Commenter Peanut on real reasons some black women prefer not to date some white men (based on her own experience):

1. It is difficult for many white men to see black women as individuals, even when they prefer to date black women. Example: expecting all black women to be able to dance.
2. Some white people tend to view the attractive, classy and intelligent black women they encounter as exceptions and exempt from being “regular black” by virtue of the fact that they do not conform to negative black female stereotypes.  Example: being called white girl in a black girl’s body, a chocolate-dipped white girl.
3. Some white people forget that you are black and will say stuff without thinking in front of you. Too many examples to recount.
4. Referring to black people who do not conform to mainstream (white society’s) expectations as “ghetto”.
5. Attributing bad behaviour on the part of the individual as a black attribute. Or racializing behaviour that has nothing to do with race.
6. Some white men think they are doing black women a favour by dating and or mating them. Since black women are perceived supposedly as being on the bottom of the beauty hierarchy.  This is especially true of older white men who married white, had white children, divorced and now approach young, young black women.
7. Some white men who date black women think they are officially an authority or expert on black people overall by virtue of the fact that their girlfriend or wife is black.
8. Some white men expect you to mindlessly agree with them about issues pertaining to politics and race, like affirmative action. When you disagree, however gently and politely, you are seen as combative or you hurt their feelings or alienate them.
9. The Bodyguard Complex: Some white men feel as if it is their job to “save” the black woman from the “wretchedness” of the black community.
10. White men who date black women as a way to rationalize away their own racism. Some white men think that because they date or end up with a black women that they are exempt from racist thoughts. Hence the classic phrase, “I’m not racist, I dated a black girl in high school.”

I do not condemn white men who have these thoughts. White American culture has a history of brainwashing both blacks and whites to believe certains notions and stereotypes. But there is always going to be that awkward moment where you realize how our two cultures have really been created in opposition to each other.

Overall, if you are a black women who prefers to date white men or other non-black men, go for it! As long as he respects you. If you are a black women who prefers black men, go for it, as long as he respects you. If you do not care, more power to you. That is my take on it.

See also:

• Siditty: How to Get Black Women
• Why so few white men marry black women part II – this post grew out of comments on this post
• Stuff White Men Say to Black Women
• race and dating
• More on some of the racist errors given above:
  • Stereotypes about black women
  • “Some of my best friends are black”
  • The whiteness of Roger Ebert
    
  • Mighty Whitey – “saving” black people
    
  • The feelings of white people

Remarks:

A Jill Scott song I like that comenter Jeri posted last week.

Lyrics:

Some of them wanna break you down, steal your crown
Use and abuse you.
Some of them smile in your face, cause they heard it some place,
You got more then their used to
Some of them want to steal your love, ooh
Cuz they’re jealous of …how you’re living and giving.

I keep
Moving forward, pressing onward, striving further
I keep
Keep on laughing, keep on living, keep on loving yeah
I keep
Keep on dreaming keep on achieving, keep on believing
I keep
I keep smiling when I come thru …and I cry when I need too.

Some of them, oh they stab you in your back, cuz it’s love they lack.
Some of them won’t even try …to see the good inside.
But I ….

I keep
Moving forward, pressing onward, striving further
I keep
Keep on laughing, keep on living, keep on loving yeah
I keep
Keep on dreaming keep on achieving, keep on believing

Hey. Oh oh oh
I keep on , keep on living, keep on learning , keep on smiling ooh ooh yeah
Keep on laughing, keep on living, keep on loving yeah
I keep
Keep on dreaming, keep on believing, keep on achieving.
I keep smiling when I come thru, and I cry when I need to
(Adlib below)
Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yea yea yeah
I keep on , keep on keeping on.
Yea. I keep ,keep on keep keepin on keep keeping on

The following is based on part 12 of Jacob Bronowski’s BBC series on the history of science and invention, “The Ascent of Man” (1973). This one is about genetics:

Gregor Mendel was a farm boy who became monk. He joined the Augustinian order in Brno, the second largest city in what is now the Czech Republic. They sent him to the university of Vienna to get a teaching degree. The university said he “lacks insight and the requisite clarity of knowledge” and failed him in 1853.

A few years later he began to do experiments on pea plants. People assumed that if you cross a tall pea plant with a short one you get pea plants of middling height. Instead of assuming Mendel tried it: he found that you get nothing but tall pea plants! And if in turn you cross those tall pea plants you get 75% tall pea plants and 25% short ones.

Why? Mendel said it was because each plant gets a height particle – what we now call a gene - from each parent. In the first generation of his experiment, each plant had a tall gene and a short gene, so all of them were tall. But in the second generation one fourth received two short genes and so they were short.

He had discovered the gene, one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. It sank like a rock. Mendel was a nobody: the important science journals in France and Britain did not print it. In 1866 he had it printed in a Brno science journal and there it sat unknown to the top people in science till 1900.

The next big discovery was printed in Nature in 1953, so it was known instantly worldwide: DNA and how it works. DNA is what genes are made of. James Watson and Francis Crick beat out Linus Pauling in discovering how it works.

DNA is a double molecule, each half the mirror image of the other half. When the molecule splits in two, each half can create its missing half. But there is more: it is a long molecule that contains smaller molecules called bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. These become in effect the four letters – A, G, C and T – of the language that genes are written in, containing the instructions of how to build everything in the body.

But genes and DNA are not enough to account for life as we know it. You also need:

1. Sex, which mixes genes in new ways. Till sex came along life did not progress beyond the level of pond scum.
2. Human sexual selection, which speeds it up even faster: humans, compared to other animals, put far more thought into choosing who they have children with. They also have taboos against incest which prevents a few older males from getting all the females and lowering the rate at which genes mix.

As John Donne said:

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is his book.

See also:

• Jacob Bronowski: Knowledge or Certainty – part 11
  
• Jacob Bronowski: The Ladder of Creation – on evolution
• sexual selection and race
• mitochondrial DNA

The following is based on Chapter 1 of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The Black Man and Language”:

Fanon grew up in Martinque, an island in the Caribbean ruled by France. The capital of France, Paris, was the metropole, the centre of the empire. Martinique was the bush, the outback, the hinterland, a nowhere kind of place. All the top people in Martinique either came from France or received their university education there. They all spoke in perfect French.

But most black people in Martinique did not: they spoke Creole, a dialect of French noted for its swallowed r’s. Its closest counterpart in America is Ebonics. Everyone is taught to look down on it at school. The middle-class tries not to speak it at all – except to servants – and shame their children out of using it.

People in Martinique found Creole wanting and saw French as better. That comes not from scholarly opinion but from being colonized, from being under French rule.

Fanon noticed that when people came back from France after receiving their university education they would speak in painfully perfect French and act as if they no longer knew Creole. Why was that?

Fanon found out first-hand: in France white people talk down to you if you are black. Either they speak in fake pidgin French – “Why you left big savanna?” – or they would act too familiar, calling you old fellow and so on. French doctors, for example, would talk to their white patients with impersonal respect but to blacks and Arabs like they were their old friend or something.

The whites say that they are just trying to make blacks feel comfortable. Fanon says no, they are scumbags trying to keep blacks in their place – as perpetual children, as beings of a lesser mind. He noticed they talked to blacks the same way he talked to retarded patients.

So under such circumstances students from Martinique make it a point to speak perfect French, complete with all the r’s. Not because they want to be white or because they think white people are better or something – but to prove they are the equal of any white Frenchman, to deny whites the satisfaction of looking down on them because of their French. (And, admittedly, because French opens doors to opportunities that Creole simply cannot.)

And yet even if you speak perfect French the racism does not stop: white people will then say stuff like, “You speak such perfect French!” – something they never say to a white person with the same university education. Or they will say of one of your country’s writers, “Here is a black man who handles the French language unlike any white man today.” As if that is a surprise or something.

But then mastering perfect French puts black students in a bind: “To speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture,”  says Fanon. Through learning to speak perfect French, they have unwittingly become culturally whiter.

See also:

• Fanon: Black Skins, White Masks: Introduction
• Reading David Foster Wallace
• Haitian Creole
• Ebonics
• Standard English
• acceptable blackness
• Leopold Sedar Senghor

James Franco (1978- ) is an American actor. He played Daniel Desario on the television show  “Freaks and Geeks” (1999-2000) and Harry Osborn, Spiderman’s best friend, in the three Spiderman films (2002, 2004, 2007).

On this blog he was voted the seventh most gorgeous man in the world in 2009, just ahead of Paul Newman. It is not just this blog either:

• 1996: Palo Alto High School: “Best Smile”
• 2004: People magazine: 50 Hottest Bachelors
• 2009: Salon.com: Sexiest Man Living

Salon also named him one of ten men “who might just inspire the rebirth of Jewish male cool“.

He says he is only Jewish “technically” – you know, because his mother is Jewish. He was not brought up Jewish. Still, he hopes to have his bar mitzvah in his thirties. His mother’s family is from Russia, his father’s from Sweden and Portugal.

He has wanted to become an actor ever since his shy, buck-toothed youth when he saw “My Own Private Idaho” (1991), directed by Gus Van Sant, one of his heroes, and “Beverly Hills, 90210″ (1990-2000). He thought acting would be kind of cool. Cool enough to get his teeth straightened. And to drop out of university: he left UCLA after his first year to study acting for 15 months under Robert Carnegie at Playhouse West.

He landed a part as a freak on “Freaks and Geeks”, a high school comedy that NBC half-heartedly ran on television for the 1999-2000 season. Some loved it, especially television reviewers, but the masses apparently prefer their high school characters to be beautiful and as deep as spit – like on “Beverly Hills, 90210″. NBC killed it after 18 episodes.

His big break came in 2001 when he starred in “James Dean”, a straight-to-television film made by TNT. He got so into character that he picked up James Dean’s smoking habit! But it also got him a Golden Globe and the notice of the great and good of Hollywood, like Robert De Niro. He has been working steadily ever since.

He tried out for the lead part in “Spiderman” (2002). He lost to Tobey Maguire, so he wound up playing Spiderman’s best friend, Harry Osborn. The Spiderman films were maybe not as good as “Freaks and Geeks” (certainly not according to voters at IMDb.com) but hugely successful nonetheless in terms of ticket and DVD sales.

In 2008 he appeared in “Milk” about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. He played Milk’s boyfriend. The great part of that is that it was directed by none other than Gus Van Sant. The not-so-good part is that he had to kiss Sean Penn, who played the lead. Franco said it made him feel uncomfortable.

He went back to UCLA, at last, and got his degree. There he studied writing under Mona Simpson, the blood sister of Steve Jobs. After UCLA he studied writing and film in New York at NYU and Columbia. While there he acted in “General Hospital”, the soap opera, for the 2009-2010 season. He played a character named Franco.

In 2010 he is set to play Allen Ginsburg in the film “Howl”.

See also:

• The ten most gorgeous men in the world

Blacks according to American film and television seems to go something like this:

1. There are not many of them – maybe just 6% of America.
2. Unlike whites, they do not represent the full range of humanity but just a narrow, screwed-up part of it.
3. Blacks are so limited in their behaviour and interests that a dozen Hollywood stereotypes are enough to cover nearly all of them. The rest can be covered by the phrase, “You are not like other blacks”. Hip hop videos and BET prove that the stereotypes are true to life!
4. Blacks are mostly poor, live in big cities, listen to hip hop, are disrespectful, have loose morals and speak bad English full of slang.
5. Most black people are poor and most poor people are black.
6. Most black men commit crimes and most crimes are committed by black men. Most therefore wind up in prison at some point. They account for most of the country’s gun violence. They will kill a complete stranger for no good reason.
7. Most black women are “ghetto”. They are poor, ill-mannered, loud-mouthed, loose and are baby mamas, having children by different men they never marry.
8. Blacks, both male and female, have a hard time controlling their anger.
9. Few black women have any true beauty or grace. Most are either fat and ugly or, at best, sexy in a trashy way.
10. Black-on-black love is rare.
11. Black men prefer white and Latina women over black women.
12. It is not uncommon for a black person to have a white parent or be mostly white by blood.
13. Black success comes mainly through sports, entertainment and crime, not through education and hard work.
14. There are not many middle-class blacks. Most of them are noble but boring – and have little or no love life.
15. Missing black women are rare compared to missing white women.
16. Racism is rare – just a matter of some skinheads. Most of the ills that blacks suffer from come from their own pathologies.
17. Black political opinion is divided between those who are pretty much happy with the way things are (“black conservatives”) and those who always seem to find something to complain about for no good reason (the “race industry”). There are no independent black views of America that are seriously worth considering.
18. The lives of black people are good for a few laughs, but not something that would be serious or interesting in its own right.
19. Most Jamaicans are Rastafarians who speak with a fake Jamaican accent.
20. Africa is a country full of unending tribal violence and cruel, unsmiling rulers who wear sunglasses. It is incapable of peace and civilization without the help of whites – who always seem to be well-meaning and have nothing to do with how screwed up things are.
21. Black ghettos are full of unending gang violence and cruel, unsmiling drug lords who wear sunglasses. It is incapable of peace and civilization without the help of whites – who always seem to be well-meaning and have nothing to do with how screwed up things are.

See also:

• white gaze
  
  • Mighty Whitey
  • The Missing White Woman Syndrome
  • the single story
  • native informant
  • stereotype
    • The black brute stereotype
    • The Sapphire stereotype
    • The welfare queen stereotype
    • Black Savage Rule
• race and television:
  • beauty and race and television
  • race and crime and poverty and television
  • The blackness of American television
  • How the press is soft on racism
• about blacks in America:
  • Some numbers on Black Americans
  • The black middle-class in America
• How to argue like a white racist
  • the race industry argument

Staceyann Chin (1971- ) is a slam poet from Jamaica who now lives in the country of Brooklyn in New York City. She travels the world performing and teaching poetry. Unlike most poets she has been on Oprah’s television show and has her own Blockbuster Online page.

I thought maybe she was just television-driven fluff, that she had no substance, but when she made me cry at her grandmother’s death – not mine but hers - then I knew she could write.

She was a slam poet before slam poets were in fashion, when it was still underground in New York. Like in Ancient Greece, slam poets perform their poetry for an audience with judges picking the winner. Their pieces generally run three minutes long and tell a story. A video of one of her pieces is at the end of this post.

She got into slam poetry almost by accident: one day she went to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The rest is history.

Her first published book is not of her poetry – she is not ready for that yet – but a  story in prose about her first 24 years: “The Other Side of Paradise” (2009).

She was born on Christmas day in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the unwanted daughter of a rich Chinese businessman and a poor black woman. Her mother left the country soon after and Chin was brought up by her grandmother, then in her sixties. Although unwanted by her mother, her grandmother loved her unconditionally. No one has ever loved her more. Because her grandmother could not read, Chin read the Bible to her, especially the psalms – a slam poet in training!

All that ended at age nine when her mother arrived from Canada, briefly, and put her with a great-aunt whose sons tried to force her into sex. She was shifted from house to house without a home, till age 16 when she went away to boarding school and then university – paid for by a Chinese businessman who denies he is her father.

At age 21 while at university she found out she was lesbian. She only told close friends: in Jamaica  you cannot live openly as a homosexual and expect to not be beaten up or, in the case of women, raped.

As much as she loved Jamaica, she had to leave: it would not allow her to live freely as a lesbian. So at age 24 she came to New York:

New York was my godsend. As soon as I landed, I knew I was in a place that welcomed misfits.

No one in New York cared if she kissed girls. She was free! Yet not free: she was black. In Jamaica, because of its colourism, she was favoured for her light skin. But in America she found herself at the bottom – for the very same skin, now seen as black. America may have been more enlightened about lesbians, but it was way less enlightened about black people.

See also:

• posted videos of her on this blog:
  • Staceyann Chin: Pity The Nation
  • Staceyann Chin reads Las Casas on the Spanish genocide of Hispaniola
• colourism
• New York
• Jamaica
• Oprah

One of my coloring books when I was younger was called Color Me Brown, and it had twenty-five little etchings of black American contributors that you could color in. So I knew about Benjamin Banneker, I knew about Phillis Wheatley. I knew about Ira Aldridge and Ida B. Wells. Those were the names that came to my mouth like Mary Poppins might to another’s. So when I went to school and parts of me were omitted from history books, I knew the hole wasn’t in me, it was in the books.

- Attallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X

Source: Mes Deux Cents

See also:

• On Little Black Girls, Beauty and Barbie Dolls – another colouring book anecdote
• growing up black
• colour-blind child rearing
  • growing up Nezua
• white lens
• If blacks ran Hollywood like whites do
• Malcolm X
• Ida B. Wells

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), an American civil rights activist, wrote and spoke fearlessly against the evils of Jim Crow, particularly lynching. She was one of the founders of the NAACP. She also fought for the right of women to vote and ran for the state senate in Illinois. She knew both Susan B. Anthony and Marcus Garvey. She was opposed by Booker T. Washington.

She was born a slave in 1862 in Mississippi, not far from Memphis. At age three the slaves were freed. She went to school and did well. At sixteen her parents and youngest brother died of yellow fever. She took over the family, working as a school teacher. In time she moved to Memphis with her two youngest sisters. She went to Fisk and taught school in Memphis.

One time she bought a first-class ticket on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad and sat in the ladies car. The conductor told her to move to the car for coloureds. She refused. He took her arm, she bit him. He got help and they threw her off the train.

She took  the company to court and was won a $500 settlement (back when very few made much more than a dollar a day). But then the decision was overturned. She learned that the law is not on the side of black people.

She wrote about the whole thing for a church newspaper. Soon her essays were appearing in black newspapers across the country. She wrote about how bad the black schools in Memphis were where she taught – and was fired. She wrote about white violence against blacks in Memphis – and had to leave town.

A friend of hers owned and ran a food store in Memphis with two other black men. Some whites did not like it and a fight broke out between whites and blacks. Shots were fired. The next morning the police arrested the owners and hundreds of black men. A few days later the owners were lynched: they were taken out of jail by angry whites and murdered.

That taught her that the lynchings in the South had very little to do with black men raping white women, like white people said. They had more to do with keeping black people down.

She looked into hundreds of cases of lynchings. She found that only in a third of them was anyone even accused of rape. And even in the cases of rape many of the white women were willing. They were hardly as pure as white men said they were.

She wrote about lynching and spoke out against it – one of the few who did. She spoke against it all across the north and the west and even in Britain.

While her fearlessness and outspokenness got her noticed and helped to get things like the NAACP off the ground, Booker T. Washington opposed her and limited her power in civil rights circles. He did not think speaking truth to power was the way to go.

See also:

• Ida B. Wells: The Red Record (1895) – one of her main works on lynching
• Jim Crow
• The pure white woman stereotype
• Booker T Washington

Remarks:

This song is next to unknown in America – where it was recorded! – but it reached #3 in Britain in 1994. I have wanted to post it for a long time but it was not embeddable.

Lyrics:

Yousou N’Dour in Wolof:

Boul ma sene, boul ma guiss madi re nga fokni mane
Khamouma li neka thi sama souf ak thi guinaw
Beugouma kouma khol oaldine yaw li neka si yaw
mo ne si man, li ne si mane moye dilene diapale

Neneh Cherry in English:

Roughneck and rudeness,
We should be using, on the ones who practice wicked charms
For the sword and the stone
Bad to the bone
Battle’s not over
Even when it’s won
And when a child is born into this world
It has no concept
Of the tone the skin it’s living in
It’s not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting
It’s not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting
I’ll be waiting
I’ll be waiting

Youssou N’Dour in French:

J’assume les raisons qui nous poussent de changer tout,
J’aimerais qu’on oublie leur couleur pour qu’ils esperent
Beaucoup de sentiments de races qui font qu’ils desesperent
Je veux les deux mains ouvertes,
Des amis pour parler de leur peine, de leur joie
Pour qu’ils leur filent des infos qui ne divisent pas
Changer

Neneh Cherry in English:

7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting
It’s not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting
I’ll be waiting
I’ll be waiting
And when a child is born into this world
It has no concept
Of the tone the skin it´s living in
And there’s a million voices
And there’s a million voices
To tell you what you should be thinking
So you better sober up for just a second
We´re 7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting
It’s not a second
We´re 7 seconds away
For just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting
It’s not a second
7 seconds away
Just as long as I stay
I’ll be waiting

The following is based on part eleven of Jacob Bronowski’s BBC series on the history of science and invention, “The Ascent of Man” (1973). This one is about quantum physics:

We used to think that science could give us a perfect picture of the material world. But we now know, because of quantum physics in the 1900s, that absolute knowledge is impossible. There is a limit to what we can know – even with the most perfect and most powerful instruments imaginable.

For example, with a high-powered electron miscroscope you can see atoms. Yet no matter how much you increase the power you will never get a sharp image.

Even something as simple and straightforward as the position of a star in the sky is not perfectly knowable: different human observers come up with different positions and even the same person repeating the observation does not come up with the very same answer each time.

Karl Gauss in 1795 noticed that the observations made a bell curve – the closer you get to the average position, the more observations there are. But you cannot even say that the star is at the average position – all you can say is that it is the most probable position, which is not quite the same thing as its true position.

Gauss lived in Gottingen, a small German university town. It was here, over a hundred years later, in the 1920s, that some of the leading minds of physics came on the train from Berlin to work out the physics of the atom and its parts: quantum physics.

The atom is made of moving parts, such as the electron, and yet there is something very strange about them. Werner Heisenberg in 1927 found that you can tell what the position of an electron is but not its speed and direction – or, if you nail down its speed and direction, then you cannot tell its position. It is one or the other but never both at the same time. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Gottingen had something else: a collection of skulls. These skulls were used to support a racist view of the world, a view of the world that dealt in inhuman certainties. It came to power in the person of Hitler. The skies darkened over Europe, as they had in the days of Galileo. The great minds of Europe fled – or fell silent:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

See also:

• Jacob Bronowski: Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people – the conclusion of this part
• Jacob Bronowski: World Within World – part ten
• Jacob Bronowski: The Starry Messenger – about Galileo
  
• Hitler
  

Once a week I am going to do a post on a chapter of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952). This post covers the introduction. I will try to get the posts out on Friday – you know, because then I can call it Fanon Fridays in blogly fashion. But as you can see this Fanon Friday has turned into Fanon Sunday! My apologies!

“Black Skin, White Masks” is one Fanon’s main books. In it he tries to understand blacks and whites and the relationship between them by applying the ideas of psychology. He wants to examine their souls. He wants to help them:

My true wish is to get my brother, black or white, to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension.

Whites are locked in their whiteness and blacks in their blackness. It keeps them both from becoming free, from becoming truly human. But to destroy their prison we must first understand that prison.

Being black himself, Fanon is more interested in helping blacks, in helping himself. So he talks mainly about them:

We shall attempt to discover the various mental attitudes the black man adopts in the face of white civilization.

He says his observations and conclusions are valid only for the French Antilles (he is from Martinique). And, since he wrote in 1952, what he says might be way out of date by now. But given that my translation into English was done in America in 2008, and given how quickly even good books go out of print, I am going to assume, for now, that what he says applies more broadly than just the French Antilles in the 1950s, that it is useful for blacks – and whites – in America to know now in the 2010s.

And, I should think, anyone who lives in a society shaped by the white empires would get something out of it too.

He says that not all blacks – or whites – will see themselves in the book, but those who do will have made a step in the right direction.

I love how the book starts out. Here is some of it:

Why am I writing this book? Nobody asked me to.
Especially not those for whom it is intended.
So? So in all serenity my answer is that there are too many idiots on this earth. And now that I’ve said it, I have to prove it….

This books should have been written three years ago. But at the time the truths made our blood boil. Today the fever has dropped and truths can be said without having them hurled into people’s faces…. Zealousness is the arm par excellence of the powerless.

But later in the introduction he throws in this unsettling sentence:

As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white.

Chapters:

1. The Black Man and Language
2. The Woman of Colour and the White Man
3. The Man of Colour and the White Woman
4. The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized
5. The Lived Experience of the Black Man
6. The Black Man and Psychopathology
7. The Black Man and Recognition
8. By Way of Conclusion

See also:

• Frantz Fanon
• Martinique
• Freud
• Adler
• the colonized mind
• the black buck stereotype

Paul Newman (1925-2008) was a Hollywood actor and sex symbol, from the 1960s and early 1970s. He was married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years.

On this blog at the end of 2009 he was voted the eighth most gorgeous man in the world – over a year after he died at age 83!

His best films (those receiving an IMDb rating of at least 8.0):

• 1958: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• 1961: The Hustler
• 1967: Cool Hand Luke
• 1969: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
• 1973: The Sting

The first he did with Elizabeth Taylor, the last two with Robert Redford, both Hollywood sex symbols in their own right. He is known for playing anti-heroes. He was acting almost right up to the end of his life.

His name was put up for an Oscar for best actor eight times, but only won once, for “The Color of Money” in 1987. Some say his acting got better with age – the Oscar nominations seem to bear that out.

He was born the son of a Cleveland shopkeeper. Both sides of his family come from Eastern Europe (Slovakia, Hungary, Poland). Like his father but unlike his mother he is Jewish.

In the Second World War he wanted to be a pilot and fly planes but his colour blindness prevented him. He almost fought in the battle of Okinawa but the pilot of his plane got an ear infection and they stayed back. Everyone else in their detail died in battle.

After the war he went into acting, at first on Broadway and television and then in Hollywood films. He did terribly in his first film, “The Silver Chalice” (1954), but then did well two years later in “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956) – a part he got through the death of James Dean. Soon he was starring opposite Elizabeth Taylor. His acting was not as good as, say, Marlon Brando’s, but his good looks made up for it.

In 1958 he starred with Joanne Woodward in “The Long Hot Summer”. That year he divorced his first year of nine years and married Woodward. He has three children by each wife. In 1960 he and Woodward moved to Connecticut.

In 1978 his only son died of a drug overdose at age 28.

Newman was a race car driver. He came in second at Le Mans in 1979.

He used to make salad dressing as a Christmas gift. It caught on and in 1982 he started selling it under the brand name Newman’s Own. He later branched out into spaghetti sauce and popcorn. Since Newman was not interested in getting rich, he gave the profits to charity – education, health, the environment, disaster relief, etc. He joked that Newman’s Own brought in more money than his acting ever did (true).

In 1988 he started the Hole in the Wall Gang, a free summer camp in Connecticut, between New York and Boston, for children who are dying or who have spent a long time in the hospital.

See also:

• The ten most gorgeous men in the world
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Jews
• Hollywood

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an American professor and historian, best known for his book “A People’s History of the United States” (1980). It is not a story of presidents and generals but instead “a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” He was to the left of Mao and proud of it.

He did not just teach history, he took part in it, like marching at Selma and hiding the Pentagon Papers. He was brave, doing what was right even though it meant that Spelman fired him and the Boston police beat him.

He grew up in the poor parts of Brooklyn. When the Second World War came he joined the Air Force to fight the good war against Hitler and fascism. He bombed towns in France and Germany. From his plane, six miles up in the sky, he could not hear the screams or see the blood.

He came home and went to university on the G.I. Bill. There he read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” (1946) and began to think about the people he killed, many of them children. He began to see that America was an empire no different from all the other empires in history.

In 1956 he became a history professor at Spelman College. He found himself teaching American history to black women from books that said little about blacks. He began to question the way American history was taught.

Then came the civil rights movement, the fight for equal rights for blacks. He joined SNCC and the sit-ins. He urged his students to protest too. Spelman fired him. Writer Alice Walker, one of his students, puts it this way:

Well, he was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens. He didn’t see why we shouldn’t be able to eat where we wanted to and sleep where we wanted to and be with the people we wanted to be with. And so, he was with us. He didn’t stay back, you know, in his tower there at the school. And so, he was a subversive in that situation.

In 1964 he went to Boston University where he taught till he retired in 1988. There he took part in the protests against the Vietnam War and became friends with Noam Chomsky.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg gave him one of his copies of the Pentagon Papers, which held the government’s secrets about the Vietnam War. The big secret was that it knew the war was hopeless but lied to the people about it. Zinn found out that the war was not about freedom and democracy but about tin, rubber and oil. America in the 1960s, it turned out, was no different than Japan in the 1940s.

In 1980 he came out with “A People’s History of the United States”. The first printing was only 4,000 copies, but in 2003 the millionth copy was sold! The latest, and now last, revision comes out in July 2010.

See also:

• Howard Zinn: Against Discouragement – a beautiful speech he gave at Spelman to the graduating class of 2005.
• Chomsky
• Staceyann Chin reads Las Casas on the Spanish genocide of Hispaniola – you can hear him at the beginning of this video
• Haiti: a brief history – partly based on his history.
• The best American writers live north of 110th Street – I would not call him one of the best American writers, but he did live north of 110th Street from 1952 to 1956 and has the very mindset I talk about in that post. In particular he did not believe in:
  • Apple-pie America
  • just world doctrine
• Stuff I Might Like

This is five minutes long, but well worth listening to all the way to the end. As a slam poet Chin always makes sure to save the best for last. The male voice you hear at the beginning is Howard Zinn, who has just passed away.

See also:

• Haiti: a brief history – which is partly based on Las Casas
• Staceyann Chin: Pity the Nation – more good stuff from Staceyann
• genocide
  • How to deny a genocide
• Staceyann Chin
• Howard Zinn