Cobb

1973. Los Angeles. Democracy Works.

Posted without further comment. 

The Other End of the End of Blackness

-- from the archives October 2012 --

This morning somebody wrote me about something I posted a decade ago on another website. It was a slanderous critique of Dinesh D'Souza describing his 'phoney half-breed superiority'. That's not an actual quote but is basically encapsulates all this character had to say about D'Souza. It got me thinking about what's up with him (some sex scandal I think has got him in the news) and what if anything people think about his 'End of Racism' now.

So it naturally made me think that there must have been somebody who thought that because a black man 'cannot get a cab' in NYC that we'd never have a black president. Considering that we've actually had a mediocrity as a black president, I wonder where all of the blackness and racism arguments have gone. So this little bit of stuff is what I pulled from the Archives. 

February 1, 2004
'The End of Blackness': American Skin
By GERALD EARLY
THE END OF BLACKNESS
Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners.
By Debra J. Dickerson.
306 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $24.

With the publication of ''The End of Blackness,'' a book not only about white racism but about black people's response to it, Debra J. Dickerson joins a growing and varied class of black public intellectuals that includes people like John McWhorter, Bell Hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Shelby Steele, Thulani Davis, Stanley Crouch, Greg Tate, Ellis Cose and Brent Staples. Their views are sufficiently different that they might be said to represent distinct factions among African-Americans and, no less relevant, speak to distinct factions of educated whites.

But ''The End of Blackness'' has another layer of significance. It is, in the end, despite its notes, index and historical consideration of its subject, largely an advice book. ''This book will both prove and promote the idea that the concept of 'blackness,' as it has come to be understood, is rapidly losing its ability to describe, let alone predict or manipulate, the political and social behavior of African Americans,'' Dickerson begins. '' 'Blackness' must be updated so that blacks can free themselves from the past and lead America into the future.'' The American reading public, black and white, loves advice books, whether from C.E.O.'s or retired athletic coaches offering bromides and thought-cliches about success, love gurus telling how to find a mate or psychologists and teachers offering tips on how to make your children smarter or better adjusted. One of the biggest business ventures in the United States, the diet industry, is nothing more than a huge advice mill. Americans, black and white, are suckers for advice because they are so inspired by the efficacy of self-improvement. Most black polemical writers of Dickerson's sort, from David Walker in his 1829 ''Appeal'' to W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1897 ''Conservation of the Races'' to Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, Amiri Baraka and Shelby Steele, whatever their politics, offer racial advice to blacks, because they have felt and continue to feel that black people, or some significant segment of them, need improvement for their own good, that black people need instruction in how to be black people of the kind the author thinks they should be. Although most black polemicists bristle at the suggestion that blacks are pathological, these books are driven by the view that the behavior and thinking that need correcting are so self-defeating as to require public censure. I find the prescriptive nature of this book and the others like it, including my own when they have been guilty of it, presumptuous and off-putting.

''The End of Blackness'' opens by criticizing blacks for saying that they don't feel American, for marginalizing themselves, for the imprisoning conformity of group racial consciousness. ''Only by daring to live as autonomous individuals with voluntary group identification, only by charting a course unconcerned with the existence of white people, only by taking responsibility for their comportment and decisions -- only then will blacks be able to achieve collective goals, assess collective penalties, award collective benefits and jockey for sociopolitical positions like fully entitled citizens.'' And the real enemy are middle-class blacks, bourgie blase blacks, as Dickerson calls them, because these are the blacks who feel ''least at home.'' These are the blacks who try to court the white attention they crave through cries of racism, who are the most afflicted by self-hatred and most deeply feel the inadequacy of being black when compared to whites, who are the norm.

The prologue gives a brief account of the origins of racism and the long history of white oppression that was finally broken by the civil rights movement. ''Thanks to the civil rights movement,'' Dickerson writes, ''black Americans are free and thriving.'' But, she continues, many blacks do not know how to live in this brave new world ''where you have no one to blame for your failures but you.'' The body of the book then proceeds as a series of head fakes. One chapter excoriates whites, their narcissism, their refusal to relinquish their privilege, their inability to see blacks as fully human: ''There is scarcely an area of American life in which blacks are not the worst off of all groups. More to the point, they are worse off for reasons that have nothing to do with either accident or simple black failure.'' Racism and structural inequity are the cause, although many blacks seem to revel in their low status because it gives them something with which to whip whites. This is followed by a chapter about blacks' inability to see themselves except as they are reflected in whites, the way they ''simply do not know who and how to be absent oppression.'' Blacks, by book's end, crave ''leadership that believes in the unlimited capacity of black talent, not the unlimited capacity of white evil. Blacks need leaders looking to the limitless future, not to the hunched-over past; leaders who are excited and hopeful, not bitter and defeated.'' The problems with this book are several and severe. It lacks nuance and balance. Politically, Dickerson wants to have her cake and eat it too, so she nods to conservatives in saying blacks need to ''do for self'' and quit worrying about what whites think of them, and nods to liberals in saying how horrible whites are and how persistent and unrelenting racism is. Her conclusion that ''blacks must look inside themselves'' is hardly novel, something that most black people hear all the time from a variety of sources within the race; it is an almost time-honored form of conservatism for blacks. The black middle class is harshly criticized as a neurotic, philistine bunch (a typical complaint of the educated, both black and white, about the middle class). But the middle class includes such a great range of people, from schoolteachers to accountants, from doctors to librarians to professional politicians. Since Dickerson shares Albert Murray's disdain for sociology and the sociological interpretation of black experience, why does she try to sound like a sociologist with sweeping, superficial generalizations about large numbers of people? About whites. About blacks. About the middle class.

How is it that whites can be so racist that whenever blacks appear on the covers of magazines the sales go down 40 to 60 percent, yet financially support and rabidly attend professional and college football and basketball, which are completely dominated by blacks? How can it be that ''many more Africanisms than blacks are aware of reside within them still, from language to comportment to musical forms,'' yet blacks ''lost their family structure, their histories, their knowledge, their religions, their customs, their cultures, their countries, their continent''? How can you be stripped, yet not stripped?

Superficialities abound. Though there is a rich history of black American travel writing about encounters with Africa, from Martin R. Delany in the 19th century to Richard Wright to Marita Golden to Eddy L. Harris in the 20th, Dickerson's section on blacks' discomfort with modern-day Africa is based on one book, Keith B. Richburg's ''Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' easy enough to condemn because the author's negative views of Africa are so unreflective and overwrought. Nor is the complexity of how blacks have seen and depicted Africa imaginatively in their literature weighed -- take Lorraine Hansberry's ''Raisin in the Sun'' or Langston Hughes's ''Big Sea'' -- or in their music, from Art Blakey to Sun Ra to John Coltrane. 

No blacks are depicted in Steven Spielberg's ''Saving Private Ryan,'' she notes, adding that no blacks were part of the D-Day invasion as infantry soldiers, then asking ''why no symbolism''? But blacks did participate, in the quartermaster corps or as the truck drivers who made up the Red Ball Express. (Spielberg hardly needed to be symbolic. Blacks were there.) Nearly 50 years before ''Saving Private Ryan'' Sidney Poitier starred in ''Red Ball Express.'' And the last dozen years have given us Spielberg's own ''Amistad'' and Edward Zwick's film about black soldiers in the Civil War, ''Glory.'' Why would Hollywood make a film about black soldiers and D-Day a half-century ago and not now is the question. Dickerson's discussion of Hollywood's depiction of the African-American soldier or blacks generally lacks context.

The problem is that the author does not know enough, has not researched enough, to write an incisive book on African-American life or American racism. If one listens to a lot of black talk radio or has some bull sessions with other blacks, nearly every gripe and observation in ''The End of Blackness'' will be familiar. One does not write a book like this. One gets over it. That is why good writers keep journals.

Gerald Early is the director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis and the author, most recently, of ''This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960's.''

 I'm a good writer and Cobb is my journal.

Racial Dialog, Privileged Rage & Failed Exchanges

Just a data point for Robin Hanson. When I was one of a large integrating group of black students at what had been a largely white prep school in 1974, I heard a lot of presumptions about 'what you people have been through' that was already part of the assumptions that got us invited to integrate in the first place.

At a high level of society where certain indignities are met with rage, invective and recourse (imagine what might happen if you called Secretary of State Hilary Clinton 'a dumb cunt'), I perceived an interesting dualism. The primary civil gesture is a kind of condescending sympathy towards those insulted. "My dad is a bank president, if somebody treated him like a nigger, heads would roll". On the other hand there is an upper class burden on becoming conduct that blacks were presumed not to assume. So our stiff upper lips were discounted in that same backhanded way. "You're actually lucky; you have no idea how hard it is to deal with men like my father." That whole slumming Bullworth vibe, and racial authenticity establishes a kind of class double standard.

I raise this because there is a seemingly permanent dissonance over matters of racism in 'high' and 'low' races because the rage, invective and recourse of the low race is privileged - and it's easy to do so when the expected prizes are faits accompli for the high race. So anytime a black man in NYC is snubbed for a cab, it's OK to complain and have this insult as representative of the pain of racisms attack on dignity and social mobility.

So long as the rage and invective don't require recourse to the very source of the high race's power, then the double standard is acceptable. And for the most part this has been the case, because the level of power deemed acceptable to a racially weighted negotiation has been relatively low. I always make mention that the SCLC once gathered 15,000 Negroes to the streets to protest inequality that was satiated by the hiring of 3 to be cashiers in a Southern drugstore. Today the same kind of legitimated 'black rage' asks for a 575 million dollar forfeiture of a pro sports team.

There is no open market dialog that sets the price of racism. Each team gins up their own numbers and makes gestures of obeisance to totems like 'Affirmative Action' or NAACP Image Awards or the word 'diversity'.

I say there are two camps in America. Those who wish for matters of justice to hold NO regard to race, and those who prefer 'social justice' with SPECIFIC regard to race. The latter camp thinks they have the set the perfect price, but they have no idea.

Trackback to Hanson
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/05/lets-talk-about-race.html/trackback

Obligatory Seriousness on Some Rich Racist Commentary

I hear that there are a couple of rich white men with problems. One of them has a problem with the Federal government that has something to do with cows. The other has a problem with a girlfriend who brings black people to his basketball games. 

There's about three things to say here. 

The first is that it doesn't take a genius to realize that America has a pretty good sense of outrage. In fact we have an outrage machine that cranks up the volume and puts such offensive commentary on blast. It also doesn't require black politics. All of this is on autopilot. Nobody is calling on black political leaders and asking for an interpretation of the facts. That is interesting to me because it means a few things that should be obvious but are not. 

1. Americans are sufficiently outraged at racist comments by big shots. Nobody gets away with it.

2. Americans understand that this sort of thing exists. Nobody is pretending that it doesn't.

3. Americans aren't particularly interested in the rarified implications, and are not seeking expert advice on what to do. 

In this regard, racism is treated by the American people like the social outrage that it is. Nothing more and nothing less. So it makes news, it aggrevates the lot of us, it gets replaced by the next big story. 

The second thing is that people are recognizing the difference between the comments of Bundy and the comments of Sterling and they rightly understand that Sterling's comments are much more offensive. Sterling, unlike Bundy is not making theories about the implications of slavery, he's just straight out saying that he doesn't want black people around. 

The third thing is that we all probably would be edified just a bit more if we did look into the rarified implications and expert advice. It's not going to change society and as with all sin, constant vigilance is required. The same thing applies for all the evils of men, including that of war. But we know that a military will sit idle when the deadly consequences of human aggression are not clear, present, drastic and immediate. It always requires wise leadership to muster the appropriate response.  Sterling wasn't lynching anyone and so he shouldn't be lynched. Our useful and correct mob sensibility on these blow-ups require expert perspective, but it doesn't change the fact that it was TMZ that broke the Sterling story. Is this is an opportunity for beer summitry, or a change in NBA ethics rules? We don't know, but somebody will. 

On that last point, we should keep in mind that every racial theorist doesn't actually know what they are talking about. We have a broad variety of experts who are actually experts from whom to draw advice. They will be versed in world history - and this outrage is not of world historical proportions. As it should be clear, there is more than enough common sense to go around.

Voluntary Negrosis & the Treachery of Black Images

Any testiment that begins with the words 'As a black man, I..' is one that should raise eyebrows of skepticism. That is not because there is something wrong with the tribes invoked, but because what follows is inevitably trying to represent something that may or may not exist. I'm not saying that blackness doesn't exist, rather I'm saying that perhaps it only exists in the confession. In other words, the only thing that is universally true about blackness is that it begins with voluntary negrosis, the conscious act of making oneself darker than they are - an action of conformity, of taking a particular fork in the road of identity, a racial construction in progress.

I understand that there is no black American cultural orthodoxy because that racial construction is always in process, often at the Peasant level. (c.f. 'ratchet'). There are recognizable forms. In music, there is R&B, Gospel, Blues, Jazz and Hiphop. Within those forms there are better and worse examples, and of course the influence of these cultural inventions is wide and deep. A lot of people get wrapped around various axels of authenticity but no one dares say "Miles Davis IS Jazz". What Mahalia Jackson sung may be the best example of Gospel, but nobody gets to say that all gospel singers since her are lesser shades of black. 

This all comes to mind in the context of the complaints of a number of black American college students managing the microaggressions that have come to give rise to their profiles in recent weeks. Today, the Kwaku network produced "I Too Am Harvard", with its hard bitten confessions. Not long before that, UCLA Law students pleaded their discomforts and receive this kind of response from the sympathetic.

There is, of course, some intellectual tradition in all of this that is not vapid or silly. That's because the tradition is written as literature. It would have been nice to see some mugshots with a bit more creativity, though I certainly wonder if the dude in the Alpha jersey isn't mocking himself all hoodified. Be that as it may, one hopes that the literary tradition can indeed survive Tumbler and YouTube as it takes its hits today by kids who think they represent. 

Obligatory Update on Race

(excerpted from some Facebooking during the MLK holiday)

I have long held that 'colorblindness is the moral equivalent of racism' but I no longer do. I have been convinced that there is a moral blindness in the selective application of racial discriminations that undermines rational discussion - a position long held by the dude at http://www.discriminations.us/

. I am also convinced that there is a continuing pathology in America to have various theories of race upheld into which new generations must be subject. Thirdly I am quite skeptical of 'social justice' which I see as little more or less than the purposeful skewing of perception by the chatting classes, or as I say, 'social justice is crowd-sourced law, the whining little sister of mob rule'. 

I think it is certainly fair to say that conservatives, in their abandonment of developing a race-specific narrative, default to an audience for whom racial matters are of diminished concern - me for example, and those audiences tend to be unreflective and nominally 'white'. Many are insensitive or even hostile to racial analysis, and I believe most of the hostility is due to an attempt to racialize responsibility for institutional racism. IE "We 'good' whites who recognize the racism of the justice system have accepted our existential racial complicity in the status quo and you bad whites have not, therefore you must accept your racial original sin and serve penance as we do. " This is clearly a racial appeal to whites to be better whites, and that is severely problematic, because the reflexive and proper response is "We 'bad' whites already paid that price with the set of X", the largest member of the set being the Civil War involving commitment unto death, which no contemporary social justice movement demands. 

Again the history of multiculturalism and the multifaceted brokering of racial discrimination treaties (affirmative action) has failed to deracialize the roles and responsibilities of citizens against racial injustice. The target of racial injustice has shrunk (vis a vis MLK's principles of racial integration) but the amount of racial fingerpointing has increased as have racialized narratives. 
On the whole our ability as a society to solve racial problems has been dealt a series of crushing blows, fortunately there is a lot less work to do. So I perceive increasing shrillness over decreasing value. 

You won't find any conservative who is displeased with the results of the Innocence Project except to the extent that its supporters find it so necessary to call conservatives racists or talk about Goldwater or Reagan or their other fetish white boys. I'm thinking of calling this "White Battle Royale" in which some whites beat up other whites with black and brown clubs.

That White Backpack

Many years ago there was a set of questions or observations put together by a researcher by the name of Peggy McIntosh. You can look her up, but the gist of McIntosh is that her 'invisible knapsack' meme made her a star in the days before people figured out how to monetize meme-creation. She ended up resenting the popularity of her meme and withdrew support from the ideas percolating around them. But she still gets a lot of credit for the phrase 'white privilege' and of course 'white male privilege'.

I just dipped into some doo surrounding one of the derivative scoldings authored by a dude named John Scalzi, a scifi writer who can be easily described as an Ohio State fan. If you don't understand anything about Ohio State fans let me try to explain. There are several things that can be said about folks from Ohio, and in my experience the best three adjectives are, 'friendly', 'provincial' and 'self-conscious'. I really don't want to get into all that. Take my word, if you can understand that Ohio State fans believe themselves at once to be the greatest and most unpretentious people in America then you have an idea of where I'm ultimately going.

Scalzi wrote a lovely set of sci-fi war stories in a set known as the Old Man's War series. I read the first and found it enjoyable but not particularly deep. Scalzi's protagonist is existentially simple - like a second string lineman for the Buckeyes. You know exactly what to expect in the wholesome department. But over at his blog he decided to block for Peggy McIntosh by writing an essay with a videogame analogy called 'Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is'. I once knew a guy who used to play the role of a white boy. This meant that he spent a bit of extra energy convincing people he thought needed convincing that even though he was a white boy, he could X. I leave defining the full set of X to you so you can explore your own ideas by offering one member of the set: eat spicy foreign food. 

Currently, I am under the influence of this bit of studied wit about post-literacy. I find it brilliant as it underscores what I have noticed about failures of modernity in the West and the increasingly serious farce of multicultural education. Additionally, I sense that this ties in with the higher level debate about modernity itself, perhaps expressed best as Lyotard vs Giddens, but I really don't have time for all that. Still I cannot deny the influence as I continue to find Dickens fascinating and occasionally refine my Peasant Theory. 

So I respond to Scalzi: Imagine a game called 'White Male Battle Royale' in which white males were thrown into a ring and forced to compete for a panel of judges. Scalzi emerges as champion with his essay (which tells you something about the judges) and raises his fists in triumph, but not too high. There I sit watching this channel on television and I change it, wondering why I watched it in the first place.

Scalzi did address who the hell he was supposed to be writing that essay for in a subsequent follow up, but that didn't seem particularly compelling. On the whole all of this white privilege backpacking, repacking and unpacking seems to be as pointless and significant, boring and compelling as Ohio State football.  Or football. Or sports. Or entertainment. 

It's difficult for me to assess what the point of making Scalzi's point is, or actually the point of my critique. Perhaps both of us have too much time on our hands.

Nah. That's too easy an exit. What I mean to say is that Scalzi is wasting time on a morally self-congratulatory mission which involves foolish white guilt of the sort that actually undermines modern society by advancing arguments about identity which have nothing whatsoever to do with the presence or absence of justice. 

Related articles

The Filter Bubble Problem

White Privilege: What Can You Do?

Artificial Black Scarcity

This morning I'm listening to Natalie Cole and remembering that both Stephanie Mills and Ren Woods launched their singing careers through their association with the Broadway production of The Wiz. Later, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russel, Richard Pryor and of course Diana Ross burnished their careers in association with this same old American standard, blackified version. 

Whenever I listen to black music of the Seventies (including that which I just immersed myself finally having viewed Jamie Foxx' extraordinary portrayal in the film 'Ray'), I am reminded of how it emphasized the 'natural'. Very much like with Ray Charles, Earth Wind and Fire hit upon an innovative combination of more basic Negro styles and combined them with state of the art recording techniques into something nobody had ever heard before. The early EWF, and their live performances require my best ear to hear the fundaments of the blues. But peppered through all of this modern combinatorial is the gruff punctuation of huffs, puffs, grunts, wails, screams, moans and groans. It seems at times that they were almost afraid to leave any air dead for mere virtuoso instrumentalism unless it was a bass break. 

It couldn't be more simple then for all this ceiling bashing breakthrough talent to redefine American culture. The ambition had to be expressed in every dimension, and the cultural window planks could not stop zombie black music from breaking into the big house and infecting everyone with big funky bites of rhythm and blues. It's rather easy to see in retrospect, and we are greatly fortunate that the extraordinary shoulders of those talented pioneers were more than broad and strong enough to bear the scrutiny. But was it our Black?

It sounds to me that Natalie Cole is singing to me. But surely when I first heard her I thought she was singing to black men in the same way surely Marvin Gaye was singing to black women. It was nearly impossible to consider that they were 'universal' artists. No, we were sure that they were our heroes alone. It wasn't love, it was black love - the kind of love the whole world was missing until we showed 'em. We alone were keeping it real and the rest of the world's pulsations were pallid imitations.. But now we can't be so sure. I certainly am not going to assert that all that emoting was much more than what got recorded, not that it was what the Negro was or a complete well-balanced accounting of his culture. 

So it occurs to me that we black Americans latched onto what was made available through markets and appropriated it as our own, thinking it rare and precious and unique - even knowing it was the tip of our own iceberg of culture. Nothing burst this wide open so much as the advent of post-soul, when finally my generation was able to listen to our own music. Hiphop expressed everything else left out that soul, jazz, blues, r&b and gospel didn't cover, and the lid was off for being cool and proper. And still, hiphop reflected that same artificial scarcity. Hiphop did what it could - but it was what got recorded, it wasn't a complete well-balanced accounting of black post-soul culture. 

The other day I heard (in GTA5's Los Santos) NWA's Appetite for Destruction, and that still sounds to me like the bones upon which rap is built. My colleagues in black cultural criticism might find my opinion reductive but it seems to me that amongst the other black styles of music, along with gospel, hiphop has said the least. In other words, by being very specific and thus being rare its influence is overrated as compared to the breadth of actual black American experience and culture. No other form of black American music has been so specific about its blues. Snoop has got it down to an area code in the LBC, and a generation of producers shout out to each other by name. 

Ultimately it is the test of time which will show what matters and is representative, but I think that is something that the vast majority of commercial cultural production does not serve. The rarity of the good stuff does not make it literature, and the artificial scarcity of black cultural productions should not necessarily make black Americans special beneficiaries. We've just cherished any drink in the desert, that doesn't make it fine wine.

I feel very particular to Ren Woods and Courtney Pine and Shinehead. There are many musical artists who spoke to me uniquely and it felt like a  black thing and then they disappeared. Who can say how universal any of that was? 

 

Racism Uber Alles

It is generally and falsely assumed that anything that makes black folks happy stands as evidence of a good America. Which is to say specifically that there is a miscalculation in the judgment that the suppression of racism surpasses all other moral concerns relating to black Americans. Since it is assumed (again falsely) that black cultural influence has always been suppressed because of racism, that any increase in black cultural influence is therefore evidence of the remission or defeat of racism. Since hiphop is everywhere it must be a good thing - and this goes without regard to the moral content of hiphop or the moral character of black hiphop artists, or black politicians, or black athletes, or black anything.

In this regard black success becomes an end in and of itself, the (false) presumption being that America's racism is so violent and evil that any success of any black American is worth any cost. And it is this fetish that the total value of any black American must necessarily be tied to the question of the elimination of racism that doubly binds the standing of any black American with race in our society.

This is an unquestioned assumption of both the group solipsism of the Talented Tenth and the white liberal Left.

--

I think this is a neat distillation. 

Vision Circle Summit

A while back, several folks and I started a group blog called Vision Circle. I think we did a pretty good job handling a number of issues we felt were of weight and moment for black politics and culture. We retired the blog after several years, but it still exists with all of its comments, here within the Cobb family of blogs hosted by our good friends at Typepad.com. 

A couple months ago, Spence contacted me to ask if I've heard anything from the legendary Prometheus6. I had not. Rumors were that he was in poor health. His blog was dark. Well we know he's alive and may very well be well. But he's not blogging any longer. Neither is LaShawn Barber. I haven't heard from George Kelly in a while.

So maybe we should have a Vision Circle Summit. And I'm thinking that for a couple weeks, until we are all bloviated out, we should talk about the past, present and future. Maybe make a few predictions, exchange ideas, give personal and professional updates, shoot the shit and basically make it into the black online Davos. Bet we could make some ducats and some impressions.

So here is a list of people I think would make for a healthy mix of some of the most notable black bloggers I've ever met. Who do you think should be on? What should we talk about? (And I'm not trying to load up the list with people I know, just the people who most impressed me... well I got to know most of them)

• Earl Dunovant - Prometheus Six
• George Kelly - Negrophile
• Lester K. Spence - Vision Circle, Blacksmythe
• Jimi Izrael - NPR
• Kevin Ross - The Kevin Ross Show
• Ed Brown - Vision Circle
• Del Gines - Adequate Defense
• Shay Riley - Booker Rising
• Oliver Willis - Oliver Willis
• Craig Nulan - Vision Circle, Subrealism
• EC Hopkins
• LaShawn Barber

I don't think you can say a whole lot about the black blogosphere without having consulted this group of individuals. I'm certainly out of date and I will amend this list to include people I forgot. So please don't get all wanky on me. Do you think it's a good idea as a media event? If you're on this list, please weigh in. If you're not on the list but have access to people on the list who may not drop by here on the regular, let 'em know. I'm going to try to pub this up myself and see what kind of traction I get. 

The New Transgressive Fungibles

About 18 years ago, Charles Isbell came up with a theory about why people who can't deal with black individuals ask about *your* opinion about the same list of black people. I wrote about it here:

http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/debunk/fungibles.htm

But over the past ten years or so, this stupidity has been replicated by a rear guard of black race men, and aped in the general population. What's different is that this time it's about criminals, reprobates, ne'er do wells and knuckleheads. The formula is the same. I give you a name, and you tell me if you respect or disrespect said person, and then I make a judgment about your blackness based upon your answer.

Here are, as best I can think up at the moment the new bad boys. And I might as well go back in time a bit, because some of those still creep up.

Trayvon Martin
Trayvon Martin is the new king of the NTFs because he 'represents' young 'at-risk' black males. Notice how 'males' has been used, like zoo specimens. Anyway, the politically correct answer is that you should believe that what happened to him could happen to anybody, because his situation is just like anybody's (appropriately young and black and male)

You know what? It gives me a headache just repeating the awful logic of these identity politics. I'll just settle for the names. You know who they are. And of course I know who they are because I probably had to write about this crap before.

• Shaquanda Cotton
• Michael Vick
• Sylvester Johnson
• Sean Bell
• Stanley Tookie Williams
• Mumia Abu Jamal
• The Jena Six
• Devin Brown
• Stanley Miller

So I carefully picked out these stories and all of them have their nuance, and in the past 90 minutes of doing that, I've calmed down a bit. There isn't much to say these days as I'm much more disengaged from the thrash of political news. But there remains that simple connection - some people have decided that it is there business to stay put, even when they know they're in a bad place. OK... this is another old argument, let me give it to you this way.

The Great Migration.

If you live in a state that was a slave state, a state that lost the Civil War and you complain about racism, then you are really embracing the culture of race and racism. The same thing goes for economics and the ghetto. Of course there are no jobs in the ghetto, that's why they call it the ghetto. Any man's first responsibility is to his family, and a man who knowingly lives in a poison environment who cannot remove his children from that environment is a failure as a man. It America, the threshold is fairly low for getting out of Dodge. So get out.

 

The Next Mr. Tibbs

Apparently, there is a 'superstar' cardinal in the running to become the next Pope. His name is Cardinal Peter Turkson. And since there is a sizeable Progressive black American contingent here still doing some thinking about such things, he represents the next Head Negro In Charge. But like many other black heroes, he is a hero not because he has done anything in particular, but that generally speaking, he's the boss over white people. There has been a running joke and brag that is somewhere between 30 and 500 years old about who white people's 'worst nightmare' is. You may recognize "He's *your* President" as another variation of this joke. 

In order to pin an intellectual handle on this concept, I'm going to overload the previous handle of 'The Tibbs Threshold'. You see, there is this famous American movie set in the Jim Crow South, or perhaps just after the beginning of its decline, starring Sidney Poitier - a gentleman of distinction of the sort you only seem to get in James Bond movies today. And Poitier represents Authority and in the process of solving a homicide becomes all sorts of white people's worst nightmare.. etc. Once I invented a concept called the Tibbs Threshold - which was necessary for me while I engaged the dubious occupation of amateur race man. The idea of the Tibbs Threshold is that some white people will insult black men without recognizing that he might have sensibilities developed enough to be insulted. This is essentially how I feel any time someone tries to give me a pound. I don't do dap, and I don't like being called by my first name. "But I thought you were a revolutionary brother, down with the post-colonial struggle." No. 

At any rate, the significance of any Tibbs figure, be he Barack Obama, Derrick Bell, Thabo Mbeki or Reginald Lewis is that he is a sort of unimpeachable source of black power and is a real authority over matters for which black Americans have been underrepresented, ignored or barred. And of course there are always efforts to associate this man with the people. Now of course this doesn't always work. Lots of these would-be role models, heroes and power proxies aren't actually capable or even interested in becoming a champion of the common man. But by definition, that is what a clergyman is supposed to be all about. The leader of the Catholic Church must certainly be about that - so the probability that Turkson would be for the people is relatively high.

But who are Turkson's people? There is where the racial expectations of black Americans are likely to be dashed, raising all kinds of interesting questions back and forth. And that's about all I'm ready to speculate about at this point. 

A Rude Question About Gun Control, Mental Health & Race

When the Beltway Snipers, two black men, perpetrated their mass murder, America said, yes obviously they are crazy and it was just their insanity that made them evil killers. It has nothing to do with the dysfunction of American society. But when some white kid perpetrates mass murder, America thinks there must be something wrong with all of us - we need to control our guns because none of us can be trusted.

Well the reason is obvious. If mass-murderous rage can happen in a nice white community, there's obviously something wrong with all of American society. But if black people do some mass murder, well that's not really our civilization, our fault or our problem. Blame it on those crazy Negroes. They're special. 

John Allen Muhammed? Psychopath - completely unhinged, nothing he does reflects upon what America is about. Let's put this maniac under the jail as soon as possible. Insane. Evil. Guilty. Case Closed. 

Adam Lanza? - Well, he had some mental health challenges. We need to control guns and help people with mental illness. His story illustrates how America needs to get better. We ought to even reconsider the whole Second Amendment to the Constitution. 

Now say something. 

 

 

National Socialist Civil Rights

This morning, as every morning, I woke up with a song in my head. On August 27th, that song was Deuchland Uber Alles. Part of it, I think had to do with the fact that I went to bed last night watching the Motor Trend 2012 Driver's Car Award which went to the new Porsche 911 Carrera S. Or maybe it was the Olympics. Or maybe it was the fact that my youngest daughter is now reading about WW1 (All's Quiet). Either way, the granduer of the song, and my growing fondness for Mahler (starting with #5 of course) provoked an interesting question. 

If Germany had won WW2, would black Americans have greater or fewer civil rights by now? 

In part, the rhetorical question seeks to debunk the racial qua racial aspect of complaints against racism. Racism doesn't exist because whites are white. It exists because whites are politically racist. It isn't about one's 'aryan' qualities that makes one more or less racist, rather about ones need for a theory of race in politics and government. 

That in turn raises the question of whether or not the extermination of Jews as part and parcel of the plan of the Third Reich was an ultimate goal, or an enabler, or both. Was it a domestic question or not? I'm not sure of the answers to these questions even though I did read, some time ago, the book Fatherland. 

But tangential to the direct question is whether or not the UK would have fragmented & what the character of the British we Americans would be fond of, which goes back to how much of the global order we now know and take for granted would have emerged under the triumphant but exhausted Third Reich. Would Hitler have initiated his own Marshall Plan? Was Vichy France actually so terrible? Is it conceivable that the Germany we have today, which is by all appearances kinder, gentler, more reasonable and civilized would be similar under the National Socialists? What differences in European Socialism, or the sort Barack Obama seeks to establish as a Neoliberal Social Democrat today would be evident as the Third Reich evolved? These are all variations of the question of whether or not Hitler's fascism would have survived and scaled in the post-war era. Surely the Japanese, holding out as long as they did, would not have capitulated as Axis partners and their influence would have been served as well, in the post-war era - the Italians, not so much.

Ultimately, it is a question of the ways in which, philosophically, National Socialism itself regards the citizen and what levels of provisional citizenship Germany would have given to Americans, and much of that depends upon what level of recognitions Americans would have demanded of themselves.

It might be argued that the American defeats in Korea and Vietnam generated a new kind of abashed unity among Americans, and that such a defeat in WW2 would have all Americans demanding the most rights possible for all Americans under German rule. It could also be argued that given any opportunity for advanced rights under a German system, American whites would gladly accept second (or third) class citizens for all American ethnics the Germans bothered to classify. I find it difficult to believe, without researching the matter, that triumphant Germans would leave the matter open to interpretation. There most definitely would be classes of citizens in the Global Third Reich, and you would be held to them.

It is that notion of the Teutonic persnickety factor that suggests to me that whatever rights were granted to the American Negro, he would have them in short order and have little more than that in the long term. And so that is my position. Now what exactly might those rights be? Would they have been enough? Would we have been satisfied? How effective could any protest against them be in the short term, in the long term? And so where would we be today?

Now here's where the question gets a lot more tricky and interesting. Considering the status and tone of the debate on race today, and especially with the particular significance given by writers like T. Coates at the Atlantic about latent racial cultural politics in America:

What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism—rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness. 

What are we to make of the inevitable(?) progress in anti-racist politics? In other words, if black Americans understood white supremacy so well, is there anything at all so different about the white supremacy of the Third Reich, of Jim Crow of Apartheid that would have disabled the sort of progress we have seen in America? Would the Black Panthers, MLK and Malcolm X sufficed? Would black America have come up with the right formula no matter who the white overlords were and how they manifested their dominance? I don't see it difficult to imagine black and white resistance against Nazis building, as it were, a second Underground Railroad - a different kind of Civil Rights movement. On the other hand, it's also not so difficult to imagine a horde of white American Nazi sellouts led by the like of Charles Lindbergh. You may feel free to speculate.

On Race Traitor

I hung out a little over at Dean Esmay's joint and said..

I'm talking about a formal movement started by Tim Wise. The basic motto was 'Treason to race is loyalty to humanity', but something of the ugly presumption was that whites had more to lose and more to gain by becoming traitors to their race. The multicultural angle bought into the idea of the term 'African American' = cultural whereas 'black American' = racial. And the intended target of this sort of multiculturalism was the undifferentiated white person who has unconsciously subjugated their ethnic roots to become white. 'How The Irish Became White' being the seminal text in this matter. So the Race Traitors and Tim Wise rode this angle on the premise that if you *ever* identified yourself as white instead of 'German American' then you were part and parcel of a racist conspiracy to demonize every white ethnicity in the Klan era. In other words, in order to become a 'real' American, someone in your family had to pass Klan muster around that time in the 20s, and nothing essentially has changed since then except that you are now unconsciously white. All of your frustrations with what America has become stem from your inability to rescue any authentic cultural value from the ethnicity you have disabused. So if you, mr whiteboy, were authentically multicultural, then you'd be just 'un-American' enough to understand where all the other 'un-Americans' are coming from. Thus your duty to a post-racial world is...blah blah culture.. blah blah. recognize other culture.. blah.

The problem with all of this is that it runs afoul of the premises of modernism and equality *without* regard to race and culture - some fundamental tenets of the idea of nationalism. But this problem gets ignored from the Race Traitor POV because American nationalism has contained so much racism. IE that 'true' nation has yet to be born..etc the melting pot melted white and boiled all the authentic flavor away.

This makes for a moral component to cultural identity which is precisely the goop on the bottom of every multiculturalist shoe. It requires a very tight parsing between race, identity, culture, morality and citizenship - a mix that two decades of American Studies *still* hasn't worked out. In the end their fundamental contradiction is with the Constitutional implication and legal explicits of Civil Rights Law. To wit, we are supposed to be equal *without regard* to all the identity parameters. Multiculturalists must say we are equal *with special regard* to all the identity parameters. And so they are stuck with the obvious flaws, like it's ok to say that you hate women if you are a gay man.

Ellis Cose: The End of Anger

As Black As A President Gets

Back when I was a baby, there was some controversy over the Irish Catholicism of Candidate Kennedy. I didn't participate in that sort of thing, obviously, but I heard enough about it so that it was a big deal. Eventually, Kennedy was shot, and so finally was his brother Robert. I suspect that if I read whatever the most notable Irish newspaper in America at the time, I would hear all over the editorial section how blatantly anti-Irish it all was. And the chorus says 'huh?'

I do read the headlines from The Root every day, and they serve to remind me of a number of things. Primarily however they remind me that the American Left is at odds with itself with regard to its multiculturalist principles and priorities. That comes out as frustration with its racial narrative and the actual way that successful ethnics express their power in America. 

America is a melting pot, but only the Civil War made it hot enough to melt Africans into citizenship. The Civil Rights Movement, often interpreted as a grass roots revolution, demonstrated a different kind of heat that melted glass ceilings and second-class citizenship. But between you and me, it was the triumph of Thurgood Marshall's legal practice and that of his amicus partners.  I've always expressed my interpretation of the progress of the African in America as one of human rights to civil rights and continuing on towards social power. But I am rather convinced these days that there are only civil rights in law and the rest requires old fashioned clout of the sort that is never arrayed for the masses outside of revolution. In other words, the only people who get 100% Civil Rights - the only kind of rights there are, are the rich and powerful. Everybody else gets a gentleman's C, and as such they follow the prerogatives of class, education and general human fitness. Nevertheless certain aspects of these rights and privileges accrue through the example of those who amass social capital, of which African Americans have a goodly share, and quite frankly have enjoyed since society girls started dancing Uptown. You could ask Sir Duke or Marion Anderson if they were still alive. 

None of that changes the fact of the Black Power Struggle which always and everywhere refused the very idea of assimilation. America is no melting pot to them, but a lumpy salad and they like it lumpy, with a particularly tart flavor of relativist salad dressing called multiculturalism. But everybody knows a black olive is fundamentally different from egg whites... 

You must keep this in mind when reading contemporary accounts of the complaints of the so-called 'African American' and discussions of 'race' attending such debate. I was reminded of this starkly last week as I tuned in to some of my old favorite reggae albums, notably that of Steel Pulse. Their music provides a very useful insight. 

 

I won't belabor the point of the following lyrics:

They took us away captivity captivity
Required from us a song
Right now man say repatriate repatriate
I and I patience have now long time gone
Father's mothers sons daughters every one
Four hundred million strong
Ethiopia stretch forth her hand
Closer to God we Africans
Closer to God we can
In our hearts is Mount Zion
Now you know seek the Lion
How can we sing in a strange land
Don't want to sing in a strange land no
Liberation true democracy
One God one aim one destiny

Except to point out that they come from an album entitled True Democracy. If you ask a certain type of black American if they are patriotic you will find that they are, contingent on America's ability or willingness to produce True Democracy. I leave it to your curiosity to determine what degree of multicultural salad dressing that is, or more pointedly if there is sympathy with Marcus Garvey, Franz Fanon or Black Liberation Theology. 

That is a very critical question that must be pointedly raised when certain assumptions about 'the' black polity's satisfaction with the purported black agenda of Barack Obama. I understand him very well to be exactly the sort who like me, loves to play the dub version (without lyrics) of that Steel Pulse song, (yes it is very popular). Unlike me, I happen to think Barack Obama would enjoy tweaking our democracy towards the 'True' in service of a lumpier multiculturalism. 

The Washington Post's editorial by Frederick Harris reflects the disappointment anyone in search of 'True Democracy' must have with real political power in America. Him say:

After winning office, such race-neutral politicians don’t normally embrace issues and positions that black voters might prefer. Instead, the imperatives of reelection take over. To maintain their winning coalitions, these politicians usually need to govern in a racially neutral manner as well. (Black Americans understand this: In the 2008 ABC News-USA Today-Columbia University Black Politics Survey, nearly half of all black respondents believed that African Americans must play down their racial identity to get ahead in the United States.)

Obama has followed this pattern. During the 2008 campaign, the most significant moment when race hit the national stage was when controversy broke out over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forcing Obama to deliver a much-heralded speech on race in Philadelphia. During his presidency, racial discussions have been largely limited to his reactions to unexpected public debates, such as the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

In theory, these two episodes offered opportunities for Obama to discuss reforms to the criminal justice system — an issue he’d raised early in his campaign — but instead, he limited his response to tamping down potential racial conflicts, then quickly moving on.

I take this complaint as one typical of the racially minded who can never be satisfied that America is talking enough about race - when the fact of the matter is they themselves can never shutup about race. 

But I saw all this coming back when Obama proved his charm to the American electorate years ago. All of his black politics were a fiction, and then he made all black politics into a fiction - both the traditional and the newly opportunistic. Because it was all about Barack Obama, not about any real continuation of 'The Struggle'. Nevertheless, Obama played the right background music, gave fist bumps onstage and did those things that suited the styles of the revolutionaries and radicals. A suit he wore very well. I believe my characterization of him was 'Barbara Boxer in a black man suit', which is to say a typical Lefty American with no real loyalties but to the prerogatives of Left rhetoric as usual and win, win, win, elections. His agenda was indistinguishable from that of John Edwards basically until Shepard Fairy made the famous poster. And then he went on to raised more money in his campaign than any man in American history.

I understood, as much as I found Obama to be disagreeable, that he would not paint the White House black and that he would fit, one way or another, into the President Suit - that giant robot that says Made in America and Leader of the Free World with the stars and stripes on its chest. And in several ways he has done so admirably. But some fraction of his black electorate has reason to be disappointed in themselves for following a racial line that turns out not to be the doctrine they were expecting. And thus they have to be asked about their definitions of True Democracy.

Well actually they really don't, because if Barack Obama ain't black enough for you, then perhaps you take blackness not only too seriously, and in dubious directions. But the real news is that the next US President of African descent will have much less to prove about his blackness or the color of his skin indicating something about 'race relations.'

You see, the Civil Rights Movement is over. It is as over in 2012 as the Civil War was over in when those society girls were getting their Charleston on up in Harlem. We are fast approaching the day when all Civil Rights Movement veterans will be as dead as Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps Steven Speilberg or Clint Eastwood will direct the movie that has the last word on Thurgood. I'd like to see that movie.  And if the idea that it won't be Spike Lee makes you uncomfortable - well then you just peed your own pants on that one, brother. And every day we will bury with another layer of abstraction those stories that retain their racial purity, as if only Africans can tell the story of Ocean Hill - Brownsville, only gays of Stonewall, only Chicanos of the Zoot Suit Riots. Because it will be America's history, and Americans will only tell themselves the stories that they feel comfortable with. That's not because the truth doesn't matter so much, but because race doesn't matter so much.

When the truth is told, that's what America wants. 

 

Up Yours, Mighty Race

The Baby Boom isn't dead. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes not. 

Like most of the people slightly older than me, I thought the Space Race was a thrilling time and I picked up the usual compliment of values and heroes. Like the Boomers, I have lamented the failure of vision and see no flying cars or colonies on the Moon. I have lamented the lame days of the 80s when American Muscle cars disappeared from the planet - enough to make Knight Rider a superstar. But unlike Boomers, especially those that don't get the 'Information Superhighway'. I know where the energy of all that inspiration has gone. It has gone into my generation through different metaphors, like Star Wars and video games, and come out different and more powerful. I never forget the inspiration and the original vision, but I don't mistake the different shape and form of today's reality for failure. No matter how brilliant Kubrick may have been, the future of computing was never HAL 9000. 

Whenever I hear somebody older than me (and I'm 50) talk about how many race problems we have in America, I know immediately that we are hearing the voice of some pesky Boomer demanding his flying car. Another clue is the phrase 'post-racial America'. 

A thoughtful reader has reminded me that Frank Rich might be exactly the kind of bummed out Boomer missing his racial utopia. Consider the following litany of complaint ailing our poor critic's conscience, and presumeably that of our nation:

Just a short list would include: the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge; the hysterical tea-party rally against health-care reform that showered obscenities on black congressmen entering the Capitol; the ousting of the African-­American Department of Agriculture worker Shirley Sherrod after she was ­libeled as a racist; the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia; the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida; and, this month, the protest of more than 40 percent of West Virginia Democratic-primary voters, who pulled the lever for an obscure white federal-­prison inmate rather than endorse a second run for the incumbent president of their own party. Last week brought the pièce de résistance: the Times revelation of a proposed super-PAC TV commercial that would slime Obama as pretending to be a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” 

and then finally

I still remember seeing A Raisin in the Sun as a white middle-class kid in 1961, a few months after the Kennedy inaugural, when it played the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., on tour. It was just as Martin Luther King was bringing his gospel to the nation. For an 11-year-old attending a (de facto) segregated public-school system in the nation’s capital, it was an awakening to the unreconstructed apartheid America all around me. Anyone of any race who remembers that America knows just how epic a difference the civil-rights movement made in sweeping so much of it away. The actual lives of many, if hardly all, black Americans have improved immeasurably in those 50 years.

What about 'Blues for Mister Charlie'? Didn't he see that play too? Or how about 'The Colored Museum'? Or ar the only plays that have anything significant to say about race bound to be that old sentimental favorite? 

I happen to be blessed with the curse of having read at least 50 books by black authors over the past 20 years. My sentimental favorite is 'Drylongso' by Gwaltney. The premise and proof of this book is that black Americans see their situations very well and do so continuously with a very clear understanding of their individual predicaments. The implication of this is that for the purposes of justice and the general welfare, there needn't be great orators, politicians, speechifiers, playwrights or their critics. 

Think about it. If you were writing about computers in 1961 and you cared about equality, you might be concerned that the government would create some Colossus or WOPR to take the planet to the brink of nuclear war - something no black Americans wanted. Today, 50 years later, black Americans have more compute power in their pockets than Neil Armstrong had on the moon, and they play chess better than HAL 9000. That's because the vision of the future and the nature of social reality is in the hands of the people, not so much in the hands of great orators, etc. 

There are not flying cars. But a car has gone faster than the speed of sound, and there are cars that parallel park themselves and there are styles of automobiles that reflect the specific and uniques cultural tastes of some black Americans. 

Like many Boomers, I had some trouble thinking past '2001'. For decades we thought of that year as 'the future' and we all through we knew how it would be shaped. But we were as wrong as the Japanese filmmakers of Godzilla were about the effects of nuclear tests at sea. We were as wrong as the animators of the Bugs Bunny era were about household robots that looked like toasters with their own arms and four-fingered hands. We were as wrong as Edison was about DC electrification of the country. 

But let's talk about race shall we? 

My parents don't. They've done their share, and as black parents they stand pretty much in awe of what has transpired. I speak as the son of a mother who dodged bricks thrown at her when she was pregnant, protesting restrictive housing covenants in Los Angeles County. Something far less odious than Jim Crow. I speak as the son of a father arrested and thrown in jail for dating a white girl in New Haven, CT. I've known what they think about race for my entire life, a conversation that has never been difficult to have, or require the ministrations of a Broadway production. I speak as the nephew of one of the first black stewardesses in the American airline industry, and as the nephew of a college president.  I speak as the brother of a young man who died in police custody. I speak as the brother of a man who is a sworn police officer. My black family has experienced a lot of the things we like to talk when we talk about race and a lot of things we don't like to talk about when we talk about race. 

I have the choice to abstract these experiences into that narrow kind of plus and minus calculation we like to use when we talk about race in America. But since I know, like all reasonably unsentimentally thoughtful people know, race is a fiction - a narrative kept alive by people who want to believe something about race and have some idea how things ought to be when it comes to race. I'm tempted to say that I have no idea how things ought to be when it comes to race, but I have my druthers. In fact, thinking about race is as easy to me as thinking about sin and I understand very well what a lack of moderation in thinking about sin turns you into.  So on the whole, it's very clear that you take race like you take sin, like you take war. Which is to say, you bury the dead and you move on.  

I am not stunned that wars end. I am not amazed that the future happens.  But here is Frank Rich:

There has been change on the American playing field of race since Inauguration Day 2009—not so much for the better or the worse, but a shift into a kind of twilight zone where the nation’s racial conversation has moved from its usual gears of intractability, obfuscation, angry debate, and platitudinous sentimentality to the truly unhinged. It’s as if everyone can now say, well, that’s that, we’ve elected our first African-American president, we can pat ourselves on the back for doing so, and, with that noble and historic accomplishment in the bank, we will sign on to sideshows ranging from a Herman Cain stunt presidential run to a malicious jihad mounted by a right-wing hit man in Los Angeles, Andrew Breitbart, to destroy Sherrod, an obscure federal worker in Georgia. You’d think Obama’s victory gave the entire country permission to act out like the racial brawlers ofClybourne Park.

There is something unhinged about detatching the narrative about race from its traditional boundaries of 'civil discourse' to the kind of sideshow freakorama it takes on these days. I think two things about that. The first is that Rich, among his Boomer peers, remains bound to articles of faith about race that were set in stone by simple American conventions that are passe and were never quite welded to sound philosophy. And the second is that the unreality of race - its essential Orwellian nature has made all civil discourse about it plainly absurd. These thoughts reinforce each other when taken in the historical context of the Negro Problem and the international attention it once commanded and now no longer deserves. If Herman Cain is a joke, perhaps it is because Thurgood Marshall had to be so serious. But in Thurgood's light, Barack Obama is a joke as well. Perhaps a more sophisticated joke, of the sort that gets giggles of the sort reserved for New Yorker cartoons, but a cartoon nonetheless. For how could this, the administration of the NDAA and secret B-52 bombings, er drone assassinations, be considered serious in contrast to the civil libertarian standards of Justice Marshall? All these jokes are acceptable because there is no deadly or world historical subtext. No great Communist conspiracy is attempting to turn the Negro against America in any Cold War context. No great Pan African Summit awaits great black American keynote speakers about the post-colonial future. Skip Gates is no WEB DuBois. He's just another Harvard professor, and that's all he needs to be. So we don't need to think about him, his predicament or his predictions do we?

Speaking of which, Toni Morrison won her Nobel prize in literature 19 years ago. How many of her books do you suppose Trayvon Martin read? I happen to be one of those black Americans who tends to think a great deal more about our Morrisons than our Martins, more about our Churchills than our chavs. And I recognize that it is outside the narrative for a black American to be inspired by Winston Churchill or to use the term 'chav'. Then again I'm one of those folks that Gwaltney was talking about. I write my own words. I'm invested in the idea that my individuality matters, no matter what whomever is scribbling elsewhere about the significance of the sacking of this or that petty bureacrat or how fair or foul ethnic insults get.

I suddenly was attacked by the idea of the single word I've banned from this website being amplified in a sort of twist on the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. There is that assumption that if the white person turns up the volume dial high and hard enough that the black pain is inevitable. It's not the content that hurts, but the ridiculous volume. The narrative on race has always and ever been noise. The truth is in millions of lives who neither fit the profile, nor the audience for the utopian dreams of yesteryear. How do I get through life without a racial discourse? How does anyone?

I hear they're making plays about race on Broadway. I wonder if any line from it will ever compete with Marcus Garvey who said around the time my great-grandparents died, "Up you mighty race, accomplish what you will."  What if we had and nobody noticed? I suppose we couldn't be called a race any longer could we?

 

Baubles, Bangles & Fields Medals

I wondered when at last it would happen. But somebody decided to take Derbyshire up on his assertion that the fact of no black Fields Medalist is 'civilizationally ...' something. Significant, I think was his word. Well it turns out the Fields Medal has something to do with mathematics, and mathematics has something to do with civilization, therefore..

Sine qua non is perhaps the logical cliche that Derbyshire was attempting to dog whistle, wink wink, nod nod. Insults and insinuations don't have to be logically precise, and sly implications are part of the joke but Derbyshire's syllogism doesn't parse. I leave it to you as an exercise.

Now it's time for my dog whistle. Two words. Dick Feynman. 

There is a community of black folks out there who would pay attention and would be genuinely proud of the author and I'm almost one of them. In my race man days, I would always cite some black American mathematician at the U of Chicago who corrected Edward Teller's homework although he was not specifically invited to be on the Manhattan Project. But all such proving is unnecessary unless you are racialist in the first place - which is that you believe the acts of the one reflect on the capacities of the many and therefore the illogic of the enemy of the many.

On the other hand it's possible that by citing examples of racist discrimination you mean to suggest that it is racism and only racism that keeps the other man down. Fortunately the author doesn't make the logical error of citing a lack of proportional representation as significant because that too fails serious scrutiny. 

It doesn't present itself as a compelling question to me to find the exact person who convinced me that in order to undermine the fallacies and immorality of racial reasoning, one must behave *as if* the proper actions will make for the proper environment. But I know this to be true - it is as axiomatic as any profession. And so black apologetics remains to me, something of a pedantic exercise riddled with futility. 

(Full Disclosure)
Two weeks ago I was reminded by the presence of an old clunker automobile with a Harvard sticker of the snide kind of statement that would be. It was something I always wanted to have. I grew up thinking that the coolest job in the world was to be a tenured professor of philosophy at Harvard. The man who helped me believe that was Dr. Alfred Ligon.  

Suicide: Erasing White Privilege Since 1994

Deaths by Suicide By Race Los Angeles County, 1994 - 2003   Race   All Races   White   Black Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* Suicides Rate* 2003 727 8 442 12 55 6 163 4 65 5 2002 727 8 401 11 72 8 171 4 81 6 2001 762 8 443 13 51 6 188 5 78 6 2000 711 8 434 12 57 6 155 4 61 5 1999 732 8 449 13 52 6 154 5 75 5 Because of changes to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), 1994-1998 may not be comparable to 1999-2003. 1998* 794 9 510 14 65 7 156 5 62 7 1997* 776 9 474 13 59 7 166 5 75 7 1996* 873 10 537 15 72 8 181 5 81 7 1995 954 11 610 17 82 9 188 6 72 7 1994 902 10 559 15 72 8 199 5 71 7

 

I know that people like this guy want to make white Americans feel guilty about all the racism that is harshing the mellow of people of color. And of course everybody in the nation is in tune with the outrage of a single needless death. But you might wonder, given all of that, what kind of penalty the white collective hive mind should pay for its evil and sinister oppression. Well, how about death? Better yet how about suicide?

Turns out that in LA County, white Americans have been killing themselves off at double the rate of blacks and at triple the rate of hispanics. 

Who would dare call this justice?

And in case you didn't know, there are about 17,000 murders every year in America. There are about 30,000 suicides. Satisfied?

Derbyshire's Miscalculation

I've only read that John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review a moment ago. That's a nice gesture and one that is entirely reasonable considering the depth at which matters of intellectual and moral import ought to be taken. Thoughtful men such as myself see this as a small victory, not against racism or against an individual racist, but against sloppy thinking that begins and ends with facts and ignores humanity altogether.

I was thinking today while waiting to get a haircut in Inglewood how foolish is The Root for announcing once more that there needs to be an ongoing national discussion on race and until such a thing happens we are doomed in some embarassing and even perilous way. But I think it is most fair to say that this is a species of the Root's failure to realize that it already encapsulates that discussion, it has for years, and it is not ever going to get any better. The editors of The Root are mad that everyone doesn't obsess, debate, pontificate and otherwise take advantage of every 'teachable moment' on the affairs of race. To be honest, there is no good faith anywhere. 

People who want to talk about race actually just can't shut up about it - they get mad and stay mad because the others are not up on the theory. People who don't want to talk about race actually depend too much on shortcuts - they get mad because the others are too deep into theory. 

The shortcut John Derbyshire has taken is one that is familiar to me. Me speaking as someone who used to spend a lot of time talking about race and even more time being sick of listening to people talk about race. Derbyshire's shortcut is what I call 'Statistical Morality'. It is a social error that has become more acceptable under the banner of 'racial realism'. Racial realism suggests there are no hard and fast doctrines about genetic race, but beaviourly speaking that which quacks like a duck...The error of statistical morality as I think of it today is much like the error of the neo-atheist who believes the errors of religion invalidate moral discipline established by reglion. Thus a new logical regime of moral discipline must supplant the old. So, any way of thinking about how to deal with black Americans must follow a new regime - one that is fact based. Since it's impossibly difficult to treat people as if they had no group proclivities, dispense with the old abstracts about blacks and use these statistically proven ones instead. Imagine yourself going to a country of black Americans, which 40 page brochure should you read? Heaven forbid you use anything but the properly derived stereotypes, all in the name of 'statistical common sense'.

 

• Stats and Morals
• Statistical Morality: The Logic of Life
• More Statistical Morality

 

As the characteristic moaning and groaning about how unfortunate this is drones on, the great irony (whether intended or not) in Derbyshire's piece is that the exact same logic is treated with great reverence when the shoe is on the other foot. But nobody is going to fire this guy for the talk he has with his son about rolling the dice in mixed(!) company. (Can't find the video somebody showed me last week - but it was basically 'wise' black father telling black son (for TV cameras) that what happens to TM can happen to him because white cops can't be trusted)

But there is a higher standard for nationally syndicated writers; the greater intellectual error suggests a moral failing which sounds rather obvious when stated like this: Let's come up with a mathematical formula that allows us to make an exception to the Golden Rule when it comes to black people. It will be factual and scientific, and people will doubt their intelligence if they defy it.

That is not incorrect, but it is wrong. And that is exactly how I came across 'The Talk - The Nonblack Version' on Google Plus this afternoon. Via an article posted on a blog which asks questions about intelligence, facts, hypocrisy and that level of bourgeois sensibility. (Oh, that was Eric Raymond)

As for Derbyshire himself. Well he's had a similar problem for a long time. IE, he thinks he can make sense of a nonsensical problem. 

• Derbyshire's Dilemma

Obligatory Seriousness on the Trayvon Martin

A nation mourns its youth, gone away, gone astray, dying by the bullet. And painted in stereotypical black, we have another stereotypical tragedy that cannot be anything but grist for a cycle of protest, outrage, sadness, disappointment and resentment. It quiets down until another bullet gives another HBO writer of 'The Wire' another million dollars. Because that's reality.

One day, America will let its black families mourn their loss in peace. Until that day, scribble another name in grafitti sharpie - the name of the innocent: Trayvon Martin. 

What is forgotten at this moment in time is the politics behind all sorts of pseudo-para-police forces that have always been a flawed concept, but last time around had another group of politically misled people jumping up and down with anticipation. I'm talking about Philadelphia and I'm talking about Sylvester Johnson. What I said:

This is evidence that in Philly (which from my experience, fits the profile) that social segregation is alive and well. I use the term 'social segregation' lightly because I'm fleshing it out. It's basically that the idea of separatism is alive. People *expect* that there is something fundamentally different about black crime, and therefore that there must be some kind of separate solution to it. People then accept that there is fundamentally something different about how black suspects and criminals must be treated and how black families must be organized etc. This is a regional / social / cultural /political thing that's working its way back to Jim Crow. The idea of equality is being undermined from both sides of the law.

Something like 'support your local police' just doesn't work with the black community in Philly. Instead some bizarre hybrid of protest politics and  God knows what else is informing this situation.

I agree that black residents of Philadelphia should expect and deserve equal protection from police. But that also means they should give equal respect for and collaboration with police. I hope this idea never gets off the ground. It's nothing more or less than a call for an ethnic militia, the root of all unrest in the modern world. 

I expect that in the ebb and flow, that black politics is angling more towards an anti-militia sentiment, and perhaps especially an anti-ethnic militia sentiment now that The Man is of African descent. But surely that sentiment is not necessarily logical because this time around it's correct. After all, if that were the case, we would expect to hear a great deal more calling for the head of the President over 16 dead civilians in Afghanistan... but I second-guess people I don't even listen to. 

The answer is for all peasants to support their local police, always. Because this is precisely what happens when knucklehead peasants attempt to take the law (that they don't really understand) into their own cotton-picking hands. 

Obviously George Zimmerman, the shooter, needs to be arrested, tried and convicted. Obviously he will get the benefit of some over-zealous public defender and the slack in the criminal justice system. But I think he should get 2nd Degree Murder conviction, and 20 years. But adding the circumstances of impersonating an officer and acting under the color of authority, I could see the combination get him 40 years, although if I were the family, I'd like to have him pilloried and stoned. 

But Zimmerman will not be stoned because we seem to have lost our perspective of what good people deserve and what bad people deserve. Something is inverted when you get umpty million saying 'I should never have to go broke because I don't have health insurance' but not 'Death to Zimmerman'. 

So I ask the question I've been meaning to write about but haven't gotten around to: Who is your Leviathan?

Or in political terms, are you safer today than you were four years ago?

Why Race Talk Is Pointless

McWhorter's over at the Root today on this subject. This video I cut in the Spring of 2008 is a bit more sympathetic to the race-talkers than I am today, but there's not much in it I would contradict. I'll probably go make the dinger point that race-talk among blacks empowers blacks over in the Root's comment section...

Most recently I noted that race talkers generally want to empower their own race and have a racial answer to the race questions, but never want to leave race out of the question. And of course my greatest argument against post-racism is that racism is sin and unless and until people are ready to eradicate sin, then the racial manifestation will always be there.

A Rude Question for White People

I'm disappointed with Adam Serwer. Ever since I started following his blog at American Prospect, he seems to have gone short attention span theatre on me. I know that when you're in the zone, you can keep up with every little thing, but a lot of crap creeps in. For example, I have no reason to expect that any sensible American would pay attention to anything Donald Trump says, and yet he has bought the attention of millions. So one of the things that slipped through Serwer's keyboard was this retweet:

Harvard. RT @KathaPollitt I know, they wouldn't let me in because i'm white. And not a law student. But mostly because I'm white.

My immediate answer is, well hell Katha, if you want to represent that way, you're exactly as white as you want to be. My general goodwill position is equally reflective. If there is something in 'white' that is not racial, then it is entirely the choice of the individual. Same thing counts for 'black'. We all pretty much parotted the same thing all through the 90s and 00s. Race is a cultural construct. That means it can be constructed and of course as the drooling pomo scholars know, it can be deconstructed. But what if Katha is not in charge of her whiteness, at all? What if blackness is an American essentialism and so is whiteness? What if they are inescapable? What if white Americans can never be anything but what non-whites say they are? 

Not that I like getting into the subject, but I cannot avoid the question. How white exactly are white people and do you 'as a white person' believe that you are in control of your whiteness?

If you are in control of your whiteness, what exactly do you want it to mean? Does that work for you? If you are not in control and want to escape your whiteness, what exactly is it you want to leave behind? Can you? If you're somewhere in the middle, how do you see it in other white people?

My opinion, which I'm sure I will have to explain two or three times, is that of course every American inherits a reductionist racial identity and that it is up to them to shed that skin. For some people it's important for others it is not. I say racism is primarily in the gaze, not in the being, so I have reversed my Race Traitor (as in Tim Wise) position on whiteness studies. I no longer say that white people must invest a great deal of thought and energy into undoing their identity for America to be what it should. That applies equally to black Americans and everyone else. The first step in demonstrating your racism starts with such prescriptions as "I cannot fulfill my human potential until  ____ people do the following.."

So white people. What's up with being white? You know who you are. 

What Month Is It?

McWhorter:

It can be strangely hard to admit that a battle has been won. But especially considering that the typical white person isn’t exactly a walking encyclopedia of “white” history, it’s time to admit that America knows its black history as well as anyone has reason to wish it to.

Yeah. 

A Bit of History: Black CMC

(From the archives - 2003)

 

A BIT OF HISTORY, BLACK CMC

Over with the Afrofuturists, I've been going through a number of raisons d'etre and mapping out black cyberspace. Here follows materials from the archives...

The full transcript of this forum can be found at Drylongso.

Phase One:
When I first got on computer networks to communicate with other folks, there were very few black women or men online on at all. This had mostly to do with the fact that I was emailing on the Xerox internal network in the mid 80s long before there was a public Internet. So, I started my online discussions at a time when the builders of the networks frowned heavily on any non-technical discussion. Matters of netiquette were taken very seriously. That didn't stop me from having black oriented political and social discussions in the Xerox corporate intranet.

Since I had been fairly prominent in college as a national officer with NSBE, I felt that on the Xerox network I was continuing the discussions about the fate and future of blacks in Corporate America from a business and technical angle. It was certainly a male dominated world, but it existed primarily as a support network. Nobody took any social discussions seriously. The very idea of men and women meeting each other socially online was simply not done. Besides, most of us already knew each other. We assumed that white folks were listening in, and the biggest controversies had to do with airing dirty laundry.

Phase Two:
A literacy project got me involved with open mike poetry in Los Angeles around 1990. Some of that got political, and it occurred to me that any black organization that would publish a newsletter would be a candidate for their own website. It was in this spirit a few years later that I created my first website with the idea in mind that many black organizations would follow suit. It was not to be. Everything associated with the information superhighway was considered elitist, and there was a sort of anxiety about it being another example of what white folks purposely did to leave black folks behind. So between black men and women there was no issue because most were not participating.

SCAA
There was a golden age of black conversation on the net that took place between 1993 and 1996. For the most part, however, gender issues were deeply subordinated to racial and political issues. The core of the group of participants there came to know each other well enough to distinguish gender issues from personality issues. Nevertheless, there were always new folks coming into discussions, who would take communications issue and extrapolate them to "the problem with us." As a compiler of the FAQ for the SCAA group in 1995, gender issues simply weren't high on anyone's priority list. What was much more important was maintenance of the space free and clear of racist "drive-by" conduct. SCAA finally fell to a barrage of racists and serves no useful purpose today, diehards not withstanding.

Salon Table Talk
At Salon, we got into issues of identity and gender a lot deeper. One notable conversation there was specifically about hiding race and gender in cyberspace. Having been hardened by the experience of SCAA, it was clear to me, as the Internet was getting popular with non-technical folks, that certain mythologies were being promoted. I don't believe any of the black veterans of the SCAA wars would easily swallow the cliché on the Internet that "nobody knows you're a dog." We knew all too well that being black was more than just skin color--that identity was a crucial part of the way you saw and thus discussed things online. If anything, the anonymity of text enhanced the differences and conflicts as well as the contrasts and synergies. But it certainly did not obviate them. Cyberspace made you more of what you are; only the things you really felt passionate about would come through in a memorable way. So when this subject was breached at Salon's Table Talk, I really took a hard line against masking.

I never wanted to get into a trap with "authenticity," partially because spoofing identity was part of the fun of some cyberspace haunts. I think the nature of MUDs and IRC lend them particularly to this. But I never considered these places for the kinds of discussions I wished to have vis-à-vis black cultural production, criticism or political talk. Instead they were social adventures. I did have an online life as a girl named "Sindeetha" at a game site called "Sissyfight," which was very popular for a short time.

Black Planet, NetNoir
I have spent only a limited amount of time in black on black social forums where the primary activity is socializing and flirting. They simply came into being too late in my life to be of any use.

Conclusions
In general I would say that black folks' expectations for the type of interactions in which gender issues are significant came to the Internet some time after I did. In the early days, people simply didn't expect anything. People didn't expect black folks to *be* online, much less socialize there with any seriousness. Even when I had dreams of millions of black folks online, I didn't expect or desire a dating service.

I think it must be said that the contributions of black cultural production or academic quality materials has been disappointing and too little too late for me. It is in that area that I wish such matters could be handled better. I blame black professors and professionals for following the dollar instead of contributing to community. Those who are intelligent and capable of delivering evolutionary content to the web don't bother and/or take a cynical attitude towards the entire enterprise. Those who have been trained to speak about such social issues only do so to be paid, and their default in the online world leaves it to lay-people to struggle with issues to which the answers already exist. Consequently, I don't really look for much. Yet. I can admit to having exceptional expectations. That I'm not satisfied in no way suggests that a plurality of black folks can't be. I've always been the explorer looking to carve out new frontiers. Let's see what happens next.

Mike Bowen - Summer 2003

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Becoming more real over the years in cyberspace-a distinction between expectations and reality. From: Mike Bowen

I perceive that people have come to appear more real to each other over the years in cyberspace. The convention of masking, originally established by techies, and the inability of the medium to use long names and pictures, has given way to more highly interactive virtual communities with highly stylized artifacts. I would think that BlackPlanet is a very good case in point. When content management software became available at no cost, the texture of online communities changed. Suddenly people who were very opaque in IRC using an abbreviated name and spurting short comments intermittently had the chance to put some style into a permanent website which added a dimension to their chat. With IRC, as soon as you stopped typing, you disappeared. With a website, you became permanent. Furthermore, with a website, you could attach pictures of yourself, artwork, favorite quotes and longer texts about yourself.

Additionally, people became more real in cyberspace because they volunteer information about their own circle of communicants and interests. Back in the days of Usenet before free website authoring became possible, individuals would put their �sig� at the end of each post. I have never seen a sig with a list of friends. Websites always list things that people might find interesting. So people could then be judged not only by what they say on one particular day, but by the online company they keep. Sure, you could tell something about a man who quotes Shakespeare, but he could become more complex if his best friend quotes Muddy Waters and less so if his friend also quotes Shakespeare.

Despite all of this, serious dislocations occur. The more real the cyber presentation is, the less likely one is to question your interpretation of it, and therefore the more likely you are to be shocked if you misinterpret all that you see. The problem is that as real as this cyber presentation feels and as much communication as it allows, it is not community. It still lacks the nuance we have with personal relationships offline. Whatever is established online is always and can never be more than an artificial community. We can no more have a relationship with people online than we do with movie stars or rock idols. Every communication is a presentation, and every presentation is interpreted. What exacerbates this problem is the reality of connecting with a wider variety and larger number of individuals online than offline.

Before establishing my persona of �boohab� I wrote:

 

Everything I do in computer-mediated communications (CMC) is an experiment in blackness as a post-modern concept. I am futzing with identity in cyberspace and trying to figure out what happens to your race when people cannot see you, hear you or smell you. (hee haw). Everybody knows that you have some freedom in CMC to choose who you be. If I choose to be black, how would I express it? If I choose to be white, how? Why? What can I say in CMC that I would never say face to face? What silences are overcome w/ respect to racial issues, which are created?

 

Everyone who represents consciously in a gender-specific way in cyberspace must reckon with its sensory deprivation. It�s not enough to simply write �I am female� because this is not how people perceive femininity offline. And so presenting oneself simply as female has issues not unlike presenting oneself as anything for which the imaginations of your audience cannot easily adopt. If you are attempting to be an instructive figure as well, the challenge is even more severe.

I recently got into a bit of trouble addressing someone who called herself �thuqmami�. I was looking around for black content in the blogosphere and found a registry site called blogs of color. It turned out that it was undergoing construction, but 9 out of 10 links I found were dead. I considered it an embarrassment and said so. I was certainly passing judgment from the perspective of an upper-middle class middle-aged father from the old school, but I ended up being corrected. There actually is a difference between a �thuq� and a �thug�. Thuqmami actually inherited the name and the site from someone else. After a time, we came to understand each other, but it took more than a few emails.

Goddess� remarks brought to mind something that I did see very often, which was the flaming of younger more naive persons, especially women but all newbies , who were trying to express themselves artistically without any understanding or consideration of the conventions of online conversation. I seem to recall this happening often. One spot that I used to hang out in was Caf� Los Negroes. It was chocked full of people who felt it was their appointed duty to put a personal spin on everything that happened. So it was as much a billboard for certain characters to rant on with inside humor as it was a public hangout. Anyone who felt it important to creatively express their blackness was suddenly held to very rigorous, if arbitrary standards. A certain smallish clique of members would give each other affirmations on their own style of speak and observations, and others who came in fresh, especially those considered unorthodox would get the virtual equivalent of a cold shoulder. I recall that this seemed rather cruel for some.

So I think the reality of cyberspace is that black folks feel as though the kinds of relationships they have in real life will be the same kind that they have online and are sometimes surprised and/or ill equipped to deal with the real individuality of people they do meet. People seeking affirmation of their personal lives and relationships are just as often as not given a cold reception or condescended to for opening up their feelings online. It�s very easy for people to turn you off and decide not to care. I think it is a mistake for black folks to assume that all black oriented content online is expressly for them and people like them. They must recognize that the monolith is shattered. This ability of cyberspace to create connections ends up introducing people to each other with widely differing perspectives on what it means to be black, the negative experience of a failure to create community only reinforces the stereotype of black disunity. Considering how important the idea of unity has been, it is not surprising that black folks may tend to be more disappointed with online experiences than others.

Cyberspace is capable of establishing a type of communications that you wouldn�t be able to sustain in person and that is good. Cyberspace fails to maintain the quality and nuance of multi-sensory communication of community and flattens experience into the strictly literary and visual; this is destructive of the expectation of a beloved community. The distinction between advanced connectedness, which the Internet delivers, and real community, which it does not, is the difference between our expectations and reality.

Mike Bowen - Summer 2003

 

 

The Boohabian Standard for Hate Crime

The Boohabian Standard for Hate Crime	Deadlinks refreshed Jan 2003
about the Standard | about Boohab

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Richard Kim - The Truth About Hate Crimes Laws The Nation, June, 1999 Michael Bowen - Hate Crime: Healing vs Curing November, 1998	Georgia Bias Crimes Information and Documentation Act 'Bias crime' means any crime that hinders any person's exercise of the enjoyment of rights ... because of the status of a person...
Stop Hate Arguments about the even-handedness of HateCrime reporting from Parterre.	Senate Bill S1529 - Hate Crimes Prevention Bill of 1998

The Basic Idea:
To win a hate crime prosecution, the prosecution has to show a clear expression of group hatred through the felony. It is not a "hate crime" merely because the perpetrator hates people of that group. The crime has to be intended to communicate that hatred of the group to the victim. The idea that police search for hidden hate motivations is antithetical to the notion of hate crime. Hate crime statutes don't enhance your punishment merely for thinking bad thoughts. They enhance your punishment for committing your crime in a manner that creates added psychological injury to the victim and society.

---

 

Racial Identification	NO, but	In any ordinary crime, the race of the suspect should not be identified unless: The charges brought against the subject are specific to a hate crime OR The suspect remains at large and the police have requested the media to broadcast information for the purposes of enlisting public assistance in their apprehension of the suspect.
Mandatory Sentencing	NO	there is a difference between having a hate crime law in one's quiver as a district attorney and having mandatory sentencing to force the hand of judges. it's clearly up to the discretion of district attorneys as to which laws they will prosecute. I am in favor of hate crimes as aggravating factors to crimes already on the books, not as a new class of crimes in and of themselves.
Reporting of Arrests	YES	Reporting of hate 'crimes' is a different matter and should be mandated. Even if racial/sexual/religious animus as proximate cause to a crime is not proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt, the public should be informed about arrests made on those grounds. In other words we shouldn't put the cart before the horse and try to establish a rule for prosecution until we can establish a standard for definition in arrests. Although prosecutorial choice is important (they need to make whatever case they can) it shouldn't be the record of prosecutions which informs the public, rather the record of arrests/complaints. What I don't want to see is a situation in which someone could point to a year of statistics based on the rate of convictions which may grossly understate the prevalence of hate crimes themselves. Nor do I want to see judges forced to add penalties in cases where proximate cause is subject to broad interpretation. I would like to see information made available to the public which is credible as regards the incidence of hate crime such that communities can take action. If indeed a town like Bensonhurst *is* hostile to blacks, then that community should not be able to hide behind an 'aberration' excuse. If a district attorney is prosecuting only one kind of hate crime and not another, then that kind of information should be open to public scrutiny.

Much of this applies to terrorism, fwiw. 

The Willie Lynch Metaphor

Offered without comment from the Kwaku Network:

http://content.postnewsgroup.com/?p=10716

What will America do with 36 million Black Americans now that there is no more cotton to pick?  Even in states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, Black people are not involved in the planting, growing or harvesting of cotton.  This is now done by White and Latino men and women who drive machines that plant and pick the cotton, as millions of Black men of working age stand idle on street corners.  For Black people in America, there is no more cotton to pick.

Black people were brought to America as slaves to pick cotton, tobacco and sugar cane.  America’s dilemma today is: what to do with 36 million Black American descendants of slaves who were shipped to American shores 400 years ago for their economic value yet whose heirs today have lost that value?  While America might have once considered shipping Black Americans back to Africa, that is no longer a practical or palatable option.

So America has a serious problem that demands a solution.  What will America do with 36 million Black Americans who have lost their value to the American economy?  As the world moves towards science, technology, engineering, math and medicine (STEMM), fewer than fifty percent of Black boys graduate from high school in the United States.  Many of those who graduate are given diplomas that qualify them for low-wage jobs or no jobs at all, street-corner hustling, incarceration and violent death.  At best, the majority of Black students in America get an education that prepares them to only pick cotton – if there were cotton for them to pick.

Race In America: Dancing On The Third Rail

(from the archives April 2005)

It's interesting to read these in retrospect. I see it all rather as a sleeping dog I might have let lie, and find I'm not so interested that progress in that area needs to be my concern. I was essentially, at the time of that writing, through the existentials of black conservatism, but still primarily interested in the negotiations between racial identity politics. It's difficult for me to say that there's another way to deal with that whole domain because philosophy is not democratic. The answer for me is philosophical which takes me out of caring what the masses do. It's liberatingly irresponsible. 

Part One

The problem with learning and caring is that you can never shutup, even when you want to. Even when it's better to let people be wrong, and misinterpret, to be committed to what you know to be true forces one, in the end to add another straw to the camel's back, hoping it will balance the odd one someone else put on a moment, or a millenium before.

So it is with race in America. The conversation never stops.

What I understand about race in America is that it involves two sides, and that neither side can win. Black and white are like twin brothers wrestling on the floor. But I think the most true thing about race in America is that it inhabits all of our metaphors. There are so many stories and so many reasons and so many prayers bound up in the drama of race. For anyone who truly cares about the American condition, the state of our union, the meaning of our values, race is always intrinsic, ever puzzling, ever revealing, ever punishing.

I shake my head because I have not yet reached that time in parenthood during which my children rebel. So my instinct remains at the patient-explanation-for-your-own-good level rather than the, fine-do-it-your-way-you'll-see level. And so I am taking an hour or so to respond at length to some straws I see poking out.

Two cats respond here at Cobb on the regular. One is Dave, the other is Chap. I don't really know them. I don't really know anyone in cyberspace, and it's difficult to explain how much of an in-your-face person I am, how I am such an acute observer of people. The web and all computer mediated communications represent to me an abstract medium for the expression of (more or less) pure thought, and it is perfect for certain things, but doesn't begin to approach what I can remember when watching a man or woman walk or listen to them speak or read their faces. So I am something of a bull in a china shop of ideas out here on the web, I am an arrow on a path. I redefine and correct, and I don't listen as much as I would face to face. And it is that gap bewteen the person and the virus of an idea inhabiting their minds which may or may not express itself clearly in the digital realm, that I both recognize and obliterate. So if it sounds like I am beating up them, or whitefolks, or blackfolks, I am, but only in digital bits, only in the realm of ideas. I am a great respecter of people, but when I see a bad paragraph, I am compelled to attack. I don't know that I will find one, but don't hold your breath. This is not about you guys in particular, it's sorta about your being a part of this thing that I and the Brotherhood, and America is going through. I understand your stake as Americans in the reconciliation between all of us.

The best defense, they say, is a good offense. And I really have no need nor cause to be defensive. I'm already here, on the other side of the mountain of personal achievement that unleashes a man's spirit. I have been unleashed for a dozen years and then some. It is how I have managed to take the diary I had been writing in college, to the public - to stand in front of hungry patrons and recite poetry from the heart - to write the unspeakable memo, to correct the man who thinks he knows it all. I care deeply for people, but I only answer to God. Engagement with me is an exercise in honesty, it's about how real I think I can get with you, it's about how much truth you show that you can handle. Sooner or later we get to that place called intimacy. It's a quick jump to there when I write. And I am true to myself and therefore not false with my readers.

So what is this racial thing and why do I bother? I thought about that at the baggage claim this morning after a good 4 hours of sleep. Why is it that this black experience thing is so difficult for my white cousins to understand? Why do I appear obsessed? Why even use such a word? The first answer that passed back through my mind was that it only seems obsessive if you don't see the value in it. But like breeding sows or birthing cows, somebody has to stick their whole arm into uncomfortable places, and once you have learned to do so everything is different. I think whitefolks depend on blackfolks to stick our arms up into race, and they take our civility to be a sign of forgiveness. That's partially true. But there is also a science of husbandry in this, we bring it along generation by generation. But that is always done by engagement, and never by distance.

Represent
Speaking for myself, and I think for many in my generation, much of black culture has been about representation. We have been engaged in a struggle to be a different we. We were like stowaway children under the tarp of the horsecart of the Underground Railroad. Our parents rode shotgun with their hats down low, not speaking too loudly less they draw too much attention. And yet we were their joy and it was our brightness, sheltered within our humble homes, that gave them the courage to take that road to freedom. But my generation crawled out from under the tarp and started talking loud. Yeah! We're free, and guess what you don't really know about us? We've been representing black culture, we've been blackety blackety black black y'all. We've been painting the white house black, and we've dared you to say anything about it. And it was necessary, God knows what the world has been missing in the wake of our parents' silence. And you've been discovering it from Eddie Murphy to Joe Jett to Serena Williams to Condi Rice. The Negro is dead. Blackness is about busting out of jail, about bringing music to the Nowhere Man, about never letting anyone forget about our flavor and unlimited potential.

The success of blackness is demonstrable but its task is not complete. It will take another two generations I think. When my grandchildren purchase banks in Chile or Ghana perhaps. When there's a country club in Georgia where two black ex-presidents hang out. When the Kwaku Foundation awards it's million dollar grant for the 40th time and the networks celebrate. These are my expectations of a fulfilled African American destiny. But lots of African Americans have their own. These hopes and aspirations were forged in different fires and every family's history shapes them, but there is a direction to it, and a common kind of struggle when it comes from African American history. In our generation, it has been to represent - to come out and be loud and proud. As Rick James said, we're bustin' out of this L 7 square, done braided our hair and don't mind if you stare.

The Balance
James Baldwin said: 

Take no one's word for anything, including mine-but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration, There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.

 

And so I know that American destiny is not complete until African American destiny is complete. And we keep working, we blacks and whites, we keep working each others nerves until we reach a settlement. Today the settlement is an accomodation, a compromise, a tenable peace which is both uneasy and comfortable. We still live in a society where OJ makes a difference. We still live in a society in which Colin Powell's wife fears for her husband's life. We still live in a society in which Camilla Cosby was considered crazy when she said race mattered in the murder of her son. And whitefolks know very well, as they look at their own families and friends and associates, that something about them is unfinished and unreconciled to the rest of America. It's nothing a simple as 'discrimination'. Hell, nobody I know is a racist. Everybody I know hates racism. But only few can talk about it in mixed company for more than a minute.

Online is a different story. I've proven that, because I wanted to and I paid close attention. But the fact remains, there is still dissonance, sometimes it is as clearly defined and significant as the street between a white gentrified enclave and the beat down streets of chinatown. Sometimes it's as subtle and insignificant as choosing the right beer when ordering Thai food in New Orleans while listening to reggae music. I don't mean to be cavalier, but I'm not sure that we know what to do with our Multicultural ethos or exactly what it buys us in the post 9/11 world. I'm not sure we know what to do with our new sensitivities. Today, 3000 gay couples had their marriages annulled by legal fiat in the state of Oregon. Online we can talk about all this stuff, but what do we do?

Coherent Racial Animus

I used to talk about hate crime, and I came up with a pretty good standard. For most people whose opinions and common sense I respect, the consensus is that if you're going to get shot in the head, the race of the person who did it doesn't really matter. Murder is murder. 

My key phrase from that discussion was 'racial animus as proximate cause', because while I have some reasonable tolerance for an academic discussion, I respect the law a lot more. Stare decisis being what it is (a damned good and civilizing principle) I tend to take that razor to new racial research. I have a hard time believing, as that goes, that it's easier to get an anti-racist law from fresh theory and research made in countries with a great deal more racial violence than our own. Over here we flip-flop and re-legislate every four years. It's retarded. Then again we have a lot of bored and obsessed academics, and a surfeit of faith in scientific socialism in the US. Call it exceptionalism.

So here's what the chart means.

The more power you have, the less you need a coherent racial reason to do what you do. The inverse is also true. The more powerless you are the more you need a coherent racial theory to do what you do.

So I'm also thinking of generators of racial theories and audiences for those theories. As you go to the right, the theories become more coherent. If you are powerful, you're attitude is going to be 'whatever'. In the upper class, you may be cognizant of race but "it doesn't matter if you're black white, red green or purple". In the middle class, you may require a some general principles, like affirmative action. Down the power curve in the working class, you need something sophisticated like a theory of intelligence as might be provided by the Virginia House of Burgesses or The Bell Curve. In the underclass, where you have no power, a simple color bar enforced by law is what you need. As your individual power to manifest your racial discriminations decreases, you need more racist social infrastructure.

 

The Inevitable Racism of Liberty?

The substantive ideals of American conservatism—limited government, states’ rights, individualism, property rights, and the prioritizing of liberty over equality—when applied consistently inevitably result in racism...--Anon

This is the most stunning and revealing argument I think I've ever heard someone say with a straight face. Because if this is provably true then I'm going to have to accept racism rather the way I accept the cholesterol in steak. I don't care if it's not good for me, I'm going to just take my little pill and eat all the steak I want. Just like Cipher in The Matrix.

This sounds to me like a preposterous argument because it suggests that (and this is my immediate counter) that if these were principles at the heart of a post-colonial African nation, that it would necessarily be a racist nation. One must note that this is a blanket statement that does not say that the race of those benefiting from or implementing those ideas is material to the resultant racism, but that racism itself is a result of those principles.  

I do agree that these are the substantive ideals of American conservatism, which is why I am in rapt attention. I also find the statement addresses the level of abstraction which is right up my alley in that (maybe I'm repeating myself) it doesn't suggest the imperfections of the humans in charge have anything to do with it. In other words, if you weren't trying to be a racist when you came up with those five operating principles, so long as you achieve them you will inevitably be a racist. 

Did I say this sounds preposterous? At once I am tempted to find someone out at Claremont to mail it to for a righteous fisking, and I am embarrassed to even dignify it. Be that as it may, it's a square topic for Cobb, and I'm biting.

I put the emphasis on liberty because it seems to me that limited government and states rights are means to an end, with the end being [individual] liberty. I suspect we will get into matters of collective freedom vs individual freedom, as well as the very premises of the point of consent of the governed vis a vis why systems of law and government are preferable over anarchy in the first place. There's probably good stuff to discuss in that vein. I'm also interested to find out a more precise definition of six pounds of racism, because we're going to have to weigh out the balances here. Which is to say how much racism can a society bear? How much property rights can a society bear?

As an example of the latter, I would very much agree that a society that chops off somebody's right hand for the commission of a robbery of $100 would be horrendously unfair and would not serve the purposes of individual freedom - one would question whether such a definition of liberty is just. Note my brackets on [individual] liberty above. One could say that the collective freedom of people who have $100 and don't steal $100 is well served by a society with a death penalty for that level of theft. But nobody could say that serves individual freedom.

Subrealism & The Substance of Black Cultural Identity

For a number of reasons too numerous, complex and inconsistent to state, I put up with the antics, insights, flippancy, and vituperation, of the occasionally brilliant, constantly cryptic, usefully pessimistic and caustically biting wit of Craig Nulan, aka Xavier Hesychastic Moon the Subrealist. If he didn't exist, I would have to invent him. He is often Moriarty to my Holmes, which to say a challenging fiend whom I believe is genrally wrong and not often a pleasure to deal with. Every once in a while he says something obscenely crude which makes me wonder why I ever put up with him. Every other once in a blue moon he says something the borders on sheer enlightenment which cements the twisted bond we've shared as black cultural critics for nearly a decade online. 

Just the other day he said something of the first sort, and I considered devoweling his comment, it just so happened that I got called off in the middle of doing so, and in the end let the matter slide. But now I need a bit of a refresher to re-adjust my assessment of the relationship. In other words, Craig sweeheart, we need to talk. And of course all others are invited to this retrospective and intervention. 

The last time I went down this alley was three years ago. It pretty much boiled down to the following:

Me:
I think that blacks have a responsibility to conserve the best of our culture independent of politics. I must confess that when it comes to matters Nulan characterizes as the interpersonal communinion, I find that as a compelling argument primarily in the context of culture. That is to say that I think there's a jazz call and response requirement of soul.

Him:
That's EXACTLY the trifling underestimation of the psychological adaptation called Blackness that got the collective membership of the afrofuturist list slapped around for weeks on end, i.e., when you were loving my ruthless dissection of Blackness as a psychological garment. To see you here and now publicly donning this tawdry drag is profoundly disappointing..., try to get with some of MLK's post assimilationist truth!!!

In short, Nulan wants to make a political dollar out of a cultural 15 cents through the bank of King. I'm not invested. 

Here's what I suspect. That having represented myself as a black cultural critic, or black at all, that I am subject to an Intellectual One Drop Rule which I do not respect. It is a subject upon which Nulan declined to speak. In that regard, I am suspected intellectually and personally of being something akin to a traitor. I would actually much rather be considered a heretic, because in the end, blackness is a matter of faith whose orthodoxy is incomplete and always undergoing change. My refusal to update my version of blackness is problematic. Not for me, for 'them'.

I am not really interested in updating or changing, and I'm not sure that I care to explain myself any more than I do, but since I know CNu updates his critique of me periodically, I am willing to discuss the implications of his most recent rumbling. I do so with the bold presumption that over time the difference between his worldview and mine might prove of some use to those curious about where 'black thought' is going, if I could presume to call any of this 'black thought' other than as a convenient tag and mnemonic.  

Here's the thing and backdrop. Nulan percieves that the great American experiment is about to go belly up. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian in tune with a sort of meditation which cannot be easily witnessed or explained around these parts, he is highly frustrated with the ethics of American life. If there is one way to see CNu, it is rather like the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's 'The Razor's Edge'. He's sick to death of the fatuity of American class-ness, and he sees it riven with the sort of corruption that requires purging by fire. Only he believes the fire will spontaneously erupt, so he's actually not the other sort of revolutionary. In other words, he's a doomday prophet and every day we don't burn, he's a scolding misanthrope. Except that he comes from the ranks of the oppressed and in his own self-actualization realized a better way, and latent in the souls of black folk are the tools and embodiment of the only hopeful future we might possibly have. 

Every day he looks at me and my writing he feels the pang of betrayal of a similar soul who has decided to keep hope in Western Civilization alive, and worse yet, I do so without being subversive with the nerve to suggest my investment of self-actualization be branded under the red white and blue - the banner of the winged monkeys since 1776 and before. And worse yet, I do so in the company of a class of morons who have no such deeper aims or understandings. So he sees my patriotism as false. It is either false in the hopeful way of perfidy that under the right circumstances I will abandon with alacrity. Or it is false in the hopeless way of brown nosing a class of vermin I have decided to naively entrust with my loyalty. So he keeps me at arms distance until the real truth of me is revealed, slapping me as Moe slaps Curly on a daily basis. Like Curly, most of the time I'm immune, but every once in a while, he says 'Niagara Falls'.  

In one way, I feel fortunate to have someone who cares enough to give my writings contrast, and I am indebted to Mr. Nulan for his attention. In another way it is very much like a bad marriage and I do so want to run off to Bangkok and forget I ever knew him. But since I've never met the man in person, I don't really have an emotional investment at all - which is why I take the time to put all of this in the context of something we have both cared about from varying perspectives and in varying degrees which is The Substance of Black Cultural Identity.

Before I get into that, I need to get at the thing that annoys me most about his most recent references to Niagara Falls (and for those benighted few who don't know, the phrase 'Niagara Falls' was to Curly of the Three Stooges like a call to his subconscious unleashing his id. It released his beast.)

Nulan has taken in recent months a second prong of a two prong attack which falls more heavily on his assumption of a hopeless patriotism. And so this is, I presume, the basis of his whinging, bleating and blathering on about the 'knuckledraggers' of the Tea Party and his misguided broadsides against proper Conservatism. It is not clear to me exactly how misanthropic Nulan is, but he clearly gives no quarter to the rank and file of the GOP and suggests a very strong correlation between them, white supremacy, errant capitalism, and other sorts of devil worship. So here I stand, a not insignificantly gifted blogger, on the side of what is in his eyes a clear and present danger to the soul of mankind. And I actually forgive those people. So he must exert what pressure he can and call me both 'anti-black' and all that implies on the first prong, and now as defenders of the faithless, idiot whiteboys and their great soul-killing manipulations, worse yet with some of the same slogans that Fox uses.

Anyway, that's what I think he sees, and he's wrong, but I can live with that uncorrected so long as he doesn't get on my last freaking nerve. Except that occasionally he does. 

And so since it's not all about me, I turn to the substance of black cultural identity, which I think having been given a good airing will deflect me from having to ban Nulan for his ad-hominem screeds and glib derailments of otherwise interesting threads.

It should be said that nothing I say with regard to black cultural identity should be considered outside of the scope of my evolving Peasant Theory. If you buy into the idea of native alienation, then black Americans, as the first true post-modern people are only particular and key in exemplifying the universal truth That truth is that as human society advances, those in power become more and more able to promise and deliver greater prizes for the souls of the civilizationally indigent - aka people who have not yet achieved the status of free men of means. The enticements to peasants should be evaluated as should all such social contracts. That provided by MLK and all others mentioned with him in mind are only Constitutional. I defend that as a patriot, but as a human being who doesn't wish to be considered a peasant, I know better. 

What arrangements can black cultural identity make that might be more rewarding than that offered to any and all American peasants? And so why should patriotism be different for anyone? Indeed if America is the superpower and defacto empire of the planet, why should any patriotism be different than American patriotism? Why should anyone want to live under any other sort of rule, and then finally why bother with a racial or cultural nationalist distinction?

Fists of Fury

Thinking of things racial, I found some blogger who, commenting on Jon Stewart said:

The first time Stewart told this joke, the one about the effort it took to be a hater, it was a couple of years ago and he was complaining on his show about casual references to Nazis. I thought it was kind of a glib joke at the time, but shrugged it off. You can’t expect a comedian to be funny and insightful all the time.

But apparently he thought it was a good one, because, he’s expanded this staggering example of Yankee liberal naivete to racism and homophobia.

[..]

Let’s take this weird notion – one that should astonish anyone who has actually seen racism in the raw — that the hatred that drives racists and homophobes requires effort.

It doesn’t. Hell, it’s the easiest, most lazy fallback position there is. I’ve known many, many racists and homophobes who did not actually take the trouble to attend rallies, download essays from Stormfront and sit up at a their sewing machine to adjust the eyeholes in their robes. Haters just hate, effortless, casually, and without thought.

You are halfway right. The only way that hatred can become effective is if hard work is put into it. You'd understand this if you ever tried to kill someone.

Huh? What?

If I put you in a ring and get you to fight another man, you will be exhausted within 10 minutes. After you've taken about 50 punches and dealt out as many, I pretty much guarantee that you will be as tired as you have ever been in your life. There's some evolutionary biology behind the knockout. If you knock somebody out, you win the fight. But you will also be completely spent yourself.

To cause permanent damage to your opponent, you have to think hard about how to hurt him. You have to bring weapons, you have to have martial training. You can't go in windmilling and pulling hair and otherwise fighting like a girl - all hate and no punching ability.

Wars are not spontaneous.

So if you are to be part of a political agenda that is based on principled racism, or 'homophobic' (which is such an idiotic term - for a dozen reasons I won't go into), then you have to be disciplined and organized.

What is laughable is that somebody carrying a sign with an offensive word is going to take bread off my table. This is how the Left has made duds of their moral ammunition, invoking a history of racist masterminds just a the sight of a flag.

It is not surprising, however that the sort of fancy imbecile who would vote for the sort of man who promises peace through speeches, while defunding the actual armed forces of a nation, would be atwitter about some redneck's placard. As if cardboard and a sharpie were weapons.

Mere contempt does not make an enemy formidable. The quality of the enemy is determined by his skill in combat.

My White Brother

I haven't spoken to my brother in a long while because he's just getting back on the right terms with my sister, and I've known her for her entire life whereas he's only been my brother for a decade or so. This essay is not so much about him personally, or my white family in Italy or France, but my theoretical family in the next generation. 

In particular, I thought about how cool it would be if one of my daughters married into the kind of Latino family whose father I could get along with - like one of the guys I went to high school with, like Rueda or Izqierdo, Zamora, Rodriguez or Baca. Man that would be cool. Then I thought how cool it would be if my son married into another kind of family... and then I oopsed a bit. What if none of them marry black? Well, I'm actually already cool with that, so long as the family has got soul. But it's really not for me to choose. On the other hand, what gets me excited is the extent to which these new families get me and my family history into their trees. 

I read over at Alternet some commenter who talked about black culture vs asian culture vis a vis 'culture of achievement'. I haven't heard that one in a long time. You can't really capitalize those because they are talking points in lightweight racial discussions. There is nothing quite like the black and white of America, so much so that Asians don't much fit in or weigh in. The minute you think you're saying something about Japanese, dude looks at you and says, "Duh I'm Korean."

It's the same generational thing. I thought about it the other day at the student car wash when I noticed the Asian dad sitting alone. I ignored him and spoke to the guy I know, even though we never say much. It's true I ignore most people but the Asian guy, whom I seem to recall had a really sporty car, I ignored even more. I have met several Asian men I find admirable. The best project manager I ever worked with, and other token spots in memory. It's difficult to tell how much any Asian guys I have somewhat known want to deal with whatever cultural status there is to be had in this America. I tend to believe that most do what I do some of the time, which is to obsess over my family strengths and be the Old Harsh Jew. 

The Old Harsh Jew is only named here and now in this blog post, but has existed in my mind for two decades after reading a particular issue of Granta. The story was told by the son of the OHJ who, ex of Nazi Germany here in the land of milk and honey, never took any time to enjoy life's simple pleasures, nor to give any. Always with the looking over the shoulder, checking for the double-cross, and trusting no one, he grew upon his personality a carapace of steel and this was the visage passed to the son. The son got no warmth, but he did get lessons he never appreciated until much later in life. But the greater lesson of the OHJ is that family matters more than society and it should. What you do for family, you might do for society and that might be a proper way of looking at things, but those who sacrifice family for society we scratch our heads about. Societies can turn ugly, and they are much more volatile than they used to be. It's better to have strong ties in a strong family. 

How much integration is possible without the integration of families?

I don't think it even makes sense to contemplate an integrated society without that fundamental premise. For all the talk about racism in America, this is the discussion that gets no play among the pundits. I suspect that is because the pundits seek to influence policy and that sort of bureaucratic stuff. Family is something over which they'd like to have control but cannot approach it. It occurs to me that the greatest integration of American society with respect to black and white came with the stroke of a pen sorts of powers that changed the Civil Service and Armed Forces. That's the biggest chunk on the pareto, everything else is weak by comparison, even Affirmative Action. I would have a skeptical eyebrow about the Fair Housing laws, because black neighborhoods haven't much changed or moved from where they were 60 years ago. Only those who could afford to move would move anyhow, and the Great Migration from the South was not a government initiative. Nor was the Civil Rights Movement and all that has transpired in American culture to change hearts and minds. But it all still comes down, as I see it, to race mixing. 

Race mixing not for the purposes of destroying a race, but for the purposes of destroying the idea. At some point it has to be about the dance, and not about the dancers.

 

 

American Lynchings

Lynchings: By State and Race, 1882-1968 *
State	White	Black	Total
Alabama	48	299	347
Arizona	31	0	31
Arkansas	58	226	284
California	41	2	43
Colorado	65	3	68
Delaware	0	1	1
Florida	25	257	282
Georgia	39	492	531
Idaho	20	0	20
Illinois	15	19	34
Indiana	33	14	47
Iowa	17	2	19
Kansas	35	19	54
Kentucky	63	142	205
Louisiana	56	335	391
Maine	1	0	1
Maryland	2	27	29
Michigan	7	1	8
Minnesota	5	4	9
Mississippi	42	539	581
Missouri	53	69	122
Montana	82	2	84
Nebraska	52	5	57
Nevada	6	0	6
New Jersey	1	1	2
New Mexico	33	3	36
New York	1	1	2
North Carolina	15	86	101
North Dakota	13	3	16
Ohio	10	16	26
Oklahoma	82	40	122
Oregon	20	1	21
Pennsylvania	2	6	8
South Carolina	4	156	160
South Dakota	27	0	27
Tennessee	47	204	251
Texas	141	352	493
Utah	6	2	8
Vermont	1	0	1
Virginia	17	83	100
Washington	25	1	26
West Virginia	20	28	48
Wisconsin	6	0	6
Wyoming	30	5	35
Total	1,297	3,446	4,743
*Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.

Data by year (aggregated again!)

Year	Whites	Blacks	Total
1882	64	49	113
1883	77	53	130
1884	160	51	211
1885	110	74	184
1886	64	74	138
1887	50	70	120
1888	68	69	137
1889	76	94	170
1890	11	85	96
1891	71	113	184
1892	69	161	230
1893	34	118	152
1894	58	134	192
1895	66	113	179
1896	45	78	123
1897	35	123	158
1898	19	101	120
1899	21	85	106
1900	9	106	115
1901	25	105	130
1902	7	85	92
1903	15	84	99
1904	7	76	83
1905	5	57	62
1906	3	62	65
1907	3	58	61
1908	8	89	97
1909	13	69	82
1910	9	67	76
1911	7	60	67
1912	2	62	64
1913	1	51	52
1914	4	51	55
1915	13	56	69
1916	4	50	54
1917	2	36	38
1918	4	60	64
1919	7	76	83
1920	8	53	61
1921	5	59	64
1922	6	51	57
1923	4	29	33
1924	0	16	16
1925	0	17	17
1926	7	23	30
1927	0	16	16
1928	1	10	11
1929	3	7	10
1930	1	20	21
1931	1	12	13
1932	2	6	8
1933	2	24	26
1934	0	15	15
1935	2	18	20
1936	0	8	8
1937	0	8	8
1938	0	6	6
1939	1	2	3
1940	1	4	5
1941	0	4	4
1942	0	6	6
1943	0	3	3
1944	0	2	2
1945	0	1	1
1946	0	6	6
1947	0	1	1
1948	1	1	2
1949	0	3	3
1950	1	1	2
1951	0	1	1
1952	0	0	0
1953	0	0	0
1954	0	0	0
1955	0	3	3
1956	0	0	0
1957	1	0	1
1958	0	0	0
1959	0	1	1
1960	0	0	0
1961	0	1	1
1962	0	0	0
1963	0	1	1
1964	2	1	3
1965	0	0	0
1966	0	0	0
1967	0	0	0
1968	0	0	0
Total	1,297	3,445	4,742

Doing the Equality Math

A long time ago, I put together a manpower planning system for a Fortune 50 company. It was one of those opportunities for me to see something most people don't see. I learned some valuable lessons. I'd like to repeat one or two of them here. It's an old argument that I used to call 'Angry White Math' in defense of Affirmative Action. As it turns out I'm going to use that same math for another purpose which is to demonstrate why it is I believe that Progressives are shrill.

As we got into some details about my fact-free philosophical reconnoitering it was suggested that the numbers are on 'the side' of people who constantly argue against racism and sexism. So exactly how much of that argument is just self-righteous moralizing? Well that's a subjective question. But see if you can follow along with the following mathematical syllogism which I replicate in its original idiotic form from 12 years ago:

america 1998 - population approximately 260 million

black population approximately 32 million.

question: what is the effect of affirmative action on 'white' employment?

given: 1/2 of the population is the workforce

therefore the black workforce is 16 million

the non-black workforce is 114 million.

given: black unemployment is 50%, non-black unemployment is 0%

goal: using a zero-sum hardball forced affirmative action program to create 0% black unemployment.

find: what is the net effect on the non-black workforce?

so we have to find 8 million jobs, that would leave the non-black workforce with 98 million jobs.

therefore the net non-black unemployment rate would go from 50% down to 0%

the non-black unemployment rate would go from 0% to 7.017%

this is an absolutely rediculous worse-case scenario. but several things become immediately clear which debunk a lot of angry white math against affirmative action.

1. under the worst of all circumstances, affirmative action could only affect about 1 out of every 14 non-black jobs.

2. black unemployment is nowhere near 50%, it's not even at 25%, it's closer to half that. so that makes the maximum reasonable number of zero-sum replacement jobs 2 million.

3. it is not a fair assumption that affirmative action is applied everywhere - at least 50% of all american employment comes from firms which are too small to be bound to affirmative action rules. that drops the maximum to 1 million.

4. those one million jobs against a black unemployment rate of 12.5% would cut black unemployment in half to 6.25%

so let's do another re-assessment.

given: non-black unemployment is 6.25% it would take something less than 1 million zero-sum jobs to give racial parity in employment. so far, affirmative action hasn't come close. so it stands to reason that white displacement is a myth, and that affirmative action has yet to cost non-black america one million jobs. out of a total workforce of 130 million, that is 7/10's of a percent of all american jobs.

but let's double it, just to be on the safe side. affirmative action covers less than 1.5% of all the jobs in america. which don't all belong to whites, but to asians and latinos as well. furthermore, everybody should know that the largest class of affirmative action beneficiaries are white women.

so i think i have pretty much destroyed the economic case for angry white math, proving once and for all that the primary obstacle to affirmative action is RESENTMENT, not ECONOMICS.

I welcome challenges to my syllogism.

So here we have to inject a little reality and update the numbers. Nationally, unemployment is somewhere around 9.5 percent. I don't know what black unemployment is. Let's guess that it is triple the national average. So let's say it's 28.5%  Let us further assume that all the racism of America is expressed in the loss of black jobs. So let us therefore invent, under the Obama Administration, the Department of Racial Payback. If you are black and unemployed, it will be automatically assumed that racism is the cause. Show up at the office and the Department will get you a job. Boom. So how many jobs will the DRP have to produce to provide magical equality and destroy all of the effects of racism? How many if they are zero-sum jobs? How many if they are new jobs? OK well assuming we use the following figures.

Workforce: 150 million
Black Pop. 35 million
Black Workforce 17.5 ( about 12.5 M working 5 M not working)

Non-Zero Sum Parity requires 1.66M new jobs. I don't have a spreadsheet on this machine so I can't figure out the zero-sum parity. But it would be less than 1.66M. Now, what does it take to create somewhere around 1.66 new jobs, or fire around 1.4M folks and give their jobs to unemployed blacks? Something close to an act of God in either case, especially if in the second case you don't want riots in the streets.

It's obvious to me, as it should be to you, that x years Affirmative Action was insufficient to close the gap in black vs non-black unemployment. But it's also obvious to me that when you norm for education and class, the gap in black vs non-black unemployment drops significantly. I'm sure anyone focused on such mathematical ways of looking at people would provide us with those vetted statistics, right?

So how exactly do Progressives measure the effect of racism on their protected classes and how big are those gaps? It's not clear. But it's clear to me that the claim of a goal of statistical equality begs for acts of God. And what exactly are the areas in which Progressives get hyped about gaps explained by racism? Let me not put words in their mouths. But let us examine the costs of such things as zero sum Affirmative Action that will close the gap.

I think that an honest discussion of this, loaded to the gills with statistics will reveal several acts of God, not to mention acts of Congress and huge amounts of money. Then how is it that we maintain the status quo without riots in the streets? This is the great dilemma of the Progressive mindset. It is my opinion that they cannot quite understand why the outrage is always in their heads and not in the people, and that an economic accounting of all of the relevant factors shows that all of the outrage is priced out of the equation. In other words, just like there is Angry White Math over the existence of Affrmative Action, when you look at what's actually being done, the outrage is all out of proportion. On the exact other side of the coin, there is Angry Progressive Politics over the existence of disparities, but when you look at what it actually costs to eliminate those disparities to the standard of 'equality', and see how it is that society continues to function without that elimination, you see that the outrage is similarly out of proportion.

I specifically ask for ways and means to have solutions to these problems that are objective. If racism weighs six pounds, then the six pound adjustment cures racism and everybody can agree. The important question between liberals and conservatives is where you take those six pounds of flesh, from public or private hands. The answer I stereotypically expect is that the only way America can get six pounds of flesh for every victim of racism is through compelled state action. I would actually be happy to hear such a straight answer, because the six pounds would be quantified objectively.

Since 2001, and in dealing with the then-pressing issue of Reparations, I have looked at the economics. And my premise has been simple. We are at racial equilibrium in reality. But political resentment and outrage cannot accept that. I don't disagree that the outrage is moral, but that doesn't change the fact that it is insufficient to dramatically alter the status quo and provide funding for the solutions whatever they may be. This would not be a political problem if Progressives could see their way around to a privately funded solution. Instead their poltical opponents are blamed for *all* racism because of their refusal to consent to a state sponsored solution - whose dimensions if honestly reckoned with, would require an act of God.

So the challenge remains which is something you can unanimously get ascent to from 90% of the Right. If you can solve any problem with racism or sexism or both with a Federal tax ceiling of 20%, it gets done tomorrow. If it costs 40%, it gets done when hell freezes over. There's plenty room for negotiation, and that's how the parties go back and forth forever. But we still don't honestly know what the cost for the solution to racism is.

How about some facts?

 

The Intellectual One-Drop Rule

If there's a matter that haunts me regarding race in America, it is the sense many Americans have arrogated unto themselves to claim an implicit understanding of what is best for black Americans. The great irony of this matter is that it is genuinely considered sincere and well-meaning. What's interesting is that what was once a broad sentiment has been reduced to a small cadre of black critics. What's sad is how irrelevant and obnoxious some of them have become.

I have recently purchased a box set of DVDs from PBS of Juan Williams' landmark documentary Eyes on the Prize. And in listening to the narrative, I am reminded of a term that has rather disappeared from American English. I have no idea how or if it was written properly. One might consider it to be a specific pronunciation of the term 'Negro' in the Southern dialect. But what it sounds like is 'nigrah', accent on the first syllable. In my youth, when I heard the term more frequently, I considered it to be a contraction of 'nigger' and 'Negro', and I interpreted it as the term that white Southerners used when they were thinking 'nigger' but were speaking to an audience who would consider it morally loaded. The term was one of a provincial paternalism, because it was almost always prefaced by the possessive term 'our', especially in the oft-repeated context of law and culture. Northerners and other 'outside agitators' were to blame, said the Segregationist Southerner of messing with the minds of 'our nigrahs' and thusly disturbing the peace of Jim Crow Segregation.

As I grew up on the West Coast, I never heard the term used anywhere but on TV in the context of the righteous indignation the more 'progressive' and 'liberal' of us must have. So as Bin Laden is, so was Bull Connor and all his baby bulls of the radical Islamofascism of the day, Jim Crow. Nevertheless, out here there were plenty of people who had new ideas of what these dark skinned people should be and how they should conduct themselves in society. It wasn't enough, when I was growing up, to merely be thankful for Civil Rights victories and to integrate into American society under the protection of the specifically amended law. It was de rigeur for the 'so-called Negro' to take up a new identity. I've recently called this thing black radical autonomy. That may be somewhat harsh but perhaps necessary to understand the breadth of the gap I perceive between the old colored man and the New Black Man. I am apt to use the often observed comparison of Muhammed Ali to Floyd Patterson - or even Muhammad Ali to his old self, Cassius Clay. It wasn't enough for the Negro to evolve, he needed to be transformed into a new sort of creature - the Black Man. It was famously enshrined in the poem Die Nigger.

The difficulty with that evolution, necessary in its context is that it has formed the basis of what I have decided to call Jim Crow Jr. But the operating characteristic of this regime of truth is its aim of a permanent claim of authority on the thinking of anyone calling themselves or who once called themselves 'Black'. It is, for all intents and purposes an intellectual one drop rule. If you ever thought orthodoxically black, then you are for all time wedded to and responsible for Black Thought. No matter what Black Thought must become, you must become part of it as well. It is a never-ending Struggle that must always continue and always occupy proper, moral men's minds.

Except that it can't, it doesn't and it becomes more ridiculous with every passing day that it tries. Black Thought requires an immanent apocalypse, a shadow force of Klan-like proportions, a rhetorical threat used to hush dissent. There is no endgame, because in the end, the only real game is about control of the putative Black mind. Once I thought: "I'm beginning to think that it is reasonable to believe that the end of black politics will come when we have a black President, rather like the end of Irish Catholic politics." But then we got one and he's not really Black and there are other evasions. But eventually, all will have to admit that Black Politics is a fiction, or essentially a useless tangent absorbed into whatever sentient neo-liberalism that emreges from America's Democrat Party. All of it boils down to the same invective. These here are 'our nigrahs', and everybody else ought to keep their hands off because we know what's best for them. 

Dick Feynman once said, that simply because you've lived under the effects of gravity for your entire life is not a sufficient condition to make you understand gravitational physics. And with that warning in mind I have always looked at race as an intellectual problem. My own history of being black is only tangential to what my research and discovery help me to know. And so I have always wrestled with the intersections of that knowledge and my own identity. But having ignored race and de-emphasized it for so long in other pursuits it only recently occurs to me that it really doesn't matter what experience I claim. There's always a black ball rolling somewhere, and it's not always useful to find it, hop on top of it and gain balance. It doesn't matter how black one claims to be or how intense one feels ones soulful roots, it's only ethnicity. Ethnicity is rarely more than tribal, and such claims are not useful in working out the problems of this republic. Nor is seeing things as if most claims were tribal, because they are not. What I observe is a constant dissonance among people who never want to *be* racist or support racist agendas, and yet the subtext is that there remains a persistent bad faith. That is the tragedy of American race relations - a perpetual pollution - an obsession always seeking that one drop of causality, always passionately disturbed at a lack of unity, against a perceived unity of the Other-Americans.

It must be, in the end, a peasant fascination. That only re-generates opportunities for intellects to exploit in every generation. We are fortunate to have a tradition of emergence and defense of civil rights by hook or crook in this land that while it may seldom produce bravery, it always promises freedom. There is something natural to natural aristocracy and that concept does not lie dormant but renews its truth despite meddling and advocacy one way or another. So people *do* finally realize they belong to themselves here in America. May that continue.

 

 

Amy Wax & The Truck Driver

I've heard this parable before. Have you?

Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience—and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”

This is from John McWhorter's recent review of Amy Wax' latest book. Race, Wrongs & Remedies.

I suppose that there are a couple dozen thousand people who need to read this whole book. I understand that implacable logic from experience. 

Wax writes directly:

The government cannot make people watch less television, talk to their children, or read more books. It cannot ordain domestic order, harmony, tranquility, stability, or other conditions conducive to academic success and the development of sound character. Nor can it determine how families structure their interactions and routines or how family resources—including time and money—are expended. Large-scale programs are especially ineffective in changing attitudes and values toward learning, work, and marriage.

This is controversial only in a land of fools.

Life and Death of The Boohab - An Anti-Racist Activist's Retrospective

CD asks: A question, I gave you a working, if not indirect definition of racism in my original query, please, and I would really find this useful, can you give me a definition of racism, and two, can you point to any example of anti-white racism in this country since its inception on the part of black people. Now, I am not talking about prejudice (deserved or otherwise), I mean racism, something with structural, historical, wealth, life chance consequences.

What I'm going to do is give a complete contextual reading of my interest in anti-racism from it origins and where it stands today. This will, if read carefully, help anyone understand why CD and I are principally different.

First of all, informing my opinion about race was established by the scholarship of K. Anthony Appiah of Harvard, a member of one of the families involved in the post-colonial governments of West Africa. Appiah's book "In My Father's House" sought to examine the causes for the failures of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism from the point of view of their own internal failings. I read this book when it was new, which would be somewhere around 1992. The basic goodies of the book, and one of the reasons I was attracted to it was to find out what went wrong with Marcus Garvey and all of the black consciousness movements in America, and also why organizations like Malcolm's post-hajj OAU(?) failed to unite African and African-American political forces.

Appiah starts with a definition of race which I probably should quote more directly, but I don't have the book handy. I'm sure I got the gist of it, and what I do have are my own definitions.

I also came upon a matter of racism that struck me as intolerable during that same period. So it became a project of mine to define and sustain a singly principled anti-racist praxis that was specifically not relativistically defined depending upon what race you happened to 'be'. The incident had something to do with a campaign trick that essentially paid black ministers to keep their parishioners out of an election. It seemed to me at the time that blatant racism had gone underground and was being used in dastardly and secretive ways - ways that a sophisticated analysis could observe and combat.

Thirdly, it should also be noted that I felt that cyberspace was a medium through which conflicting ideas about race could be discussed due to the impersonal yet detailed aspect of the forums it could create. I didn't want shouting matches or encounter groups. The 'net provided.

So I took on the persona of 'Boohab' and became a 'persistent black object', as an anti-racist agitator in every major cyberspace forum of the day. This took place between '93 and '96-97. That was my project. Before that, I was only interested in talking to blackfolks on the web. 

So here are Appiah's race-neutral definitions of racism that I used as the basis of my online writing in support of a multicultural anti-racist praxis for American citizens.
--

I have said before in this and other fora that the best definitions I have come across are stated by Kwame Anthony Appiah in his recent book "In My Father's House" . I think his ideas are significant because of the depth and scope of his knowledge and experience and the fact that he is an internationally recognized scholar. I believe him capable of making his points clearly at any level of discourse. Unfortunately he's not on this particular distribution. So I will paraphrase.

racialism

The belief that there are differences between human beings which are inherited such that they can be ordered into separate races in such a way that each race shares traits and tendencies which are not shared by members of any other race. Each race has an 'essence'.

All forms of racism build from the premise of racialism. Notice that racialism is not saying anything 'good' or 'bad' about races just that mutually exclusive races absolutely exist and divide the species. The racialist would argue that you could trace the bloodlines of Jews throughout history and that you can definitely determine the 'jewness' of any human being according to his racial 'essence'.

A racialist does not necessarily believe that the races, as we understand them in America are complete. He may say that there are, in actuality, 37 races. We just don't know what they are yet. The racialist's point however is that race, whatever it turns out to be, is deterministic of human behavior and that we need to know.  

extrinsic racism:
    The extrinsic racist says that there is a moral component to the 'essence' of a race which warrants differential treatment.  These differences are, to the extrinsic racist, not particularly controversial.  The extrinsic racist, while maintaining the belief for example that Jews are  greedy, might not feel anything wrong with befriending a Jew. The extrinsic racist might very well applaud the Jew who proves himself not greedy and call  him a credit to his race.
 
intrinsic racism:
    The intrinsic racist says that the moral 'essence' of a race establishes an incontrovertible status for the race. no matter what an individual member of a race does he should be treated just like the rest of his race. the intrinsic racist would argue that the Jew is so greedy that he would hide his greed in order to gain other's confidence or that this generous person is simply not a Jew.

I use these definitions for a purpose. My interest is in generating and maintaining anti-racist praxis in individuals for the primary purposes of ridding racism from American politics. Thus it is important that these categories work for political ideologies as well as the thoughts of individuals. An individual bigot may be converted for better or worse any day of the week, but a policy enacted by like-minded individuals at any moment in time survives the individual.

Thus whether or not one individually holds racist ideas, the existence of racist policies is that citizen's responsibility.

--

So this gives me a basis for recognizing the fundamental error of racialist reasoning and a context for assigning moral weight to offenses that proceed from such bases.

It should also be said, that I was once a fan of Tim Wise and supported the premises of the project of Whiteness Studies. I no longer do, and that is because I find the premises to be flawed as well as the implementation of that project. But we can get into all that in the comments.

Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of Astrology

Imagine: Protest, Insurgency and the Workings of Astrology
by Michael David Cobb Bowen with no apologies to Tim Wise
July 20, 2010

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning races as the primary characteristic of people we’ll envision zodiac signs of folks. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were defined by something we know is meaningless, non-deterministic and not to be taken seriously, rather than race which fast-talking, know-it-all people obsessively invest with meaning and seriousness. This will help you gain the insight into the workings of race hustlers in America who keep loading meaning into the social construction of race by racializing every event that comes on the news.

So let’s begin. Oh. Just it case it gets confusing, you need to assume that humanity is divided into animal, human and object zodiac signs. As such, Geminis and Pisces don't get along.

Imagine that hundreds of Gemini protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters—the Gemini protesters--spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters--these Gemini protesters with guns--be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most Pisces as a danger to the republic? What if they were Saggitarians? Because, after all, that's what happened recently when Pisces gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation's capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country's political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that Pisces members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry Gemini people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the Gemini demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionist mob? After all, this is what Pisces protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a Gemini artist were to say, in reference to a Pisces politician and presidential candidate: "He's a living turd and I told him to bite my Uzi." And what would happen to any prominent commentator who then, when asked about that statement, replied that the rapper was a friend and that he (the commentator) would not disavow or even criticize him for his remarks. Because that’s what artist Joe Spigot said in 2007, and that's how Deak Warson responded to Spigot's remarks when he was asked about them.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream Gemini political commentator had long employed an overt Pisces hater as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in Gemini separatist conferences, and once assaulted a Pisces person while calling them by a astrological slur. When that prominent Gemini commentator and his sister--who also works for the organization--defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Paul Bissenden employed as Executive Director of his group, The National Trust, a blatant hater who did all these things, or at least their Pisces equivalents: attending Pisces separatist conferences and attacking a Gemini woman while calling her an astrological slur.

Imagine that a Gemini radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a Pisces president is by “hating Gemini people,” or that a prominent Pisces person had only endorsed a Pisces presidential candidate as an act of astrological bonding, or blamed a Pisces president for a fight on a school bus in which a Gemini kid was jumped by two Pisces kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all of them, but rather, would like to leave just enough--“living skeletons” as he called them--“so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

Imagine that a Gemini pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a Pisces president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Minister Sam C. Smith said recently at a rally in Bluetown, South Dakota.

Imagine a Gemini radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by the human zodiac if the government continues to be dominated by the rich Pisces men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Scorpios or Libras non-humans, or say that when it came to such people, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Manny Sandoober, predicting Pisces revolution in the face of multi-astrologism, or said by Sandoober about Aries and Aquarians, respectively. And it was Congressman Slimp, from Vermont, who praised Sandoober in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a Gemini political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who drove his truck into the Annandale, Wisconsin gas station did wrong was not blowing up the local radio station instead. This is, after all, what Alison Creer said about Tom L. Preston, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the a national newspaper.

Imagine that a popular Gemini website posted comments about the daughter of a Pisces president, calling her “stinking rotten fish,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making bubble sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what some political group posted about (Gemini) Margaret French on livecityq.com last year, when they referred to her as “twin trash.”

Imagine that Gemini protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what Pisces protesters did last year, in reference to party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at the President, by folks who are almost exclusively Pisces, were being aimed, instead, at a Pisces president, by non-animal signs. How many Pisces viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that Pisces president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same non-animal signs?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. And this, my friends, is what astrological privilege is all about. It is the ability to have your astrological sign taken seriously and given as proximate cause for all of your thinking and your actions, whether the real reason be personal, political, medical, religious, philosophical, emotional, psychological, random or any combination of any of that or something else that nobody can honestly figure out.

I hope this exercise has been instructional. You see just as astrological signs have been a social construction that is about as old as mankind, so has race. The advance of knowledge has proven that the movement of the stars and planets have no bearing on our behavior, and so it has been proven about race. Except people still know their signs and race and decide that they want to make important, it is a choice that says a great deal about one's character. It says even more about those who seek to keep people fixated on this powerful, yet foolish and immoral obsession.

The Scopes Threshold

(from the archives: October 2009)

There are those who believe that racialism can be scientifically validated. I believe it can. However no matter how much how accurate that validation it becomes it should never cross the threshold of legal standing.

It is a fundamental premise of Enlightenment thought that societies must recognize the basic equality of individuals. Which is to say that simply by the virtue of being human, of having a soul, that there is a plateau of respect below which no man should be placed. In saying so, we are also saying that there is a ceiling of respect above which no non-human should attain. These are the basics of human rights upon which Western society is built and towards which all of our civilizations aim.

A society of law seeks to place all humans as equals before the law and grants them standing as citizens to by protected by it and bound to it. In this way it establishes all of the expectations of all powers and freedoms, etc. It makes that plateau and ceiling. To be granted citizenship is to be placed on that plateau and acknowledged by that society as an equal in the eyes of the law. And to make that clear, here in America we establish that equality before the law WITHOUT REGARD to race, and a host of other distinctions.

So I repeat what I said about the racialists in the context of Skip Gates:

Many Americans strongly believe that positive discrimination works, and that it is, always and everywhere the best policy. And therefore when you boil it down there are two camps.

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color.

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color.

[..]

But giant populations of people, especially Professor Gates himself and those of his current staunch defenders take it as axiomatic that special regard is the way to go. For example, white people should be sensitive to black people, because they are black. To them, race relations is a purpose and an end to itself. Whenever you hear the tell-tale words 'we still have a long way to go' it is an expression of their  ethics. Their purpose is not to destroy race, but to create a fixed and permanent indemnification whose implications are stamped into law but whose weights and measures are under ideological control. That is why every year and after every significant racial excressence they desire and demand to have yet another national debate on the subject of race. Just so they get their words and priorities into the court of public opinion where they have had the upper hand since the passage of Brown.

There are those like commenter RR, they are a special case of Ideological Tribe B, which is to say they are convinced that race goes far beyond something that should be stamped into law and whose weights and measures are under ideological control, but that race is the proper way to interpret human biology and genetics.

It is not illegal to be racist in this country. Socially, freedom of association is just that. There is plenty of racial discrimination that can, does and will always take place which is legitimately outside of the spirit and the letter of the law, and plenty that goes on otherwise as well. We are as racist as we want to be and it can be said that our society is at racial equilibrium. There are no pressing legislative ideas, nothing in the top 20 agendas of the past several congresses. To state the obvious, some communities are a great deal more racist than others. People are living in American society where the racial tone is appropriate for them. Otherwise they move.

--

So there is one thing to prove for these genetic racialists, and that is that for society's benefit there should be gradations in human and civil rights and the law should be changed.

That is to say that not to recognize that people are biologically and genetically inferior and superior forces people to live in a state of compromise that threatens society. Anything less than that, meaning a change in the law, is just a social freedom of the sort that allowed for White Citizens Councils and all sorts of other racialist and racist pressure groups. It's all a kind of big 'so what' if it doesn't involve the law, so far as I'm concerned. You're just another racist or racialist fragment of American society that's disenchanted with the way things are.

So where is your majority?

To question the premise of Enlightenment thinking, of the equality of man before the law, of modernism and the premise that any man can, no matter his blood, be taught any idea or speak any language, is a course whose options are thankfully small. But horrible ideas have long pedigrees as well. To violate the legal plateau is to ask to recalibrate the value of the individual and there is no doubt in my mind that the inevitable consequence will be a fascist atrocity with scientific precision.

John Rosenberg and Me

Back when I was a black and proud race man, around the beginning of my blogging career, I would periodically cross swords with John Rosenberg over at Discriminations. I am pleased to see that he's still in the blogging business. Good.

We seemed to go a round a bit on the matter of Affirmative Action, and I recall enough about our exchanges to reduce our difference to one simple point. I have supported Affirmative Action in many different weak ways, never expecting much of it since I did the math in the 80s. I realized then, that Affirmative Action was always cherry picking, it would never do enough work to raise the race and as Sowell made painfully clear, that it would not always be politically acceptable to the mainstream. I can't remember the last time I got into a good Affirmative Action debate, but it probably was around Grutter. But when Rosenberg and I got into it, we were on accord about one controversial point. Affirmative Action is racial discrimination. The way I worded it was this: Affirmative Action is positive racial discrimination for the purposes of inclusion - and that is what distinguishes it from racial discrimination for the purposes of exclusion. Rosenberg had zero tolerance for any racial discrimination, a position I considered hokey and impractical. My basis for that had to do with the fact that the nation had, by acclimation, determined that Affirmative Action would be the political settlement negotiated with respect to historical discrimination and 'the legacy of slavery'. So long as people would employ those careworn phrases with political currency; well, a deal's a deal. This was especially viable considering that we were in the post-Bakke regime, meaning no numerical quotas.

All of this devolved towards the verbiage of 'diversity' which I considered mealy-mouthed and euphemistic. Affirmative Action, for what it was worth, at least had some hardball edges that appealed to me as a virulent, pro-integration race-mixer. Yeah. You're going to integrate your schools, dorms, churches, armies, civil services and institutions whether you liked it or not. And then things started to get multiculturally weird. 

Today, I have very little reason to give two craps about Affirmative Action. Nobody talks about it. I think Grutter was decided wrongly by the way. The exceptions should have gone to the undergraduate program not the certified graduate program. I never supported race-norming of test scores or any such actions that put meritocracy at risk. But it seems to me that supporters of multicultural diversity sunk their own ship when they opted for their identity politics that decided to traffic in more than just race.If you truly want to disable identity politics, racial or otherwise, then you must adhere to a standard of assimilation and conformity based on shared values. 'Diversity' became its own meaningless value and since the focus was almost always on young people, those values were nothing more or less than identity stereotypes. It became inevitable then that such logic and defense of such would be riven by hypocrisy.

Anyway, I dropped by his blog and am going to start tracking back and commenting over there, rather as a supplement (and countermeasure) to what I do at Respectable Negroes when I feel froggy on matters of race. What I expect will be a decent standard with some legal chops that doesn't wax lyrical or encourage speculation. We'll see.

The Black Anti-Summit

My friend EC is concerned with hope about the accountability of black public intellectuals who have subscribed to the Involuntary Black Poverty Theory. The theory is more of an assumption which helps determine the burden of proof regarding whose responsibility black poverty is. Without going into any extremes of qualification, suffice it to say that the difference between Voluntary and Involuntary still must deal with economic structure and civil infrastructure. In many ways it's an existential, and thus to my way of thinking, somewhat inconsequential matter. That is to say if the best minds could determine the size, scope, budget and schedule for the final project to mitigate the spread between average American poverty and black American poverty, it shouldn't much matter to someone like me, who would be an engineer of that solution, where the funding is coming from. Rather, I'm worried that the nature of the solution itself has some fundamental implementation issues.

The one we are discussing now has to do with the roles and responsibilities of the leadership of such a project. EC is shaping himself up to be a world beater on the legal front and has picked out a locale for his, the third generation of movement after Brown. What we are confronting now is what we conceive of as the shortcomings of my generation's legacy.

I raise the question of the way you get this work done. Specifically, how do you set up a communications network that enables a virtual organization that can coordinate information about localities? This is something I have been doing, on and off, for the past 17 years. It's how I became an online writer.

First of all, where do we agree? We agree that there needs to be a colloquy of intellectuals who are capable of situating the sorts of problems of black poverty in an accurate context. There needs to be the kind of thoughtful people who might, for example, understand the shortcomings of trying to recruit a black male militia in Philadelphia in order to combat the high murder rate. We also agree that such folks need to have some real understanding about how real economies and businesses work.

EC and I agree that the current crop of intellectuals are not and cannot be held accountable, but any future such group must be accountable. Moreover, they must be effective. There are several reasons for the current lack of accountability & effectiveness.

• They are not elected.
• They are not independently funded.
• They do not own their own communications.
• They are not locally focused.
• They are not thematically focused.
• They are not coordinated.

That's plenty enough hurdles.

How would I go about it? Start an online portal as a joint exercise by a coalition of the top five black organizations in every metro. I did this during college for the 12 or so black clubs and organizations on campus. My group was called the Executive Central Committee, the ECC. It was only moderately successful and ultimately failed. That's because it was informal and had no budget, but the basic idea was sound, which was to coordinate calendars. What I attempted was to get an officer from every organization to attend ECC meetings and share what their group was doing. Nobody had the time, even though everybody agreed that communications were necessary because you would get low turnouts if events were double booked on campus. Where you might have enough people to make one event profitable, you wouldn't have enough to make two profitable. What I should have done was to have runners from the ECC to attend each of the clubs meetings and report back, then have the ECC calendar created from those reports.

This is the power of a decentralized communications organization. It works much better and cheaper than a summit. At a summit, the top leadership has to stop what they are doing and repeat their messages to some super group that gets together once a year. Except that nobody is accountable to the super group. This is why Tavis Smiley will fail if he hasn't failed already. You cannot herd all them cats. You just have to have a cat backchannel.

Right now, as Kevin Ross knows very well, that black American backchannel is black radio. But they're having their own economic crisis. The political end can actually be accomplished on the cheap. When that starts to happen, that will be the beginning of the beginning of a renaissance in black leadership addressing the issue of poverty and other black partisan politics. 

BTW, if you don't know Kevin Ross, then get to know him. He's about action, and he's got the connections.

Two Black Intellectual Stories

A thoughtful reader writes:

1. I think the pathology of white racism impacts Black folks in various degrees depending where you are on the ladder both income and color of hue.

2. To many Black folks are still wounded from the pathology of white racism in America and as a result it makes them create and develop a low self esteem and as such you get this need to seek validation, affirmation from the very forces that wounded and fractured your cultural, self and community and..

3. Black intellectuals who for some reason refuse to create and advance their own paradigms simply then parrot and mimic the paradigms of white intellectuals

4. I would argue that few Black folks have cross this barrier and have the capacity to actually create new paradigms entirely removed from the blueprint and constructs of white folks..

And I respond.

On point 1, yes. I agree that many black Americans do internalize White Supremacy. It's kinda how they know they are still 'black'. And the constant racism chasing done by various parties keeps them assured of their place in society - which they are perversely comfortable in.  Money and light-skindedness are just two ways they offset that. Money is more real, but then it has to be real money.

2. Yes. That's absolutely right. The big problem is, of course, that people believe falsely about who 'white' people are, how they get and how they maintain their power. After enough time of looking at all power as a corrupt white hustle, these black people do themselves in. They doom themselves to powerlessness because they never learn the lessons of what real power is. It's like the man who only looks at women as objects because he's never known a truly good woman and all the ones who answer to 'bitch' are well.. just that. So that's all he knows. That's all he gets. He's doomed.

3. I think we, speaking for myself in this, have put too much faith in somebody special to explain it all to us. On the one hand it's true that we used to lack for enough righteous education and we needed our own leaders. But that's not really the case any longer. After all, it has been almost 50 years of public accommodations. And the fact of the matter is that if you really read Carter G Woodson or James Weldon Johnson, you'd realize that the answers are all out there and they're old answers. The problem is that people have been convinced that their freedom isn't real unless everyone in the race is free. That's foolishness and the Klan talking. See Point 1.

There doesn't need to be a brand new paradigm. The whole of revisionist history 'for' black poeple is wrong, which is what I hope Jelani Cobb was implying in his piece. People need to understand the whole of real history, not the self-esteem steroid version. Christianity is sufficient.

Let me take this tangent for a moment because it's kinda important and personal.

I'll tell my story about Nell Painter.
Nell Painter wrote the definitive biography/history of Sojourner Truth. I met her around 1991 when she joined the faculty at UCLA. So one day I'm on campus and she's being introduced to students and she talks about Tubman and being glad to be in Los Angeles. Then one of the students pipe up. What do you think is the solution to the problems in the black community? And of course, Painter, being an honest peson, can't asnwer. She's not from LA and she doesn't know what's going on in this black community. She's a little flustered but the answer that comes out is essentially, hell you live there, you should be telling me!

I'll tell you another story: of Derek Walcott.
I bought his epic poem Omeros when it came out. I was reading Moliere at the time and digging it, but thought I should perhaps pay attention to some blackness. So every once in a while, you could catch me with his book trying to rap it. And I would do so in cafes like the young pretentious aesthete that I was trying to be at the ripe old age of 29, just loud enough so people could ask me what I was doing. And I would explain that Derek Walcott was the darling of the intellectual set (and he was) and everybody acknowledges what a painstaking act of genius it was to take the story of the Illiad and translate it into a black Caribbean metaphor. Have you never heard of Derek Walcott?  He won the Nobel Prize in Poetry. But he didn't solve the problem of the black community. And nobody in the black community reads anything by Derek Walcott.

The black community is its own problem. Black Intellectuals who try to solve its problems always fail. Black Intellectuals who don't try are not long considered Black Intellectuals. So it basically comes down to this point. Who's down with The Struggle and who's not. 

Now the difficulty with The Struggle is that it has been hijacked by people who can't think their way out of a paper bag. And that's because the Real Struggle has already been won and the architects of that struggle have moved on. The laws of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet are now not against you based on the color of your skin. And in case you haven't noticed, thousands of people from halfway around the planet have come here in the past 20 years to work in an industry that didn't even exist until 20 years after those laws were changed. So why are there more Indians than black American in Silicon Valley? Was there ever an apartheid of computers? No, of course not. But the Black Intellectuals didn't go in that direction - they all wanted to rewrite history as academic department heads, not through private enterprise. The Struggle is a farce. It's about getting police officers fired. It's about getting comedians to apologize. It's about getting 20 year olds into undergraduate programs. That ain't power. That's middle class meddling.

So The Struggle is all about getting people out of ghetto depravity into middle class mediocrity, which is the essential component of Christian Missionary work in deepest darkest Africa. Teach 'em some hymns. Not that it's an entirely bad idea, lord know some of those pound cake thieves could use a lesson in Christian ethics. But it doesn't take an intellectual to effect such a program. Just a big bleeding heart and gobs of patience, which could easily be substituted with condescension - your mileage may vary.

Now might be a good time to go back and watch Sanford and Son. A father raised his son. Lamont Sanford didn't turn out so bad.

LAPD Puts .50 Caliber Rifle in Black Man's Face

So he can use it.

It has been a couple interesting weeks as we dipped into the race pool for a few moments. I haven't thought about it for a couple days, especially after my great day with my son at the Long Beach Grand Prix - another one of those things that are supposed to be impossible for black men to enjoy.

But it occurred to me today that I may have witnessed over that period another instance of a specific kind of black on black criticism, which I've been getting since day one of outing myself. It's the somewhat reasonable and somewhat paranoid inquiry into the question of whether or not I'm an idiot or have lost my moral compass (as a black man). With the subtext of Conservatism, the foreground of Republican and the obsession over the press double whammy over Tea Party activism and Confederate history, the subject of the actual racist history of Conservatism got lost. What I started off as an investigation of history ended up as an investigation of me. That is, of course, the very stuff of bigotry, but since I'm a hardcase, it doesn't bother me much. It's not about me, even when it somehow becomes about me. And so much for that.

Still, one has to recognize that despite my temptation to put 'black' in quotes, there are some fairly hard social constructions we all have to deal with. And since I come from one of those crazy families full of non-dysfunction and genuine authenticalness I take it upon myself to suggest that we're all Bowen first, and black somewhere down the line, whatever black means in the end. But I think I'm not stretching the definition too much when I suggest that if we took a poll, most Americans would find the picture below roughly impossible. It is the picture of a black man who has been given a .50 caliber rifle by the LAPD so he can get good at shooting it.  That black man is my brother Doc, that's Officer Bowen to you, the pictures you don't see are him with the AR and the 308. But all that's rather redundant, and I think you get my point.

Now I really want you to check yourself, honestly. Does it freak you out somewhere in the back of your mind when you put black man and LAPD together?  Are you tempted to draw inferences from the positions of the white hands in the photo? Are you thinking maybe Doc isn't what you really mean by black? Or can you just take the picture at face value? 

He's just another American who refuses to be disarmed, and he's me brudda!

Where The Wild Things Are

My father tells me that his mother used to tell him something. When he was moping around a day after he got punished, he kept wanting to hash over the unfairness of the punishment, even though he was free to go out and play. "You just want to stay mad", she would tell him.

I'm old enough to remember SCAA. SCAA was soc.culture.african.american, the first and legendary black oriented USENET newsgroup. I was the FAQmaster of that joint and so I was something of an authority on its history. What killed this, the most popular and foremost venture of American blacks into the 'information superhighway' was its uncanny ability to attract every white supremacist possible.
We got fed up and left, but I didn't stay mad.

Yesterday, as I turned to the subject of race, I found myself engaged over at the Field Negro's blog. Suddenly some of those memories came back. The old debates about race that I had long gotten bored and sick of were in full flame over in the comment section. I almost forgot about that rotten taste in my mouth. Here's where the people who want to stay mad are. Why else would the proprietor of a blog refer to himself in slavery terms?

What I think is this. Every racist with enough nerve to speak out is speaking out, 24/7 and they are doing it where their targets are. Which is to say, if you want to find where the white supremacists and their apologists are, just go to your local black political website. That's where the people stay mad. That's where the wild things are.

So if you want to actually talk about how many racists are holding up non-photoshopped signs and extrapolate how many items of white supremacy make it onto the planks of the Tea Party - well, I'm sure there's some sociology department at Brown University where the grant money awaits that kind of hedge-fund mathematics. But if you'd like to count noses, just head to the web. There you will find people in realtime doing their dirty racist business. That's not where they ALL are, but that's where they show up every day.

I've had several occasions to fight the spectre of the Southern Strategy in intransigent and defensive minds, and several years back sponsored an internet racial snark hunt of sorts. I didn't get results so much as I got smacked around for defending 'them', them being all of the conservatives I hang out with who are 'obviously' racist. I'm not interest in combating racism online or in any political program. It's not as if it were criminal. I mean it quite seriously that I have to chuckle when the racist meme of the day sweeps through - like this fistfight on a bus in Oakland. When there's a crime, I'm pro-cop and pro- law and order as usual. That's all anybody needs to be, outside of church.

White Masculinity, Black Masculinity

"We, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are.."
-- James Baldwin

OK, here's the experiment. I'm going to ask the question to an answer I presume to know. I presume that the answer is, "in the end, nothing". The question is, 'what is the difference between white masculinity and black masculinity?'

I do presume, however, that somewhere in academia there are theories about the 'lived' difference. And I also presume that difference, however slight, is to be studied with rigor. But I do wonder from what perspective it really matters and if Americans themselves take these roles to be anything more serious than stereotypes and archetypes.

Here's my own small background. Last weekend I smiled at a woman who smiled back. The woman was a middle aged black woman. I was walking alone towards the parking structure a the mall. She was walking hand in hand with a middle aged white man. I was happy, she was happy and I was happy that she was happy and she acknowledged my recognition of her happiness by returning my smile. That's the way I took it.

So I asked myself the question, as if it were posed to me by somebody else, would I mind if - do I expect that, my daughter marry a white man? And I immediately answered in terms of black men. I said, well that depends on what kind of white man he is. If he's a white man like Denzel, well of course I wouldn't mind. But if he were a white man like Dennis Rodman, I would mind a great deal. And so it went for another fraction of a second or two as I listed a few out in my mind, whereupon my mind rested upon the consideration - as it often does - that there is no kind of character I cannot imagine in black men, to the point at which race doesn't matter at all, except to the extent that it traps a mind into thinking that it does.

I haven't met every kind of man, surely. But I know whom I like by type, temperament and character. And I consider my self of the worldly sort, prepared to deal with any man, within the ambit of my powers. By that qualification I mean to say I do live by Cobb's Rule Number 7 which is - never trust anyone whose shoes cost more than your whole day's pay. I should amend that rule to read 'beware of' instead of 'never trust'. As it happens, I am meeting a man today whose wealth lies in Extremistan, although he wears common shoes. But I think Rudyard Kipling's "If" is a suitable enough framework.

I suspect that if anyone answers with differences, the differences would be circumstantial rather than principled. And I think it would be sad to think that men should be defined by their circumstances or that they are judged more according to circumstance than to standard. Of course there is the difference between achievements, of course the distance traveled matters, but should we not all head towards the same virtues?  I believe we should and so it is by compass trajectory that I tend to judge.

The difference between white and black men via circumstance is rather easy to see in Baldwin's letter to his nephew. Both are saddled with a peculiar history of mistrust, offense and crime here in America, and both must learn to accept each other as they should be, whether or not they are. To the extent that they are more race then men, they are not men.

By the way, there are two men I am in film. Two men I presume to be those who capture who I presume to be in spirit. Whom I presume to be in mind brings no one in film to mind. But those two are Washington and Willis.

MLK: The Last Negro?

MLK is as deeply embedded in our national myth as J. Edgar Hoover, Teddy Roosevelt and Johnny Appleseed. So there's really not much else to say at a popular level that hasn't already been said. So this King Day is becoming more and more like President's Day, and this and that about King himself is just about as boring and cliche as any other story about cross-dressing, rough riding or tree-planting. King brought us to our senses in many different ways. Most importantly to me, Martin Luther King reminded us that in the eyes of Christianity and in the eyes of the Constitution, there is no place for race, and if the society and the law forget that, there are severe moral and political consequences. 

But there's something else about MLK that I think needs to be said perhaps in the same way that the Triumvirate (Crouch, Murray & Marsalis) might say. Which is that he needs to be considered the Negro instead of the Black and that the more enlightened and elevated choice in light of this recent historical period is that of the Negro. Now this is something that is very difficult for me to apply to myself. I prefer some neologism rather than the putative throwback term of 'Negro'. But I can think of a number of ways in which somebody hewing to the framework of the Negro in America would be much better situated than someone who aspires to an Afrocentric or Black cult-nat position.

What's the primary difference between a Black (purposefully using capital letters) and a Negro? It's actually rather simple. It is the matter of radical autonomy. The Negro is satisfied that the end of his journey is that of a well assimilated American. The Black is satisfied that the end of his journey is an autonomous group who may just happen to be in America. This is a subtle but important difference and they are often the markers that distinguish King from X. As time goes by, I prefer to deal with the differences in concept and ideas, rather than the extent to which the persons of King and X represented them to America and in their own lives - so let's set aside the biographical accuracy and get to the conceptual.

The measure of a man, said King, is best assessed when he is under duress, and for the African American throughout America's history, this duress came when one man sees that his liberty is not served and defended by his society. If that man is a Negro, then his political impulse will be towards reform. If that man is a Black, then his his political impulse will be towards subversion. In one way it can be said that the Black is more courageous than the Negro and that the intolerance of the Black man towards the corruption of society is more principled. But the radical autonomy puts the Black man in an odd situation which may not have seemed so odd when the Black idea was new, but as the success of King's legacy of reform becomes more taken for granted in America the radical autonomy of Blackness appears more foolish.

I have had, on every occasion that Haiti has been in the news, time to reflect on the fact that my family believed as a proper Black family should have, that America was doomed to corruption and the best place for us was Haiti. There is, somewhere in my vast collection of family photos, on in particular - a black and white passport photo, taken in 1968. When America was burning down, when my father believed that the FBI was tapping our telephone, when MLK was assassinated, the best place for a Black man to be was out of America. At that time, all the Negroes looked extraordinarily foolish. And Malcolm X, had he been alive to tell the tale, would have put an exclamation on that point. Why should a Black man be patient with America?

Well, things get a bit more complicated from my perspective in answering that question. The great success of Blackness has always been its cultural autonomy, not it's political or economic autonomy. There have never really been successful Black politicians. Such men as Kwame Ture have never stood for democratic election. Such organizations as the Nation of Islam have never put forth candidates. There are no Black Nationalists anywhere in our government, there are only liberal integrationists who occasionally and deniably shout cult-nat rhetoric to the faithful. Could Charlie Rangel be called a Black according to the radicalized leaders of the SNCC and the Black Panther Party? Well, he could certainly be a soul brother, and he could wear a dashiki and say it loud that he's black and he's proud - but not Rangel, not Stokes, nor any of those blokes were Black in the political and economic sense. I would argue that they weren't Pan-Africanist either.

So what am I saying? I'm saying that all 'Black' politics in America that have met with any success since the era of MLK has actually been Negro politics.

What does it take to satisfy a Negro? The fulfillment of the Reverend Doctor's Dream, and that dream has been fulfilled. Middle class merit in the middle of Middle America. That was and is the Promised Land, my fellow Americans. What complaint is left in these days that there is an African American in the big chair of the Oval Office? There is only the Black complaint of radical autonomy - and that is a complaint that, not ironically, fits snugly in the belly of today's multiculturalism. Except when it doesn't, because you'll not often hear anyone asking to rearrange the letters of the NAACP so that 'People of Color' become its primary focus. No, that is an organization which has, in the wake of King's Dream un-deferred sits ignored like a grape in the freezer. And now Blacks who work and hustle the Progressive agenda to increasingly deaf and bored ears find themselves overshadowed by even more loud and radical minorities.

What happened? Blackness as ideological platform failed, but as an existential mask, it succeeded. You don't need to look up in Wikipedia what 'Angry Black Man' means. That pose is well-defined, because it has been well-maintained in our culture. Everybody gets to try it because it's so easy. And because it is so easy to adopt it is also easy to ignore - it is a mask whose shape has not changed or become more relevant as times have changed. It has become like our own panto with Black Mr. Punch struggling against the Devil of America. And because it is so easy to pantomime, it is also trivial to ignore, which is why it's so easy to be called a 'sell-out' or 'Uncle Tom'. What that means most of the time is 'Negro', if it means anything at all. A Negro can be satisfied in the middle of an imperfect America and has no need for radical Black economic, political or cultural autonomy.

Idealistically, there was much promise in the Black agenda. And any honest assessment of a genuine Black agenda will tell you that it has a long way to go. But I question the value of such an endgame more than I question the practical organization of people who might be involved. To invoke Blackness is to invoke a racial autonomy which at this point in history, and I would argue henceforth is foolish. Henceforth because there is very little interest internationally of any Pan-Africanist brotherhood. Nobody was thinking of Haiti two weeks ago, and nobody was asked to. But the Black agenda, such as it is, will present itself at this moment and ask embarrassing questions. Like how can we call ourselves Black if we have done nothing, from our positions of relative power in the US to help our Black brothers of Haiti? The question remains, but there is no Black organization to successfully answer it. Randall Robinson's Trans-Africa might have, but they make less money than Steve Harvey. Well, most of us do.

So the Black pose persists as the Black agenda stagnates, and now we face the consequences of that failure. Everybody likes to pretend that they can be as Black as they wanna be, and a few actually can. But for the overwhelming majority of African Americans, we discard the Black mask and invoke the Christian and Constitutional legacies of righteousness and apply them to American society. Those are our criticisms that are taken most serious because we are clear about what those traditions mean and we are not entirely sure what Blackness means. At the very least, we recognize the wisdom of Christian ethics and Constitutional government, none of which we would trade for Blackness.

I would like to have been a New World Afrikan, and I still might be that kind of brown-skinned international cosmopolite. If and when I hang out and have drinks with Djimon Hounsou and conversate in French over in Ibiza on a yacht, I'll let you know, but I won't throw away my passport. And I will think twice the next time I hear the word 'Negro' used pejoratively. These days, when I think of the term, I think of Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. And I think of Sidney Poitier and Martin Luther King Jr. And I think of the America the Negro always desired, and I think that I'm living in it.

To Them What Got Racial Issues

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i'd be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural 
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman 
does when she's natural
i would have a revolution
---

 That's Nikki Giovanni. And for all the non-liberated negroes of the world, the message is simple. As long as you are a Negro, your life will be pain and suffering under the intentional and unintentional slings and arrows of people no more powerful than drunk suburban adolescents. Because they are They and you are Other, and you cannot think your way out of that bag. Pity. Pity. Pity. 

Maybe that's why you're still unloved. 

I wonder with doubt if the peasant generation of negroes, without the benefit of literacy, will ever achieve beyond this self-pity they call 'sensitivity'. It's the ignorance of the echo chamber - you know. Only babysitters respond to baby whining, and babysitters are paid to *mind* you. So crawl out the back door and learn to walk.

Stand up. Run. Run away from that little old hovel you complain about being a hovel. Get fledging. Drop to the forest floor and work them winglets. You may not grow up to be a raptor, but at least you could fly. Do you believe you can fly? Do you believe you can touch the sky? Then think about it every night and day until you can spread your wings and fly away. 

The Longhair Speaks of Beer

It has been such a long time since I have been at Michel and Jimi's Barbershop that I'm starting to feel guilty about having their icon on my page. I have been tied up in the business of making ducats for myself and my feudal masters at a Fortune 50 corporation (and I still say that with pride). Consequently, I have had to reluctantly decline kind offers to appear on the radio. But I'm feeling like I want to mix it up with my partners, so mebbe I will. Starting today.

Speaking of Obama's Beer Summit.
The definition of a blockbuster is any event that has people lined up around the block and then some. But in Russia and Poland they were called breadlines. Try to get into a Neil Diamond concert. Go ahead, I dare ya. Anytime people really want something badly, they'll line up for it. But that doesn't mean what they get at the front of the line is all that valuable. Sometimes it's just rare, and people think they ought to have it with more frequency. Then you get it, and look at all the suckers still in line behind you and you laugh derisively. Suckers!

So it, this is one of those occasions where people are lined up in droves to hear any scrap of racial wisdom, reconciliation, fisticuffs whatever. I find it difficult not to piss on the entire situation as really beneath the three of them, none of whom serve the situation well. You see America has yet to find its 24/7 raceman, its Dr. Phil of race relations. And it's always some fool like Rodney King or George Allen who gets put in the spotlight, has their moment and then disappears. And still people line up because they're not satisfied.

Remember Ice Cube? Three years ago he convinced the guys at Fox, yeah Fox, to air a show he produced called Black White. This show did a riff off an old Eddie Murphy joke which was to put a black man in whiteface and a white man in blackface - actually whole families, and engage them in an extended game of bait and switch. Prime sociological experimentation, like post-modern performance poetry. You will note that this program was canceled due to a lack of ratings.

Why?

Because once you get your bread at the head of the line, you're not hungry any more. And in the end, most Americans are not hungry for race. They just want to rage a little bit, have somebody say, yeah right on, and then get on with their lives.

--

Anyway I'm much more inclined to consider the comic ramifications of the beers deployed at the summit. According to my sources, the menu had:

Biden: non-alcoholic Buckler beer
Crowley: Blue Moon
Gates: Sam Adams Light
Obama: Bud Light

Not surprisingly, the only man there with a nickel's worth of taste was Gates himself. But that Gates has some taste in beer at all is a bit surprising. I'm going to have to ask my man if this is Gates' regular brew or if he did a little research before ordering. Quite frankly, it's probably the ideal beer to order at the White House, if you must have a light beer. I am a personal fan of Sam Adams Light and I say that without question it is the best America light beer, period. Big thumbs up for Skip.

Blue Moon? What the heck is that?  A new beer out of the Coors factory that I've never heard of. Their marketing makes it sound, well, way more sophisticated than Coors. But since I haven't tasted it, I really can't say. I give Crowley a 'meh'. I should have expected a Rolling Rock, a righteous East Coast blue collar cop beer.

Biden does more to poison whatever scrap of dignity he has at every opportunity. I find it difficult to subvert the impression that he's a recovering alcoholic and has made this point to drink the near beer to squelch any idea that he's backsliding. But my information tells me that he's a somewhat moralistic teetotaller. He had drunks in the family and swore off the stuff completely. Either way, when invited to a beer summit you drink beer, you ballless wonder. 

Obama is doing what Obama does. Meticulously crafting his image. I'm sure that he polled his staff to figure out what beer to drink, and they told him it should be Bud Light. When he went on the trail last year he drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. Pure political craft.

--

Wait. This just in. As I look around there is conflicting reports about Skip's regular beer. I'm hearing Red Stripe and I'm thinking yep, that sounds more like the Skip Gates I think I know.

--

As for me I've changed my brands over time. When I first started drinking beer in my late 20s, I basically drank Bud in a Bottle and Coronas. Then I tried to get sophisticated with my beers, first going Mexican to Tecate and Dos Equis, and then going European with Becks and Grolsch. By the time I was 30, I was pretty much only ordering Grolsch and Red Stripe, beers for BAPs and Bohos the world over. When I moved to Brooklyn I started in with the Rolling Rock and Ginger Beer and Heineken, doing that bohemian culture vulture thing. Then when I moved to Boston I was all about Sam Adams and Bass Ale. By the time I was 35 and living in Atlanta, I was pretty much back to Coronas. But I also did Mike's Hard Lemonade and Red Dog. But I did spend some time in the UK and developed a taste for Tetley bitters and Hooch. I couldn't find either in the South so I did Mike's instead.  People couldn't believe I liked Red Dog, but I did. It was a good beer. When I moved back to Cali in my late 30s, I picked up on Tequiza for a hot minute, kept up with the Mike's. But Corona was the mainstay. These days when I find myself at a bar that has Newcastle, I always get it. Other than that it's Sam Adams Light.

Now. to put all of this in perspective, I buy probably one six pack a month. I prefer bourbon and y'all should know that. But I find myself having a lot more Bombay these days.  Tonight I'm hanging out in Redondo Beach at Kinkaid's. I'm going to have a bourbon summit there at 7:30pm. Now that will be worth checking out.