The White Rules For Thinking About Black People

Here, in one handy post, are the main rules many if not most White Americans seem to apply when thinking about black people:

1. All blacks are niggers. No matter how well-dressed, well-educated, well-spoken or well-anything, at bottom they are all the same. Note: Do not use the n-word out loud. Blacks are sensitive about it for some reason.
2. Blacks are emotional thinkers. Well, except when they say bad things about each other. Then in that case they are being utterly objective and profound in their observations.  The same goes for when they agree with white people. Otherwise they are blinded by race loyalty and hatred of whites. Or at least lack the education and intelligence to know what the hell they are talking about.
3. Blacks imagine racism. All 40 million of them. They suffer from mass hallucinations. Well, all right, sometimes they are just being “oversensitive”. Racism is pretty much dead because whites say it is – and they should know!
4. Blacks are born bad. When they do something bad, it is because they are black. If they do something good, it is an exception. That is why black drug dealers who support none of their 13 children by 5 different women are TRBC: Truly Representative of the Black Community. Pathological killers too. And any black person arrested on the 11 o’clock news. For whites it is the other way round: Jeffrey Dahmer? An exception. Isaac Newton? White people are so amazing!
5. The stereotypes are true. When you see a black person who fits a stereotype, that proves it! Even if the black person in question is a character on television created by a white screenwriter. After all, why in the world would whites make this stuff up? There must be some truth to it. Whites know blacks better than blacks know themselves. It is not like most whites are still racist or something.
6. Television gives a fair representation of blacks. Especially the parts where there are mostly black people on the screen. Black comedians, hip hop videos and BET all apply rigorous anthropological standards to their work, just like National Geographic. It is like what a PBS documentary is to white people.
7. White cultural institutions are reasonably objective. The press, universities, high school history, etc, present a fair picture of blacks and Africa. They are untouched by racist thinking. Whites are neutral and objective.
8. American society is more or less fair. Slavery was outlawed in 1865. Racism was outlawed in the 1960s. Therefore the police, courts, schools, hospitals, banks, labour market,  housing market, Congress, the Supreme Court, the president, etc, are pretty much colour-blind and fair.  That means whatever troubles blacks still have must be of their own making.
9. Bootstrap Myth. Anyone can start from the bottom of American society and, with nothing more than hard work and good values, make it to the top – or at least out of poverty. If millions of blacks are still poor, it is due to laziness and bad character. What else could it be?

See also:

• The Five Rules of Racial Standing
• colour blind racism: the four frames
• “Stereotypes have some truth to them”
• ENT: Emotional Negro Thinking
• Bootstrap Myth
• BET Fallacy
• just world doctrine
• prejudice

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calling out racism

What racists seem to think!

Calling out racism is where you point out that something is racist. It might not seem like a big deal, but it is an important part of fighting racism. It can even stop genocide, as crazy as that sounds.

Genocide: Genocides unfold in eight stages. Stopping it at any one stage, stops the genocide from going forward. The second to last stage before the mass killings is this:

• Polarization: The first people killed in any genocide are not the pariahs themselves but those in the mainstream who speak up for them. The voices in the middle are silenced through threats, arrests or even killings. Now the message of hate goes unchallenged.

What applies to genocide applies to racism more generally. Racism grows and feeds off a culture of silence. The point of calling out racism is to break down that silence. It does not matter if you persuade anyone, it does not matter if you “win the argument”. It is very unlikely you will. What matters is that you were heard and planted that seed in people’s minds of, “Hey, maybe this is not right.”

Elizabeth Eckford was one of the first nine black students to go to Little Rock Central High School in the American South. That school was a racist hell for her – because the 90% who were not giving her hell would not stand up to the 10% who were. She could not even enter the school till the president of the nation grew a pair and stood up to the governor of the state.

The American civil rights movement succeeded when people stopped being cowed by fear of standing up to racists.

White people calling out racism: One of the best thing white people can do at the personal level to fight racism is to call it out when they see it. If not to the racist person’s face, then to family and friends. If not to family and friends, then at least inside their own head. Anything is better than nothing.

In America calling out racism matters more when it comes from whites. That is because of the Rules of Racial Standing – that thing where white people think others whites are way more objective and neutral about racism than blacks. The Tim Wise Effect.

Black people calling out racism: White Americans discount what blacks say, it is part of their cultural conditioning, but they still hear it. They hear what they say and, just as important, what they do not say. If something racist goes down and blacks say nothing, whites will assume that it is “okay” or “not so bad”. Especially since many whites assume blacks are “oversensitive”.

That is part of why I post on, say, Quvenzhané Wallis, but not Don Imus or the racist outcry over the Cheerios ad - because those two were roundly condemned even by white people.

Warning: Calling out racism does require judgement and sometimes courage. This post is not about that.

See also:

• You cannot “prove” racism to most White Americans
• The Five Rules of Racial Standing
  • Tim Wise
• Elizabeth Eckford
• Medgar Evers
• My advice to white people
• the r-word
• the eight stages of genocide

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You cannot “prove” racism to most White Americans

You cannot “prove” racism to most White Americans. Some white commenters seem to think that is what I am trying to do!

Important terms:

• Most: means like maybe 80% in this case, not “all” White Americans.
• “Prove”: means to move them from a state of intellectual unbelief to one of intellectual belief that racism is still a big deal in American society.  I say “intellectual belief” because most of them deep down seem to know perfectly well what is going on.
• Racism: in this case it means that American society generally favours whites over people of colour – and not just because on average whites have more money or education – that would be classism – or that they have fewer “cultural pathologies” or whatever non-racist reason whites dream up.

The reasons why, in no particular order (click on the links for more):

1. They are emotional thinkers. That is clear from how they put their own white feelings above facts. Many get bent out of shape when you use the word “racist”: they can no longer stay calm and think clearly.
2. Their minds are bought and paid for. They benefit from racism, psychologically and often materially. This causes them to turn a blind eye, to make excuses, to believe highly unlikely things about their country – like that racism suddenly stopped in the 1960s after 300 years of skinhead racism. There is not only the carrot of thinking they are better than others, of belonging to the white club, but also the stick of avoiding white shame and guilt about the frauds that they are.
3. They control the cultural institutions that determine “truth”. The press, universities, scientific journals, museums, schoolbooks, etc. Maori professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith: “We are not the final arbiters of what really counts as the truth.”
4. Cultural conditioning. From this comes their scripted denials, excuses and arguments: “Get over it!”, “Blacks are racist too!”, “Africans sold their own into slavery!”, “Go back to Africa”, “You are the racist one!”, etc.
5. Racism makes you blind to racism. Personal racism allows whites to live in a racist society and not notice. It seems “normal”. Blacks have twice the unemployment rate of whites? There must be something wrong with blacks. Whites live in neighbourhoods that are over 90% white? It is natural to want to live with one’s own. Wiped out the Indians and took their land? Everyone does it. Etc.
6. Prejudice is not logical. That makes it hard to disprove, logically. It can be confirmed by facts (one loud-mouthed black woman) but never disproved (a hundred quiet black women). It works in a part of the brain that deals with feeling, not thought. So:
7. Racism is “proved” psychologically, not intellectually. In practice, most people believe in racism not because they read it in a book, but because they experienced it first-hand. For blacks the experience is direct. For whites, it comes through seeing family, friends or lovers subjected to racism – but even then they might still discount it for one or more of the reasons above.

See also:

• I do not write this blog for white people
• the r-word
• moral blindness
• The white club
• Teflon Theory of History
• Broken Record arguments
• What this blog has taught me about white people

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Freedom Writers

“Freedom Writers” (2007) is a Hollywood film based on the true story of Erin Gruwell, a white  teacher who got through to her 149 poor black, Asian and Latino students and one white student. Instead of dropping out of school, as many probably would have done, they all graduate, most going on to university. It is the film “MADtv” made fun of in the “Nice White Lady” sketch. Hilary Swank stars.

It is 1993 at Woodrow Wilson high school in Long Beach, California (part of metropolitan Los Angeles). Nearly all of Gruwell’s students come from poor, violent neighbourhoods ruled by gangs, where the police do whatever they want and get away with it. Black, Latino and Asian students at the school are deeply divided by race. They do not mix. Fights break out between them. One student is killed.

The school has written off her students as sure to drop out. The fact that she is teaching them is a sign of that: she is completely inexperienced! So is the fact that they expect her to be a glorified babysitter: she is not allowed to use the copies of Anne Frank’s diary that the school bought. The school says the books would be “wasted” on them: their reading scores were too low, they would just damage the books.

But she does not give up on them. 

Her students hate her because she is white and tell her so to her face. Instead of getting angry or defensive or shutting them up, she listens to them, seriously. She sees in them Anne Frank  - 14-year-olds whose lives are torn apart by racism, violence and knowing that any day could be their last.

She has them write about their lives. She takes a second job to buy them copies of Anne Frank. They eat it up: Frank puts words to what they are going through in the ghetto. Gruwell finds other books that speak to their experience. Their scores go up. They stay in school.

Good:

• I wanted to hug each student!
• A good understanding of prejudice: Shows how dehumanizing and destructive it is – and how the lack of moral courage lets it grow.

Bad:

• White Saviour trope: Yet another white teacher saves inner city kids! When is Hollywood going to do Tucson’s equally successful Latino teachers? While the film is not as cringetastic as, say, “The Blind Side” (2009), it gives Gruwell an oversized part when you consider all those student diaries! Only one student, Eva, is fleshed out. The Asian students are cardboard. Black girls say almost nothing.
• Ghetto pathologies: The film shows the students’s home life as being more screwed up than it was. It allows you to believe that most of the ghetto’s troubles are self-caused, like it is in a foreign country or something.
• Does not openly condemn racism by White Americans – just prejudice by Nazis and people of colour. While it does show cases of white racism, drawing the parallels with the Nazis is left as an exercise for the viewer.

See also:

• YouTube:
  • “Freedom Writers” trailer
  • MADtv: Nice White Lady
  • Interview with Freedom Writer Maria Reyes - says it better than the film itself
• Freedom Riders - what the title plays on
• white paternalism
  • darkies - people of colour as seen through a white paternalist lens
  • Mighty Whitey - the white saviour trope
    • The Blind Side
    • The Help
    • Spielberg’s Lincoln
    • Precious - Mighty Lighty
• moral blindness
• Tucson:
  • HB 2281: Arizona’s law to ban ethnic studies
  • Books banned from Tucson classrooms
  • Tom Horne
• A Hidden America: Children Of The Plains

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Programming note #24

In view of the comments on  Programming note #23, I am going back to posting daily at 8:00 am EDT (12.00 GMT).

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Shannon: Let the Music Play

Remarks:

This song went to #8 on the American pop charts in 1984. If the 1980s could be boiled down to one song, this would be it. Tons of songs back then sounded pretty much just like this, not the singing part but the instrumental part.

Lyrics:

We started dancing and love put us into a groove
As soon as we started to move.
The music played while our bodies displayed through the dance,
Then love picked us out for romance.
I thought it was clear the plan was we would share,
This feeling just between ourselves.
But when the music changed, the plan was re-arranged
He went to dance with someone else.

We started dancing and love put us into a groove
But now he’s with somebody new – what does love want me to do?
Love said:

Let the music play he won’t get away,
Just keep the groove and then he’ll come back to you again, let it play.
Let the music play he won’t get away,
This groove he can’t ignore, he won’t leave you anymore, no, no, no.

He tried pretending a dance is just a dance, but I see
He’s dancing his way back to me.
Guess he’s discovered we are truly lovers,
Magic from the very start, ’cause love just kept me groovin’,
And he felt me movin’ even though we danced apart.
So we started dancing and love put us into the groove
As soon as we started to move, as soon as we started to move.
Love said:

Let the music play he won’t get away, …
He tried pretending a dance is just a dance, but I see
He’s dancing his way back to me,
He’s dancing his way back to me. – Love said:
Let the music play he won’t get away, …
Let the music play he won’t get away, …

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Abagond 20: The most beautiful people of 2013

In the spirit of the Maxim Hot 100, here is the Abagond 20, the 20 people whose pictures got the most hits on this blog over the past 365 days. Not what I expected!

1. Will Demps (1979- ) is an American football player.

2. Johnny Tri Nguyen (1974- ) is an American actor. He was the stunt double for Spider-Man in “Spider-Man 2″ (2004).

3. Russell Wong (1963- ) is an American actor. He was in “Romeo Must Die” (2000).

4. Takeshi Kaneshiro (1973- ), 金城 武, is a Japanese actor and singer who grew up in Taiwan. He has appeared on film and television in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

5. Rain (1982- ) is a South Korean singer and award-winning actor. In America he appeared in “Speed Racer” (2008) and “Ninja Assassin” (2009).

6. Lauren London (1984- ) is an American video vixen turned actress. She was New New in “ATL” (2006). She was also in “90210″ and “Entourage”. She has a son by Lil Wayne.

7. Kenya Moore (1971- ) was Miss USA in 1993, the second black woman to win it. In 2012 she became one of the Real Housewives of Atlanta.

8. Daniel Henney (1979- ), 다니엘 필립 헤니, is an American actor who made his name on South Korean television – even though he barely knew any Korean! He is half Korean, half White American by blood. On this blog in 2010 he was voted Most Gorgeous East Asian Man in the World.

9. John Cho (1972- ) is an American actor. He has appeared in the “American Pie” films, in “Star Trek” (2009) as Sulu. Apparently he is more beautiful than Gabrielle Union, whose boyfriend he played in “FlashForward” (2009).

10. Tony Leung Ka-fai (1958- ), 梁家辉, Big Tony, is a Chinese actor from Hong Kong.

11. Bria Myles (1984- ) is an American video vixen. I first saw her in Twista’s “Girl Tonight” (2005) and then in Kanye West’s “Brand New” (2005). She still models, unsure if she is still in videos.

12. Toccara Jones (1981- ) is an American model and television host. In 2004 she placed eighth in “America’s Next Top Model”.

13. Ken Watanabe (1959- ), 渡辺 謙, is a Japanese actor. He has appeared in some Hollywood films, like “The Last Samurai” (2003).

14. Tyson Beckford (1970- ) is an American model for Ralph Lauren, now turned actor. He is part Chinese and Jamaican. He hosted “Make Me a Supermodel”" (2008-2009).

15. Vilayna Lasalle is an American swimsuit model and video vixen. Her face is perfect.

16. Idris Elba (1972- ) is a British actor. He currently plays the lead in the BBC’s “Luther” (2010- ). From 2002 to 2004 he was in “The Wire” on American television. On this blog in 2011 he was voted the Most Gorgeous Black Man in the World.

17. Jill Marie Jones (1975- ) is an American actress and former Dallas Cowgirl, best know for playing Toni Childs on “Girlfriends” (2000-2008).

Boris Kodjoe

18. Boris Kodjoe (1973- ) is an American actor. He was on the television show “Soul Food” (2000-2004). He is married to Nicole Ari Parker.

19. Bruce Lee (1940-1973) is Bruce Lee.

20. Shemar Moore (1970- ) is an American actor, best known for playing Malcolm Winters on “The Young and the Restless” from 1994 to 2002. Former girlfriends: Halle Berry, Toni Braxton.

See also:

• The ten most beautiful women in the world
• The ten most gorgeous men in the world
  
  • The ten most gorgeous East Asian men in the world
  • The ten most gorgeous black man in the world

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What I was not taught about American history

Here are some of the things in American history I was taught little to nothing about at American high school. I post this as a way to compare notes and get ideas for future posts. It is hard to know what you do not know, so comments  and suggestions about what I left out are welcomed!

Note: I will not count anything after 1965 since the school year would always seem to end just before the Vietnam War! Also note that while some of these did not take place on American soil, they are still important for understanding American history, like the English Civil War or Caribbean slavery. 

In no particular order:

1. Delaware Indians – who used to own the land the high school stood on
2. W.E.B. DuBois
3. Medgar Evers
4. Malcolm X
5. slave patrols
6. Nat Turner
7. Denmark Vesey
8. Stono Rebellion
9. Toussaint Louverture
10. Abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade
11. The Middle Passage
12. Indian boarding schools
13. Indian reservations
14. Lincoln’s racism
15. Sally Hemings
16. The Map of Stolen Indian Land (those not gained through treaty)
17. Korematsu v United States
18. George Washington and Native Americans
19. Pequot Indians
20. Bartolome de Las Casas
21. Indian slaves
22. The Hispaniola genocide
23. The Nadir of American race relations (1890-1940)
24. Chinese Exclusion Act
25. FHA loans
26. GI Bill
27. White racism – except as an invisible frame through which everything was taught
28. The Third Englargement of Whiteness – or any of the other enlargements or even the idea that “white” could even change
29. Madison Grant
30. Ota Benga
31. Franz Boas
32. minstrel show
33. blackface
34. Racial stereotypes
35. The Seminole wars
36. Black Indians
37. Multiracial societies
38. Caribbean slavery
39. Brazilian slavery
40. The Great Awakening
41. Ida B. Wells
42. Bessie Coleman
43. Philippine-American War
44. David Fagen
45. Wovoka
46. The Indian Wars
47. Freedom Riders
48. SNCC
49. NAACP
50. Mormons
51. Utah statehood
52. Indian rights – or lack thereof
53. Tsien Hsue-Shen
54. Hollywood blacklist
55. Kingdom of Hawaii
56. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show – and how it shaped stereotypes about Indians
57. Miscegenation laws
58. American communism
59. Homestead Act – how it shut out blacks
60. Tuskegee Experiment
61. Tuskegee Airmen
62. Liberia
63. Fordlândia
64. United Brands
65. Racial wealth gap
66. Chinese Americans – except for building the railroads
67. Japanese Americans – covered, but not well
68. African Americans – covered, but not well
69. Italian Americans
70. Jewish Americans
71. Puerto Ricans
72. Dominican Americans
73. Chicanos
74. French Americans
75. Polish Americans
76. Irish Americans - except for the potato famine
77. Scotch-Irish Americans
78. Native Americans – before 1492 and after 1890
79. German Americans
80. David Walker’s Appeal
81. Harlem Renaissance
82. English Civil War
83. Choctaw Indians
84. Removal of the Cheyenne
85. redlining
86. blockbusting
87. white flight
88. white suburbia
89. black ghetto
90. The Great Migration
91. Immigration Acts
92. Selma
93. Martin Luther King, Jr’s anti-racism
94. Little Rock school integration
95. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
96. American exceptionalism - except as an invisible frame
97. 1904 St Louis World’s Fair
98. American Canadians
99. American Empire
100. Cointelpro
101. California – covered, but not well
102. The genocide of Native Americans
103. Crazy Horse
104. multinational corporations
105. Black Codes
106. Rape of black slave women
107. Tulsa Riot of 1921
108. Harlem Riot of 1943
109. Rosewood massacre
110. Indian Appropriation Acts
111. sundown towns
112. Emmett Till
113. Bacon’s Rebellion
114. racial steering
115. Housing segregation
116. Critical Race Theory
117. The history of black history
118. Reconstruction – covered, but not well
119. American Museum of Natural History
120. National Geographic
121. Time magazine
122. television news
123. prisons

See also:

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Programming #23

Till further notice, I will post every day at 20.09 GMT. That is currently 4:09 pm New York time. (I was going to make it 17.00, but then I found this picture of a 24-hour watch. How could I pass it up?)

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Medgar Evers

Medgar Evers (1925-1963), a martyr of the American civil rights movement, died 50 years ago today on June 12th 1963. He was the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, the most racist state in the nation.

When he was boy growing up in Mississippi a friend of the family was lynched. His bloody clothes hung on a fence for a year. No one said a word about it – not in the newspapers, not at church, nowhere. On Saturday nights whites would try to run down blacks with their cars for sport or go through town beating them up.

At 17 Evers left high school to join the army. He fought for America in the Second World War against the racist Nazis to free France and Germany.

When he and his brother came back from war, they registered to vote. But on voting day 200 armed whites blocked their way. Evers knew that if he did nothing, there would be no better world for his children. So he joined the NAACP. He got his high school and college degrees and by 1954 he was the head of the NAACP for the whole state.

The NAACP took the quiet, slow lawyerly approach of fighting for equal rights for blacks by doing it in court. So when James Meredith, for example, could not get into the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) because he was black, Evers arranged to fight it in court with the help of Thurgood Marshall.

But Evers went beyond that approach. He staged protests to fight the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks out of restaurants, libraries and even parks. He staged boycotts of white businesses that supported Jim Crow. He pushed to get as many blacks registered to vote as possible despite the laws whites passed to make it hard for them to vote.

His biggest enemy, though, was black fear, the fear that kept blacks from fighting for change. His biggest weapon was his own courage, courage that allowed him to stand up to whites despite all the death threats, despite the firebomb thrown at his house, despite being one of the blacks that whites in the Deep South most wanted dead.

On the evening of June 11th 1963 just before midnight Evers came back from a late-night meeting. He got out of his car carrying T-shirts that said, “Jim Crow Must Go”. In the bushes nearby someone shot him in the back. He fell forward. He crawled to the door, his keys still in his hand. His wife heard the shot and ran to the door. She found him at the steps, face down in blood. His three children shouted, “Daddy, get up!”

The neighbours came running. Some of them were white. When Mrs Evers saw her white neighbours, in that moment she wanted to take a machine gun and gun them all down.

And that was the turning point for Mississippi, the moment when anger overcame fear. In that moment change in Mississippi and throughout the Jim Crow South became unstoppable.

See also:

• Emmett Till
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Selma
• The Help
• Jim Crow
• Aung San Suu Kyi
• other black leaders shot dead:
  • Malcolm X
  • Martin Luther King, Jr
  • Fred Hampton
• songs inspired by Medgar Evers’s death:
  • Bob Dylan: Only a Pawn in the Game
  • Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddamn

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Are White Americans the good guys of history?

Are White Americans the good guys of history? There are two main answers to this:

1. No, of course not: Genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, wars of empire in Mexico, the Caribbean, Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. Overthrow of governments, support for cruel dictators. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, drones. And so on. They are just another dirty, ugly empire.
2. Yes:  Whatever bad they have done, everyone does. What good they have done, few achieve. The Mongols wiped out more people, Brazil had more black slaves, Rome never freed its slaves, etc. White-dominated America has brought the world freedom, democracy and television. It freed and rebuilt western Europe. It has pretty much kept the world at peace for nearly 70 years, a peace that Churchill thought would not last much  more than 30 years, a peace that could have ended in the death and destruction of Europe and North America.

The truth is, like everyone else, White Americans are a mix of good and evil.

That said, they are nowhere nearly as good as they imagine. That for several reasons:

1. American exceptionalism. They see themselves as being above history, the shining city on the hill, a light to all the world, what the whole world wants to be like. God is on their side. This goes back to the Puritans. They thought God was on their side too – as they burned peaceful Pequot Indians alive. Little has changed.
2. Moral blindness. To maintain their self-image as Basically Good they do not face up to the evil they do – which makes them yet more evil.
3. They write the history books - as winners do. But, as if basking in their own whitewashed mythology was not good enough, they also believe in the Teflon Theory of History:  that anything bad that took place over 30 years ago is Ancient History – it has Absolutely No Effect on the present.
4. They control the world’s biggest media machine – meaning they live in a land filled with their own self-serving lies and point of view.

This is why I do not waste my breath saying much good about whites. They are already tooting their own horn, the biggest in history.

They rarely hear the voices of those they screw over. They have arranged life so that they live in the constant sound of their own praise. So much so that they can no longer tell the difference between criticism and hatred, between truth and feeling.

By and large they seem incapable of seeing themselves objectively in the third person. They cannot see the dirty, ugly empire they run. They cannot see themselves as history will see them, as yet another country, not as the Automatic Good Guys of History. They have no Thucydides.

After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington they said, “Why do they hate us?”, making plain the profound historical coma into which they have slipped. Their president answered, “They hate our freedoms.”

See also:

• The White Default
• moral blindness
• Basically Good
• reading while white: history and news
• The Vast Talking Machine
• Reading Thucydides
• Edward Said: Permission to Narrate

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The term “native”

Men from Vanuatu in London, from the British television show, “Meet the Natives” (2007).

A native person is someone who was born in a place or whose people come from that place. It is acceptable when applied to whites, possibly racist when applied to others. Compare:

• native of England
• native of Kenya

That bad colonial smell comes mainly from the British Empire.

By the 1630s it meant “a non-white original inhabitant of a country” – in other words, the people whose lands whites were taking over, like the American Indians.

By the 1800s it gained a clear racist edge as white rule spread quickly across North America, Australia, the Pacific, Africa and Asia.

By 1950 it meant something like the following at its worst, as the “Oxford English Dictionary” informs us:

‘Native’ can be approximated … Greedy for beads … and alcoholic drinks. Suspect of cannibalism. Addicted to drumbeating and lewd dancing. More or less naked. Sporadically treacherous. Probably polygamous and simultaneously promiscuous. Picturesque. Comic when trying to speak English or otherwise ape white ways.

Stereotypes like these helped to excuse their dispossession by whites. As British world power sank after 1945, so did use of the word.

By the 1980s “indigenous peoples” had become more common than “native peoples”.

“Indigenous” means pretty much the same thing but it does not sound as racist since whites did not use it much in their skinhead glory days of the 1800s and early 1900s. But already in the 2010s “indigenous” sounds like a well-meaning white person’s way of saying “tribal”, meaning “not civilized”. Even worse, “indigenous” is applied to plants and animals but almost never to white people, which makes it seem like indigenous people are part of nature, not a part of human society with rights.

Enter “Native”: By the 1950s American Indians began reclaiming the word “native”, writing it with a capital N. Thus the term “Native American”. “Native” is now applied more generally to all peoples native to the lands of the present-day U.S. and Canada before the European Expansion: Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, etc.

Beyond North America the word seems less common. This is partly because other terms are used for pre-Expansion peoples in other countries:

• Australia: Aboriginal, Aborigine
• New Zealand: Maori
• Israel: Palestinians
• South Africa: black South Africans

In New Zealand and Israel natives belong to a single ethnic group; in South Africa, to the same (Western-defined) race. Thus no need to use a more general term. Many would not regard Palestinians or black South Africans as “indigenous” because they are seen as “civilized” (live in cities).

Does it make sense to have a common term for these people? Yes, because they all face issues of settler colonialism taking over their land and, in many cases, the education of their young. It is a process that goes back to Columbus and is still going on. “Indigenous” is already the wrong word. “Native” still sounds too racist, but that seems to be changing. Best would be a word that makes clear their cultural and land rights.

See also:

• Other terms:
  • tribe
  • ethnic
  • illegal immigrant
  • Indian
  • sub-Saharan Africa
  • Middle East
  • Europe
  • race
• Christopher Columbus
  • John Trudell: When Columbus Got Off The Boat
• Mighty Whitey
• Natives through the National Geographic lens - here “native” means non-Westerner
• Native Americans according to Western thought: a brief history

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The Byrds: Turn! Turn! Turn!

Remarks:

This went to #1 on the American pop charts in 1965, #26 in Britain. It is a cover of a Pete Seeger song. The words come almost straight out of  the King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1.

Lyrics:

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time of war, a time of peace
A time of love, a time of hate
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time for every purpose under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it’s not too late!

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The Anything But Racism argument

The Anything But Racism argument, common among White Americans, says that racism is so dead that it is the least likely cause of the races being unequal, like in housing, education, unemployment, police protection, banking, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc. There must be some Perfectly Logical Reason that has nothing to do with racism.

For example, in 2009 the New York Times reported that blacks in New York were four times more likely to be out of work than whites, much higher than a year before. The Times’s (white) reporters examined several possible causes – but racism was not one of them!

The logical reasoning goes like this:

1. Racism is pretty much dead. Only the Klan, skinheads and people who use the n-word are still racist.
2. Therefore a case of racial inequality must have some other cause.  Sure, there is still some racism, but it is so rare that it must be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. Like murder or an appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary (pictured).
3. Since it is not white people who are screwed up, it must be blacks.

But the emotional reasoning goes like this:

1. Holy crap!
2. White people are not racist! They are good people! No one I know is racist – well, except maybe my grandmother. This cannot be right. There must be some mistake.
3. There must be some Perfectly Logical Reason that has Absolutely Nothing To Do With Racism. What is it? Think, think, think.
4. I know, I can buy time by making them “prove” it was racism. Demand peer-reviewed articles, statistics, all of it. Buy more time by finding holes in those.
5. If all else fails, derail: “Blacks are the racist ones,”, etc.

This is not to say that the “It Must Racism” argument is any better. It is just as extreme.

But, given:

• that America has a violently racist past;
• that at least 80% of whites are still racist – not in a Klan way, but in what they assume about people;
• that whites still pretty much control stuff like the courts, police, press, schools, banks, labour market, housing market, etc,

The “It Could Be Racism” argument needs to be seriously and honestly considered. To dismiss it out of hand or not even consider it, like many whites do, is not level-headed.

The trouble is that a huge part of white people’s self-image is based on being white. But to maintain that image as something good requires heavy layers of duct tape called moral blindness. This argument is a piece of that duct tape.

The irony, of course, is that Anything But Racism is itself racist. Notice where the Presumption of Pathology lies: it is never white people who are screwed up but always black people, Latinos or whoever. Not that black people, say, are perfect, that they do not have issues of their own that have nothing to do with racism. They do. But white people are screwed up too – but they have the cultural power to make their pathologies seem “normal”.

See also:

• How to argue like a white racist
• colour blind racism: the four frames
• just world doctrine
• Basically Good
• moral blindness

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My views on relationships between black women and white men

Bria Myles and boyfriend

I have written many posts about relationships between black women and white men in America. It used to be a big topic on this blog. Of all the different things I have written about, it was the first to catch fire and get over 300 comments. At one point it seemed like half my commenters were in such relationships. My views have changed over time, so there is some confusion about where I stand.

My current views: Here is my current thinking. If it is different than something I said in an earlier post, that just means my opinion has changed:

1. There is nothing wrong with such relationships, but black women can go into them for the wrong reasons, like internalized racism. The Black Women’s Empowerment  movement (BWE), for example, presents white men as saving black women from black men. That is internalized racism straight-up, all the way.
2. Black women do not secretly desire white men. Not any more than I secretly desire white women. Some of them might, of course, but probably not most of them. I do not remember ever saying otherwise. There is nothing to support the idea of a common secret desire other than a white racist worldview or black male insecurity. Other than the BWE sorts, I do not hear black women going on and on about how wonderful white men are. Not even close. Even those who are in such relationships seem more defensive than anything else.
3. Why there are not many black women with white men in America:  because most black women do not want to be with white men. It is women who do the choosing, especially when it comes to race and particularly since most men are dogs. Further, as shown in studies on Chinese American women, most women marry men like those they grew up among. Most black women grow up in black neighbourhoods, so based just on that alone you would expect most black women to be with black men.
4. Racialized beauty standards. I have written about this at length. Not just because American beauty standards are at odds with my own, but because it is a part of White American racism, a big subject on this blog. But, yes, in writing about it, black women can come off seeming like they are in a meat market and found wanting, which is demeaning, I agree. I do talk about white men not seeming to want black women, but I do that not to put down black women, but rather to point out the racism of white men. Because black women are, first and foremost, women it seems strange to me for so many white men to seem like they feel no attraction for them – unless, of course, you assume they are looking at the world through a racist lens.

Thanks (I think) to commenter Peanut for suggesting this post. 

See also:

• My supposed secret desire for white women
• sexual selection and race
• race and dating
• race and beauty
• internalized racism
• BWE: Black Women’s Empowerment
• black women, white men

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