well-meaning whites

Well-meaning whites (c. 1787- ) are those who mean well when it comes to people of colour but might still be unknowingly racist in some way. Most whites in America seem to present themselves this way – and they mostly seem to believe it too. It is a phenomenon that goes back at least to the late 1700s and extends to Europe too.

Some well-meaning whites truly are well-meaning. Like John Brown, William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln and those who were abolitionists and Freedom Riders.

Lincoln is a good example. He was straight-up racist, we know that from things he said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, yet in the end he did free the slaves. That was not the easy or safe thing to do – it led to all-out war – but still he did it. And many whites from the North willingly gave their very lives for that cause.

But most whites who seem well-meaning are not, not deep down. It is an act to maintain their self-image as being Basically Good.

How I know: I used to think most whites were well-meaning but were racist because they just did not know any better – that if you pointed out their mistake the scales would fall from their eyes and they would say, “Wow, you are so right!” But instead you get anger, hatred, scripted denials, blame-shifting, Repeatedly Missing the Point, Changing the Subject and that strange deer-in-the-headlights look on their face.

Not the behaviour of a clueless innocent. Deep down they know just what the deal is and what their dirty, ugly part in it is. And at bottom they just do not care. Thus their “well-meaning”.

The well-meaning act is just that – an act. For most of them. They even talk like they are reading from a script and not speaking from their heart – like they are speaking lines they learned somewhere.

Their racism is not some accident, not something left over from slave days that never got properly examined and thrown out. No, racism is the very thing that allows them to benefit from an unjust society while still thinking of themselves as – well-meaning. And the well-meaning act allows them to think of themselves as – not truly racist.

Being well-meaning and being racist often go hand in hand.

That is why they like those Mighty Whitey films where a white person helps Helpless Darkies: “The Help”, “The Blind Side”, “Mississippi Burning”, etc.

That is what the white man’s burden is about: white people are not the biggest robbers and killers the world has ever seen. No, they are helping to uplift mankind!

That is why some white allies are paternalistic and controlling: their well-meaningness is driven by racism: They want to think of themselves as anti-racist, so they do anti-racist things, yet their racism makes them think white people know better and should help the less fortunate.

All this stuff is a lie to hide their true natures from themselves.

See also:

• Basically Good
• Mighty Whitey
• darkies
• white man’s burden
• white allies
• The Help
• The Blind Side
• Lincoln
• John Brown
• William Wilberforce
• Freedom Riders

Tuskegee Airmen

Lt. Charles P. Bailey in the cockpit of his P-51C "My Buddy" 1944

Tuskegee Airmen (1941-1945) are the 993 Black American pilots who served in the air force in the Second World War. They fought against both Nazi Germany and American racism.

Flight record: They lost very few bomber planes and were the first Americans to get bombers to Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany. They were the first fighter pilots ever to sink a destroyer. And when Germany came out with the world’s first jet fighters, the fastest planes ever seen, they shot those down too.

But more important than their flight record was the fact that they even had a flight record. The flight school at Tuskegee was set up not to provide black pilots for the war, like you might think, but to prove that blacks could not fly and become good fighter pilots!

Despite Bessie Coleman, a black female pilot of the early 1920s, and despite there being 125 black pilots on the eve of the war, it was still widely believed that blacks did not have the brains and courage it took to be good pilots. Only white men possessed the right mix of qualities.

A government study proved it: “The Use of Negro Manpower in War” of 1925: blacks were “inferior human beings”, they were not honest or trustworthy, they were more given to crime, they caused trouble and:

In physical courage, it must be admitted that the American Negro falls well back of the white man and possibly behind all races.

So the air force (then the Army Air Corps) would not admit black pilots or mechanics. Blacks fought for that right. The president, wanting the black vote (blacks in the North could vote), promised to open a flight school at Tuskegee to produce air force pilots. It was widely expected to fail.

But it did not fail. And when Tuskegee produced enough pilots for its first squadron no one knew what to do with them. They were kept well behind the front lines – and then when they failed to shoot down many enemy aircraft, that was used as proof that they lacked courage! And when they did shoot down the enemy against orders (something white pilots did all the time), that was proof they lacked discipline!

As was common in American wars,  blacks were kept out of direct combat till commanders had little choice. Then all the fighting for rights and all the careful preparation that went into the Tuskegee Airmen could shine.

"My Buddy" a P-51C assigned to 1st Lt. Charles P. Bailey of the 99th FS, 332nd FG, as he keeps watch over a squadron of B-24s from the 451st BG flying over the Alps en route to Germany. (Credit: Troy White)

Segregation: The American military was segregated by race. A black officer, for example, despite his military rank, could not enter a white officers’s club. The excuse was white morale. It was civil disobedience by the Airmen at Freeman Field in Michigan in 1945 that helped to overturn that. Among the protesters:

• Daniel “Chappie” James, who later became the first black four-star general
• Coleman Young, who later became the first black mayor of Detroit
• William Coleman, who later became the first black secretary of transportation

See also:

• Tuskegee Experiment - a very different experiment carried out at the same place and at the same time
• Red Tails
• The Liberation of Paris: whites only
• Tirailleurs Senegalais
• How white people think
• Jim Crow racism
• Madison Grant
• Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs - the sort of racist cartoons they were showing back home at the time

Red Tails

“Red Tails” (2012) is a Hollywood film about the Tuskegee airmen, Black American fighter pilots who fought against Hitler in the Second World War.

Credits: George Lucas of Star Wars fame was the executive producer. It stars Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard. Method Man and Ne-Yo also appear. It was written by Aaron McGruder (“The Boondocks”) and John Ridley (“Three Kings”, “Undercover Brother”). It is the first film by television director Anthony Hemingway (“The Wire”).

Bottom line: The dogfights were good – what you would expect from Lucas – but the plot was weak, slow and whitewashed.

A shame since Lucas has been working on this film on and off since 1988. He wanted it to come out in 1992 but the big money in Hollywood would not touch it: it was  an all-black film, which meant a limited audience.  Lucas had to put his own millions into it.

The true story is just loaded in irony and conflict – fighting racist Nazis while fighting against American racism – but the writers threw it away.  The racism was too weak and the proving themselves bit came too easily.

Only a few whites in the film were racist, cartoon racists at that, and none of them serious characters. Most whites were well-meaning, fair-minded and readily admitted blacks were good pilots once they were given the chance to prove  it. Not only that, they even dropped their segregationist ways by letting them into the whites officers’s club and were laughing and drinking and telling corny jokes in no time! Wow. Even 70 years later America does not work like that.

I assume they were going for at least part of the white market, but that is a knife in the heart of any story about the Tuskegee airmen. They were more than just some black men who flew planes and shot down Nazis.

Some stuff they left out:

• The race riots that were going on back home as they were fighting overseas for “democracy”.
• The racism they faced when they returned home.
• How they affected the desegregation of the military
• The true story about the officers’s clubs.
• Their arrival in Morocco
• How blacks had to fight tooth and nail just to get pilots and mechanics admitted into the air force.
• Black women

The only time you see a black woman in any form it is as a painting on one of the planes, and you never get a good look at her – she is always edging out of the frame or gets cut off. I was not sure if she was a black mermaid or what. Talk about marginalization!

The only time you see a picture of any of their wives or girlfriends it is a picture of a white woman. Like black women do not matter or something.

To its credit the black characters were not stereotyped, though they were still pretty thin.

I like how they showed the mechanics because that is what I would have been.

See also:

• The Help
• The Bechdel Test and Race
• American history books and racism

How to write about black women

Here is my shortened, bulleted version of Karnythia’s post of the same name on Angry Black Woman:

1. State your credentials. It’s okay to be a woman, but not a black woman. Their lived experiences are immaterial and can be dismissed as merely anecdotal.
2. Make it clear that you are not racist or sexist.
3. Say you are merely concerned about their plight: Marriage, children, lack of the above, too much education, not enough education, welfare, whatever you think will sell.
4. Highlight their troublesome natures. They aren’t like other women. They are failing to perform in some way that affects the whole of society, even if you can’t quite explain how or why their personal lives are public property.
5. Rely heavily on the idea of research that shows the problem is a problem. Never mention exactly when that research was done, or who were the subjects of it.
6. Utilize stereotypes whenever possible, preferably ones that tie into the Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire tropes.
7. Play up their sexuality and remove their humanity:
   • their skin is a food stuff,
   • the space between their thighs is mysterious,
   • they have never ever been innocent.
8. When speaking of black mothers make it clear that they need guidance, financial support, or salvation.
   • There is no point at which they can balance work and family
   • They are emasculating and thus unworthy of relationships,
   • Unrapeable, they can be trusted to raise any children but their own, and are sexually available until they become sexless.
   • They exist to be support systems, whether for men of all colors or women of every color but black.
9. No need to mention their needs, hopes, dreams, or concerns. They have none, even if they do occasionally speak of themselves as real people with feelings. Their voices are too loud, too uneducated, or simply too aggressive. They are always angry about something, but their feelings aren’t real so they don’t matter.
10. Specify how reasonable you are in the face of their unreasonable behavior. Write of how you studied them at a safe distance, while proclaiming that some of your closest friends are black women – proof that you know your subject, and are not racist or sexist.
11. Contrast them with women of other races, always making sure to highlight that other women are real women, while black women are simply black.
12. Feel free to make blanket statements about their religious beliefs, educational levels, income levels, and family dynamics. All of it is true because you say it is, and you are the expert in black women, not any actual black women.
13. If they are offended by your words, remind them of your credentials and refuse to engage in a conversation with them until they can be less emotional. Point to their tone as a reason to doubt the veracity of their experiences. After all they are only black women and thus they know nothing, own nothing, and are worth nothing but what you say they are.

See also:

• Angry Black Woman: How To Write About Black Women – the full, original post by Karnythia
• The Sapphire stereotype - angry
• The Jezebel stereotype - sex machine
• The Mammy stereotype - support system
• The tone argument
• “Some of my best friends are black”
• Zora Neale Hurston: What White Publishers Won’t Print

SOPA and PIPA

SOPA and PIPA (2011) are two Internet anti-piracy bills before the U.S. Congress as of January 2012. They are mostly the same: PIPA is the Senate one, SOPA the House of Representatives one. They are a naked power grab by Hollywood to control the Internet.

They would allow Hollywood and people like Rupert Murdoch to do to the Internet in America pretty much what the Communist Party has done to it in China: decide what people inside the country can and cannot see.  It allows them to block not just foreign websites but even American ones.

That might all sound more extreme than what you have been hearing, but bear with me.

First, these six companies produce 90% of what Americans read, watch and listen to as of 2011. The numbers are how much each makes in a year:

• Viacom; $14.9 billion
• CBS Corporation: $14.1 billion
• News Corp: $33.4 billion
• Time Warner: $26.9 billion
• GE: $150.2 billion
• Disney: $40.9 billion

Together they have spent millions to push SOPA and PIPA. And then put on this Clueless Act like they do not quite understand how the Internet works or what the bills that they pretty much wrote are asking for. Like they were born yesterday.

Some people buy into the Clueless Act and say stuff like SOPA and PIPA are badly written or so broad they are open to abuse. Like it was an accident they were written that way.

I have to assume that anyone who spends millions asking for something knows full well what they are asking for and wants it badly.

And therefore it must be a power grab.

Means, opportunity – and motive: these same companies are based on business models that no longer work in an Internet age. But rather than adjust to the Internet, they want the Internet to adjust to them.

The anti-piracy stuff in the bills is laughable. Therefore I have to assume it is window dressing for the broad powers that are given.

To wit:

To block a website from America all they have to do is get a judge to agree that it either has infringed copyrighted material or links to one that does!!!!  That is like half the Internet. At least.

Even worse: the burden of proof is not on them but on the website owner. Guilty till proven innocent – by lawyers better than whatever a multibillion dollar company can afford.

Also bad: the government can shut down websites on their behalf. The copyright stuff could be used as an excuse for darker motives.

It would make websites like the Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and WordPress (this one!) unworkable because they are based on user-created content that is next to impossible to police.

Hollywood content would be king, not our content.

This is part of a long battle: if SOPA and PIPA are killed, the media companies will try again later with new bills with new names. And, as they have already shown, they will try to take just as much power as they can get away with.

PIPA is set for a Senate vote on January 24th 2012.

See also:

•  Send a message to your senator
• ProPublica has a wonderful website on where senators stand and who they get their money from. You can click through see a senator’s Twitter, Facebook, telephone number, etc.
• The BET Fallacy
• Rented Negroes
• gangsta rap
• The Vast Talking Machine

Selma

Selma is the town in Alabama in the American South where blacks in 1965 at long last won the right to vote all across the country.

The Constitution gave black men the right to vote in 1870. But whites in the South found ways to take away that right bit by bit: by requiring poll taxes, reading tests, by threats, arrests, violence and even murder.

Selma was in a county where only 1% of blacks were registered to vote while over 60% of whites were. In neighbouring Lowndes county 0% of the blacks were registered while 118% of whites were.

The two main wings of the civil rights movement at the time were:

• SCLC – made up of church leaders, like Martin Luther King, Jr. It had the big names and could raise plenty of money.
• SNCC (“Snick”), the student movement.

Both practised civil disobedience along the lines of Gandhi.

SNCC was more fearless. It led the fight for the vote in Alabama. It made the town of Selma the centre of that fight: its top policeman was an easily angered, physically violent, made-for-television racist. They hoped that protests would cause him to discredit himself and white rule.

In February 1965 during a protest in a nearby town Jimmie Lee Jackson, while trying to protect his mother, was shot dead by police.

Anger among blacks over Jackson’s death threatened to tear the movement apart. It needed be expressed somehow. The SCLC came up with the idea of a five-day march to the state capital, Montgomery.

Bloody Sunday: On March 7th they set out for the capital. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and there stood the police. Some were on horses. Governor George Wallace had ordered the police to block the way.

Hosea Williams and John Lewis in front being approached by the state troopers.

The protesters stopped. The police ordered them to leave. The protesters stood their ground. The police started pushing them back. Then with whips and clubs they beat up utterly defenceless people. There was tear gas and screaming everywhere.

Selma Movement leader Amelia Boynton is assisted after being tear-gassed and clubbed to the ground, while tear gas and other fallen marchers cover the route to Montgomery on Bloody Sunday.

The police had stopped the march, but that night on television the whole country saw them in action. It was shocking – even to Jim Crow racists.

Hundreds of people from all over the country, even whites, came to Selma to join a new march.

On March 9th the marchers and the police faced off again at the foot of the bridge. This time Martin Luther King led the march. They prayed and turned back.

That night three of the white protesters were beaten up with clubs. One of them, James Reeb, a Christian minister, died. That set off protests across the country. The president got on television and promised to sign the Voting Rights Act, which would outlaw poll taxes, reading tests and all the rest.

On March 16th King set out again, leading over 8,000 marchers. The third time was a charm: a state judge ruled they had the right to march. The governor would not protect them but the president did.

Along the way Stokely Carmichael and others in SNCC began what would later become the Black Panthers.

Children waving to marchers from a porch during the Selma march, 1965. © Bob Adelman / Magnum Photos

See also:

• Jim Crow
• Martin Luther King Jr
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Freedom Riders
• The education of Angela Davis
• Elizabeth Eckford

Deniece Williams: Black Butterfly

Remarks:

This went to #22 on the American R&B charts in 1984. Nothing compared to “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” from the same album – a song I could not stand even though I am a fan of hers.

Lyrics:

Morning light, silken dream to flight
As the darkness gave way to dawn
You’ve survived, now your moment has arrived
Now your dream has finally been born

Chorus:
Black Butterfly, sailed across the waters
tell your sons and daughters
what the struggle brings
Black Butterfly, set the skies on fire
rise up even higher
so the ageless winds of time can catch your wings

ooh…ooh

While you slept, the promise was unkept
But your faith was as sure as the stars
Now you’re free, and the world has come to see
Just how proud and beautiful you are

Chorus

Let the current lift your heart and send it soaring
Write the timeless message clear across the sky
So that all of can read it and remember when we need it
That a dream conceived in truth can never die
Butterfly

Cause now that you’re free and the world has come to see
Just how proud and beautiful you are

Chorus

Fly
Butterfly
Yeah, yeah, yes
Fly

microaggression

Credit: Reckless Tortuga: Racism in the Elevator

Microaggressions are those small everyday acts and subtle indignities through which the privileged, often without knowing it, make the marginalized feel, well, marginalized. This post looks at those by whites against people of colour in America, though women, gays, poor people and others experience them too.

Examples:

• “Where are you really from?” – where New Jersey does not count as the right answer because they do not see you as really American (perpetual foreigner stereotype).
• “I don’t see you as black.” – as if being black is some terrible thing they have to overlook (colour-blindness).
• “I understand racism – whites painted swastikas on my house.” – as if American anti-Semitism is pretty much like anti-black racism.
• “It’s not racist, you’re just being oversensitive.” – discounting your thoughts and feelings as if whites are better judges of racism.
• Assuming you are good at sports – or mathematics – because of your race.
• “You’re not like the other blacks” – as if the other blacks are so stereotypical
• Making you feel like you are representing your whole race.
• “You are so articulate/speak such good English!” – as if only whites have a good command of English
• “She’s pretty for a black girl” – as if white girls are prettier than black girls
• Being hypervisible to shopowners, the police, etc.
• Telling a racist joke
• Showing a Confederate flag

And on and on.

The YouTube videos about racism by Reckless Tortuga (pictured above) and Chescaleigh’s video about the stuff white girls say to black girls are full of excellent examples of microaggressions, from purse clutching to hair touching.

In most cases whites do not mean to be racist and, in fact, think they are not being racist at all. But so many are sunk in a racist mindset and blind to it that it comes out in hundreds of little ways like this.

If you try to point it out to them they often get upset, no matter how gently and kindly you tell them.  They say that you are being oversensitive, that you have a chip on your shoulder,  that you see race in everything, that you are making a big deal out of nothing, etc.

It is because of this kind of stuff that many whites feel like they are walking on eggshells when it comes to blacks. It is like no matter what they say or do it will be seen as racist!

The trouble is not that blacks see racism in everything but that most whites see racism in nothing – except like the Klan and the n-word (and not always even then).

In most cases any one microaggression is not a big deal and people of colour let it go – they have to pick their battles. But it is the constant rain of microaggressions day after day and month after month and year after year that wears away at one’s spirit. It can even affect your physical health. And the most dangerous microaggressions by far are those you do not see as microaggressions.

See also:

• Reckless Tortuga: Racism in the Elevator
• Chescaleigh: Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls
• How white people think
• The perpetual foreigner stereotype
• colour-blindness
• white women’s tears
• shopping while black

The bootstrap myth

The bootstrap myth, also called the meritocracy myth, says that anyone can come to America with nothing and, with hard work and clean living, rise into the middle-class in one, two or three generations: “My grandfather came here with $25 in his pocket. If he can do it, anyone can. What is wrong with black people?”

As commonly conceived it is

• way too simple and
• mainly used in a racist, self-serving way

Many whites use it to support their idea that American society is fair, that racism is dead. And then, in almost the same breath, they use it to support their own racist ideas! You know, that Asians and Jews have more intelligence, that blacks are shiftless layabouts, and so on.

In my experience, which mainly concerns West Indian New York, plenty of people do come to America with nothing and lift themselves into the middle-class – yet plenty more do not. Despite all their hard work and clean living. Because the key seems not to be hard work and clean living but a university degree in a useful field.

West Indians succeed not because racism died but because American public schools suck. New York, with its factories mostly gone, needs a work force that its schools cannot produce on their own.

Meanwhile one of the main images of America that is burned into my brain are the million or more people in New York who live in poverty through no fault of their own. And, by some Amazing Coincidence, few are white.

So when white people start with the bootstrap stuff it sounds self-serving and delusional. The Asians they love to talk about are part of a brain drain. They came to America with a much better education than most whites have. They hardly pulled themselves up from the bottom depending on American institutions.

And these Asians and West Indians most certainly do face racism. They succeed in spite of it, not because it has magically disappeared somehow.

The bootstrapper trope almost always overlooks black success. Half of blacks are now middle-class (or were just before the Great Recession). Something you would never know from the trope. They talk about Jews and Asians – and even the Irish – as if millions of blacks have not done the very same thing. Which shows that the trope comes from a racist mindset, not from the latest studies.

The “come to America with nothing” part is hugely misleading. Here is some of that “nothing”:

• education
• political rights
• whether immigration is voluntary or involuntary
• how much one’s culture has been destroyed
• knowledge of English
• parents’s class and education
• family support
• ethnic support and institutions
• internalized racism
• growth of the labour market
• racist hiring and promotion practices
• racist incarceration rates

Some of the “ethnic support and institutions” for whites which come with their “nothing”:

• labour market
• housing market
• courts
• police
• the press
• Homestead Act
• manifest destiny
• television
• banks
• cheap black and Latino labour
• 347 years of slave labour

See also:

• white privilege
• white privilege mindset
• rootedness
• Three Bears Effect
• “How can it be racist if Asians do better?”
• The black middle-class in America
• Irish Americans
• just world doctrine

How to talk like a mobster’s daughter-in-law

Once upon a time there was a poor but beautiful woman. She married the mobster’s son. Oh, she knew how his family got their money. Everyone did: Kidnapping, murder, robbery, taking control of businesses, drug dealing, money laundering and on and on. Mostly on the other side of town.

After she married she lived in a big beautiful house on top of the hill overlooking the town. Her husband bought her diamonds and pearls. He made sure her brothers, sisters and cousins all got work at good pay at the businesses his family took over. Her children went to the best schools.

Then her father-in-law died. Then her husband died. They left her millions. She was now the richest person in town. Her children grew up and became pillars of the community: doctors, lawyers, judges and bankers.

Then one winter’s morning poor people started coming to her door, one after another. It was the strangest thing. One had lost his family business. Another had a kidnapped child that was never found. Another’s father had been murdered. Another was on drugs. And on and on.

And then it hit her: these were the people whose families her father-in-law had robbed and killed and sold drugs to and all the rest to build his fortune, a fortune she now owned. At interest. While her family rose to the top, the other side of town sank into poverty, drugs, crime and prostitution.

So she started making excuses:

• That was long ago. Those were different times. Get over it!
• It has nothing to do with me! I never robbed or killed anyone. I never sold drugs. Why are you looking at me?
• You people rob and kill each other all the time, why are you singling me out?
• Robbing and killing is common to all societies. Give it a rest.
• Someone broke into my house once. They took my grandmother’s necklace that had been in the family for over a hundred years. You people are not the only ones who have suffered. Sniff.
• What about the mobsters in other towns? How come you never talk about them? You act like we were the only ones.
• Your family business was going broke anyway. We made it a success
• The important thing to remember is that my husband turned from a life of crime. On Thanksgivings he went to the other side of town and fed the poor. On Christmas he gave toys to the children. How come you people never talk about that stuff? You just want to hate, to whine and wallow in your victimhood. We need to learn to live in harmony and not be so divisive.
• Give back your business? Are you nuts? It is too late for that.
• Give you money? Impossible. How am I going to buy diamonds and pearls if I give money to every family affected by my father-in-law? I owe you nothing. Get lost.
• You need to kiss up to me and not get so angry.

See also:

• Why do whites hate, demonize, fear and look down on blacks?
• Current arguments about slavery
• How White America got rich
• “But that happens to me too!”
• Teflon Theory of History
• The tone argument

Is this blog racist?

Is this blog racist? Are my blog posts prejudiced against whites? Many White American commenters seem to think so. Some go so far as to say it is like a black Stormfront (the Klan website).

The reasons given come down to these as best as I can tell:

1. Generalizations: To make any general statement about whites is stereotyping and therefore racist.
2. Lack of colour-blindness: To see them as white means I am seeing them according to the colour of their skin, not the content of their character.
3. The “all whites” argument: Even though I am not so brainless as to ever say “all whites” are anything, the “all” gets read in anyway. Even when I say “many whites”, “some whites” or “most whites”.
4. Divisiveness: To bring up race at all is to create division and hatred.
5. Tone: To say anything bad about whites is read as hatred against whites.

Number #3 cannot be helped: no matter how carefully I word my statements, the “all whites” gets read into it.

But neither can the others be helped. To talk about white racism at all I must:

• Make general statements about whites.
• Notice the race of actors and the race of those they act against.
• Say possibly bad things about whites.

Yes, each of these can be used to make racist statements. The trouble is, they must also be used to make any statement about race, like those about racism.

It is a confusion of form over substance. Racism lies not in the form of a statement but in what is being said.

For a post to be racist it would have to say or assume that one race is naturally better than another. People who call me racist never seem to be able to show that.

I am not perfect, I have been brainwashed by a racist culture like everyone else in America. No doubt you can find unintended racist thought in my posts. But the heart of my thinking in regard to race has been that it is the creation of history to excuse the inexcusable, both in the past and even now. The One Drop Rule makes that crystal clear to me.

In a perfect world people should be colour-blind but in America in 2012 it is profoundly unwise for people of colour while for whites it amounts to a studied blindness about the true nature of their society. It makes it hard for anyone to see racism as clearly as they should.

What keeps racism alive is that whites as a whole are not forced to face up to it. Most hide behind well-scripted excuses and lies.

Whites are individuals yet, sadly, the thought and behaviour of most of them is racist enough that it has serious, unmistakable, large-scale effects on blacks and other people of colour.

To notice this stuff and point it out is not racist. To turn a blind eye to it is.

See also:

• racist
• race conscious
• The “not all whites” argument
• Being colour-blind will not end racism
• The tone argument
• whites are individuals

Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was a Hollywood actor who became the American president from 1981 to 1989. He gave us the welfare queen stereotype and trickle-down economics so he could take from the poor and borrow from the future to give huge tax cuts to the rich. His fans say he won the Cold War, yet the fall of the Soviet Union took even the CIA by surprise.

He was a television spokesman for rich white people. In print he seemed like he did not have a full brain (it was in fact falling apart) but on television he seemed like he was just talking common sense.

Cartoonist Tim Krieder put it best as part of the country mourned his death:

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a Brylcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. I secretly wept on the stairs the night he was elected President, because I understood that the kind of shitheads I had to listen to in the cafeteria grew up to become voters, and won…

The Washington press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was – a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch.

• He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of “Dr. Strangelove”.
• He put a genial face on chauvanism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again.
• He likened Central American death squads to our Founding Fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.”
• His legacy includes
  • the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,
  • the final dirty win of Management over Labor,
  • the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base,
  • the embezzlement of almost all the country’s wealth by 1% of its citizens,
  • the scapegoating of the poor and black,
  • the War on Drugs,
  • the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets,
  • AIDS,
  • acid rain,
  • Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget,
  • the corpses of 240  United States Marines.
• He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet.
• He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn’t know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted.
• He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush.
• He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be – nothing.
• He made me ashamed to be an American.

If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys’ adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and potter’s fields.

Krieder does not get all his facts right but he nailed it nonetheless.

See also:

• Tom Krieder on Ronald Reagan
• The welfare queen stereotype
• George W. Bush
• Taliban
• The Crack Era
• Hollywood
• Raymond Bonner
• The Vast Talking Machine

Oran “Juice” Jones: The Rain

Remarks:

One of the best breakup songs ever. If only life were this simple! A pity that Mr Jones was a one-hit wonder. The song went to #1 on the American R&B chart in 1986, #9 on the pop chart  and #4 in Britain. Ledisi did a cover.

Lyrics:

I saw you (and him) walking in the rain;
you were holding hands and I’ll never be the same.

Tossing and turning another sleepless night
the rain crashes against my window pane
Jumped into my car didn’t drive too far,
that moment I knew I would never be the same.
‘Cause

I saw you (and him) walking in the rain;
you were holding hands and I’ll never be the same.

Now here you are begging to me to give our love another try
Girl I love you and I always will
but darling right now I’ve got to say goodbye.
‘Cause

I saw you (and him) walking in the rain;
you were holding hands and I’ll never be the same.
I saw you (and him) walking in the rain;
you were holding hands and I’ll never be the same.
I saw you ….

Hey, hey baby how ya doin’ come on in here
Got some hot chocolate on the stove waiting for you
Listen first things first let me hang up the coat
Yeah how was your day today? Did you miss me?
You did? Yeah? I missed you too
I missed you so much I followed you today
That’s right now close your mouth ’cause you cold busted
That’s right, now sit down here, sit down here
I’m so upset with you I don’t know what to do
My first impulse was to run up on you and do a Rambo
I was about to jam you and flat blast both of you
But I ain’t wanna mess up this thirty-seven hundred dollar lynx coat
So instead I chilled – That’s right chilled
Then I went up the bank… took out every dime.
And then I went and canceled all those credit cards, yeah
All your charge accounts, yeah
I stuck you up for every piece of jewelry I ever bought you!
Yeah that’s right, everything, everything,
Don’t go lookin’ in that closet ’cause you ain’t got nuthin’ in there
Everything you came here with is packed up and waiting for you in the guest room.
That’s right, what was you thinking about, huh?
What you trying to prove, huh? This is the Juice!
I gave you silk suits, Gucci handbags, blue diamonds.
I gave you things you couldn’t even pronounce,
but now I can’t give you nothing but advice.
But you’re still young, yeah that’s right, you’re still young.
I hope you learn a valuable lesson from this, you know
And you’re gonna find somebody like me one of these days…
Until then, you know what you gotta do?
You gotta get on outta here with that alley-cat-coat-wearing, Hush-Puppy-shoe-wearing crumbcake I saw you with. Cause you dismissed!

That’s right, silly rabbit, tricks are made for kids, don’t you know that?
You without me is like Corn Flakes without the milk!
This is my world. You’re just a squirrel trying to get a nut!
Now get on outta here. Scat!
Don’t touch that coat…

Chescaleigh: Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls

"That one kind of looks like you!"

“Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls” (2012) is a YouTube video by American blogger Chescaleigh, who calls it “basically my life story in 2 minutes.” Putting on a long blond wig she repeated the well-meaning but racist things (called microaggressions) that white girls have said to her:

• Not to to be racist but…
• Not to sound racist but…
• Not to sound racist…
• My grandma hates collards. Wait, is that racist?
• Why isn’t there a White Entertainment Television?
• The Jews were slaves, too. You don’t hear us complaining about it all the time.
• Is it, like, bad to do blackface? Is that still, like, a thing?
• You can say the n-word but I can’t? How is that okay?
• My best friend was black. I mean she’s still black, but we’re not really friends anymore.
• (Talking about her skin) Oh my god, I’m practically black! Twinsies!
• I told you to stop borrowing my lotion!

The word “ghetto”:

• Why is my computer acting so ghetto?
• (While shopping) This is so ghetto.
• (Showing a hand bag) Ghetto!

Black guys:

• I’m not really into black guys, though.
• So cute for a black guy, right?

All blacks look alike:

• (Pointing to one of three pictures of faceless black women) That one kind of looks like you!

• Tanisha, what did you do to my computer?

Hair: petting zoo moments:

• Can I touch it? Okay, I’m already touching it a little.
• Is this real?
• Is this all yours?
• Wait, it’s not real? It is? It is! It is, okay. Sorry.
• So nappy!
• It kind of feels like a Brillo pad.
• Oh, did that hurt. Oh, sorry! Sorry.
• You guys can do so much with your hair.
• Kinda feels like Cheetos.

Most blacks know each other:

• Hey do you know a Tyrone Jenkins. He just requested me. I don’t know, he’s black.

White girls acting stereotypically black:

• Girlfriend. (hand motion)
• Holler!
• Holler!
• Sorry, girlfriend.
• He could get it!

Rap music:

• Sorry, could we turn it down. I don’t really like rap (makes a face).
• (Singing to a rap song, Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass”) Boom, badoom, boom bass? Boy you got my heartbeat runnin’ away.

• I gotta call you back. There’s an Oprah rerun on.

Most blacks are stereotypical:

• I think what I like the most about them is they’re not, like, stereotypical, like, black people. You know what I mean?
• It’s almost like you’re not black.

• Have you seen “Shit That Black Girls Say”? Kind of racist.

She posted the video and left for work. Then it went viral. It got over a million views in the first day. Unlike most viral videos, this one is told from a black point of view.

Some whites were offended, not understanding the difference between racism and pointing out racism. Or “whites” and “all whites”.

Chescaleigh:

I made this video to highlight how many people don’t see the relevance in their words, but the comments just prove how many people still have a long way to go.

See also:

• franchesca.net: Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls - the video posted on her blog
• microaggression
• The BET Fallacy
• The “not all whites” argument
• “Some of my best friends are black”
• blackface
• Dr Laura and the n-word

Leah Price: Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

“Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books” (2011) by Leah Price is about the private libraries of 13 living writers:

1. Alison Bechdel
2. Stephen Carter
3. Junot Diaz
4. Rebecca Goldstein
5. Steven Pinker
6. Lev Grossmann
7. Sophie Gee
8. Jonathan Lethem
9. Claire Messud
10. James Wood
11. Philip Pullman
12. Gary Shteyngart
13. Edmund Wilson

For each it has:

1. their picture
2. a picture of their library
3. a short interview about their library
4. a list of their top ten books and a picture of their copy of each
5. page after page of pictures of the books on their shelves

She asks questions like:

• When did you start buying books?
• How do you arrange them?
• How many of them have you read?
• Do you throw any out?
• Do you mark them up?
• Do you have an e-book reader?

and so on.

It is like you went to visit them. I always look at people’s books when I visit. As Lev Grossmann said, it gives you an insight into them that you can get in almost no other way. On the other hand, when people see my books they almost always draw the wrong conclusions!

The best part of all are the pictures of the books on their shelves. You can see their range of interests. You can see how worn a book is, how old it is, which edition they bought and so on. It is one thing for someone to say that they like “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James and quite another to see their falling-apart copy. But coolest of all is to see which books you have in common with them. It is a kind of a shock and a joy to see a copy of a book you have sitting on their shelves.

The kitchen branch of Diaz's library! Life as it should be.

I liked Junot Diaz the best. Now I know I am not the only one who has both “Poison River” by the Hernandez brothers and a multi-volume Oxford dictionary. Or the only one who will buy a book instead of eating.

Or who has a wall of books - most have at least that and then some. Of course, to be a writer (or a professor, as some of them are) you pretty much need to be a shameless book lover. In fact the book most reminds me of the few times I have seen libraries of my professors - except that the libraries in this book are much more orderly looking (for the cameras no doubt).

Most seem to throw out books to keep down the size of their libraries. Not just because keeping a book costs shelf space but also because when you move, transporting them is a big pain, especially if you have a thousand or two like they do.

Most are not threatened by e-book readers: they think printed books are here to stay. How can having all your books laid out in front of you on shelves begin to compare with a grey piece of plastic?

Common authors: Chekhov, Nabokov, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Green, Henry James, Herge (Tintin), C.S. Lewis, Plato.

See also:

• Jefferson’s library - now the biggest in the world
• Augustine’s Library - lost
• Library of Alexandria - once  the biggest in the world