Theophilus London: Flying Overseas

Remarks:

This song came out in June 2011. As far as I know it has not charted. It features Solange Knowles and Devonte Hynes. The woman you see in the video is not Solange, though she is the woman you hear singing.

Lyrics:

Mr. Taxi Man
It’s been along time, I’ll be back again
The birds and the bees be attracting them
The pretty little flowers on the racks a’blend
Fulfilled with meaning, let’s sip the Riesling
I’m thinking about white to match the season
Let’s visit the gardens, the rivered parks
I’ll bring it to your eyes, delivered hearts

Do u remember me
Do u remember me
Ms. Hilary
Do u remember me

I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all
I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all

When I’m overseas your love just come over me
Attacking me viciously in a sweet way that’s loving to me
Gifts and diamond rings,a car, that’s nothing to me
You send a picture, a mail package, that’s something to me
Have a cup of my tea
All the suckers should leave
Baby, I’m no sucker I’m free
Age is numbers to me
You send a picture, I send a picture that’s comforting me
A star gets lonely at night
Only if moments are bright
We just can’t get enough of us
This is our night
The moon is saying somehting to us
At all times bright
Her eyes said it all, lips are the softest
Let’s go in the wind and get driven by the forces
Let’s lay in the wind and get driven by the forces

Do u remember me
Do u remember me
Ms. Hilary
Do u remember me

I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all
I’m going overseas
Come fly with me, I’ll give you all

I ache for you, this heart of mine
Don’t be afraid to crack a smile my dear
Ohh she said to me what a tragedy
Live happily in life throughout the years

I ache for you, this heart of mine
Don’t be afraid to crack a smile my dear
Ohh he said to me what a tragedy
Live hapilly in life throughout the years

Super Size Me

“Super Size Me” (2004) is a film about overeating in America by independent New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. For one month everything he ate or drank came from McDonald’s. Everything.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner. And snacks. Even the water he drank. He ate everything on the McDonald’s menu at least once.

He also made sure he got no more exercise than most Americans – which as a New Yorker was hard to do. Most New Yorkers do not have cars and wind up walking 8 km a day, twice as much as the average American. He made up for this by going on the road to the fattest city in the land: Houston, Texas.

One other rule: Whenever a McDonald’s employee asked whether he wanted to “super size” his order, he had to say yes. He was asked nine times.

He had doctors check him out at the beginning, middle and end. He wrote down everything he ate and drank and had a nutritionist review it regularly and give him  advice.

In just one month he gained 24.5 pounds (11.1 kg), more than a tenth of his body weight. He gained most of it in the first 11 days. Even worse, by the end his liver was like that of a drunk. The doctors were shocked. They did not expect that at all. On top of that he doubled his chances of a heart attack and his sex drive dropped.

He threw up after he ate his first super-sized meal but soon he found he was eating twice as much as his body weight required. He got hooked on the stuff: he felt wonderful when he was eating it, but felt tired and terrible when he was not. Cue Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” and pictures of Ronald McDonald.

More troubling than any of that was his part on what children eat:

The food industry says that it merely provides the food and drink that people freely choose to buy, that it is up to parents and schools to inform children about healthy eating.

If it were only that simple.

First, Spurlock showed how terrible most school lunches are. It was not a matter of cost: he showed a school that provided healthy lunches at low cost. No, it was because the companies which provide the lunches, like Sodexho, block any meaningful change. They give schools a hard time just for wanting to get rid of soft drinks.

Even worse:

He showed young schoolchildren pictures of three famous people:

Half of them got George Washington, none of them got Jesus Christ (!!!) but every single one got Ronald McDonald. McDonald’s is better than any school or any church at getting its message across.

McDonald’s cries “personal responsibility” but what of their responsibility? Is it just to the shareholders and the bottom line?

Throughout the film Spurlock shows pictures of evil-looking Ronald McDonalds.

After his month of McDonald’s food, his girlfriend, a vegetarian cook, took over. It took him 14 months to lose all the weight he had gained.

See also:

• IMDb.com: Super Size Me
• YouTube: Curtis Mayfield: Pusherman
• high fructose corn syrup
• sugar

My bookcases

My books have been sitting in boxes and stacks on the floor. But now I have some bookcases – some I bought, some were given to me by kind souls, some are coming in orders I could not cancel. So now, for the first time in since forever, I will soon have more bookshelves than books to fill them with.

My mother says I do not “need” bookshelves and then said something about Diogenes. When I talked about the more advanced subject of matching bookcases, she asked if I wanted to be in Better Homes & Gardens. She is something of a bohemian. (When my wife first met her and saw her cheap shoes, she was surprised at how good her English was.)

I tried to make her understand that without bookcases all my books are in boxes and in stacks on the floor, that it takes up way too much room and makes it hard to find anything. With a bookcase they take up way less floor space, you can see all your books at once and can pick out what you want without creating a mess. There is a reason they invented bookcases. It was not just for looks.

As you might suspect, I once wrote about what kind of library I would have if money were no object. It would be in the mountains, round with a dome on top. Tall windows. Between the windows would be the bookcases. On the floor is a huge Persian carpet with a world map from the 1600s. To find a book, you walk to the part of the world it came from on the carpet and then walk towards the shelves straight in front of you on the wall.

I know that greater minds than mine, like those who run the Library of Congress, have come up with better ways of arranging books, but I think my way will work well enough for those of us with fewer than 5,000 books. Which is like almost everyone.

In addition, my way of doing it has one huge advantage: it will show the holes in my collection. Which are probably vast. Probably like 80% of my books are American and only 5% tops are from Asia – and even that would mostly be Bibles.

Well, I do not have the money to build a library in the mountains, but now I do have enough shelves, for once, where stuff like Arrangement matters. So, like in good computer engineering, you think about what you would truly want and then scale that back to the possible.

Therefore I will apply my map idea. It will go something like this:

• upper left; North America
• lower left: South America
• upper middle: Europe
• lower middle: Africa
• right: Asia and the Pacific

North America South America

Europe Africa

Asia & Pacific

Another way I might do it is as a simple timeline going by copyright or date of composition. In the upper left would be the Bible and Homer and all that, in the lower right, my computer books.

See also:

• The Abagond Library
• world population
• Diogenes

Diop: Origination in the Delta?

The following is based on “Origination in the Delta?”, chapter four of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

Diop argues that Egyptian civilization did not first appear in the Nile Delta.

Some scholars, interested in proving that Egypt got its civilization from light-skinned outsiders, have argued that it began in the Delta. After all, if civilization came from Asia, North Africa, Europe or over the Mediterranean Sea, then it would appear first in the Delta and then spread up the Nile to Upper Egypt.

Diop says there are no hard facts to support this. True, the Delta is far wetter so less comes down to us there from ancient times, yet even wood is able to last there for up to 4,000 years. So there should be at least some hard facts in its favour. Instead it is a theory without any hard facts to support it.

If the facts are simply missing due to wetness or bad luck, then the history of Upper Egypt should not make complete sense on its own. But it does. Civilization arises there step by step. Its archaeological record goes back over 9,000 years without any break that a Delta origin of civilization would help us to understand.

The pharaohs mostly ruled from Thebes in Upper Egypt. When they ruled from Memphis near the Delta, it was for military reasons. And even then when the pharaoh died, they sent his body back to Upper Egypt to be buried.

Upper Egypt, particularly in and near Thebes, was the centre of Egyptian religion. The worship of Osiris was centred there. The oldest books have the gods coming from Upper Egypt or further south, never from the Delta. The first fight between Set and Horus took place in Nubia to the south.

All this makes sense if, as the ancients believed, Egyptians came from Ethiopia. Or if Egyptian civilization simply started in Upper Egypt. But if the gods came from the Delta, as some maintain, it would make little sense.

Other reasons that run counter to a Delta origin of Egyptian civilization:

• Egypt has always been mainly a land power, not a sea power. Which would be odd if it was born in the Delta, right near the Mediterranean Sea.
• The Delta became liveable and Memphis even possible due to advanced public works upriver in Upper Egypt.
• The Delta was subject to war and plague far more than Upper Egypt, making it a less favourable place for civilization to start.
• Some argue that the Egyptian calendar started in Memphis because that is where the Sun and Sirius seem to rise together. Yet that same calendar’s oldest known date is 4236 BC, a thousand years before the founding of Memphis, back when the place where Memphis was to be built still stood under water.

In short, a Delta origin, instead of making better sense of what we know about Egypt, makes it more of a mystery.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ancient Egypt

Diop: Modern Falsification of History

The following is based on “Modern Falsification of History”, chapter three of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

In ancient times it was widely believed that Egyptians came from the Ethiopians, but in the 1800s many European scholars began to distance Egypt from black Africa, from “Africa proper”. They looked to Asia or even North Africa for the seeds of Egyptian civilization.  The black people found in Ancient Egypt were seen as slaves in a white civilization.

One of the more desperate attempts to do this was to say that Egyptian civilization came from the Libyans to the west. Libyans were light-skinned and possibly came from Europe. But the Egyptians regarded them as savages. Herodotus too:

Their women wear on each leg a ring made of bronze, they let their hair grow long, and when they catch vermin on their person, bite it and throw it away.

The Libyans did in fact take over and rule Egypt for a while, but that was thousands of years after the rise of Egyptian civilization. The same goes for all the light-skinned rulers of Egypt – the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks. In fact, their settling in Egypt is proof not that Egypt was white, but that it used to be much blacker than it is today.

As it turns out Egyptians painted pictures of the different people of the known world and even gave each a different skin colour, putting them in this order:

I could not find any photographs showing the four Egyptian divisions of mankind, but I did find some coloured drawings, which I put here in the order given by Diop.

1. dark red or copper: Egyptians
2. black: Africans
3. tan or yellow: Asians
4. white: Europeans

Whites were  not only last, they were the only ones pictured as savages (as most were back then some 3,500 years ago).

European scholars jumped on this to show that the Egyptians did not regard themselves as black. Yet, as one of these very same scholars pointed out elsewhere, copper is part of the natural skin colour range of black Africa.

Three photographs showing tomb paintings of foreigners in the time of Ramses III (-1100s)

The Egyptians naturally saw themselves as being different and apart from everyone else. But they also saw themselves as being closest, in appearance and civilization, to “Africa proper” – and farthest from whites!

It was not just skin colour either, but even their features:

• nose short and fleshy
• mouth stretched a bit too far
• thick lips
• large eyes opened wide

and that in the words of a scholar who tried to prove the Egyptians were not black!

For comparison here is how Egyptians pictured white people (in the words of Champollion):

a white skin of the most delicate shade, a nose straight or slightly arched, blue eyes, blond or reddish beard, tall stature and very slender, clad in a hairy ox-skin, a veritable savage, tattooed on various parts of his body.

The Egyptians also painted their gods black. Isis, for example, always has the skin colour of a Nubian. If Egypt was a white civilization with black slaves then why the black gods? Most people paint gods in their own image, not that of their slaves.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ancient Egypt
• How black was Ancient Egypt?

Norman Rockwell: The Problem We All Live With

Norman Rockwell, "The Problem We All Live With" (1964) - click to enlarge

“The Problem We All Live With” (1964) is arguably the best Norman Rockwell painting ever. It shows Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old black girl, walking to school – with four guards. It is 1960 in New Orleans. It is the first time a black child is going to an all-white grade school in the American South.

John Steinbeck was there. He wrote about it in “Travels with Charley in Search of America” (1962):

The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school.

But Ruby Bridges was not the main attraction:

The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school.

When the white man and the white child arrived:

A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they had come to see and hear.

No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?

White women shouting not at Ruby Bridges but at Elizabeth Eckford three years earlier when the high schools in the South desegregated

The painting is about racism: Rockwell calls it “The Problem We All Live With”. Yet racism remains faceless. We do not see the faces of the white women shouting indelicate things. And neither Steinbeck nor the newspapers nor the television stations would let us know what they were.

While both Steinbeck and Rockwell clearly condemn racism, it is the racism of open hatred, the Klan-and-n-word sort of racism. Rockwell even has “KKK” and “nigger” written on the wall. Untouched is the racism common back north where they lived, the racism that created white flight, bad schools and high crime rates.

All the same, for Rockwell this picture was a huge step. It was like Nixon going to China or Walter Cronkite condemning the Vietnam War: Rockwell was so famous for painting whitewashed pictures of Apple-pie America, almost to the point of parody, that it made this picture that much more powerful. He even painted it in a more true-to-life style, yet it is still clearly Rockwellian.

The cracked American flag you can make from of her schoolbook and the running tomato strains

The picture, currently in 2011, hangs in the White House, just outside President Obama’s office.

President Obama views "The Problem We All Live With" with Ruby Bridges.

See also:

• Elizabeth Eckford – who went through the same thing as Ruby Bridges when high schools in the South desegregated three years before. Not painted by Norman Rockwell.
• Apple-pie America
• white flight
• Jim Crow racism
• colour-blind racism
• Twilight Zone: Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder – which first appeared on television three days before the scene in the painting took place

Kindle books on race

I was asked what books I have on race on my Kindle. Here are some of them, listed alphabetically by author’s last name. No, Amazon is not paying me. Please note that having a book on your Kindle is not the same thing as having read it! If only life were that simple. Anyway, these look good and I do not yet regret having bought them. If you have any recommendations, good or bad, about these or others please let me know!

Click on the picture or title to see the book’s Kindle page on Amazon.

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – I have only read bits of this so far, but they were pretty mind-blowing bits! My post on mass incarceration was based mainly on Alexander.

Karen Brodkin: How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America – a social history of the whiteness of Jewish Americans and how it affected their success. This will become a post in time.

Sarah Burns: The Central Park Five – about the five black and Latino boys who were falsely accused and imprisoned for the rape of the Central Park Jogger in New York in 1989. Burns is white and it shows, but she seems thorough and honest.

Tom Burrell: Brainwashed – about internalized racism among blacks in America. My post Why are black and beautiful still contradictions? was based on one of his chapters. I will probably do some others.

Ellis Cose: The End of Anger – Cose’s case that racism is pretty much dead for blacks growing up now in America. I would have never bought a book like this from John McWhorter, but Cose seems like an honest mind.

Nell Irvin Painter: The History of White People – the intellectual and (to a degree) social history of what “white” means in America. My posts on the white beauty ideal as science and Caucasians came mostly from this book.

Thomas M. Shapiro: The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality – how being black and middle-class is not quite the same thing as being white and middle-class. Stuff on schools, housing and the wealth gap.

Thomas J. Sugrue: The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit – how racism helped to make Detroit into a mess.

Mary C Waters: Black Identites: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities – how race in America affects West Indians and their children.

Frank Wu: Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White – about racism against Asian Americans. Excellent.

Howard Zinn: Race – Stuff Zinn wrote about race and the civil rights movement put into one book. What a great idea!

I also have Kindle books by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Staceyann Chin, Michael Eric Dyson, Heidi Durrow, bell hooks, June Jordan, Carter G. Woodson, Richard Wright and others where racism is pretty much an unavoidable subject although they did not set out to write just about that.

See also:

• Kindle

Judy Mowatt: Let’s Dance

Remarks:

Judy Mowatt was a backing singer for Bob Marley. I do not know what it is about her songs but I just like them for some reason. Like this one, which I have played to death. Maybe it is her use of horns or her style of hopefulness.

Lyrics:

Sweet music gives me good vibration
Feel it, anywhere in creation
And even if you’re down and out
Uh, when you hear your favorite song
You wanna jump and shout

And dance
Because the rhythm is right
Yes, dance
Rock it the way you like

Let’s dance
Because the music is free
Let’s dance
Sweet music make you feel irie, yeah
(Sweet music make you feel irie)

Everyone was on the dancin’ floor
When the deejay say
Harlem, pull up, operator
The crowd ball lot more

Bongo Harry
Makin’ all kind of skankin’ move
The people saw it, oh, my gosh
They started to rock and groove

And dance
Because the rhythm is right
Yes, dance
You can rock it the way you like

Let’s dance, come on now, now
Because the music is free
Let’s dance
Sweet music make you feel irie, yeah
(Sweet music make you feel irie)

Ah, come dance, let’s dance
Mmm, mmm, mmm, yeah

Everyone was on the dancin’ floor
When the deejay say
Harlem, operator, operator
Once more

Jane and Harry
Doin’ the latest dancin’ move
They look so neat, rhythm real sweet
Rock now to this beat

And dance

Let’s dance, oh, my gosh
Because the music is free
Let’s dance
Sweet music make you feel irie, yes
(Sweet music make you feel irie)

(Let’s dance)
Makes you wanna jump, be free lately
(Let’s dance)
Ah, come dance, let’s dance

(Let’s dance, bubble little, bubble little)
Rock it the way you like
(Let’s dance, bubble little, bubble little)
Rock it till broad daylight

(Let’s dance)

Diop: Birth of the Negro Myth

The following is based on “Birth of the Negro Myth”, chapter two of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974):

The Negro Myth is the belief that black people are not as good as whites. And not just in this period of history in certain particular ways, like in weapons or wealth, but in most ways throughout all of history. Because, the myth says, blacks lack brains, morals, reason, civilization, working constitutional government and all the rest.

The myth is so firmly believed that when whites do admit that blacks can equal or pass them in something, like music or art, it is strangely twisted into proof that blacks are less than fully human, that they have more of an animal-like nature.

The myth is so firmly believed that the idea of ancient Egypt being a black civilization seems highly improbable if not laughable. So much so that when archaeologists find the remains of blacks in Egypt or the Middle East they are assumed – without the trouble of a proof – to be slaves.

The myth is so firmly believed that whites saw it as their duty to civilize blacks for their own good – the white man’s burden.

The myth is so firmly believed that that even top black thinkers sometimes believe in it.

Senghor, for example, once said:

Emotion is Negro and reason Greek.

While Cesaire pictured blacks as:

Those who invented neither gunpowder nor compass
those who tamed neither steam nor electricity
those who explored neither the sea nor the sky…

The birth of the myth:

When Egypt fell under foreign rule from about –500 onwards, most of Africa became cut off from the rest of the world for 2000 years. Since people there could make a comfortable living with just a hoe, they fell behind in terms of material progress, though they continued to progress in other ways.  Constitutional government, for example, was common in West Africa before it was common in Europe.

When Europeans arrived in West Africa in the 1400s they had far better weapons and ships than anyone in that part of the world. They used this advantage to rob Africa of its riches and make its people into slaves.

Europeans assumed that their material advantage extended to morals, society, government and everything else.

They also assumed this advantage extended to all of history.

This caused them to misread history in certain ways. So, for example, when the French scholar Count Constantin de Volney arrived in Egypt in the 1780s he was shocked to find that the people there appeared to be part black – even though he knew his Herodotus.

The myth started out as an understandable misunderstanding of Portuguese sailors of the 1400s. But it proved so useful an excuse for the slave trade and colonization that it got written about and in time flowered into revealed truth, part of the European mindset.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Diop: What were the Egyptians?
• Leopold Sedar Senghor
• white man’s burden
• Anti-black racism as a guide to science
• Chinua Achebe: Africa’s Tarnished Name
• white people

Diop: What were the Egyptians?

The following is based on “What were the Egyptians?”, chapter one of Cheikh Anta Diop’s “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974). The pictures were supplied by me, not Diop.

The Greeks and Jews saw the ancient Egyptians first-hand before they became mixed with Greek and Arab blood. They never thought of them as looking like the people in the Middle East or Europe. They saw them as cousins of the Ethiopians and used the word “black” when talking about them.

For example, when Herodotus argues that the people on the island of Colchis came from Egypt, he says:

The Egyptians said they believed the Colchians to be descended from the army of Sesostris. My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair…

Amenhotep III, grandfather of King Tut, ruled Egypt from -1382 to -1344.

One of the reasons he gives for why the rising of the Nile is not caused by melting snow is that, “It is certain that the natives of the country are black with the heat…”

When talking about an oracle he uses the blackness of a dove to argue that it stands for an Egyptian woman.

Some say Herodotus was simply a teller of tales, yet he was careful to point out what he saw with his own eyes, what he heard and what made sense. Egypt is something he saw with his own eyes. Archaeology continues to back up his eyewitness accounts.

Herodotus said that Egypt was the cradle of civilization, that the Greeks got all the elements of their civilization from Egypt – even their gods.

Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III, -1300s.

The Greeks Herodotus, Diodorus of Sicily and Strabo all believed that the Egyptians and Ethiopians were of the same race: that either the Egyptians came from the Ethiopians or the Ethiopians came from the Egyptians – depending on whether they saw the Nile as being settled upstream or downstream.

It was not just the Greeks. The Jews who wrote the Bible saw it pretty much the same way too. For example, they said that after the Flood Egypt and Ethiopia were both settled by the sons of Ham.

Diop:

Whence came this name Ham (Cham, Kam)? Where could Moses have found it? Right in Egypt where Moses was born, grew up and lived until the Exodus. In fact, we know the Egyptians called their country Kemit, which means “black” in their language. The interpretation according to which Kemit designates the black soil of Egypt, rather than the black man and, by extension, the black race of the country of the Blacks, stems from a gratuitous distortion by minds aware of what an exact interpretation of this word would imply. Hence it is natural to find Kam in Hebrew, meaning heat, black, burned.

Diop says that the Jews got most of the elements of their civilization from Egypt too: they came to Egypt as a small band of shepherds in the time of Joseph and lived there for 400 years. Their belief in one God, for example, goes back to that of Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt about a hundred years before Moses.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop
• Diop: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
• Ancient Egypt
  • Queen Tiye
• How black was Ancient Egypt?
• Herodotus
  • Black people according to Herodotus
• The curse of Ham

Programming Note #15

I know some people do not like when I “obsess”, a condition I have suffered from since at least age eight. Unfortunately my parents were too poor to have it treated. So fair warning: for the rest of July 2011 I will be writing mostly about Cheikh Anta Diop. In particular, I will most likely be doing a post on each of the 13 chapters of “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974). It is one of those books that people either love or hate.

As always I will make each post stand on its own so you can read just the ones that interest you.

See also:

• Cheikh Anta Diop

The Ankhesen Mié Lexicon

The Ankhesen Mié Lexicon is a continuing series on Ankhesen Mié’s blog. Here is a taste:

Drones

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

~ Anatole France

This is a term for most white Americans when discussing issues of race.  I derived it from the concept of Borg Drones being linked by a hive mind.  Drones all respond to things the same way, often verbatim.  Yet each drone (mine, not the Borg’s) insists they are an individual with thoughts untainted by their upbringing or their society.  Each considers themselves, unique, often “special”, and immune to social and familial racial conditioning.

Drones tend to focus on “agreement” where opinions are concerned.  When seeing/hearing other opinions similar to theirs, drones are either comfortable or excited and tend to point out how others agree with their thoughts, so naturally, they must be correct.  It never occurs to drones that they’ve simply been conditioned to generate the same thoughts to begin with.  In fact, they adamantly resist the notion, insisting they are each unique and special individuals; after all, all their friends and family say so.

Drones also be referred to as Lemmings or Sheeple; they can engage in “drone-speak” or “droning” (which is different from trolling, but still on the same level).

Mira’s Law

Inspired by a guest post, and most recently confirmed by a draptoresponsic patient, Mira’s Law refers to the dislike Europeans tend to feel for white Americans, which white Americans often are unaware of and have made no efforts to truly understand.  Mira’s Law also warns against treating all white-skinned humans as a monolith, for on a continent like Europe, being “white” is not a deciding factor.  Ethnic heritage, language, attitude, and country of origin are more stressed than mere skintone.

Happy Montage Thinking

This is delusional racism.  Whenever a person [read: white] goes on a tangent about how “colorblind” they are, how they believe racism is “dying out on its own” (or even go so far as to say it’s already dead), or that people just need to have more mixed babies and everything will be okay, you can practically hear the sappy music playing in their heads as they envision a peaceful, post-racial world.  They’ve skipped to the end of the movie, to the wordless montage in the sugary sweet epilogue which screams, “And they all lived happily ever after.”

People [read: white] often indulge the Happy Montage because they don’t want to talk about the darker part of the film (accidental pun…keeping it!).  They don’t want to discuss racism as it is right now.  They don’t want to examine their role in its perpetuation.  They don’t want to look at their families and communities with a more critical eye.  They just want to skip to the happy ending–which they will not see in their own lifetimes, by the way–while not actually doing anything to bring it about.  In essence, they’re basically sitting back and letting everyone else–including other white folks–do the all heavy lifting.

More

See also:

• The Ankhesen Mié Lexicon
• Posts I have done on terms that appear there: drapto, the white chamber, Rented Negroes
• The Glosario
• Abagond’s glossary

An American Family

“An American Family” (1973) was an American television series that showed the day-to-day life of the Louds, a white American upper-middle-class family of  35 Woodale Lane, Santa Barbara, California, 146 km north-west of Hollywood.

The Louds were filmed as they went about their lives from May 30th to December 31st 1971 – reality television in the true sense. It was the brainchild of television producer Craig Gilbert.

Plain old everyday life can be pretty boring, but there is much that television never shows. For example, it was the first time American television showed an openly gay person (Lance Loud, the oldest son). It showed Pat Loud, the mother, asking for a divorce – right there in front of us on television. No “Leave It to Beaver” world this.

And it showed all the little things that never get scripted, like mindless talk, trying to walk on a garden hose without falling off or licking peanut butter off a spoon.

People drive cheap American cars but the music is surprisingly good. The young people look like Neil Young and Janis Joplin or something. The middle-aged people look like they came from a liquor ad.

It was more in period than anything Hollywood has ever produced. Because Hollywood almost never gives us life as it is, but a staged experience produced by costume designers, make-up artists, script writers, best boys and the dozens of others whose names roll by at the end of the show.

That said, we see only a very carefully chosen 4% of the 300 hours filmed. Both the family and the film crew felt that the producer played up the bad and left out much of the good.

Dramatis Personae:

• Bill Loud, age 50, husband, father and businessman. He sells equipment to strip mines, so he is often on the road. He has been unfaithful to his wife for the past six years. He fears his children will become penniless layabouts.
• Pat Loud, age 44, wife and mother. A cold fish who wears large, insect-like sunglasses and always seems to be smoking. She knows her husband has been unfaithful for years. Even though he is not in love with any of the other women, it takes time and attention away from her and the children. Marriage is lonely, hollow and sexless.
• Lance Loud, age 19, son. Lives in New York. He has by far more wit and charm than any of them. He complains most people are boring.
• Kevin Loud, age 18, son. The only one who seems to be following in his father’s footsteps of becoming a businessman.
• Grant Loud, age 17, son. He does not think he should have to work five days a week.
• Delilah Loud, age 15, daughter.
• Michelle Loud, age 13, daughter.

The divorce was long in coming, though Bill thought his wife would wait till their children were somewhat older. In any case he packs his bags and leaves without protest. Only the film crew and a dog see him leave in the night in the Jaguar.

See also:

• Facebook: The Loud Family
• Their house on Google Maps: 34.448332 N, 119.692781 W
• Hollywood
• TV Tropes
• The Vast Talking Machine
• Zora Neale Hurston: What White Publishers Won’t Print
• The history of black history

South Sudan

South Sudan (2011- ) is the southern part of Sudan, which became independent on July 9th 2011. It became the 193rd country in the world and the 54th in Africa. It is west of Ethiopia and north of Uganda.

Independence came after one of the worst wars of the past 50 years: 2 million died in the worst genocide since Hitler and 5 million fled their homes (Alek Wek among them). And that in a part of Sudan where only about 8 million live. Countless others were made into slaves. It was the largest jihad in living memory.

The north and south are very different places:

1. The north is mostly Arab in language and Muslim by religion, like neighbouring Egypt, but few are Arab by blood. Most live near the Nile that winds its way through the wastelands of the Sahara.
2. In the south English and Christianity are more common, as in neighbouring Uganda to the south. Few are Muslim, some are Christians, most follow native religions. It is mostly grassland and forest.

The British, who ruled Sudan till 1956, knew this but made it into one country all the same – which broke apart into civil war before it was even independent.

War lasted from 1955 to 1972 and again from 1983 to 2005, making it Africa’s longest civil war. Peace was made by George Bush, of all people – he who famously does not care about black people. Even though the war received little press in the West, it was an issue among many of the Christians who voted for him as president.

The south has 75% of the oil of the old Sudan, but the north has the refineries to process it and the pipes that go to the Red Sea. From 2005 to 2011 the north and south equally divided the money made from the oil, but now with independence there is no deal. South Sudan still has some unused oil fields but many are owned by Total, a French oil company.

South Sudan also has gold, chromium, iron and hardwood. With its vast grasslands and fertile soil it could become a bread basket of Africa.

The government is weak. It is made up of guerrilla fighters and has few computers. Many of its tax men cannot even read.

The country is among the least developed in the world: it has few good roads and 85% cannot read. In a place where most people make their living as small-time farmers, many have been driven off their land by war.

Its northern border is still in dispute – which is partly why it does not appear yet on Google Maps. It could easily touch off another war in time.

The people are Dinka (the largest group), Nuer, Shilluk and other things. Some are Acholi, like in Uganda. Most in government are Dinka.

South Sudan does not take in the Nuba, who were also subject to genocide and jihad, who are largely Christian, and who are still fighting to the north.

See also:

• Sudan
• The genocide in Southern Sudan
• Alek Wek
• George Bush
• Ethiopia

Funkadelic: You And Your Folks, Me And My Folks

Remarks:

This song is from their 1971 album “Maggot Brain”. None of the songs on the album charted but the album itself did well. Funkadelic was headed by George Clinton and later became the Funk in P-Funk. Musically “Maggot Brain” sounds like something somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Erykah Badu.

Lyrics:

Yeah, yeah, yeah
(let me hear you say)
Yeah, yeah, yeah
(let me hear you say)
Yeah, yeah, yeah
(yeah-yeah) yeah, yeah, yeah

If you and your folks love me and my folks like
Me and my folks love you and your folks
If there ever was folks
That ever ever was poor

If you and your thing dig me and my thing
Like me and my thing dig you and your thing
And we all got a thing
Yeah, and it’s a very good thing

Ha! But if in our fears, we don’t learn to trust each other
And if in our tears, we don’t learn to share with your brother
You know that hate is gonna keep on multiplying
And you know that man is gonna keep right on dying
Yeah
Yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

The rich got a big piece of this and that
The poor got a big piece of roaches and rats
Can you get to that
Tell me where it’s at
Yeah!

Yeah, yeah, yeah
{until last two verses, under other lyrics}

Hey!
You want peace
I want peace
They want peace
And the kids need peace
There won’t be no peace

The rich got a big piece of this and that
The poor got a big piece of roaches and rats
Can you get to that
Tell me where it’s at

Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah!
Yeah, yeah

If you and your folks loved me and my folks
Like me and my folks love you and your folks
If there ever was folks
That ever ever was poor

If you and your thing dig me and my thing
Like me and my thing dig you and your thing
Then we all got a thing
And it’s a very good thing

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah