which titillates their populist base, even as the irony that all either avoided military service (or exaggerated their responsibilities) remains uncommented upon.

Much the same can be said of the flag wavers in Red State, Right-wing America, a group of people who love to talk tough about foreign intervention, but in a society where a relatively small number of people have gone to war, are likely to have never been in combat.

We also cannot forget that President Obama presides over a killing machine that is almost industrial in its efficiency. While his Tea Party GOP detractors paint him as anything but "aggressive," "manly," "strong," or "brave" on foreign affairs, as Commander in Chief, Barack Obama has stacked up "terrorist" bodies as if they were cord wood. He shows no signs of stopping any time soon.

In total, America is a violent society. We lack the maturity to discuss this fact in honest terms. Likewise, many avoid a mature reflection on what the consequences--psychological, emotional, material, financial, and spiritual--are for those young men and women who are sent off to maintain and expand the empire.

And then we have men like Chris Kyle, an example of martial skill, who killed by the hundreds while wearing the insignia of his favorite Marvel comic book character.

His Charlie platoon even adopted the insignia of the comic-book vigilante The Punisher, spray-painting skulls on their body armor, vehicles, helmets and guns. “You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us, because we will kill you, motherf--ker,” he writes.

Maybe I have gotten old. Chris Kyle and his tribe should be respected, they should be given a pat on the back, and welcomed home as best we can. But, their skill at killing should not be celebrated. That is a minor distinction; it is also an important one.

A country needs its heroes, and who it chooses to elevate as exemplars of martial prowess says much about its national character in a given moment. World War One brought us Alvin York. World War Two gave us Audie Murphy, Robert Leckie, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the 442nd Infantry Regiment. Vietnam had Carlos Hathcock. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought us Leroy Arthur Petry and Chris Kyle.

Where do we go from here? And what do heroes such as Chris Kyle--dangerous men with kill streaks in the hundreds--tell us about ourselves and the country's future at the nadir of American empire?

The Logical Fallacy of Defending Ron Paul's Racism or You Do Know That There Were Racist Abolitionists?

2012-01-08T20:28:00.006-05:00

Ron Paul's non-answer about his racist attitudes towards black Americans during the New Hampshire GOP debate was a classic evasion. It was also a virtual admission of guilt.

Akin to a man on trial for murdering his wife--but who insists on talking about how he is a good father--Ron Paul is unable to explain away the racist screeds in his newsletters, opposition to honoring Dr. King with a national holiday, and belief that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be overturned because black folks' freedom is an imposition on white people's liberty.

Ron Paul is also a beneficiary of a cult of personality. With such status comes a reservoir of good faith among his public. To their eyes, the libertarian messiah could not possibly be a racist, for that would involve some reflection about the relationship between libertarian approaches to government in theory, and how in practice said philosophy enables white supremacy.

In all, if Ron Paul were a private citizen this would be a non-issue: his name is on the masthead of a newsletter which has repeatedly featured racist editorials; he cashes the checks from the subscribers to this newsletter; he believes that Civil Rights legislation is tyrannical towards whites; white supremacists have endorsed his works; his son, also an elected official, shares the same attitudes about sacrificing the full citizenship of black Americans to a "higher principle."

Check and mate.

Ron Paul's defenders have twisted themselves into all sorts of knots as they try to white wash these inconvenient facts. Their most common claim is that because Ron Paul supports ending the ruinous War on Drugs (with its well documented racial disparities in enforcement, imprisonment, and punishment), that he is a believer in racial equality. This is a symptom of a larger dynamic at work in post-Civil Rights era racial discourse

Primarily, the bar for what constitutes racism has been set so high that even the most obvious examples of racial animus have to be couched in careful terms lest an "innocent" white person be branded a bigot. Second, the definition of what constitutes "racism" has been narrowed down to include only bogeyman and caricatures of White wickedness, White hate, White sheets, White race pride tattoos, White hands holding nooses, and White hands burning crosses. And as an auxiliary-enabler of post-Civil Rights race discourse, the lazy newspeak of "playing the race card" was invented precisely to serve as a defense mechanism that exists only to enable such specious concepts as "white oppression" or "reverse racism."

Of course, real life is much more complicated. Here, the argument that Ron Paul is not a racist because he wants to end the War on Drugs is a logical fallacy. Racist people can support policies that are "race neutral." Racists can be "good people." Anti-racists and progressives can be forward thinking in some areas and unrepentant bigots in others. And of course, while many are loathe to admit it, racism is a sin of both liberals and conservatives alike.

As I am so fond of saying, history is once more our greatest teacher. For example, there were abolitionists who wanted to end slavery and the vile trade in human beings, yet who also thought that black Americans were subhuman. There were abolitionists who urged blacks to rise up against the evils of the Southern slaveocracy, yet these same people thought that the presence of Africans in America was a problem to be solved by colonization because their presence was antithetical to white democracy.

Hinton Rowan Helper was one such figure. His 1868 work, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin in its influence on the public imagination about the evils of chattel slavery. Helper was also an unrepentant white supremacist.

For example, in his compendium "The Negroes in Negroland", he included such observations as:

In every part of the United States, there is a broad and impassable line of demarcation between every man who has one drop of African blood in his veins, and every other class in the community. The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society, — prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue, — mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this'country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society ; and from that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, his virtues what they may." — African Repository , Vol. IV., page 118.

Even more pithy, Helper included how:

"'The negro is not wholly without talents, but they are limited to imitation, — the learning of what has been previously known. He has neither invention nor judgment. Africans may be consid- ered docile, but few of them are judicious, and thus in mental qualities we are disposed to see a certain analogy with the apes, whose imitative powers are proverbial.'" — Burmeister's Black Man, page 14.

Or how about this gem of common sense race science:

"So great a difference of opinion has ever existed upon the intrinsic value of the negro, that the very perplexity of the ques- tion is a proof that he is altogether a distinct variety. So long as it is generally considered that the negro and the white man are to be governed by the same laws and guided by the same management, so long will the former remain a thorn in the side of every community to which he may unhappily belong. When the horse and the ass shall be found to match in double harness, the white man and the African black will pull together under the same re- gime. It is the grand error of equalizing that which is unequal that has lowered the negro character, and made the black man a reproach." — Baker's Great Basin of the Nile, page 195.

People are complicated. One can be an abolitionist like Hinton Rowan Helper and believe that black humanity and personhood are sub-par, well below that of whites, and that African Americans have no place in American society. Ron Paul can be right on foreign relations and government waste for example, but dead wrong on matters of race, justice, and civil rights.

Such is life. Despite the temptations, there are no easy answers. Some in the American public will see Ron Paul's racism as necessarily compromising his vision, ethics, and judgement more generally; it is a first order problem, not a mere inconvenience. For Ron Paul's supporters, attitudes about black people are secondary to his libertarian vision for the United States. How a person reconciles this matter tells us a great deal about their own ethics and values.

On questions of race and justice the personal is indeed the political. The challenge here--and for libertarianism more broadly--is how these personal choices become impositions on the full citizenship, full rights, and full personhood of other people. To this point, Ron Paul's version of libertarianism offers no satisfying answers for those who are not White, not privileged, and outside of the moneyed classes.

Is he a racist? I do not know. But the policies which Ron Paul advocates, and the philosophy which he subscribes to, are none too friendly to people of color. For me, that is enough of a disqualification.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Chauncey DeVega is One of the 50 Most Despicable People According to the Right-Wing Blogosphere

2012-01-07T22:15:00.005-05:00

While flipping between the NFL playoffs and the Tea Party GOP New Hampshire debate (isn't Mitt Romney an amazing dresser? dude is dudded up for real) I was forwarded the following bit of news.

Apparently, Right Wing News included me among its list of the 50 most obnoxious quotes by liberals/lefties/progressives/thinking people who conservatives hate in the year 2011.

I am touched.

I would like to thank God, the Force, my fashion consultant, fish monger, the local bar frau, various muses, and the chicken wings from Joy Yee's Chinese restaurant for helping me muster the strength and inspiration necessary to win such a great honor.

I am also in good company, as I am on the enemies list right before President Obama and after Ed Schultz.

Good stuff:

25) You have what I call the ‘Get the N-word out of the White House party,’ the Tea Party…. At the end of the day, there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, ‘Can we just lynch him?’ — Sean Penn

24) What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. [The] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neo-cons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons….The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it. — Paul Krugman

23) President Obama is going to be visiting Joplin, Missouri, on Sunday, but you know what they’re talking about? Like this right-wing slut, what’s her name, Laura Ingraham? Yeah, she’s a talk slut. You see, she was, back in the day, praising President Reagan when he was drinking a beer overseas. But now that Obama’s doing it, they’re working him over. — Ed Schultz

22) Herman Cain’s shtick is a version of race minstrelsy where he performs “authentic negritude” as wish fulfillment for White Conservative fantasies. Like the fountain at Lourdes, Cain in his designated role as black Conservative mascot, absolves the White racial reactionaries at CPAC of their sins. This is a refined performance that Black Conservatives have perfected over many decades and centuries of practice. — Chauncey DeVega

21) The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln. — Barack Obama

Fame in a small and obscure corner of the Right-wing blogosphere is fleeting; I will enjoy it while it lasts.

Once more, thank you.

A Chappelle Skit in Real Life: Introducing Robert Traynham, Self-Hating Black, Gay, Former Aide to Rick Santorum

2012-01-06T19:01:00.007-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Where do they find these people?

Here, we have a gay man who defends Rick Santorum, a man that is an open homophobe, theocrat, and bigot who compares gay and lesbian Americans to sex deviants that have intercourse with animals.

Here, we have an African American who defends Rick Santorum, a man that is a race-baiter who suggests that blacks are lazy parasites on White America.

Fanon would have so much fun with Robert Traynham.

Question: are folks like him just professional mercenaries who will take any position because it pays well? Or, and these questions may not be exclusive of one another, is Traynham just self-hating, working for a political agenda that devalues his personhood in a neat act of self-flagellating guilt?

In all, the human capacity for self-delusion boggles the mind. I do not know if Robert Tranyham is loathsome, tragic, or both.

Racial Resentment, White Novelty, and the Tim Tebow Phenomenon

2012-01-06T02:25:00.008-05:00

ESPN has a great discussion on its website about the Tim Tebow cult of personality.

I am a Patriots fan. I loved watching Tebow get owned by Tom Brady. I also believe that Tebow is grossly overrated, and his popularity is a function of Christian Dominionist born again shtick and the "novelty" of a white quarterback with a "black" style of play. In many ways, Tebow is the Eminem of the NFL, with the latter being imminently more talented. Alternatively, we can suggest that Tebow is to black quarterbacks who play at HBCU's as white girls who are "thick" are to black women with the same physiques. One is "exotic"; the other is "ordinary" and "typical."

In all, the ESPN round table hits on a number of issues, and while they over read "racism" and "racial resentment" into the Tebow debate, the panelists are spot on in that a black quarterback who played like him would not get any of his shine.

Is Tebow the great white hope? And what does this tell us about race and sports--what should be the greatest of all meritocracies where none of these questions of identity ought to matter--but where the real world offers no such comforts?

Racial Misunderstandings: A Black Woman and a White Woman Sit Down to Talk About "Gone With the Wind" and...

2012-01-05T03:00:00.007-05:00

In recent months, we have talked a good amount about historical memory and how race is a variable in our shared--yet often different--understandings of American life. For some, these matters are intensely personal, for others they are asides, and for many more, a cultivated naivete about the centrality of race in this country's long struggle towards full democracy is a luxury afforded only by white privilege.

I have alluded to the book a Country of Strangers on a few occasions. It is a good text, not particularly rigorous, but very readable, "journalistic," and full of great stories about how real people negotiate (or not) the color line in America.

With all of the back and forth about the Republican Party regarding its embrace of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause as a way to mobilize conservative white voters against Barack Obama, we must also acknowledge how this literal whitewashing of history by the Right would not be so compelling this process was gross and obvious in its bigoted hostility towards black and brown people.

While the Tea Party GOP uses dog whistles, and at times naked appeals to white racism to motivate their voters, electoral calculus in the post Civil Rights era demands some feigned effort at color blindness and race neutrality. As I have pointed out previously, conservatives who are motivated by racism in their hostility towards Obama, specifically, and "liberals" (as "race traitors," the imagined advocates for the interests of people of color) more generally, need some chaff, a convenient out, so that they can continue to feel like good people.

Few people want to be labeled as active racists--even if their political worldview and decision-making are animated by white racism on a semi-deep, yet not quite subconscious, level. The following exchange detailed in A Country of Strangers between two friends--one white and one black--about the movie Gone with the Wind captures the willful ignorance of the Tea Party GOP faithful on these matters.

Just as I suggested about Santorum's and Gingrich's public(s), Right-wing white populists are not necessarily pernicious racists. Rather, they simply subscribe to a type of common sense that is based on excluding people of color, and on the assumed superiority of Whiteness, White values, White dreams, White hopes, and White politics as the very definition of what it means to be "American."

Is the white woman in the following situation a "racist?" Perhaps, but only a "passive" one such that her assumptions, lack of asking questions about her own universal "I," and lazy thinking about a shared life experience with others who happen to not be white, is her shortcoming. However, this type of ignorance is a short stones throw away from the type of prejudice and bigotry that is the foundation for Birtherism, and all of the American exceptionalism, nativist, "Real America" talk that is the Esperanto of the New Right.

Do tell me. Am I onto something here? Or am I being too hard on an otherwise well-intended woman, one who is simply blinded by the gaze of whiteness...so much so that she is unable to see how race is central to the full personhood and humanity of people, even her close friends, who may not be white?

In all, this is an epic face palm moment:

Iowa and Beyond: For the Tea Party GOP "Common Sense" Racism is the Road to the White House

2012-01-04T04:10:00.008-05:00

The 2012 Republican presidential field, a hydra which self-destructively feeds on itself, had one more battle royale in Iowa. Fighting to a standstill, Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul bloodied each other. While the Tea Party GOP is still a house divided, their leading candidates share a common, uniting, go to issue: hating on the blacks makes for good politics; it pays substantial political dividends.

As Iowa demonstrated, be it Gingrich's yearning to have lazy black and brown kids pick up mops and brooms as janitors in work houses, Romney's nativist Klan inspired opines to keep "America America," Santorum's appeals to a belief that African Americans find sustenance by stealing from hardworking white people, or Ron Paul's assertion that the Civil Rights Act (with its bringing down of Jim and Jane Crow) was an unfair intrusion on white people's "liberty" and "freedom," the Tea Party GOP remains addicted to the crack rock of dog whistle politics.

Decades after the founding of the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, the old school remains the true school. Ultimately for conservatives, demagoguing the negroes can still help stir up support among the white populist faithful.

Precision matters here. Research on public opinion and political behavior has demonstrated that not all conservatives are racist. However, racists are much more likely to be conservative--and to identify as Republicans.

Social scientists, historians, psychologists and others have developed an extensive vocabulary to talk about the lived politics of the color line. These terms include such notable phrases as symbolic racism, white racial resentment, the white racial frame, in-group and out-group anxiety, ethnocentrism, prejudice, realistic group conflict, colorblind racism, systems of structured inequality, racial formation, and front stage vs. backstage racism.

In thinking through the politics of race at work in the white conservative political imagination, this seemingly disparate terminology is connected by a common thread. Race and racial ideologies are ways of seeing the world, of locating people and individuals relative to one another, and are a cognitive map for making sense of social relationships. While shocking to outsiders, the type of racism played with so casually by Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, Paul and other conservatives is a type of "common sense" for their public.

For example, the audiences that cheer Romney's speeches about a country that is lost, one led by an anti-American usurper, are not necessarily "bad people." They are motivated by a sense of belonging, and made to feel special by virtue of being "real Americans," part of a special tribe anointed with unique insight and wisdom by their oracles.

Likewise, those who embrace Gingrich's habit of stereotyping "inner city blacks" as lazy, unmotivated, and criminal, probably identify as "compassionate conservatives," or "good Christians." There is no intended malice on their part. To them, "everyone knows" that these observations about black and brown people are "true."

Rick Santorum's Iowa speech on the nature of black people's greed and degeneracy is an especially instructive example of this broader pattern:

"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program," Santorum said. "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is."

He added: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."
"And provide for themselves and their families," Santorum added, to applause. "The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again."

"Right," responded one audience member, as another woman can be seen nodding.

There are several elements at work here.

First, poverty in America is racialized. The image in the public imagination is of black welfare queens, or illegal aliens birthing "anchor babies" who live off of the government tit, profiting from food stamps and the generosity of the American people. The white poor rarely, if ever, enter the picture. Second, black people are in a parasitic relationship with white Americans (Santorum's "someone" else). In sum, black people are "lazy," and a dependent class, unable to take care of their families except for the generosity and benevolence of white people.

The most powerful part of Santorum's appeal to his white audience in Iowa is the implication that black people are receiving some type of "reparations." For Santorum and the Tea Party GOP, blacks are plagued by "bad culture" and are existentially prone to poverty. Therefore, in a country where labor, capitalism, and citizenship are inexorably connected, blacks are outside of the political community.

In the age of Fox News and the Right-wing echo chamber, one cannot forget how the conservative imagination is constituted as a dream world: it is a mature fulfillment of some of the most sophisticated propaganda in the post World War 2 period.

In this imagination, it does not matter that whites are the majority of America's poor.

It does not matter that most people on public assistance and welfare in Iowa are white.

It does not matter that there is a deep history which explains how conservatives have spun a fiction about black and brown poverty while ignoring structural economic inequality, and how many of the policies endorsed by the Tea Party GOP in the name of economic austerity and punishing people of color (who are coded as "the poor" or "unproductive citizens"), also disproportionately harm the white working and middle classes.

This local type of common sense helps to explain the feelings of defense, denial, and injury that many white conservatives exhibit when challenged about the racism of the Tea Party GOP and the Right-wing establishment. While the leadership and media elites from which they take their cues skillfully play the race baiting game, rank and file Fox News conservatives simply feel aggrieved at the suggestion that anyone would take their common sense understandings of the world to be racist, bigoted, or based on false understandings about the nature of racism and white privilege in the Age of Obama.

In the same way that a fish does not know that it is wet, the politics of nativism, an authoritarian-like embrace of the politics of us and them, and a fear of the Other, are so central to contemporary white populist conservatism, that they are taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of the world.

Moreover, politics is essentially about the creation of an imagined community. The stump speeches about evil liberals who hate America, the cheering of dying cancer patients who lack insurance, the booing of gay soldiers, and the numerous fictions about the economy, science, the Constitution, and public policy more generally are taken as divine gospel. These fictions are standing priors for contemporary conservatives which help to mark out the boundaries of their political world.

During an election year, and as a function of a highly polarized 24 hour news environment, it is a given that the incumbent president will be the target of vicious attacks by the out party. By implication, the election of Barack Obama, America's first black president, has amplified all of these tensions. The election of a member of the racial out-group has made the stakes especially high for white conservatism. Obama is anathema to the Tea Party GOP soul, the living embodiment of a world turned upside down, for no man who looks like him could ever be leader of the free world, where whiteness is inseparable from being "American."

By implication, there is a short line from the white racial appeals of Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, Romney and others directly to President Obama. He has been called "the food stamp president" and a "ghetto crackhead." Obama is stained by the Birthers who say he is not an American citizen. The appeals to American exceptionalism are naked arguments that a black man like Obama cannot help but be outside of the "normal" political culture of this country. It has also been implied that President Obama is a perpetual "they," a member of a marginalized group who by association is lazy, anti-white, unqualified, and an "affirmative action baby" that somehow managed to steal a presidential election and win the popular vote.

Many may laugh at such a formulation. However, the Tea Party GOP, Iowa voters, and others who clamor to participate in the Republican primaries, would take such claims as common sense knowledge. For people of color, the outsider, the Other, and those who are not (in their eyes) "quintessentially American" (and thus have to prove their authenticity to the white conservative gaze), this is not your country.

You people may have built and improved this country, but it is not yours. For the Tea Party GOP and the populist conservatism of the present moment, you people are just guests. They will remind you people of that fact at every moment.

Why? Because it is common sense. Didn't you know that?

The Racial Futures Prediction Market Game: What Will the Black Misery Index be in 2012?

2012-01-02T02:11:00.015-05:00

If it bleeds it leads.

Bad news is good news.

Who wants to hear the good news, when the bad news is so much more compelling?

While slick, sharp, coherent, professional, and emotive, Colorlines' "The Year in Race" makes me tired. Existentially. Yes, the stakes are high for people of color in the Great Recession. We have experienced proportionately greater losses in terms of employment, the housing market, wealth, life spans, and inter-generational social mobility, than have white Americans. This reality is a signal to the permanence of race in this country. It is also a reminder of how far we have yet to go as a people.

But, are things really that bad? Are there no high points, or moments of joy and success, to celebrate going forward?

I am not suggesting that we should engage in some pie in the sky, self-aggrandizing denial--as truth telling should always be our first commitment, "the prime directive"--but rather, that there must be room for positive thinking and balance in our perspectives.

Developing a metric for community happiness can take many forms. Some would use life chances and develop a mathematical model based on income, wealth, lifespan, and social capital. Others would talk to folks and do elaborate public opinion surveys where they ask respondents to describe their hopes for the future, and "if things will be better or worse in the years to come for your children?"

I am a dreamer. I also think there is something to be said for "soft" or intuitive measurements of happiness and progress.

My question: what do you predict the Black Misery Index (our "B.M.I.") will be for the year 2012?

If "1" is joyful bliss, and "10" is utter misery, where will Black America (and people of color more generally), rate in the upcoming 12 months? And if the truism holds that Black folks are the miner's canary, a barometer of sorts for the well-being of the United States at large, what is the calculi for how the Black Misery Index relates to that of the country as a whole?

Ultimately, is there a special rubric, an exception rule for Red State U.S.A. and the Tea Party GOP, where black and brown people's suffering means that everything is going right for Whiteness and the White Conservative Soul?

For example, I would suggest that those moments in the hellish prisons of Goree Island and in the slave ships of the Middle Passage rate a "10" on the scale. The moment of Barack Obama's election and his inauguration and swearing-in would score a "1."

The great and wonderful project known as Reconstruction would be a "6." Yes, on the surface one could rate it a "3." But, any accurate measure must account for how Reconstruction has been grossly mischaracterized in the public mind, as well as the pain of a radically inclusive democratic project born, and then too soon retroactively aborted, by white supremacy and its ugly violence. To my mind's eye, wonderful things temporarily earned and then stolen away require a special accounting.

In all, the prediction game/futures market is a wonderfully personal and imprecise science that reveals much about who we are as individuals and our ability to generalize (or not) outward to that of society as a whole.

Yes, the white gaze can be utterly disingenuous as its yearns to celebrate the end of racism, to inaugurate a post-racial America despite all evidence to the contrary, and to find a way to emancipate itself from the burdens of history (as well as the blood that it has on its proverbial hands in both the present and the past). This creates a natural, intelligent, well-founded, and reasoned tendency among people of color (and smart forward thinking white folks) to emphasize the challenges ahead, as opposed to the demons slayed, the victories won.

And of course, there is a Black racial misery and grievance industry--one that will exist for as long as there are people who are nominally considered "African American." We need the Black racial misery and grievance industry...even in the year 2012. As often as they are wrong, their clarion calls remain a useful and necessary alarm.

But for a moment, let the metaphorical hair down, and feel free to celebrate (or not) the successes of black and brown people in the year 2011

I know that you have it in you.

Some Queen for the New Year: Thank You and Well Wishes in 2012

2012-01-01T02:48:00.008-05:00

One more year is past. I hope that all of you are happy, safe, relaxed, and sufficiently medicated--be it on life, Jesus Juice, or Red Stripe...the latter being my drink of choice tonight.

This has been one hell of a year, both good and bad. Let's lean on each other in the New Year, stay strong, and keep building.

Thanks for all of your support, helping WARN grow, providing me the opportunity to learn from our conversations, and a platform to engage other pursuits. More good things are coming, I feel it in these increasingly old bones.

But seriously, I love you all--in a cyber platonic way--and appreciate those voices who have been here from the beginning, those folks who have found WARN recently, and the good number of folks who lurk.

The average blog lasts only a few months. We beat that a long time ago, and while we have a long ways to go, the momentum keeps growing.

I have several goals for the year, and with your help, we will get there together. This is the time for resolutions: besides my "academic" goals, in 2012 I want to nail down a book contract for Chauncey DeVega and We Are Respectable Negroes, do more interviews, go on TV, and get a regular radio spot going. Lofty goals. I aim high. If I lose, it won't be for lack of shooting back or a lack of ammo.

Once more, I thank you all--friends and enemies alike. Together, you keep me on my toes, humble, and honest. Sometimes, there is a temptation to write for comments, dance for gold, and follow trends for attention sake. I try really hard not to do that.

As I said years ago, continue to say often, and will do my best to stay committed to going forward, I am me with the volume turned up. If you ever feel or think that I am following trends, "selling out," or getting lazy and betraying my commitment to Black Pragmatism, please call me out. Trust me, in this world the temptations are many, we need truth tellers to keep us on point.

May the force be with you.

Compassionate Conservatism? An Open Letter to Newt Gingrich From the Child of a Janitor

2011-12-29T03:52:00.008-05:00

I write this for little girls and boys like her...

Newt Gingrich has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a horrible human being. Therefore, his repeated comments about the black poor, and “inner city” communities, where people “don’t have a work ethic” are not at all a surprise. Time has demonstrated that “compassionate conservatism,” an oxymoron if there ever was one, is not particularly kind, just, or humane.

As demonstrated by his Wednesday editorial on the website Human Events, Newt Gingrich is apparently wedded to the idea that young black and brown kids should have the “privilege” of becoming janitors in their schools in order to learn about the value of “hard work."

There are any number of problems with this argument. Primarily, Gingrich is recycling the ugly and deeply racist belief that black people are inherently lazy: poor children who don’t see people around them working apparently grow up to be lazy adults, who are on welfare, dependent on the state, and have no understanding of how to put in an honest day’s work. He gives no consideration to the stigma that child janitors would experience, and the taunting and bullying that would inevitably result from being one of the students who carries a pail, mop, or broom around their school.

Newt Gingrich is also blindly ignorant of the issues surrounding structural unemployment in poor inner city communities, and where it is not a deficit of work ethic or drive, but a lack of desperately wanted job opportunities—especially for young people—that drives urban poverty. Given the Right-wing’s assault on unions, and the social safety net, more broadly, Gingrich’s smearing of school janitors as an enriched and craven class of greedy public employees is just more red meat for an agenda that wants to destroy the American middle and working classes.

In all, Newt Gingrich is offering up a Dickensonian fantasy of workhouses in which African American wastrels and street urchins learn the value of hard work from benevolent white folks like him.

Of course, Newt Gingrich’s children, and those of the moneyed classes who he represents, would never be asked to pick up a mop and broom at their schools—as their kids’ responsibility is first and foremost to prepare and study for college, and the bright future which awaits them.

And I must wonder, what lessons have the children of the financier class, the trust fund baby and inherited money types who brought about the Great Recession, been taught about the value of hard work from observing the destructive behavior of their parents during this time of economic calamity?

Over the years, I have developed a pretty thick skin regarding these matters. However, there is something particular offensive about Newt Gingrich’s repeated insistence that poor black kids become janitors in order to learn about the merits of “hard work” that demands engagement. It would seem to his eyes that janitors are disposable people with easy jobs. Moreover, to him, a janitor's job is so simple that anyone, even an elementary or middle school student, could do it well.

As the refrain goes, the personal is political. I am the son of a janitor. I try not to break kayfabe, or to drop the mask too often. Nevertheless, sometimes it is necessary to speak up for yourself, as well as for the many other people who may not have either the privilege, or opportunity, to speak truth to power.

In that spirit, please take this as an open letter of sorts to Newt Gingrich (and the particular brand of compassionate conservatism that he represents).

****

My father was a hardworking man. He was not perfect. He took his job seriously and worked for many years as a janitor. He did this with pride, integrity, and self-respect. My father rarely took a sick day, and worked in this job for several decades, retiring only in his late 70s. Work meant a great deal to him, and he would eventually pass away about a year later. I warned my father that without a sense of purpose, and isolated from the many people he befriended at his job over the years, that he would not last long. I was (sadly) proven correct.

These are not details designed to elicit a tear; they are details of a full life, the human experience that stands behind words such as “janitor,” “teacher,” “unions,” and “working class.” These are perennially good titles, now transformed into slurs, by people like Newt Gingrich and his conservative brethren.

My father was a boss, a confidante to his coworkers, and advisor to the men and women he affectionately called his “crew.” His work was at times dangerous, involved long hours, and a good amount of responsibility.

No elementary, middle, or high school student could do my father’s job.

Growing up, I was embarrassed that my father was a “lowly” janitor. His job title was technically “senior maintenance supervisor.” I used that whenever I had the chance. When one’s friends are the children of doctors, lawyers, and white collar professionals, you learn to improvise.

There would be many awkward moments, when my father, the janitor, would have one of his three or so pagers go off in the company of my friends. We could be at a bowling tournament, a movie, or a birthday party, and inevitably one of those beepers would ring.

Those who did not know the facts of the situation would ask if “he was a doctor.” I would answer “no, my father just has an emergency that he has to take care of.”

Unlike in Newt Gingrich’s twisted dream, janitors and their families are not rich. My family had good Christmases, an occasional vacation, and nice Sunday meals. My father’s pay kept me in nice clothes, indulged my hobbies, and helped me (with some hefty student loans and grants) to go to college. My father’s work, in combination with my mother’s, kept us comfortable. We were not middle class, or even solidly working class by most measures. Somehow, we were okay.

A janitor’s job is also about personal relationships. I will not pretend that my father’s position as a janitor at a large Ivy League university was typical. He made sure that I met interesting people; I could take the day off of school, follow him around, and go to the library. He would leave me with different professors or graduate students so that I could talk to them about politics, history, or philosophy. Because my father worked there for many decades, he was part of the university community. My father took that role seriously.

For example, there were many occasions when he made sure that international students had a place to eat and go for the holidays (at times, this welcoming space was our home). My father, the janitor, was a union man and took great pride in how he always fought for the rights of the part-time staff—a group that he felt was always “getting a bum deal.”

When people needed jobs, oftentimes young men who were recently released from jail, or career ex-cons, they could come to my father. He would size them up. If they passed his personal test of being honest and direct about their situation(s), my father would go with them to human resources, vouch for their reliability, and put them on his “crew” so that they would learn how to do “right.”

My father also had some fun times at his job. He loved to talk about how, on one afternoon, he had to show a student from rural China how to use an American style toilet. My father joked that “the young man made it this far, I didn’t think using one of our toilets would be so complicated.”

There were sad times too.

On more than one occasion my father, a janitor, had to take up a collection for a student to send home to their family, to help them buy a ticket if there was an emergency, or to subsidize the funeral expenses for one of his crew, or the part-timers, who didn’t have his years of seniority, and pay.

No child could do that job.

My father only wanted me to get a job where my hands would be clean, and I would not have to pick up other people’s messes. I have, fingers crossed, more or less gotten that far. It has taken some years, and a bit of growth. But now, I am finally proud to be the child of a janitor. Those millions of us who were taken care of, provided for, and raised by working class folks such as maids, home health care workers, and janitors, have much to hold our heads high about.

These people are the real “job creators” in this country: they pay bills, provide for their families, and donate to churches, mosques, synagogues, and charitable organizations.

Working class people like my father help to sustain communities and neighborhoods.

Whenever Newt Gingrich and his brand of 1% percent plutocrat conservatives besmirch the working people of this country, people like us and our kin, we need to speak up. There is no shame in our lineage. And all of us need to say thanks, to acknowledge those janitors, maintenance people, and the like who work in our schools, office buildings, apartment complexes, and take care of our aged and sick parents and relatives. They deserve our respect; unfortunately, they rarely receive it from the American people.

Once more, I am proud to be a child of the working class. Are you?

Notes on Historical Memory: "The point isn’t that American slavery is the exact moral or material equivalent of the Holocaust..."

2011-12-28T20:56:00.007-05:00

The point isn’t that American slavery is the exact moral or material equivalent of the Holocaust, but that our country’s “original sin” has not been fully, culturally processed.

A man with a wide smile appeared next to our table, seemingly out of nowhere, and introduced himself as the restaurant’s manager. We chatted about the proper pronunciation of “crawfish,” and the differences between the gumbos made on the bayou and in New Orleans, and when the subject turned to the Cabin, I asked him how it felt to run a place that used to house slaves.

“It’s history, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “It’s not something we dwell on, or push out there for people to see. It is a touchy subject. We just want people to have a nice time when they come here, and to enjoy the food and the history. This is a place where everybody feels welcome."

Salon has a provocative and wonderful feature by Peter Birkenhead about the tapestry that is historical memory, the slave-holding South, and contemporary conservatism. We have spent a good amount of time this past year exploring these issues, and have worked though such topics as role-playing games as a means to "explore" chattel slavery historical tourism and slave cabins,black Confederate soldier.

Why We Still Can't Talk About Slavery seems like a fitting complement to a year-long conversation.

In all, it would seem that many of us have no use for such a flattening of history:

Later that day, at Destrehan, a former sugar plantation a few miles down, the guide neglected to mention that it was the site of the largest slave revolt in American history.

When I asked Angela da Silva, a professor of black history at Lindenwood University, and owner of the St. Louis-based National Black Tourism Network, for her thoughts, she said, “Jesus coming down off the cross couldn’t get me to stay in some gentrified slave cabin with a jacuzzi in it. The misery and pain that happened in those cabins … This is about shame.

People who own these places want the history to go away. But it won’t go away. And until we as black people insist on the story being told, no one has any incentive to change their business model.”

As Birkenhead beautifully details, the rise of the New Right and the Tea Party, the Republican Party's fetish for the Confederacy, its Lost Cause ideology, and embrace of States' Rights and nullification have brought questions of historical memory to the forefront of the public discourse during the 2012 presidential primary season.

Moreover, the literal white washing of the history of a traitorous Confederacy, what was a military state dedicated to racial tyranny, and a willful lie about the benevolence of whiteness, loom large in the Conservative political imagination. Those dreams are amplified and made more imminent when a black man is President of the United States, because for the populist conservative, neo-Confederate crowd, nothing could be more of an abomination.

For Tea Party GOP conservatives, the rhetoric of American Exceptionalism is inexorably tied to a Gone With the Wind, Redemption, race and reunion narrative. This tale has no use for such "inconveniences" as chattel slavery, white supremacy, the genocide of indigenous people, and racial pogroms.

The Reconstruction-era South didn't invent dishonesty, but its response to America's defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

This should come as no surprise. Adults who dress up in Colonial era period clothing, believe that the Constitution is divinely inspired, and take the metaphor of "a shining city on the hill" as a get out of jail pass for America's shortcomings both at home and abroad, have little use for such facts. Selection bias, Fox News, and an embrace of a fantastical view of political and social reality, protects the Tea Party GOP faithful from any experience of cognitive dissonance.

Birkenhead concludes Why We Still Can't Talk About Slavery with a powerful point. He is spot on in many regards. But, Birkenhead commits a common error, where even in offering a robust critique of the lie that is the "popular" embrace of a neutered and "harmless" Confederacy--where millions of people were killed, tortured, raped, torn from family and kin, reduced to items in an inventory, or property to be taxed on a ledger--he uses the "universal I," a common sense judgement of who "we" actually are:

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn't absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don't feel the connections to it in our bones.

It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

Who is this "we" that do not feel the connections to slavery in our bones? Why must United States history, and the idea of shared (and manufactured) community, almost by definition exclude black Americans? I know that I feel slavery in my bones and spirit. Our struggle and triumph in the face of almost unimaginable White barbarism is a legacy to be honored. And when I think of the fact that my grandmother's grandmother was likely born a slave, the connection to "the peculiar institution" is pretty deep in my blood and soul.

In all, America wants to forget on its own terms, because to fully acknowledge the centuries of chattel slavery in this country, and almost a century of Jim and Jane Crow, may actually require an acknowledgement of debts due. As I have long suggested, it is not the financial or monetary compensation for harm done to black Americans both in the past, and to the present by Whites and the Racial State, that is necessarily the deal breaker. No, it is the acknowledgement of wrong doing, and the simple words "I am sorry, we were wrong," that are at the root of why reparations are a non-starter in the United States.

An apology doesn't "cost" a thing, but for Whiteness (and many White people), it seems to be prohibitively expensive.

Because we all know that the sins of the father (or mother) are never passed down to the son or the daughter. Ironically, the privileges of whiteness, materially, economically, psychically, and politically, can be accrued with interest (and with no accountability at all) for centuries without end.

That is one hell of a bargain.

Some Shameless Self-Promotion and a Dose of Pastor Manning: Chauncey DeVega Will Be on The Ed Schultz Radio Show Tomorrow Afternoon

2011-12-27T19:48:00.008-05:00

As always, just sharing when you can get a small dose of my bloviating, faux-expertise, efforts at punditry. I am scheduled for The Ed Shultz radio show Wednesday at 2:30pm EST where I will be chatting with one of WARN's friends, Mr. Mike Papantonio, host of Ring of Fire Radio.

2011 went by quickly. Tomorrow, I am going to be doing a postmortem on the role of racism in the Tea Party GOP, as well as spending some time dissecting Mitt Romney's efforts to paint Obama as unAmerican and illegitimate.

To tide you over, here is a new promo from the one and only Pastor Herman Manning. This brother is a great performer. He changes his position(s) on Beck, Palin, and the Tea Party's bigotry every broadcast. There is no consistency here--except for his laser focus on Barack Obama as an agent of the devil, a man who apparently plotted to kill his own grandmother, is a secret C.I.A. agent, and is not a U.S. citizen. Manning's deep dedication to that one meme is his genius.

Like they say, a broke clock is right twice a day: Manning is spot on in his analysis of the Tea Party and how the New Right's pining for a second American Civil War is part of a bigger gambit by corporate interests who want to bring America fully into a state of "inverted totalitarianism."

He is also quite lucid in his suggestion that Right-wing media elites are marshaling their mouth-breathing goon squads, stirring the pot of white racism for the 2012 election, and in an act of desperation, will "come home to the truth" of how Obama is not eligible to be President.

Given the clown car that is the 2012 Republican Presidential field, the paranoid style is the only style--enabled by white racial resentment--they have left to play, as the Tea Party GOP's issue positions are extremely unpopular with the mass public.

Check me out tomorrow. And do wish me luck.

What Do They Call a President Who Happens to be Black? If You Are Fox News You Call Him a "Ghetto Crackhead"

2011-12-27T04:08:00.013-05:00

Malcolm X famously asked, "what do you call an educated negro with a B.A. or an M.A., with a B.S., or a PhD?" The answer? "You call him a nigger, because that is what the white man calls him, a nigger."

Decades later, his wisdom endures.

Malcolm's observation captures the pain experienced by many African Americans, when during their coming of age moment (either before or after the talk about how not to get shot by the police during a routine traffic stop), they realize that being "young, gifted, and black" is not, all things being equal, sufficient for success in America. Malcolm's words also capture the sentiments felt by any black person whose confidence has been described by their managers or peers as "threatening" or "arrogant."

His wisdom also explains the moment when black professors walk into a room for the first time and their students look at each other in shock, wondering if this teacher is "qualified" to teach them; Malcolm's wit also captures the frustration and insult felt by any black or brown person who has been presumptively assumed to be a janitor, maintenance worker, or mail clerk at their job, when in fact, their titles are actually "manager," "director," or "vice president."

Malcolm's comment on the arrogance of white racism also speaks to collective memory: it conjures up family stories of men and women trained as doctors, engineers, and lawyers, but who had to work as Pullman Car porters, maids, and home health attendants because Jim and Jane Crow America was by definition, a system designed to choke out the social and economic mobility of the African American community. Both then and now, white racism does the work of class inequality.

African-American veterans of World War 2, "the Greatest Generation," were denied the fruits of citizenship given by the United States government to their white peers. Black Americans fought fascism abroad. But, at home they were denied access to the GI Bill, and the FHA and VA home loan programs that helped to create the American middle class. In practice, these programs were what Ira Katznelson famously described as "affirmative action" for white people.

The "Double V" campaign would continue against American Apartheid. The Black Freedom Struggle in the face of such stern and deep opposition would eventually triumph. This is an American success story, one which the popular imagination conveniently overlooks.

On the public stage in the present, the lack of faith in black expertise, ability, genius, and competence is on full display whenever the ugly phrase "qualified minority" is uttered by one of the faux populist Right in order to demagogue, and mine the waters of white racial resentment, for cheap political gains.

As the folkism suggests, African Americans have had to do ten times as well, to get half as far as whites. In the post-Civil Rights moment, that margin has diminished quite a bit. Yet, there is more than ample evidence that whiteness still pays great dividends to its owners and beneficiaries in such areas as the housing market, jobs, wealth and income inequality, inter-generational mobility, access to health care, and life chances (more generally).

It is a given that Fox News has no love for President Obama. To point, on the Hannity show last week (and without retraction or apology after the fact), Brent Bozell, of the conservative media "watchdog" group, Media Research Center, described President Barack Obama, "as a skinny, ghetto, crackhead."

This moment was an object lesson on the white racial frame in action, and the truth of Brother Malcolm's deep understanding of the pathologies of white racism, where any black person, however accomplished, intelligent, and gifted, is de facto seen as "less than," a "nigger," as a person who is not equal to even the most mediocre and lowest of white people.

Black people and black humanity are forever suspect, under watch, and viewed as less than by many in White America. To the white gaze channeled by Brent Bozzel, we are perpetual criminals, deviants, over-sexed, libidinous, dangerous, and pathological. These sentiments are a function of the "wages of whiteness," the psychological investment in white supremacy, and white superiority, spoken to perhaps most famously by W.E.B. DuBois more than a century ago.

I am not surprised by Bozzel's mouth utterances. Because they are propagandists, Fox News displays a double concentration and distillation of the impulses and anxieties which drive contemporary conservatism and the Tea Party GOP. In all, if conservatism and racism are one and the same in America, the election of a black man as President has created such cognitive upset that naked racism is the inevitable excreta, an expected outcome.

The suggestion that President Barack Obama is somehow evocative of a "ghetto crackhead," is part of a larger constellation of racial slurs, appeals to white racial anxiety, dog whistles, and open bigotry. To this point in his term, it has been suggested that Obama is not a citizen of this country. He faked his undergraduate grades at Columbia, and his success at Harvard Law was the result of "affirmative action." President Obama entertains black thugs at "hip hop barbecues." He is unqualified to be President, is "lazy," "incompetent," and "in over his head." Michelle Obama is a mirror of President Obama's shortcomings, a black radical in drag, who has never been proud of this country.

Furthermore, as offered by Palin, McCain, Fox News, and most recently by presumed presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Obama is outside of the American political tradition, a man who does not understand the country's greatness and is actively working to destroy it. Race is the connective tissue between all of these paranoid and ridiculous claims. Barack Obama is a black American. We are the perpetual outsider and the Other. Where other groups' "Americanness" is presumed, Black Americans, despite our contributions to all that makes this country unique and great--and as a people who forced her to live up to the promise of the democratic creed and the Constitution-- are marked as perpetual anti-citizens.

This pandering to the worst parts of the White racial id, contemporary populist conservatism, and the Fox News public, are textbook examples of symbolic racism.

The personal is political. The rage machine that presumes the worst of Barack Obama, precisely because he is not white, is old hat. Black folks have known that game for centuries. We did not need to read Thomas Jefferson's racist tract, Notes on the State of Virginia, in order to grasp the deep wells of anti-black sentiment which are the beating heart of America's political culture.

My surprise at the claim that President Obama shares anything in common with a "skinny, ghetto, crackhead" is rooted in its absurdity. Obama is human. He is imperfect. I often disagree with his politics. Obama is a man. He is nothing more, nothing less. But a crackhead? Impulsive drug user? A hype? Nope. Not ever. Obama's personhood and habitus, his relaxed and effortless black cool pose (even if some do not possess the cultural framework and lens necessary to perceive it) is obvious--and unapologetic.

The inability by some on the Right to see Obama's full and dignified black humanity, as opposed to a default of black drug use, criminality, and omnipresent, irrepressible "niggerdom," is the source of my hurt. I must ask: If the white conservative imagination can frame a man of Obama's abilities, poise, intelligence, genius, life accomplishments, and talent as a skinny, ghetto, crackhead, how do they see the rest of us?

And we wonder why the colorline persists.

Ultimately, as Obama derangement syndrome has continued to demonstrate, white folks need to get their own house in order; the problem of white supremacy, especially on the Right, is a sickness that only they can cure through intense dialogue and therapy with one another.

If the best and brightest of Black America are just felons and drug users in the eyes of populist conservatives, what of the legions of working class, hard working, regular folks? How do Tea Party GOPers see black bus drivers? Black teachers? Black janitors? Black attorneys and investment bankers? Black parents? Black people who are either no more, or no less, mediocre than the vast majority of White Americans?

I am not sure if I want to know the answer.

We are everyday people. All of us. Sadly, white conservatives such as Brent Bozzel, see all black people as drug addicts and crackheads. Nothing more. That is black humanity in their eyes. White pathology is real. Last week, Fox News proved that fact (again).

They are who we have always known them to be. Ugly. White. Racists. Do keep it classy Mr. Bozzel, for every time you sell your wares, you do the rest of us a favor.

Merry Christmas To You All: Enjoy Some Brother James Brown in Concert as Your Gift Giving, Gift Opening, Holiday Soundtrack

2011-12-25T14:18:00.005-05:00

Happy holidays to you all.

No Black Peter this year, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bobby the Brain Heenan do Santa, or exposes on the hellish experiences of a Christmas Story's black actors.

Nah. Just some JB.

The permed one is no longer with us, having departed five years ago on this date...could the Church of James Brown be making a return? The bass is rumbling in the background, his unintelligable utterances echoing closer, so who knows?

As you get ready to go out, have folks over for some yard bird, to watch Star Wars or Indiana Jones, or perhaps play some video games as a new family tradition, enjoy this concert from 2005 and get your good foot on.

Have fun, be safe, and I wish you all well.

Forget Braveheart, The Tea Party GOP Should Find Inspiration from The History of the World or Land of the Dead

2011-12-22T02:58:00.020-05:00

I wonder if the Republicans in Congress also enjoy playing Darkon?

You can't make this stuff up. In a headline straight out of the Onion, the Republicans in Congress apparently watched the movie Braveheart in order to get the testosterone all hot and bubbling before their vote to deny the American people much needed tax cuts and unemployment insurance for next year.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would pretend to be the main characters in movies such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Rambo, Terminator, Legend, Flash Gordon, or Red Dawn. It was great fun. While we had to improvise and find roles for black and brown people like me, somehow it all worked out.

Those movies also contributed to my having some pretty deep nerd and geek "street cred" if you would.

As followers of WARN know, one of my favorite erotic memories was making love to a beautiful queen while I was dressed as a Jedi Knight; I have also ravished a goddess who was adorned as a very sexy and curvaceous Sailor Moon.

To paraphrase Conan the Barbarian, those are the things that are best in life.

But, for all of the inspiration that those movies offered me, I never, for once, believed that they were real. Cinema Paradiso: I was playing a role and enjoying a moment of dreaming and detachment.

As they stall, delay, and ruin the holidays for millions of Americans, the Tea Party GOP have not learned that lesson. In a gross misunderstanding of the actual history mirrored by Braveheart, the Republican Party, a club of millionaires, has apparently taken to watching movies in order to get the courage to deny the unemployed the means to eat.

In this postmodern moment gone wrong, the Tea Party GOP are heroes; those dastardly folks who want to help the middle classes, in a time when the plutocrats have free reign, are enemies of "democracy" and "freedom."

I am a student of the politics of popular culture. As such, I always return to a foundational concept. In these conversations, "culture" matters. Culture resonates because it helps to create a sense of community, belonging, identity, membership, and affirmation for those who channel, reproduce, and participate in it.

To point, what does their choice of Braveheart as inspirational fare (and also the second rate, Heat wannabe movie, The Town), reveal about the Tea Party GOP?

A surface reading would suggest that the Republican Party imagines itself to be a group of freedom fighters. In their machinations, drowning the government in the bathtub--and cutting off benefits necessary to stay one step ahead of homelessness--is a courageous act in the defense of "freedom."

The mental gymnastics necessary to sustain such a belief are beyond even my abilities.

I am also struck by the Tea Party GOP's borrowing of white ethnic identity in order to make their political points. Braveheart's Scots-Irish were the original White Trash in the United States who earned their "White" identity by owning black people as property. Doubling down, the Irish Southies, and Roxbury types in The Town, are a 19th and 20th century ideal-typical example of White Trash America.

In all, the Tea Party GOP's channeling of that type of Whiteness (as "authentic" American "New Ethnic" identity)--with its deep hostility to black and brown people--reveals a great deal about their mining of the politics of racial resentment in order to destroy Barack Obama's presidency.

The popular culture game is a fun one. The Tea Party GOP's love of Braveheart is misplaced because of their failure to understand what the text is offering them: ironically, Braveheart stands against the ugly politics of the The Tea Party GOP, and not in support of it.

As conservatives search for inspiration in support of their dystopian agenda, there are other more suitable film options available. What about Soylent Green, Robocop, or Rollerball? Those movies offer a Corporatist universe in keeping with the Tea Party GOP's dreams. The Road Warrior could fit neatly as well, for House Speaker John Boehner is a passable Humungous.

Wall Street would validate the Tea Party GOP's money over people ideology, and the lie that is trickle down economics. And of course, Blazing Saddles has a classic hostage taking scene that mirrors the Tea Party GOP's approach to governance.

But, if I had to suggest one film (and given my love of zombies, this allusion is an obvious one), the Tea Party GOP are right out of George Romero's Land of the Dead because they live cloistered away in the luxury of Fiddler's Green, while the rest of the world goes to hell in a hand basket.

A Nation of Men and Not Laws: Historicizing the Ugliness of Newt Gingrich's Plan to Arrest "Uncooperative" Judges

2011-12-21T03:56:00.000-05:00

Newt Gingrich is an existentially ugly person. He cheats on women, who are unconscious, laying in a coma. Gingrich loves to get his mic checked, some brain, hot mouth, fellatio, kissing the bishop, from his mistresses because that is "not cheating." It is okay, Gingrich's Catholic faith has saved him from any moral condemnation or consequences for his ejaculatory improprieties. And of course, patriotism made Gingrich, he who is the "political bukkake king," share his hot love juice all over town.

He suggests that black people are lazy, and their kids ought to pick up brooms and mops to learn the value of "hard work." He rewrites history on a whim. Most recently,the Tea Party GOP front-runner is arguing that he would arrest "uncooperative" judges who do not kowtow to the Conservative, Right-wing agenda.

The Constitution cries again. For folks who wrap themselves in the holy robes of the Constitution at every opportunity, Gingrich, and his party of Tea Party GOP ghouls, certainly do rape her every chance they get.

Werner Herzog's Bear, historian, big booty mack daddy, Germanist, and expert opinionator, who is not coincidentally one of WARN's favorite guest commentators, sent this great essay along for your consideration.

Werner is on point again as he locates Gingrich's assault on federalism within its proper historical context.

Good stuff for the holidays.

****

When Chauncey kindly asked me to write about Newt Gingrich’s claims that if he were elected president he would use his powers to send out federal marshals to arrest judges who disagreed with him, he thought that my expertise as a historian of modern Germany would be relevant. It is, in fact, but in a different way than many folks might suspect. The German language has a wonderful and well-known precision, and one of its best words is Rechtstaat, one that is less known on these shores than Shadenfreude or Zeitgeist, but full of similar explanatory power. Rechtstaat literally means “law state,” but more precisely, it means “a state governed by laws.” The implication, of course, is “a state governed by laws, not by people.”

Germany’s admirably successful post-1945 democracy was founded as and has remained a Rechtstaat, something Germany had not been except for the sadly aborted Weimar Republic. Germany’s tragic history under those who did not respect the rule of law, be it the Kaiser, Hitler, or the Communist party (in the case of the former East) proved the perils of a government that failed to aspire to be a Rechtstaat.

That aspiration is fundamental to a functioning democracy, something that used to be better understood in this country. In Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s (the real one, not the Glenn Beck version) call for American independence, he savagely attacked the institution of monarchy for its tendency towards tyranny. Conversely, he wrote, “In America, the law is king.” Paine wasn’t using the term Rechstaat, but that’s exactly what he was talking about. For him, monarchy tended towards tyranny because monarchs refused to accept checks on their power; they wished to transform their own personal prerogatives into de facto law, any other limits on their power be damned.

This is where Gingrich comes in. He seems to ignore the idea of the rule of law when it comes to the authority of the judiciary. Instead of it being an equal branch of government with the executive and legislative branches, he claims that those two branches can agree to ignore the decisions of the Supreme Court. In essence, he is saying that if he is president and has a Republican Congress, he will simply intimidate the courts into rubber stamping his agenda.

When he made his outrageous statements, Gingrich tried to support them by saying that the courts should not be allowed to countermand the will of the people. That sounds all well and good, until you remember that the courts have long been a bulwark against the tyranny of the majority. Many of the great legal advances in the cause of equal rights in this country have been undertaken by courts who overturned prejudicial laws with majority support. A majority of Southern states would have voted to retain segregated education and bans on mixed marriages at the time of the Brown and Loving decisions, but majority support for the disrespect of a minority’s rights is still unconstitutional and injust, no matter how many people would vote for it.

We do not have the courts to protect the rights of majorities, since their political power in a democracy keeps them safe, yet in Gingrich’s conception, the right of the majority to discriminate, oppress, and mistreat minorities ought to be untrammeled. Make no mistake, that is the real subtext of what Gingrich is saying. The founding political generation of this nation, for all their faults and hypocrisies, had a healthy vigilance of tyranny and despotism, the very things Gingrich’s statements smell like.

Yet this begs a crucial question, namely, how can Gingrich and his ilk advocate a tyrannical abrogation of the judiciary and still claim to uphold the Constitution and the historical legacy of the founders? The answer is simple: Newt and his followers treat the Constitution and the historical record in ways akin to how fundamentalist Christians interpret scripture. Most fundamentalists do not get their beliefs from scripture, rather, they pick and choose scriptural references (often out of context) to prove their preconceived beliefs.

For example, the Gospel of Wealth crowd simply ignores the numerous calls by Jesus to eschew riches and live a life of poverty, but will read and evangelize an entire book based on the obscure Prayer of Jabez from Chronicles because it asks God for riches. The Rick Perry types just love to pray in public, even though Jesus specifically tells his disciples that only hypocrites do so. A hundred years ago the Bible thumpers called for liquor to banned, despite the fact that Jesus used his miraculous powers to transform water into wine.

In regards to the Constitution, the Tea Party crowd loves to talk about the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says that powers not given to the federal government belong to the states, but have almost zero understanding of what powers the federal government does have. They are searching for something that tells them “states rights,” they have found it, and they will never see it as part of a much larger and more complicated Constitution.

The same goes for the historical record. Gingrich likes to call himself a historian, but instead he is more of a historical theologian. Historians try to understand the past on its own terms, Gingrich, like a good fundamentalist, sees history as a vast orchard to be cherry picked for isolated events to uphold his philosophy. Hence his use of Thomas Jefferson’s firing of judges over two hundred years ago as precedent for his proposal to abolish the Ninth Circuit Court.

Just like the religious fundamentalists who take passages from scripture and divorce them of their context, Gingrich does not ask how Jefferson’s decision fits with larger legal and historical precedents, or even the context in which he made his decision. Here’s the context: in the last days of his political enemy and presidential predecessor John Adams’ presidency, Adams appointed several new judges at the last minute (the so called “midnight judges.”)

This was a pretty obvious attempt by Adams to put a Federalist stamp on the government even after he was gone, and so Jefferson was in fact responding to an act political malfeasance, not simply getting retribution on an established court, as Gingrich would like to do. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the midnight judges controversy and Jefferson’s attacks on the judiciary (he tried to have Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase impeached and removed from office) the concept of judicial review, as laid down by the great Chief Justice John Marshall in the famous Marbury v. Madison case, took hold.

To put it more simply, the historical example Gingrich tries to use to justify his quest to remove judges actually shows how such actions were rejected over two hundred years ago, with two centuries of precedent to support the opposite of Gingrich’s opinion. If Newt were a real historian, who understood history as a process rather than a series of isolated, unrelated events, he might actually know that.

In sum, we have a situation where people like Gingrich, who proclaim their love for the Constitution, are those most likely to rip it to shreds because they revere it as holy writ that substantiates their faith, rather than a living, breathing legal document. It is time that more historians and legal experts sound the alarm, because Gingrich and his ilk would have a Rechtstaat where “the law is king” transformed into a state governed by an extremist political theology ready to destroy any legal or Constitutional checks that stand in its way.

Let's Play the Racial Referee: Honest Disagreement or Subtle White Racism?

2011-12-19T05:32:00.002-05:00

Time to start our Monday with a mea culpa of sorts.

I missed a great conversation in the comments section a week or so ago. I would like to remedy that oversight.

As readers of WARN know, I bump comments up from time to time when the moment so merits. The following conversation about race, identity, and marriage that came following my post on James Earl Jones and "black racism," is very revealing.

A truism: talking across the colorline is difficult. Dialogue online is hard regarding most matters. Dialogue, when one cannot hear the tone of each other's voices, is even more plagued with challenges and shortcomings.

In this example, I will assume good intentions and honesty by all parties involved. Question: are the problematics surrounding "colorblindness" vs. "color consciousness" (and interracial "relationships"), really that great?

Here on WARN, I let folks do their own thing. We are a small and intimate group, and as such, I am not one to play the mean moderator, banning folks, or overly censoring comments. I like to allow people to fight it out when need be.

But damn, I totally missed this one. Too much Christmas shopping, writing, meditating, and being a sexy beast. I am only human. Consequently, I do apologize to you all.

There could something really wicked in the conversation that follows; alternatively, this could simply be folks of good intentions who are walking different paths, and yet, going towards the same goal(s). In all, much to do about nothing.

Your thoughts?

Let's do the forensics together.

As always, you make the call.

*****

Anon wrote (with my excerpting/selective quoting noted):

As a white man married to a beautiful black woman I am proud to say I have prodcued four beautiful black daughters but here's the rub --- they have been the victims of Racism by darker skinned blacks alll their lives. I was so excited to meet my black wife and marry her. We planned to raise our kids as black. We went to all the cultural festivals in town and even celebrated Kwanza instead of Christmas. I found myself leaving as much as my irish german catholic upbringing behind as I tried to make sure my wifes black culture was upheld. As soon as the girls got into school the name callinng began- "you look white, you talk white, etc. " Soon we found ourselves moving the girls to private school. Their grades shot up but they found themselves with mostly upper middle class and rich white friends. When the dating began my girls would come home reporting how the black boys were saying "You will make pretty babies someday'there was also constant pressure to have sex. My girls were being treated like sexual objects by there own race. I was angry. I had always wanted them to find black men to marry.

In any case moving to current times my daughter just finished Dartmouth recently. She told us on one trip home she had found the man she was going to marry. When we went up there to meet him not only did I discover that he was White but English at that. He asked me for "her hand" which was very touching to me as a dad. I suppose as an academic I am still a romantic. I took out that time to ask him why my daughter. He said she was increadibly beautiful inside and out but then he went on to name the qualities any man would want in a wife, elegant, carried herself well, educated, frugal with spending and an increadible cook.

I credit that to my wife's mother from South Carolina teaching the girls Low Country Cooking when we would go down there in early summers. He loves and values her as a human not a sexual object. He does not have the hatred I see in so many of her own race mostly darker skinned. The wedding is this weekend my wife sits at our other home computer as I write this putting finishing touches on things. His parents arrive from England in two days. We all plan to be in London for the Olympics guests at our new inlaws home. My beautiful mixed race daughter has done me a man born of immigrant irish and german parents the first n his family to get a degree and graduate degree- real proud. I only wish memebers of the black race could value there own.

Maybe the next daughter will find a good black guy but I don't have my hopes up.I agree that the worst racism is in the race but I see it both ways I see dark skinned blacks as just as cruel , angry and vengeful as others. When my daughter moves to France with her husband (he has accepted a position there) I hope they will find a more balanced society.

Oh Crap rebutted:

Maybe the next daughter will find a good black guy but I don't have my hopes up.

Uh-huh. Your daughters are too good for Black men, and instead should end up with an impregnator/fetishizer like yourself. Right? What if they don't even like men? Who, then, smart feller?

And yet, you whimper and complain about "racism" from all us evil negroes.

You and whites like you are not only part of the problem, your whites-first mentality is foundational to the problem.

If you're ever in doubt why white supremacist impregnators o black women like yourself will never be trusted by us, just look over your post to see what it reveals about your attitude towards us.

Like all white supremacist bigots, you kid yourself that we're too dumb to perceive what is blindingly obvious.

Thrasher chimed in:

Thank you once again for your posts one wonders if anon black wife knows her hubby is a racist? I wish I could email her his comments and she could observe the bigoted who impregnated her...WTF

Help a Book Chapter Find a Home: "The Politics of Black Masculinity in Star Wars and Star Trek"

2011-12-16T04:25:00.009-05:00

Help a brother out.

We have a rich and varied audience here. For me, part of the fun of We Are Respectable Negroes are the random folks that chime in from time to time (I learn much from you all, and the many lurkers here should certainly make themselves known too), and the range of readers that stop by the site on a daily basis.

If you are a professional writer you likely have many essays, short stories, novels, novellas, and the like that will never see the light of day. It is not all that different for those in higher ed who have to write articles, books, and reviews, as part of their professional obligations. Like the former, there are occasions where chapters and articles end up in the circular file.

It is a Friday. This is a day to indulge. To point: I have a chapter from a book project that was killed at the last moment by the publisher. Here, I explore questions of black masculinity in the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, as well as their overlaps, tensions, and what they suggest about race in science fiction, and speculative fiction, more broadly.

Some of the sections include: "The Birth of the Cool: Star Wars, Mace Windu, and Lando Calrissian"; "The Cool of Star Wars vs. the Sterility of Star Trek"; and "Confessions of a Star Wars Baby."

I was looking through my files and this project lept out at me. Usually, you look at an article or chapter that was thrown down the memory hole, and say to yourself, "good riddance" (at least I do). But, this chapter is different. There is something here that should see the light of day; Following an instinct, I will throw it out to the universe for judgement (acceptance or rejection).

Academics, friends, countrymen, and others, if you know someone working on a book project where this could be of use (written in a tone suitable for an interested lay public as per the editors' request), please forward this one passage, a few paragraphs of the obligatory 25 or so pages, along. I will forward my vita and the full chapter once business, and identities, are confirmed.

Perhaps, all parties involved will find a mutually advantageous and beneficial resolution to a shared conundrum.

Ghetto nerds, please share your thoughts.

Surviving Jar Jar Binks and the Burden of Being Commander Sisko

The controversy surrounding the character Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace brought the question of race to the forefront of the Star Wars phenomenon. In newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and online, a range of cultural critics and others took aim at the character of Jar Jar Binks. He was savaged as a racial caricature, a modern day performance of digital blackface, a contemporary Steppin Fetchit that was nothing more than a tired, hackneyed, race minstrel.

In total, Jar Jar became a symbol of the latent racism present in George Lucas’s subconscious. When placed into the context of the other “racist” depictions in Star Wars, the jury seemed to be in: instead of being a harmless space opera, Star Wars was in reality a thinly veiled racist trope. My point here is not to arbitrate this claim (although I do believe that this charge lacks a deeper appreciation of Star Wars as a cultural text), but to reflect on how the Jar Jar Binks controversy illuminates the question of soul in some surprising ways.

Jar Jar Binks represents the antithesis of soul. Although, he is a cgi character “performed” by the talented Broadway actor Ahmed Best, Jar Jar’s energy humbles and lampoons black personhood. Here, he is a bumbling, “Jamaican” inspired “Patois” speaking alien who is dangerously close to the stock race minstrel character Stepin Fetchit.

The question of Lucas’s intentionality is moot: instead, of primary importance is how Jar Jar Binks represents a character archetype, that from at least the 19th century in the United States, onward, was specifically designed to demean the personhood of African Americans as being lazy, bumbling, incompetent, and not fit for democratic citizenship.

In contrast, Star Trek’s Commander Benjamin Sisko stands strong against these forces. This burden is a heavy one, precisely because of how the dominant script for representing black personhood in mass, popular culture, is so negative. As a qualifier, my claim here is a careful one. I am not arguing that Sisko is a response to Jar Jar Binks--as the two characters do not exist concurrently with one another (Deep Space Nine first aired several years before The Phantom Menace). What I am suggesting is that Commander Sisko exists in juxtaposition to Jar Jar Binks. Furthermore, Jar Jar Binks represents the types of cultural representations of African Americans which Avery Brooks, as Commander Sisko, is actively working to negate.

There were many responsibilities thrust upon Benjamin Sisko. As the principle character, and heroic protagonist, this was not unexpected. Moreover, the weight of the Sisko character was in many ways necessary for the narrative to “work.” But, even as judged against the lofty standards of leadership expected from Star Trek’s captains, Sisko’s responsibilities were outsized and exceptional.

He was a single parent raising his only son on a space station in an extremely dangerous, and strategically critical, part of the galaxy. Sisko was seen by the Bajoran people as an emissary--an almost god-like figure. And Brooks’ character was the first captain to be featured on the Star Trek television series during a full-scale intergalactic war. As a testament to his super-human responsibilities, Benjamin Sisko eventually leaves the plane of human existence and lives as one of the Prophets, a group of demigods with the power to alter time and space.

As compared to the other black characters on Star Trek, Sisko was firmly rooted in, and tied to, the history of his people (as both a citizen of Earth, and as a black man) and actively resisted any efforts to be “whitened,” made apolitical, or presented as being “post-racial” in the narrative. For example, Sisko boasted of owning one of the finest collections of African art in the galaxy; he traveled back in time to lead a revolutionary political protest movement during the 22nd century (events which helped to give birth to a unified Earth, and eventually, the Federation of Planets); and in one of Star Trek’s most powerful episodes, he lived the life of a genius black science fiction writer in Harlem whose work was rejected by a white, racist, publishing industry.

Sisko owned his history as a black man. He was also strengthened by it. This history also exacts a price for awareness: Sisko was denied the chance to remain blissfully ignorant of humankind's cruel realities, and how they shape the present and future. As tellingly highlighted by an exchange between Benjamin Sisko, and his soon to be wife (who is also African-American), the latter tells him that we can imagine the past (in this case a holographic adventure in 1950s segregated Las Vegas) as not being racist, because humanity has moved “beyond” the bigotry of its past.

Her implication is clear: Benjamin Sisko is limiting his own pleasure and joy by seeing Earth’s long history of racism and prejudice for what it actually was--as opposed to imaging the past as it should have been. While Sisko eventually surrenders to his fiance’s suggestion, Avery Brooks’ character remains unique among the captains on the various Star Trek series (allowing for Jean Luc Picard’s apolitical and race neutral fascination with the past) by drawing nourishment from his character’s relationship to a historically specific and grounded experience.

If Jar Jar Binks represents the antithesis of soul, Commander Sisko represents the burden of blackness at the site of the politics of representation. The latter is such an obligation that it robs Sisko of the relaxed, cool sensibility that Avery Brooks channeled in his previous role as the assassin and enforcer, Hawk, on the television series Spencer for Hire. In all, the sum effect of Avery Brooks’ obligation to offer a positive representation of black personhood is existentially confining for the character Captain Benjamin Sisko.

The Land of Non-Surprise: Mitt Romney, Candidate for a Nativist Party, Channels KKK Slogan, to Win Over Nativist Voters

2011-12-15T16:59:00.005-05:00

Once more, we have proof that there is no liberal media in the United States. There is only a corporate media, one that is vulnerable to hostage taking by the Right.

Mitt Romney channels a slogan from the Ku Klux Klan that "we" ought to "keep America American" (or its more "polite" cousin, "Keep America, America"). MSNBC reports Romney's repeated use of this phrase. The Right-wing blogosphere cries "foul" and "unfair." Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton issue apologies to Mitt Romney for unfairly attacking his character.

There are two elements to this story that demand exploration.

First, the suggestion that a Republican candidate, one who is trying to sure up his conservative bonafides to a white populist base, would mine the rhetoric of the Klan (or deploy racially bigoted, xenophobic, and resentful sentiment and slogans more generally) is not at all a surprise. In fact, the politics of white racial resentment and white victimology have been central elements in Republican political strategy for five decades.

While folks are centered on the silly and distracting question--is Mitt Romney a racist or in the KKK--they should in fact be focused on the Republican Party's masterful use of a politics of white racial resentment, nativism, and disdain for the Other. Context matters. Consider the circus that is the Republican Party's presidential primary field for the election year 2012, and the policies they have endorsed.

1. Electric fences and moats to kill illegal immigrants;
2. Suggesting that black people are lazy, and their children should serve as janitors in order to develop a work ethic;
3. Wallowed in the filth of Birtherism, and indulged in rank, open bigotry against the country's first black President;
4. Suggested that Muslim Americans should be profiled (perhaps they should carry special cards? or wear a mark on their clothing?) because of their religion and a propensity to commit "terrorism";
5. Include a candidate who leisured at a family retreat named "Niggerhead" and grew up in sundown town;
6. Are beholded to the Tea Party, a faction and AstroTurf group which can trace its origins back to the white supremacist, white nationalist, John Birch Society (the former is also a group whose racist tendencies have been well-documented).

The Republican Party's rhetoric of "real America," "our America," "take our America back," and Romney's Klan-inspired slogan of "Keep America American" is based on a simple premise of "us and them." Patriotism and nationalism have almost always been infused with appeals to white racism. Given that America's history is one where to be American, meant that one had to be "white" in the eyes of the law, this ought not to be a surprise. Black folks have long been the anti-citizen, the group against which immigrants and others triangulate their belonging and group membership.

The symbolic racism indulged in by the Republican Party, especially as seen in their race baiting against Barack Obama, are dependent on a basic understanding that to be "American" one must first and most importantly be "White" (and to a lesser degree Christian). In the post-Civil Rights era, those appeals have to be hidden behind dog-whistles and coded speech.

The second teachable moment in Mitt Romney's channeling of the KKK's slogan is that historically, America is a profoundly racist country. In fact, there was no language with which to stigmatize such sentiments; "racism" was just "the law," or "commonsense," what was a "natural" way of doing things. For example, the Constitution of the United States is an explicitly pro-slavery, pro-white, herrenvolk, Apartheid document. With approximately 3 million members, the KKK was one of the most important civil society organizations in American history throughout the early part of the 20th century. Their "march on Washington" was one of the largest gatherings in the country to date.

The Civil Rights Movement, only four decades or so in the past, is a recent development. For most of the United States' history, to become a naturalized citizen a person had to be of demonstrable, and certifiable, "white ancestry" and "good stock." People of color, and "questionable" whites (Southern and Eastern Europeans), were not "fit" for American citizenship. In all, pluralist, Multicultural America, the one that elected Barack Obama, is a hiccup, a curiosity, and a very recent development in American history.

The nativism, xenophobia, and "polite" bigotry of the Republican Party, with its most recent appeals to white populism, are part of a larger pattern. In much the same way that the Tea Party brigands displayed posters of Barack Obama as a monkey or a gorilla, Mitt Romney may not even know the origins of "keep America American." But, it resonates with his audience.

More generally, Republican candidates who talk about "the pro-America parts of the country," and "real Americans," may not know about the deep relationship between nationalism, white racism, and the murder and exclusion of non-whites from the polity and public sphere. But, the words are warm and welcoming. The slogan excites them. It makes populist conservatives feel good about something; they belong to a community of "special" people, with privileged insight, and an elect commandment from on high; they are the sacred keepers of American exceptionalism and the Founding Father's prescient wisdom.

Ultimately, Mitt Romney's use of the Klan's slogan is not about responsibility: I could care less if he is a dyed in the wool racist or bigot; in fact, I suspect that he likely is not one.

And of course, how can one overlook the irony of a Mormon, a group none too popular with the KKK, channeling one of their most famous slogans.

However, the use of such language is important because of the questions surrounding causality, consequences, appeal, and sentiment. As we work through Romney's KKK turn of phrase, we cannot forget that White supremacy is part of the ether and air that all Americans, across the color line, inhale and breathe. It is part of the country's collective subconscious. An American can no more escape it, than a fish can water.

Consequently, the bigger and more important element here is the type of political work that such historically racist--but in the present--"race neutral" appeals do for Tea Party GOP candidates who are focused on destroying the United States' first Black President by any means necessary. As the late, oft-quoted, Republican political strategist Lee Atwater alluded to, Republicans most certainly cannot call black people "niggers" anymore and expect to win elections. However, Republicans can do everything to remind their white voting public, the conservative heart and soul of their party, that a President who happens to be black, most certainly, is not one of "them."

This is the truth, that MSNBC, in walking back the obvious connection between Mitt Romney, the KKK's racism and nativism, and the political gamesmanship of the Tea Party GOP, is afraid to make clear and transparent.

The Fourth Estate fails again.

Lest We Pile On Too Much: What are Black Academics Doing to Help Poor Black Kids?

2011-12-14T18:00:00.001-05:00

I try to engage in a bit of critical self-reflection whenever possible.

Gene Marks' exercise in white privilege and Internet trolling has been thoroughly demolished for its lazy thinking, arrogance, and deficit of empathy. But, in reading all of the rebuttals to the essay, I have been forced to ask myself a hard question: while it is easy to throw rocks at the town jester for his foibles, are those who are taking Gene Marks to the woodshed any better than he?

For example, I always try to reach out to first generation, low income students once they are in my classes. I have also devoted considerable professional time to grant funded programs which are tasked with improving the post-secondary and graduate school enrollment rates for first generation, low income, and under-represented students. But, is that enough?

The documentary Ebony Towers is a helpful entry point for this conversation. It deftly highlights the struggles to racially integrate colleges and universities in both the U.K. and the United States. While Ebony Towers does not sufficiently play up the role of organizations like the Ford Foundation in establishing Black Studies (a move that was part of a broader plan to deradicalize the remnants of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s), it is however quite sharp in highlighting how access to education has historically been a political act for black Americans.

While "Blackademics" and others are hating on Gene Marks for his piss poor article, what are they/we doing to improve the educational and professional opportunities for poor people of color in this country?

Yes, looking in the mirror can be hard; but, it ought not to be avoided for that reason.

If I Were a Short, Balding, Mediocre White Man I Would Write an Advice Column For Poor Black Kids in Forbes Magazine

2011-12-13T20:11:00.002-05:00

The President’s speech got me thinking. My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia. The world is not fair to those kids mainly because they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing the opportunities that the President spoke about that much harder. This is a fact. In 2011.

Forbes magazine has posted a column by Gene Marks, a middle aged white guy, who wants to give advice to poor black kids about how to be successful in America. Of course, these young black kids read Forbes everyday and will internalize his wisdom. There is no poverty porn, noblesse oblige, white paternalism, compassionate conservative masturbation, navel gazing at work here. No. None at all.

Folks are all over his butt already. In fact, Gene Marks is about to become more popular than he has any right to be, both with the conservative, "blacks have bad culture crowd" (who will hold him up as a brave truth teller), and the anti-racist lecture circuit crowd (who is going to use his essay in Forbes as an object lesson in white privilege for years and years to come).

And like flies on shit, black conservative apologists will soon start hovering over Marks' essay as they instinctively rise to defend any assault on either people of color, or the black poor, by the white conservative establishment. Black conservatives are on retainer and are obligated to shuck, buck dance, and jive to earn their keep. Their appearance is imminent.

I am not a poor black kid. I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background. So life was easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city. It doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities for them. Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind. I don’t believe that. I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed. Still. In 2011. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia.

It takes brains. It takes hard work. It takes a little luck. And a little help from others. It takes the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available. Like technology. As a person who sells and has worked with technology all my life I also know this.

If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their best. And the very best students, even at the worst schools, have more opportunities...

It is difficult to imagine oneself in the shoes of another person. Empathy and sympathy are difficult traits to practice even under the best of circumstances. I also do not know what Gene Marks' intentions were in writing his Forbes' essay. However, I am mighty curious about the intentions of Forbes' editors in publishing such a problematic piece of work.

Marks is likely a "nice" guy who is so awash in white privilege, class entitlement, and sexism (remember, discourses on poverty are almost always about both race and gender) that it is impossible for him to really imagine himself as the Other; yet, he is so arrogant that he imagines himself capable of understanding all people's experiences, at all times, and in all places. This is the crux of White privilege--a sense of gross universality and normativity, a racial heliocentrism that allows a white person to generalize outward with authority on all things.

If I was a poor black kid I would get technical. I would learn software. I would learn how to write code. I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online. I would study on my own. I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished.

Because a poor black kid who gets good grades, has a part time job and becomes proficient with a technical skill will go to college. There is financial aid available. There are programs available. And no matter what he or she majors in that person will have opportunities. They will find jobs in a country of business owners like me who are starved for smart, skilled people. They will succeed.

Predictably, Whiteness will also make Gene Marks into a victim, as "he is just trying to be helpful" and "how dare those liberals and race pimps tell him that he is wrong!"

Two truisms apply here. One, you should write what you know. As revealed by his Forbes' essay, Gene Marks does not know anything of the experiences of poor black and brown kids in inner city America. He has no access to their internal lives, his article also suggests a blinding ignorance of the realities of structural inequality in this country. Two, a fish does not know that it is wet. Despite his lip service to the concept, Marks does not really imagine himself as privileged (as he would have not written such a piece, in the manner that he so chose), or that the life experiences of a self-described mediocre technocrat, one who somehow found himself a columnist for Forbes and the NY Times, are in any way exceptional or unique.

As we saw with Newt Gingrich's ugly suggestions that poor kids should become janitors in order to teach those lazy blacks about the value of hard work, and Rush Limbaugh's observation that poor kids on school lunch programs are greedy street urchins, Marks is a singer in a conservative chorus whose message is simple: you are poor because you are lazy; moreover, poor people want to be poor; poor black kids born to crappy circumstances can do better if they just tried harder...and are smart enough to show some initiative.

President Obama was right in his speech last week. The division between rich and poor is a national problem. But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality. It’s ignorance.

I do wonder what Gene Mark's advice would be to lazy, dim, anti-intellectual, and entitled white kids (and those of the upper classes more generally) who were born on the 3rd base of life and think they hit a home run? Would his advice be the same for the white rural poor? What would Gene Marks tell the "new poor," those formerly middle class suburban types who are couch surfing, living in cars, tents, or hotels? What wisdom does he have to preach from on high?

Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids. Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.

I will let Gene Mark's closing comments stand on their own: they are ugly poetry in motion.

Where Silence Has Lease: "Massa" Rush Limbaugh Wants Black Politicians to Be Sure to Have Their Slave Passes

2011-12-12T02:46:00.002-05:00

Rush Limbaugh earned his racist bonafides a long time ago. He is also an existentially and unrepentantly ugly person. Therefore, his suggestion that the head of the Congressional Black Caucus needs to get a slave pass in order to "get off" the Democratic plantation is not at all a surprise. Moreover, that there are millions of petit authoritarians who pray at his sick and twisted mantle of Angry White Male Conservatism, is also not a surprise. Their love is just a symptom of America's cultural rot, and a dysfunctional political discourse, one identified decades ago by the noted political scientist and historian Richard Hofstadter.

Ultimately, in the 1920s through to the 1960s, there was Father Coughlin; the last few decades brought us Rush Limbaugh. There is really nothing new in the game in regards to ugly talk that plays to Whiteness's greater devils, as opposed to its lesser angels.

Of course, I will never understand why any self-respecting black person (or person of color more generally) would get in bed with the racially resentful, and bigoted strain of populism, that is the Tea Party GOP. And that black Conservatives reproduce the language of white supremacy, with the idea that principled, reflective, and politically sophisticated, utility maximizing black people--who have decided that the Democratic Party is more aligned with their interests--are on a "plantation," is one part racial Stockholm syndrome, and two parts selling out for the sake of a dollar...as well as the psychic wages of a pat or two on the metaphorical head from their overlords.

Abstractions are easy to use in a game where the scoring of cheap political points is the goal. The low brow rhetoric that passes for reasoned political discourse in the Right-wing echo chamber is masterful for its ability to provoke, use symbolically rich speech, repetition, moral clarity, as well as certitude. In all, the Eliminationists of the Right-wing are expert propagandists.

However, it is easy to invoke a thing, when one does not have to face the reality of it head on. A skilled rhetorician can paint a picture with words that move the crowd; but, their power can also be subverted when the gimmick is exposed--when the audience sees the literal thing that is being used as an allusion and metaphorical prop. The illusion is broken. The magic is gone.

Rush Limbaugh loves to talk about black people and slavery. It is a fetish of his. While we may not cure him of this obsession, nor break the Svengali-like hold that Limbaugh has on his cult members, we can examine an actual example of the "slave passes" he so casually evoked last week:

Transcription: My Boy Mack has my Permission to sleep in a house in Bedon’s Alley, hired by his Mother this ticket is good for two months from this date Sarah H. Savage Sep ber 19th, 1843

I wonder if the Right-wing populists who fawn over Rush Limbaugh would find such references so funny if they could actually see a slave pass with their own eyes, or read some of the actual handwriting that attempted to reduce grown adults into children, human property who were limited in the most basic exercise of their rights?

White populist conservatives would probably sneer and reverse this truth-seeking into some twisted claim of "white victimology," and "angry black people," who are "unfair" and "emotional." In fact, there are likely many conservatives, who in another decade would fancy themselves owners of human property, kings of the plantation, where the darkies knew their place, and everything was a Neo-Confederate, Southern GOP, Tea Party wet dream.

Their love of such abuses of history aside does not mean that we ought not to confront conservatives about their fictions at every opportunity, to hold them accountable.

Please indulge me some private-public talk for a moment. My black folks, we need to do a better job of protecting our history, the narratives that are generated about it, and how our struggle is made the fodder for political games by conservatives and liberals alike. No other group's freedom struggle and suffering (our Jewish brothers and sisters especially, are to be held up as exemplars for how to protect one's master narrative) is mocked with such ease, frequency, or with so few consequences.

These slave passes are not impersonal abstractions, curiosities of history, without meaning or weight. Slave passes were the naked and obvious demonstration of power by Whites, and the ability (or so they believed) to control black people--your kin and family--as human property from the cradle to the grave:

This is a slave pass and marriage acknowledgement from A. Greer to John Neely allowing the marriage of one of his male slaves to one of Neely’s female slaves, permitting that they do not let the marriage interfere with their work.

Where is the outrage? My people, my black folks, or are you so tired, the calluses so deep, that you have forgotten how to be upset?

History stares you in the eyes: Rush Limbaugh and his brethren slap you in the face every time they channel the glorious and proud history of black and brown folks, our sheroes and heroes, for their nefarious and dishonest ends. And you do nothing.

And some wonder, why in America, conservatism and racism are one in the same.

Of Black Pride and White Prejudice: James Earl Jones Discusses His "Racist" Black Grandmother

2011-12-09T02:59:00.008-05:00

Your shuttle is ready Lord Vader.

We have not had a salon on black prejudice and white racism in a while; I save those occasions for special moments; it would seem that we have one now.

In this interview on the BBC, Brother James Earl Jones describes his grandmother as the most racist person he has ever met. She was part Native American and black. As Jones describes it, his grandmother was a "defensive racist."

Racism is the particular crime, of a particular group of people, who happen to have power. Racism is not existential. Racism has nothing to do with skin color. Racism has everything to do with skin color.

To maintain, continue with, circulate, and support racist practices is an active choice, and also one of tacit consent. Thus, while James Earl Jones' First World, indigenous, black grandmother, may have been bigoted or prejudiced, she was in no way racist--for racism is a particular and unique sin of white people, whatever their class or social location, in modernity and beyond. Her pain and anger, were also totally understandable, reasonable, and just.

Brother Jones' reflection on his own upbringing is also a bit of powerful sharing. His grandmother was "racist" against blacks who to her eyes "enabled" slavery, and "let themselves be taken." She is also upset at her own Native American kin for their own Holocaust. These feelings are examples of the deep pain, angst, and sadness, as well as loss, that racism perpetrates as a crime on its victims.

How powerful a social force it is, when a people internalize and reproduce the terms of their own oppression, like some type of Stockholm Syndrome...

James Earl Jones' sharing of his grandma's upsetness at her own people is also an example of pulling aside the veil, and making public, our own private talk as first world, black and brown people, about our racialized predicament in the Americas (and throughout European empire, more broadly).

By implication, what follows is an uncomfortable question for some.

As you know, I always take it to the limit: If "we" were so "great," how could "they" conquer the world? Put us in chains? Steal our lands? Kill us by the tens and hundreds of millions? How did Europe, a resource and population poor part of the world, a group of people who were quite literally "cave dwellers," conquer the great empires of Latin and South America, as well as sub-Saharan Africa?

We brought knowledge to the world, and preserved its greatest mysteries when white Europeans were living like animals during the Dark Ages, so how could black folks be put under the chain and lash in the bowels of the hellish slavers during the Middle Passage? How is this even imaginable, or within the boundaries of the conceivable?

And please, do not run to the claim that Europeans were "evil." Such arguments are lazy thinking, difficult to operationalize, and do us no service in the long run. They also keep us safe from hard answers, for such existential and ontological defenses are difficult, if not impossible, to rebuff or model in practice. Such claims are comforting; yet, they teach us very little.

As frequents readers of WARN know, I have shared more than a few beers with Neo-Nazis and Klan members over the years and debated these matters. I have an answer to the riddle. In the interest of sharing and learning, I ask what is yours?

That weapon is a powerful and necessary derringer, to keep up your sleeve or in your shirt pocket. Show it off a little. Consider this your Friday riddle of steel.

Kick in the Door: Republicans Should "Ask Osama bin Laden" if Obama's Foreign Policy is Based on "Appeasement"

2011-12-08T15:29:00.012-05:00

These are the moments when I wish that there was a thought bubble above President Obama's head so that we can read his mind. God knows, there must be quite a bit of self-censoring going on...

A little bit of swaggering, phallocentric militarism, is okay every once in a while.

[Especially on a day when the Iranians pull your punk card, and display one of the bloated war machine's favorite toys before selling it to the Chinese. The irony here is that the loss of the Sentinel drone will just be used as an excuse to develop a new generation of weapons to counter the reverse engineered stealth armaments which the Chinese are going to deploy against the U.S. Navy when it cuts off their access to oil.]

And as I have not said as of late, this is the President I voted for. He is cool, calculating, a lethal opponent, and has just enough of a cool pose to let you know precisely from where his cultural roots flow.

Forgive me the indulgence in stereotypes of black masculinity, but sometimes you need a soundtrack for such a flat statement of killing prowess:

With Dignity Former Slaves Speak Across Time and the NY Times Recycles the Myth of the Black Confederate Soldier

2011-12-07T19:03:00.005-05:00

“My name is Fountain Hughes … My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson.” Hughes then begins a wily standoff with his white interviewer, Hermond Norwood, digressing into his opinions about babies wearing shoes (-22:00) and buying things “on time [credit],” decrying the Yankees throwing flour into the river (-11:10) and, finally, declaring he would shoot himself rather than go back to slavery, where “you are nothing but a dog.” (-10:00)

As part of its series commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Opinionator section of the NY Times is featuring a piece by Karenna Gore Schiff. Out of Time explores the politics surrounding the WPA's efforts to record the oral histories of former slaves during the 1930s and 1940s.

There are some great nuggets here: the fights over memory and representation; the Dixiecrats hold over the WPA and its various artistic and historical projects; the fears of now freed people of suffering retaliation from whites in the Jim Crow South if their stories about the evil ways of white folks were too honest; and how the very idea of "documentary" projects were part of a broader populist turn towards everyday people--as opposed to "great" men and women--and the importance of their life stories and experiences to understanding the grand American narrative.

While it is fashionable in Republican circles to bemoan the federal government as a source of all evil, a bogeyman to be drowned in the bathtub, the WPA projects in particular, and the New Deal more generally, are powerful examples of how the State can do so much good.

It is chilling and inspiring to hear the ancestors speak across time. History is real. It ain't even past. Some would urge us to forget the past, to embrace Whiteness' necessary forgetting, and hold close an American political culture that is both amazingly nostalgic and also being grossly amnesiac. However, many of us are "political" by birth and identity in this country; we do not have the luxury of willful naivete or denial about the realities of power. What many white folks were surprised to see at OWS--where the protesters received an iota, a small dose of what people of color have been getting for centuries at the hands of the police--black kids learn as a life survival skill at 3 years old.

Caught Out of Time is not without its problems. As a teachable moment, it reaches back to the past and meditates on how the voiced experiences of former slaves are almost "Homeric" in the power. And lest we forget, it has not even been 50 years since Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy was formally undone in the United States. But in reaching back decades, Schiff recycles a near-lie about the Confederacy and the role of black Americans in the Civil War, one that is popular even into the present:

However, some slaves’ disapproval of the Northern army was genuine. Ward writes of “astonishing empathy” for masters and mistresses and documents touching and deeply humane instances of slaves acting beyond the constraints of bondage, like carrying their masters’ bodies over long distances to be buried at home. Furthermore, in the immediate human context of war, slaves’ interests overlapped with those of slaveholders; they wanted to protect food and livestock from incoming troops not only because they had been ordered to, but because their own sustenance was at stake.

Not to mention the fact that, however cruel and twisted, intimate family bonds existed between black and white throughout the South. Adam Goodheart points out that at the dawn of the war, mixed-race slaves were more likely to join the Confederate effort (technically, the Confederacy never accepted them as enlisted troops but gladly put them to work): ”Human nature is a complicated thing.”

While an appeal to "human nature," and a desire to go beyond "good guys" and "bad guys" in our historiography is laudable, this yearning for Black Confederates is a broken record that plays to the white, racist, neo-confederate crowd, a group which is desperate to rehabilitate the image of the South as something noble, their war of Secession a great struggle for "State's Rights." In reality, blacks who "served" in the Confederate Army were the human property of their white owners, virtual mules and horses, and in few cases worked exclusively in non-combat roles as "free" laborers. As has been well documented, the Confederacy was a white supremacist, terrorist, military State, where the very idea of black men bearing arms was anathema to its foundational beliefs. The South would rather cease to be, than to offer up guns to black people, of any racial admixture, to fight in its defense.

Caught Out of Time continues with its near-lie here:

Harriet Smith’s soft, melodic voice conjures up the image of her as a girl, sitting atop a white fence watching the troops go by, surprised by the sight of “colored soldiers in droves,” and filled with wonder when a black orphan girl neighbor (who had had her arm cut off while operating a molasses mill) ran off with one of them. (-:55) (Part 2 of 4, -4:00) Approximately 300,000 black men would serve in the Union army (and thousands would also join the Confederate effort, including Fountain Hughes’s father, who was killed at Gettysburg) but the sight was particularly shocking to all Southerners in the early days of the war.

Again, "the thousands" who joined the Confederate Army did so not as free men, soldiers, fighting to "protect" the "Southern way of life." This yearning to find the Black Confederate in the attic is also a sign of a bigger cultural, political, and intellectual malaise in America. We live in a moment where all opinions are framed as being equal; this culture of narcissism is advanced by a news media, one that on a daily basis, feels obligated to offer up both sides of a story in a twisted game of false equivalence.

The 21st century, opinion journalism driven 4th Estate, elevates stupid-talk and foolishness to the level of reasoned and principled discourse. For example, Birthers are given opportunities to peddle their smut, those "experts" who believe that tax cuts create economic growth are presented as legitimate authorities when the consensus is that trickle down and the Laffer curve are fictions, propagandists from the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute are presented as "value neutral." And when the Palins, Perrys, Bachmanns, Cains, of the world offer up some specious claim about the environment, the economy, or science, their "I believe it to be true, that is my opinion, and how dare you tell me otherwise you elitist!" is treated as fact.

In all, Caught Out of Time is an exercise in the power of outliers.

How much weight do we give to inconvenient facts that stand outside and apart from the consensus on a topic, of the narrative generated by the other data points? Ideal typical cases are handy; there is also much to be learned by those which do not neatly fit into our existing models. Yes, there were a few African Americans who held other black folks as slaves in the South. But, what does this tell us about the institution as a whole? Sure, there may have been a few Blacks, who for their own reasons, tried to find a way to join the Confederate Army. But what does that tell us about the totality of the Civil War, a struggle to defend white supremacy and human bondage as a way of life?

Imagine this helpful counter-factual or alternative scenario: should a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement present the defenders of white supremacy as being "equal" to those little black boys and girls who simply wanted to attend an integrated school? Should a journalist elevate those who would blow up abortion clinics and kill doctors as being equivalent to those advocates who believe that a woman should have the right to control access to her own body?

Caught Out of Time, and the cult of false equivalence, is a cousin to these puzzles. A yearning for black Confederates, and folksy Gone with the Wind Song of the South stories about loyal slaves who carried their masters home on their backs, are outliers which tell us nothing about the story as a whole. These details are chaff for racism deniers, and those invested in the Lost Cause and "nobility" of the white supremacist, Secessionist struggle called the Confederate States of America.

The editors of the NY Times--a journal of record, containing "all of the news fit to print"--would have better served such a great piece on the voices of the ancestors, and the WPA's efforts to preserve them, by deleting such distracting and unnecessary fodder.

[The editorial choices made relative to the Times' piece also begs the following question.

Where are those many more common examples of slaves who poisoned their masters and his/her family, burned down barns, destroyed property, killed their overseers, served as Union spies, kicked their owners off of the plantations, or whipped whites in the street when the Union Army finally liberated an area?

I guess those stories are not a neat fit for the "human complexity" presented by Caught Out of Time.]

The Final Herman Cain Round-Up: the Race Minstrel Meme; Cain as Affirmative Action Baby; Ishmael and Crouch Go Hard

2011-12-06T17:58:00.010-05:00

Folks are using up all of their surplus ammo as Herman Cain exits stage left. Yesterday, the price was 2 for 1 on Herman Cain news; today he is well past the expiration date, so all Herman Cain related stories have to go at bargain prices.

Here is a list of some of my favorites from the past few days. If you have any more to contribute, please do send them along.

1. Herman Cain is an affirmative action baby whose whole career was made possible by the Civil Rights Movement, and "trouble makers" such as Jesse Jackson. It was widely known that Cain was the beneficiary of a successful lawsuit against Pillsbury (and its subsidiary Burger King) for racism and sexism in hiring and promotions, and as such, he was placed in a "fast track" executive management program.

In fact, I pitched such a story to a few different outlets and they wanted to sit on it. Thankfully, Wayne Barrett at the Daily Beast has done a great and thorough job of documenting how Herman Cain was aided by affirmative action, the very policy he repeatedly demeaned as a "self-made" black conservative.

2. Stanley Crouch serves some ownage to Herman Cain as he works through how Cornbread played a role as a dark-skinned, "authentic" negro, one who gleefully ran away from the Civil Rights Movement (and its pesky negro agitators) in order to please his white masters. Ishmael Reed, the great contrarian, provocateur, and critical thinker that he is, offers up a great essay where he highlights Cain's role as a "black bogeyman"who embodies age old fears about race and sex.

3. Race minstrelsy is everywhere. If I had a dime for every time someone picked up my meme, I would have about a $1.50. Here are some more links from these Internets on Herman Cain, race minstrel, carnival barker and charlatan.

4. Oh yeah, there is going to be a documentary, "The Curious Case of Herman Cain" on BET this Thursday.

5. Ginger White, Cain's lover, is giving up the details on their "private time." I thought that Herman Cain would have been a pipe laying, wear a woman out, take her to space mountain all night long, and have her doing the donkey walk the next day sort of brother. Alas, Ginger White would lay under Cain, thinking about what she had to buy at the supermarket, while he did his business. I thought dude was a big long sliding man putting in work, stirring the sugar in the bowl. Maybe Herman Cain in so narcissistic that he is a selfish lover? Apparently, boom, (doesn't) go the dynamite.

More Race Science: They Lock Up Those "Crazy" Negro Agitators and Call Them "Schizophrenic"

2011-12-06T02:22:00.005-05:00

Cecil Peterson had no history with the police. Even on the day the white stranger insulted his mother, Peterson simply wanted to eat lunch. He sat in his usual seat at the counter of the diner on Woodward Street and ordered his usual BLT and coffee. Somehow he caught the stranger’s eye in the squinted way that begets immediate conflict between men. The stranger glared. Peterson was not one to walk away from confrontation, but he knew the implications of glaring back. One should not glare back at a white man. So he looked down. But the two men crossed paths again after Peterson paid his tab and walked outside. And then came the remark. And then came the fight.

Two white Detroit police officers happened to be passing by the diner that September day in 1966. They ran to the altercation and tried to separate the combatants. At that point, according to their formal report, Peterson turned on the officers and struck them “without provocation.” According to the report, Peterson knocked one officer down and “kicked him in the side.” A second police team arrived and assisted in apprehending the “agitated” Mr. Peterson. Medics took the first officers on the scene to the Wayne County Hospital emergency room. The ER physician’s report noted that both officers had “bruises,” though neither required treatment. The white stranger was not charged.

Peterson was twenty-nine, African American, and an unmarried father of four who worked the line at Cadillac Motor Company. He had not previously come to the attention of the state. He had not been diagnosed or treated for any physical or mental illness. Nor had he been held for crimes or misdemeanors. He had limited interactions with white people and preferred to stay close to home. But on that September day in 1966 his life changed along with his identity. He became a prisoner. And then he became a patient.

I enjoyed the Bell Curve redux fracas. It brought out some race science polite racist types, and allowed us to see those dinosaurs for what they really are: white supremacists and new age phrenologists.

Light does indeed work as a sanitizing agent and anti-septic.

The conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates about the relationship between I.Q., race, and genetics, once again highlighted how "science" is a political enterprise. It is not "neutral," nor is it purely beholden to positivism. People do science. People conduct research. People are embedded in social relationships. People reproduce certain understandings of truth and power. People have a stake in the game, an investment in a certain outcome.

In all, race and racial ideologies are central to the social work done by science as part of an over-arching regime of truth and knowledge.

To point, there are many reasons why black folks--and people of color more generally--are distrustful of the medical establishment, and view the proposition that science is "neutral," with great suspicion. We know about medical apartheid, using radiation to put holes in people's heads, Mississippi appendectomies, the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks, and of course, Tuskegee.

There are many other hidden histories. One of these is how black folks were marginalized by the mental health field and branded by State authorities as "insane," "schizophrenic," or "mentally ill, because they dared to defy white racism.

Jonathan Metzl's, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, fleshes out this troubling history.

Histories do intersect, here we have echoes of how suffragists were treated by the United States government during their struggle for the vote and a more full citizenship. And of course, the genius work of Michel Foucault in his magisterial History of Madness.

This one is for the ~~douche bags~~ eugenicist race science clowns. Hopefully, they will have more entertaining darts to throw at what should be an open and shut case about how white supremacy works through science to reinforce the status quo.

Either way, Metzl's work is great, and his interview is well worth the listen.

Bye Bye Herman Cain: True to Form, His Race Minstrel Show Ended the Only Way That It Could

2011-12-05T13:34:00.006-05:00

Goodbye Herman Cain. You will be missed.

Unable to weather repeated charges of sexual harassment and infidelity, the Herman Cain train has finally gone off the tracks. Yet, even by the unique and unconventional standards of the 2012 Republican presidential primary field, Herman Cain was a spectacle—and one with a unique advantage.

I signaled to Herman Cain’s potential in February 2011 in a controversial essay on the online magazine Alternet, where after his break-out speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, I described it as a race minstrel-like performance. There, with everything but blackface cork, Cain channeled his dead black grand pappy with a semi-literate Southern drawl, told white folks that racism is a fiction (and that they are in fact the real victims of bigotry in the Age of Obama), and validated a belief that black people like Herman Cain—those who don’t complain, make trouble, or participate in the Civil Rights Movement—are the way forward.

In total, Herman Cain was a fantasy projection and type of racism shield, an Anti-Obama, who could soothe the anxieties of racially resentful white conservatives. While Cain’s shtick did not rise to the level of comedian David Chappelle’s character Clayton Bigsby, black white supremacist; it was, in many ways, a genius performance. He was Sarah Palin mated with the Boondocks’ Uncle Ruckus.

At the time, I was widely criticized for daring to suggest that Herman Cain was channeling such an offensive stereotype. My analysis proved prescient. In time, other observers either borrowed the meme, or were clearly inspired by it.

Unfortunately, many of those who ran with my suggestion that Herman Cain was performing as a race minstrel for the pleasures of his white conservative public, did not understand the depth of the claim. I was not trying to engage in name calling, or to get a snicker from the public, by calling attention to Herman Cain’s racially infused Tomfoolery. Rather, my deeper point was that Herman Cain’s race minstrel performance was a carefully crafted means towards an end.

Herman Cain was the mouthpiece for the unrepentant id of the New Right. He could advocate for the most extreme aspects of their ideology behind a mask of black incompetence, and “down home” mannerisms, that could potentially protect him from criticism. In addition, conservatives could deploy the race card at will to defend their chosen son: Herman Cain was a black cheerleader who could advance some of their most onerous and extreme policy positions.

The Herman Cain New Age Race Minstrel Show ended in the only way that it could. In keeping with the routine, Cain was brought down by his own arrogance and narcissism. He had grand plans and schemes that he could not fulfill. Because the race minstrel was a white supremacist fantasy that embodied fears about African Americans’ citizenship and freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War, he was a bumbling fool, and an incompetent who was not fit for democracy. And of course, the race minstrel lacked impulse control. His libido and craven pursuit of white women—what was an unattainable prize—would be his ultimate undoing.

From his willful embrace of ignorance on matters of foreign policy, a “9-9-9” tax policy cobbled together by secret advisers (and likely borrowed from a videogame), dreams of electrified fences and moats to kill “illegal” immigrants, rampant and almost cartoon-like levels of Islamophobia and Christian nationalism, “whistling Dixie” demagoguing of blacks who are not Republicans as being “on a plantation,” and of course his purported propensity for sexual harassment and adulterous behavior, Herman Cain played the role of race minstrel for the Tea Party GOP with aplomb and zest.

In all, the Herman Cain candidacy was a thing of ugly beauty. Cain began his presidential primary run with the priceless and under-used phrase “awww...shucky ducky,” seasoned it with a spiritual sung at the National Press Club, and offered a funereal oratory for his campaign that concluded with a quote from the Pokemon cartoon series.

Herman Cain caught lightning in a bottle. He combined the worst aspects of Tyler Perry’s various TV and film exercises in black buffoonery, the denigrating humor of Amos ‘N Andy, and the tropes of 19^th century race minstrelsy into one show. While some observers will try to divine some deep and symbolic meaning about race in the Age of Obama from Herman Cain’s brief and shining moment in the 2012 Republican primaries, the lesson here, is in fact, more basic. Give people what they want. In this case, the white populists in the Republican Party wanted a black man who told them that they are not racists, Jim Crow wasn’t that bad, and “our” blacks are better than “those other” blacks who happen to be Democrats.

Herman Cain, master of the racial authenticity game, fashioned himself as “a real black man” as compared to President Barack Obama. He reminded his audience of this “fact” at every opportunity. They lapped it up. Sadly for Herman Cain, just as Michael Steele and other black conservatives learned long ago, the love and affection of the White Right is instrumental, and the devotion to their mascots is temporary, with a limited shelf-life.

As of Saturday, Herman Cain was barely the flavor of the month. Black Walnut has melted; Cornbread is now stale; it is time to go home…or perhaps begin a second career as a traveling bluesman and motivational speaker, for Herman Cain’s unlikely saga as a 2012 Republican presidential primary candidate has yielded more than enough material to last a lifetime.

Let's Play the "Race Science" Mythbusters Game: Which of These Theories is Most Compelling and Why?

2011-12-02T14:47:00.017-05:00

[There is a poll up on the sidebar. Do cast your vote, if so inclined.]

I would love to watch Adam and Jamie work through some of these scenarios on Mythbusters. Me thinks the ratings would be through the roof.

The Andrew Sullivan vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates race-science-intelligence debate has found its truce. The fight over the Bell Curve was good sport because an effort to resuscitate the Bell Curve's corpse by Sullivan (and others), brought all of the eugenics, polite white supremacists, race scientists out of the woodwork. As witnessed here and elsewhere, we are no closer to ending the debate over the relationship between such a spurious concept as "race," and an even more nebulous one known as "intelligence."

To boot: all parties involved seem even farther apart on the assumption that I.Q. tests measure human brain capacity, and are at all predictive of outcomes that cannot be captured by class, income, wealth, or SES, more broadly defined. Yet, and in all, the fracas was good fun.

In the interest of transparency, I will confess a love of stereotypes. They are great heuristics. To borrow Walter Lippman's genius insight, stereotypes are neat and convenient ways of making sense of a world through the narrow lens of mediated experiences. I also revel in how researchers try to make empirical claims in support of stereotypes, that either 1) overreach in an effort to support "commonsense" understandings of the world or that 2) use the language of "rigor" and "positivism" to advance piss poor b.s. that hides behind math, overly dense language, and questionable modeling.

In the 21st century, the con of the race scientist hustlers has remained the same; the game ain't changed much over the centuries. The race science hustle remains great fun for those who see the slight of hand at work, and are confident enough to call it out.

"Bell Curve (Redux)" (what I am calling this most recent turn back to eugenics and phrenology-lite), is a chance to work through some other stereotypes about race and science.

And I can never resist a teachable moment.

The race science hustle's dirtiest secret is that different groups of people, many of who are either otherwise marginalized, or suffer under power, are invested in these true lies. For example, there are East and South Asians who embrace the model minority myth, as it does political work in racially triangulating between them and African Americans, and in turn bringing them closer to the status of a buffer race which earns the near-privileges of whiteness. Undoubtedly, there are stereotypes about African Americans, that many members of the tribe are deeply invested in perpetuating and reproducing.

To point: what follows are some commonly held beliefs about the relationship(s) between race and biology that are "supported" by "scientific findings." Which of these claims do you think are most compelling? Notice, I did not say "accurate" or "correct." Some lies have a momentum all of their own; we often have our own personal reasons for believing them.

You can share here: it is a safe space where no judgement will be passed.

1. The Middle Passage was a hellish process that was Darwinian in its killing. The strong survived. The weak died. Those millions of Africans who made it out of the bowels of the slavers were more likely to have a predisposition for retaining salt. In turn, surviving the Middle Passage naturally selected for this population, as they were less likely to die of dehydration in route. As a result, centuries later, New World blacks, and their descendants, are predisposed to high blood pressure.

2. They have a higher ratio of fast twitch muscles than whites. Their belly buttons are higher than whites. They were bred for large legs and powerful buttocks. They gain muscle mass faster than whites. In total, blacks have all of the physical traits necessary to dominate sprinting and other sports (but apparently not swimming, who would have figured?). Apparently, life is anything but fair.

3. Where was human subjects review for these experiments?

According to researchers, red headed Caucasians have the highest pain tolerance of all racial groups. Blacks are somewhere in the middle--but are particularly prone to back pain and injury from heat. Asians are the most vulnerable and responsive to pain. But, doctors have to be careful with prescribing pain killers to Negroes and Hispanics because we all know they may get addicted to them. And why do the blacks complain so much about being in pain? I thought they were made of stronger stuff than that!

Who would have thought that redheads would be natural warriors? And one must wonder, what would Bartolome De Las Casas, defender of the Indians, had done if he had access to such research in the 16th century?

4. My ding a ling. Black men are supposed to have large penises. Many brothers embrace this bestial reduction of their own personhood to the level of sperm delivery system and Sycamore tree: the myth of the black rapist recast as the legend of the penile liberator.

Perhaps, this is the negro version of the Model Minority Myth? Or a type of intervention against power, an inversion of hierarchical relationships, a subaltern infrapolitics of the pipe laying, wombshifter, Long Dong Silver, Sean Michaels, Mandingo, sex as a weapon, radical autonomy?

Doctors have done the research. The BBC offers stories which reinforce a belief that some racial groups are less endowed than others. Size queens of both genders are on the hunt for the biggest penis they can find. Rasputin smiles from the grave. Size matters: those brothers (and others) who are hung, at times describe their gift as one that is a blessing and a curse.

Is there no more pitiable a black man than he who does not measure up? Could it be that here, in some ways, and a few measures, that the soft-bigotry of low expectations may actually be an advantage?

Master Yoda tells us that size matters not. Brothers know that he is lying.

Told You So: Ginger White "Comes Out" as a Black Woman

2011-12-02T14:12:00.003-05:00

Told you so. Check out the 4:16 mark in the video.

Never doubt the experts on this race science business. So many dilettantes and frauds in this game who are trying to say that Ginger White is white. They sicken me.

Now we know, as though there was any doubt, Ginger White is a black woman. Even more funny, is that people were calling the TV station with the very same question, and that the reporters felt the need to issue a clarification.

America's national obsession continues onward...

Their Eyes Are Watching You: The UK's Guardian Discovers Sexism and Racism in the OWS Movement

2011-12-01T16:32:00.006-05:00

Their eyes are watching from across the pond. Der Spiegel comments on the embarrassing clown car freak show that is the 2012 Tea Party GOP presidential field. Now the Brits are calling out Americans over racism and sexism in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.

What ever happened to American exceptionalism? Dang it. At the nadir of empire, life can be so unfair!

We have discussed the role of race in the OWS movement on a few occasions. This latest piece from The Guardian fits neatly with the pattern established to date: like most "movements" OWS is at first greeted with fascination; then it gains momentum; criticism and push-back follow; the group is then revealed to have the same challenges of negotiating identity, race, and gender as society at large; defensiveness and denial by different stakeholders predictably follows; the show continues to a triumph, collapse, or incorporation by the powers that be.

Without using the language of "intersectionality," Karen McVeigh's essay does a good job of incorporating women's voices as being both gendered and racialized by OWS. Black women's experiences are emphasized in this piece of reporting, without being either ham-fisted, caricature-like, or essentialized. And of course, we have the obligatory picture of a nicely dressed, and if I do say so myself, quite attractive sister, being arrested by the NYPD. OWS is political theater after all, so I won't begrudge The Guardian for its obligatory black and brown person doing the perp walk photograph.

While the whole piece in The Guardian is worth reading, there are two passages that merit particular attention:

At a gathering of Occupy Wall Street activists at a public space in New York on Monday, one young woman spoke of a bruising experience she had suffered the previous day. Angry and upset, she said she had been shouted down while attempting to facilitate a general assembly. There were nods of recognition and murmurs of sympathy from those seated in a circle around her.

But her battle was not with police officers or security guards. Instead, those who had treated her with disdain were fellow activists, every one of which was white and male.
"It was a really distressing experience having people policing and patronising me" she told the group.

In the aftermath of the eviction from their camp in lower Manhattan, the organisers of Occupy Wall Street are struggling to maintain order at the general assembly, the backbone of its decision-making.

At its heart was an "ongoing crisis for people of colour, women and the marginalised", according to Kanene Holder, a part-time teaching artist from Brooklyn who is active on several working groups.

"White males are used to speaking and running things," said Holder. "You can't expect them to abdicate the power they have just because they are in this movement."

One of the defining features of the leaderless Occupy movement – aside from the occupation itself – has been its horizontal decision-making in the form of its Arab spring-inspired general assembly. The simple idea behind it: that everyone has a voice.

But a quick glance through the paper, television and web coverage spawned since Occupy's first march on Wall Street in September reveals that some voices are louder than others. While images of women as victims have endured, those who speak about the ideas and actions have been predominantly male.

To be a member of the racial in-group, and to have power by virtue of that fact, is so very comforting. As ultimately, what is privilege if not the ability to determine how, and under what circumstances, that a person will be made to feel outside of their comfort zone? Some of us are perpetual foreigners and outsiders in the country that we helped to build, others are default members, never outside of the tribe, their belonging and group membership--and entitlement--without suspicion, never suspect, always reinforced and validated.

Why would the former ever trade places with the latter, when our moral superiority only goes so far, and it demands so very much sacrifice for gains enjoyed by all, free riders that most are?

[While a truism at this point, I remain surprised that anybody would be taken aback by this dynamic--that white men who happen to be "liberals" and/or "progressives" have internalized an assumption about the universality of their experiences, and natural authority, on most, if not all things.

This is not an excuse for said behavior; it is simply an acknowledgement of the facts on the ground...one that is a given.]

Apparently, there is also no small amount of white male victimology on display in those moments when white male authority is challenged:

This week marked an important step. On Monday, after a number of women complained of "overly aggressive" men dominating events, OWS has, for the first time, instigated a series of female-led meetings where only women can speak. It was an opportunity for "males to listen and for female marginalised voices to be heard," Holder said.

The meeting at Wall Street, attended by around 20 women and 15 unusually silent men, was the first such gathering.

"There is a high level of awareness to include female voices" said Holder, who said the women-led meeting was voted on and agreed to by men.

At that point, as if to underline the issue, a commotion broke out as a white man burst into the centre of the female-led circle, demanding to speak, and angrily accusing all around him of sexism and racism.

"I'm allowed to speak," he shouted, as another man tried to usher him out of the circle. "You're allowed to be sexist? To get away with this crap?"

Holder insisted: "There is a learning curve. It exists because privilege is learned over a lifetime and cannot be erased overnight."

She is much more patient than me. Why must Holder default to caregiver and teacher, engaging in excuse-making for someone else's bad behavior and imperiousness? In all, this is a common dynamic. Black and brown folks are expected to "teach" White people about white privilege, and to lovingly work with them as they process their issues. Where race and gender intersect, these dynamics are doubly enhanced, as the dominant cultural script demands that the needs and demands of women of color are almost always made secondary and peripheral to those of men (of any race).

An honest question from a working class black guy who was taught to know the merits of silence, and of listening, and not always speaking: Is it really that hard for white men, those fully invested in their "whiteness" and "maleness," to shut up and take a knee?

[Why do those with all of the toys continue to throw temper tantrums when someone else gets a little attention?

Are the pathologies of race and gender privilege that deep, and subsequently so very difficult to overcome?]

And the final piece, the proverbial money-shot:

Rebecca Traister, author of Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women" about the 2008 election, said: "This idea that, by its nature, left-wing activism is inclusive is a myth. The left is continually plagued by gender problems.

And class, sexuality, race, and other problems too.

Occupy Wall Street's Women Struggle to Make Their Voices Heard can be read here in its entirety.

Verbal Diarrhea? Toure and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Talk to Each Other for Twenty or So Minutes About Black Authenticity

2011-12-01T03:16:00.008-05:00

I will leave this interview between Toure and Dr. Gates open for your comments.

My thought? Sometimes 23 minutes and 33 seconds is 20 minutes far too long.

As an alternative, I would rather listen to Ol' Dirty Bastard reflect about the ladies and their stinky, sexy, feet:

Andrew Sullivan and the Bell Curve Follies: "The Average Mental Age of the Negro Soldier is 10 Years Old"

2011-11-30T15:33:00.014-05:00

Internet celebrities and the pundit classes are tussling with one another about the apparent rediscovery of the (rightfully) much maligned book the Bell Curve, and its broader claims about the relationship between race and I.Q.

The story so far: Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast offered some comments on a piece from Alternet regarding the need for pure research, and how one should not avoid uncomfortable scientific findings for reasons of political correctness. Ta-Nehisi Coates chimed in, there he offered a series of great posts on how for some folks these matters are indeed personal, and exist outside of some faux commitment to methodological and scientific positivism. All parties involved have been kind to WARN. Consequently, I decided to do like George Clinton with Parliament, and to just sit back, nod my head, and vibe with the exchange.

A few folks emailed me regarding my opinion on the race-science-I.Q. fracas. I always try to respond when readers have a query--it makes me feel important; and what is blogging if not an exercise in gross narcissism? My thoughts on this matter are as follows.

****

As a member of the hip hop generation who came of age in the 1990s, I thought these matters of race and I.Q. were settled. In the year 2011, I remain surprised that anyone would take such quackery with any measure of seriousness.

Let's take a trip down memory lane for a moment. We should not forget that the Bell Curve was a shocking book at the time of its release, as this explains much of the current upset over Andrew Sullivan's observations about race and I.Q. testing.

In the United States, the period of the early to mid 1990s was highly charged political. Black nationalism was being rediscovered through hip hop, Farrakhan and others were frequently featured on the evening news and the Donahue Show, New York and Los Angeles were sweltering with inter-racial tensions, Buchanan and Duke were flying their racist bonafides as mainstream figures in the Republican Party, and Angry White Men like Rush Limbaugh were blowing up the public discourse.

The Bell Curve hit hard because it was "scientific" (i.e. it had numbers and figures). Moreover, the "finding" that African Americans were biologically defective, supported claims by the Conservatives and New Democrats about social disorganization, the ghetto underclass, black "pathologies," and the undeserving poor. On a macro-level, the Bell Curve was a "scientific" complement to the onward march of neoliberalism, the continuance of the Reagan regime's assault on the State, and Bill Clinton's promise to end welfare as "we know it."

The Bell Curve was also a slap in the face of the black professional classes--as well as politically active and engaged college students--who saw themselves at the vanguard of a new black politics, had helped to bring down Apartheid, and were now rediscovering Brother Malcolm and his claims on racial justice and black respectability.

Ultimately, the race science hustle of the Bell Curve flamed out. The book's methods and data were eviscerated, and its authors shamed by most mainstream social scientists and other researchers. However, the pain caused by that book still remains, as it is part of a long history of pseudoscience which has advanced white supremacy both in the United States and abroad.

As this often comes up in my classes, I shake my head at any claims about the relationship between I.Q. and race. The variables and measures in these types of arguments are specious and poorly constructed. Race itself is a social category with no fixed attributes. Intelligence is contextual. The history of I.Q. tests are so burdened by a foundation of eugenics and phrenology (which included such absurd practices as the weighing of human brains), that the legacy and context of "intelligence testing" should raise an immediate, Mr. Spock-like eyebrow, for all critical thinkers.

There is a slippery slope here. If we are going to entertain some link between I.Q. and race, we might as well keep searching for the Jewish gene for intelligence, or taking posture photos of the entering freshman class at universities such as Yale and Harvard.

As my colleagues who study educational psychology tell me, while extreme outliers on I.Q. tests do in fact "tell us something," the gross aggregate of I.Q. data is a function of education, wealth, access to resources, and cultural/social capital. I.Q. tests measure these variables; they do not capture some universal type of absolute intelligence.

In all, these debates about I.Q. and race are fascinating, in so far as they reveal how so many folks still believe that science is "neutral." To borrow from Foucault, science is part of a regime of truth and knowledge; it serves certain interests, goals, social arrangements, and power. Science as a field, practice, and pursuit, legitimates certain relationships between categories of people, and types of personhood. Science has not been, and likely never will be, a process that is not value-laden.

Or as the legendary W.E.B. DuBois put so well, why should there be any surprise that white scientists would come up with a test that repeated and inevitably showed black people to be intellectually deficient? I call such work "piss poor." DuBois was more kind. He labeled it "utter rot."

As always, history is the greatest teacher on these matters. And these Internets are indeed a treasure trove of information:

1. The U.S. military was deeply involved in I.Q. testing during World War One. Their result was a predictable one: black Americans were ill-suited for combat, cowardly, and not fit to be officers. According to these tests, while white enlistees had an average mental age of 13, blacks were only 10 years old. Reality causes upset here: World War One, the exploits of such units as the Harlem Hellfighters, and non-white colonials in the service of France, muddied up the race-science-I.Q. triad. So how did the white, race science hustlers, get around these findings...

2. Working through the logic of the I.Q. race game is great sport. When black northerners outscored white southerners on these test, the outcome is either conveniently ignored, or an explanation is offered that the I.Q. test is still valid, but the sample is skewed because all of the smart negroes went North while the mass of the negro population is still sub-standard intellectually. In these moments, the white supremacist agenda of the I.Q. race practitioners is made naked and clear: they reasoned backwards from their findings to justify their own in-group superiority. Funny, if the consequences were not so sad.

3. The actual tests from the early to mid 20th century are rich textual examples of how intelligence is local, socially constructed, and a function of other variables--as opposed to something inherent, innate, and fixed. Here is an example of one of the intelligence tests used by the U.S. Army that justified a Jim Crow military (as well as restrictive immigration policies against those Southern and Eastern Europeans judged to be of "undesirable" stock):

Imagine you are in a large examination room. An examiner and demonstrator stand at the front of the room, and orderlies around the room in various places to check that nobody is cheating. Here are the instructions, following which the printed test page is presented to the men being examined.

‘This is test 6 here. Look. A Lot of Pictures … Now watch.’ Examiner points to hand [picture with one finger missing] and says to demonstrator, ‘Fix it’. Demonstrator then draws a finger. Demonstrator does nothing, but looks puzzled. Examiner points to the picture of the hand, and then the place where the finger is missing and says to the demonstrator, ‘Fix it; fix it’. Demonstrator then draws in a figure. Examiner says, ‘That’s right’ … During the course of this test the orderlies walk around the room and locate individuals who are doing nothing, point to their pages and say, ‘Fix them, fix them’, trying to set everyone working. At the end of 3 minutes, the examiner says, ‘Stop! But don’t turn over the page.’

Stephen Jay Gould sums up the results of the test, administered to over one million people:

[T]hree ‘facts’ rose to the top and continued to influence social policy in America long after their source in the tests had been forgotten.

1. The average mental age of white American adults stood just above the edge of moronity at a shocking and meager thirteen … The … figure became a rallying point for eugenicists who predicted doom and lamented our declining intelligence, caused by the unconstrained breeding of the poor and feeble-minded, the spread of Negro blood through miscegenation, and the swamping of an intelligent native stock by the immigrating dregs of southern and eastern Europe.

2. European immigrants can be graded by their country of origin. The average man of many nations is a moron. The darker peoples of southern Europe and the Slavs of eastern Europe are less intelligent than the fair peoples of western and northern Europe. Nordic supremacy is not a jingoistic prejudice. The average Russian has a mental age of 11.34; the Italian, 11.01; the Pole, 10.74 …

3. The Negro lies at the bottom of the scale with an average mental age 10.41. Some camps tried to carry the analysis a bit further, and in obvious racist directions. At Camp Lee, blacks were divided into three groups based upon intensity of color; the lighter groups scored higher …

4. Pushing back is fun. In the 1970s, Professor Robert Williams, a magisterial and accomplished man, turned the tables on the academics and scientists who advocated for the use of I.Q. tests to rank and place children in schools. Featured in a great episode of the sitcom Good Times, the BITCH test (or Black Intelligence Test for Cultural Homogeneity) made clear how these questions of innate ability and smarts are anything but.

Take the BITCH test and see how well you do. Are you a high achiever? Or are you on the lower end of the BITCH distribution?

A Non-Mystery and Obligatory Question: What Race is Herman Cain's "Mistress" Ginger White?

2011-11-29T18:21:00.014-05:00

High comedy: so Ginger White's business partner preferred to date black men, but she disliked black women's hair. Hmmmm...the plot thickens. How twisted indeed is the intimate relationship between blacks and whites, feet intertwined mid-coitus on the cotton bale, but the mystery of the hair has too much symbolic weight to overcome?

What a sick society we are; white supremacy truly is a poison that has hurt us all.

If the visitor logs to We Are Respectable Negroes are any indication, there are many people who are curious as to the race of Herman Cain's "mistress" Miss Ginger White. As a service, I will try to offer some guidance on this most vexing and pressing issue of public concern.

First things first, there is only one race of people on this blue marble called planet Earth (allowing for hobbits and Neanderthals), and that is the human race.

Clarifications aside, in our contemporary nomenclature while she may be light, bright, and damn near white (as the expression goes), Ginger White is a black woman.

As a student of race, and a keen practitioner of "race science," her features, habitus, and "energy" are dead giveaways to my eye.

Does she claim the tribe? I do not know.

Yes, there is a long history of passing in the black community (as well as in others too).

Could Ginger White play that game and slip by the hypodescent rule, crossing over to whiteness in New Orleans, and dancing at an octoroon ball? Damn straight. Could she go to Latin America or Brazil and reverse the one-drop rule, where any bit of "white" ancestry makes you anything but "black?" Absolutely.

Could Ginger White move to New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles and reinvent herself as a "white woman," turning her back on her kin and people? Yes. It happened all of the time.

Folk wisdom and life experience are also good aids in matters related to the race game. I asked my mother, a black woman from the South, about Herman Cain's habits. She said months ago that he was a womanizer and had an "arrangement" with his wife. I ask moms if she thought Ginger White was black. She laughed and reminded me that a man of Herman Cain's age and social background would see a "high yellow," and "damn near" white woman who had "good hair" as the ultimate prize. He would mess around with a white woman, but Cain would keep a light-skinned black woman as his status symbol.

Commonsense goes a long way on these matters. It can also be easily deceived and tricked. So folks, what clues do you use to win the "guess what box to put this racially ambiguous person in" game? Is it their "habitus?" Skin color? Cues and hints in speech? Other tricks?

And when we play this game, we are often wrong. One, either because said person refuses to acknowledge their racial group, and gets upset when "outed." Or two, our lens is just off, and sometimes we encounter a person whose lineage we just can't place.

Do tell, I bet you have some legendary faux pas to report...all players in the race game do.

A Pitch Perfect Portrait of Narcissism: Herman "the High Achiever" Cain Reflects on His Career and Life

2011-11-29T14:08:00.010-05:00

"There is no racism to see here boss! I am shaking the tree, you sees me boss?"

With Herman Cain apparently about to drop out of the race, it is time to have a fire sale. Over the past year I developed a portfolio on the Grand High Vizier of ~~the Black Garbage Pail Kids~~ Black Conservatives. As events develop, I now have to pick some gems from that repository before they transmute into copper.

This interview from the Black Conservative propaganda hit piece "Runaway Slave" is a great distillation of Herman Cain's weaknesses of character. All of the elements that would bring him down are present; all of the elements that would make him appeal to white populist racial reactionaries are also on display as well.

Cain is arrogant, narcissistic, outside of history, and honestly believes that he stands alone, a self-made man. Free rider, Herbie Black Walnut Cornbread Cain, also believes that he is accountable to no one.

Of course, the Civil Rights Movement, and the life and death hard work of black and brown folks, with a few white allies, did not make Cain's success at all possible. Moreover, Herman Cain is the very definition of an "affirmative action baby"--a label that was once worn with pride, but has now been sullied by the Right, a move enabled through a surrender of language by progressives and liberals. While Cain momentarily signals to the old school Conservatism of Booker T. Washington in this interview, he ultimately defaults back to being a race neutral fantasy projection for the White Conservative Soul by its conclusion.

No longer a "raging elephant" or "a runaway slave," Cain is now hobbled by his libido. His channeling of American exceptionalism--as performance art and flim flam artistry in the role of Tea Party GOP candidate--is coming to a close, to now soon be seen exclusively on Fox News.

There are second and third acts in American life. What do you think awaits Herman Cain as he shuffles and dances, exiting stage right, with his sack full of money, and pockets overflowing with duckets? Will he go off into the night, satiated and spent, sleeping off a political bender of sorts while he frolics under the watchful eye of Dionysus and Pan's satyrs?

Or is this just the beginning of The Herman Cain Saga?