...on whatever crosses my mind

I Spent the Week at Alyssa Rosenberg's Crib on ThinkProgress

My friend, Alyssa Rosenberg, asked me to guest post on her blog on ThinkProgress this week.  I accepted and it was a really effin good time.  Her commenters are awesome and spending time at her crib really forced me to step my game up. I think I did ok.  

• Will ‘The Best Man’ Sequel Treat Its Women Characters Better?
• ‘Reed Between The Lines’ Is No ‘Cosby Show,’ Thankfully
• How Do You Create A Bisexual Film Character?
• How Can We Get Majority Audiences Consuming Culture About Minority Experiences? ctd.

What do y'all think?

Beauty Unqualified

This open letter from model Leomie Campbell to the Sunday Times about racism in the fashion industry is fascinating. Not so much for the tales about the racism.

Nope, what is most striking to me is how Campbell equivocates throughout the entire piece and then ends with:

I don’t think talking about racism in fashion will change anything. Even if fashion changes, it’s not going to change the world. I’d rather just have a positive attitude. If I were feeling discriminated against, I might go into a casting thinking I’m not going to get this job. It’s negativity that will disadvantage me.

Well, what's the point of writing this open letter if not to "talk about racism"? Lawd!

It's interesting to watch the millennial generation - Campbell is 19 - tie themselves in knots trying to talk about race in a world where they have been told that it is not something that we need to talk about anymore. Clearly they want to. Clearly Campbell wants to talk about what it is really like to be a black model, but she knows she can't just call the entire industry racist -- even though the primary goal of the fashion industry is to reinscribe whiteness and white beauty standards around the world, i.e. racist.

If anything, despite her prostestations, Campbell's letter makes the need to address racism in the fashion industry more critical than ever.

(H/T The YBF)

Tribute to E. Lynn Harris

Yesterday, I woke up after sleeping most of the day away to find a text on my phone from my friend Randy saying that E. Lynn Harris had died.

E. Lynn is an icon.  For a lot of gay and bisexual men, E. Lynn wrote our lives (or, in his later books, the lives some of us wanted to live). 

I discovered his books in 2002 when I was trying to decide what to do about my life having lived the previous years as a celibate man.  Invisible Life's cover art, a man caught between a man and a woman, drew me in immediately.  I saw it in a bookstore and I just picked it up and read that two-page prologue right then and there. 

I was hooked and I bought it and Just As I Am up right there.

Unlike most, I think, E Lynn's Invisible Life novels -- Invisible Life, Just As I Am, and Abide With Me -- confirmed for me that I was bisexual and that that was something that was okay to be.  I thought Raymond's story was beautiful and it spoke to a tug of war that I was dealing with that I didn't even know I was dealing with. 

Though Raymond decided he was gay in the novels, I knew after reading Raymond's story that bisexuality was real and that I was bisexual.  As E. Lynn wrote it, I understood perfectly why Raymond would fall in love with Nicole and Quinn and though I understood why the plot unfolded the way it did, for me, I knew that I would never make the choice that Raymond did, choosing one gender over the other.  And I set out to live my life as a bisexual man, of course, having no idea how to even go about doing that (still don't, by the way). 

E. Lynn gave me that.

Over the years, I've followed E. Lynn's career, reading all of his books, attending his readings, and debating with my friends about whether Boris Kodjoe or Rick Fox would make the better Basil Henderson.  Though I haven't enjoyed his books much since the Invisible Life saga, I appreciated that our stories were being told.

People often criticized E. Lynn's later work for being simplistic and formulaic, which it was.  And the elements of the earlier work that I liked least -- the name dropping and preoccupation with status -- eventually overwhelmed his work. But even if he continued to turn out serviceable fiction like his latest, Basketball Jones, nothing he could have done would diminish the beauty, sincerity, and heartbreaking prose in the Invisible Life saga. 

Raymond and Nicole were ambitious buppies, but they had deep insecurities and struggled to find a center in their frequently tumultuous lives, all of which made them relatable and human.  And Basil Henderson is probably one of the finest, most fully realized portraits of black male humanity in contemporary Black fiction.  While Raymond eventually receded into the background in later books, Basil's emergence as the most complex individual in E. Lynn's world was surprising, rewarding, and frequently quite moving.

E. Lynn apparently used to tell folks that he was no James Baldwin.  He's wrong.  Invisible Life, Just As I Am, and Abide With Me are still completely unique, incomparable works that should be read every bit as much as Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone.  Like Baldwin, E. Lynn wrote about black love.  About its redemptive power. Its sometimes frightening intensity.  And its haunting, elusive beauty.

E. Lynn is a hero.  Little confused black boys and girls will pick up his Invisible Life saga for generations to come and get yet another glimpse of the beauty of black humanity and love.

Rest in Peace.

For the record, I still think Rick Fox has the stronger acting chops and would the better choice to play Basil, though Boris is what I see in my head when I think of Basil.

Collective v. Individual; Where Does Racism Lie

(cross posted at Forbes Avenue)

I work for a progressive organization in Washington, D.C., with a wonderful group of human beings. We work side by side on any issue you can think of and, mostly, we get along while we do it.

Two days ago, four colleagues and I were talking about the degree to which race played in the Skip Gates arrest controversy. I and a fellow Black colleague were pretty confident, given what we know from news reports about how the incident went down, that race played a role.

My other colleagues, you can imagine, were skeptical. They argued, rightfully, that someone made a call and the cop had an obligation to follow through and secure the home. They asked "what are the standard procedures" in situations like this? Also, not surprisingly, they wanted to make it about the cop's ego, an idea that is picking up traction online, as if it couldn't then be about race as well.

Later that night, two other Black friends told me similar stories that they had with White colleagues. Everything they told me was the same as what went down in the conversation I had with my colleagues, almost down to the language.

White folks are quite comfortable with this notion that there is a pattern of racist behavior in America. They are reluctant, however, to say that any individual instance is about race. So what happened to Skip Gates wasn't racist. Neither was what happened to Shem Walker. Or Sean Bell. Or Oscar Grant. Or Officer Omar Edwards.

Every individual instance must be rationalized, but then at the end of the year when the stats are compiled we rant and rave against a pattern of behavior, against institutional racism.

Institutional racism is nothing more than a pattern of individual behavior that has become instituationalized. Redlining is just a lot of White folks deciding where non-whites can live. Poll taxes were nothing but a lot of White folks making it really hard for Black folks to vote.

They say the personal is political. Well the individual is the collective.

The goal here isn't to call the cop a "dirty racist" and write him off. What I said to my colleagues was that acknowledging that what the cop did to Skip Gates was racist, doesn't make him a bad person. This isn't "i hate niggers" racism, but it is still racism.

The goal is to let him (and other non-Black cops) that this kind of behavior is a problem. We need to have processes for training police for how to deal with different types of people. And we need processes to handle situations after they happen. We simply do not have this anywhere to the degree we should.

Behavior like this can be involuntary; a lot of White folks have tremendous guilt that they lock their doors in a "bad neighborhood" and clutch their purses in an elevator alone with a Black man. But rather than live in the guilt, we gotta acknowledge it and begin to unlearn it.

Until we do, we are going to keep seeing these individual instances and keep being surprised that the year-end statistics haven't changed.

Quote of the Day - July 20, 2009

Jamelle beautifully dismantles Ross Douthat's (quasi)anti-affirmative action argument in today's New York Times:

Contra Douthat, affirmative action (and especially race-based affirmative action) will be necessary for as long as our political institutions refuse to address systemic discrimination in any meaningful way.

Indeed.

Beating the Racial Double Standard Horse Dead; Or, How We Continue to Miss the Point

Perusing The Root during my lunch break today, I came across this headline, "TV's Golden Age of Rage: O'Reilly, Hannity, Olbermann and the rise of white rage on cable television."  I immediately clicked on the link, ready to read what I thought would be a brilliant dissection of white paranoia and white frustration with non-white male progress (and its perceived byproduct, white male stagnation) as propagated by the "news media."

But then I got to this part:

But now, try to think of a single African-American newsman who's exhibited—and gotten away with—the type of antics their white counterparts do each and every day on America’s top news channels. Don’t feel ignorant if you can’t. There aren’t any. But why?

Ugh.

This article, which isn't entirely wrong about the racial double standard, does succeed in diluting the force of an argument against such a standard by arguing that what Black folk want is the ability to do stupid ass shit too. 

Look, I'm all for reminding people of racial double standards.  But in this case, I don't know that we should be arguing for Black people to act a damn fool on the news. 

Or, to put it another way, the article misses the point.  The issue with cable news right now isn't that its unfair that Black folks can't behave the way Hannity, Beck, and O'Reilly behave. 

This Week in Blackness on the BET Awards

Money quote: "BET is the reason why the caged bird is in fact in the cage."

HILARIOUS!

Quote of the Day - June 23, 2009

The fellas over at The League of Ordinary Gentleman have been all up and through my blog lately.  I am aware of this and am very okay wit it.  At this point, LOG is my favorite blog to read along with my boy Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Here is Freddie goin hard at how useless the national conversation of race has become: 

But those who immediately and harshly react to any suggestion of racial impropriety don’t want any discussion at all. And that’s what a really huge amount of our racial dialogue, at present, amounts to, a sustained campaign to whittle down the parameters of appropriate debate, and to cast anyone who alleges racism or something like it out of the bounds of respectability. We don’t live in a post-race society, and we aren’t moving towards one, but we are moving towards a post-race-discussion society. That’s an incredibly dangerous thing.

Precisely.  Hats off to you, Freddie.

Pat Buchanan's Latest Lament of the Minority and Women Scourge

Pat Buchanan goes at Sotomayor's credentials in a column in the latest issue of Time magazine, mostly by conflating affirmative action with stupidity (white male conservative's favorite pasttime):

That were it not for Ivy League dishonesty, Sotomayor would not have gotten into Princeton, would never have been ranked first in her class, would not have gotten into Yale Law, nor been named editor of Yale Law Review, and thus would not be a U.S. appellate court judge today or a nominee to the Supreme Court.

Ah yes, affirmative action got her through all of that. Sure - it helped her get into Princeton, but affirmative action doesn't take the tests and do the work for you.

But that isn't the kind of thing you'll likely hear from rich privileged white man who think they are under constant assault from minorities and women. 

Wouldn't it be nice if they'd say "wow, I guess test scores aren't always great predictors of how well someone does in college?"  You know, something accurate and thoughtful.  And helpful.

It never ceases to amaze me how much they really think this is their country.

Obama Mucks It up on DOMA

A states' rights argument for the Defense of Marriage Act?

"This policy of neutrality maximizes state autonomy and democratic self-governance in an area of traditional state concern, and preserves scarce government resources. It is thus entirely rational."

Say what?!

I think what bothers me most about this is the "it is entirely rational" part.  To save money, the government should discriminate? Really?  You really wanna go down that rabbit hole, Barry? 

Get it together, patna!

A Moment of Sanity on FOX News

Shep Smith, displaying deep humanity and good sense, calls out his own viewers:

Might have been nice to then admit that FOX News courted those viewers and that's why they are there. And also might have been nice to say we need to change the way we talk about our problems in the U.S.

But, one step at a time, right?

Quote of the Day - June 11, 2009

William Jelani Cobb compares Obama's incrementalism on gay rights to that of Kennedy with civil rights in the 60s, and warns:

The president would do well to define this moment by taking immediate action to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" or ensure adoption rights for homosexual, bisexual and transgender families. Kennedy believed that promoting civil rights would jeopardize other aspects of his domestic agenda during a national crisis. Barack Obama has a broader set of crises to resolve than any president in modern history, but that is not a rationale for inaction on this issue.

Then he goads us, the people:

Ultimately, the gay rights movement will have to learn something that the civil rights movement learned again and again during the 20th century -- it is often necessary to force the hand of even your allies to achieve your goals.

Indeed.

On The Holocaust Museum Shooting

I'm still wrapping my head around everything that is going on in our country and the way it is covered in the media. 

A white supremacist man murders a Black man in a national museum and again the chattering class has turned it into a partisan slugfest.  We are living through what will probably be looked upon as the Second Reconstruction and there is no serious dialogue around the problems that plague our nation. 

It's so overwhelming and demoralizing.  I too feel powerless.  I turn on the news and I get endless reams of nonsense from the endless boxes of random no-names dissecting every. little. thing. on CNN to Rachel Maddow's latest "i'm the smartest know-it-all" schtick to the ranting, teary-eyed wingnuts lamenting a perceived loss of White male power on Fox News.

I. can't.  Just. can't.

Who cares if its leftwing or rightwing?  I do think that the rightwing bully pulpit of Fox News has contributed to a sickeningly racist fury by stoking racial, religious and class-based fears.  But the Left has responded by creating its own bully pulpit around self-important condescending liberal hacks like Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.

What does it really even matter, ultimately?  We are so polarized that each side is pretty much preaching to the choir.  It's a recipe for inertia.  Because the rest of us are just checking out.

To me, this new "identity politics" -- wherein all Americans are divided between slightly amorphous, chattering class-defined "real Americans" and "the underserving"  -- is the real problem because it distracts us from the real problems and the real solutions that we ought to be discussing and grappling with.

What happened yesterday was hate manifest.  My heart goes out to the family and friends of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the Black guard who was killed yesterday.  It's a tragedy.

Quote of the Day - June 10, 2009

E.D. Kain over at my new favorite blog, The League of Ordinary Gentleman, drops rational on the health care reform debate:

I suppose, beyond all this, medicine - like education, or crime - seems to be an area wherein profits ought to be secondary...We need to reevaluate how we treat this problem.  Not everything having to do with the public or societal or communal good needs to be labeled communist.

Indeed.

Howard Stern Goes Hard for The Gays

This is old, but peep the shock jock king on gay rights:

This is really dope.  Mad props to Stern for being eminently reasonable. 

Quote of the Day - June 8, 2009

Matt Yglesias from ThinkProgress, in responding to the Right's whining about people calling their racist acts racist, nails it:

Because, again, the contemporary right’s main view on race is that actual racism against non-white people is only a tiny problem compared with the vast social crisis that allegedly exists around people being vigilant against racism.

Dude - we just need more people saying this. 

Do Better: Understanding the Sotomayor Cartoon

This post is an entry in a blogging day of action.  Check out more posts and get involved!

When my friend Tanya told me about the Sotomayor cartoon and I looked at it, I wasn’t angry. I'm a Black man living in the United States.  Sadly, I expect this.  Since January, I’ve watched White men lose their damn minds over any little thing Obama has done, racializing everything from economic recovery to the man’s dates with his wife. Unlike most, I do remember what it was like during the election.

The man picked a Puerto Rican woman to be on the Supreme Court. Something like the cartoon was bound to happen. Sad, but inevitable.

We live in a racist, sexist country.

The reason White men are losing their minds over everything that Obama is doing and the selection of Sotomayor is because, to the core of their being, “minority” and “qualified” are mutually exclusive terms. “Qualified” and “woman” are mutually exclusive terms to them.

They so virulently go after Obama and Sotomayor because they really believe that the world is unfair, giving shit to people who don’t deserve it. Destroying our perfect union. Wrecking havoc on the wallets of ordinary Americans and deigning to join a body that has, yes, decided Brown v. Board of Education but also decided Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott. The notion that a woman of color would think she could gain entrance to it literally assaults their sense of balance and rightness in the world.

Or more pointedly, racism and sexism.

See, though far too many people think these terms have become overused and thrown around so much, that is what is at work here. It can’t really be anything else (no matter how much you argue).

It’s crucially important to recognize racism and sexism for what it is.

The image of Sotomayor strung up like a piñata with a bunch of Republican men waiting to hit her with a bat is disgusting and dehumanizing. That’s what racism and sexism are, the notion that the people you don’t like, that aren’t like you, are not even human. Sotomayor becomes an object to beat the shit out of. Literally. Further, the constant conflation of the varied nationalities and cultures of Hispanic people leads to ridiculousness like insinuating that Sotomayor is Mexican. You know, ‘cause what’s the diff, minorities aren’t human the distinction is a nonissue.

I think the reason so many other people are so livid about this cartoon and the new cover of The National Review is because of two things: 1) racism and sexism at this level still seems antiquated to most White liberals and 2) they still understand so little about how racism and sexism works (or ignore it in their neverending quest to tell the world “it’s all better”).  Given these two facts, folks get angry but can't seem to do anything much constructive with that anger.

Conversating: Obama and Dissident Voices on Race

I am interested in posting some conversations, emails, IM's I have with colleagues, friends, adversaries because often I find I say some dope ass shit when I'm just talkin and vibin off of someone compared to when I say "i'm gonna write a blog post on X thing about race today."  LOL.

To that end, this post is informed by a couple of incidents including, but not limited to, the Dyson verbal beatdown of Obama on race, some (what I would consider to be) problematic critiques of the Dyson beatdown, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell's critique of the latest Smiley effort.

Appreciating what me and a friend are discussing here is not contingent upon reading that stuff, but I wanted to provide context for those curious about why we are talkin about this stuff.

Enjoy and comment freely!

R.I.P. Officer Omar Edwards

It's a real tragedy:

According to the preliminary accounts, Officer Edwards, who was black, drew his weapon after encountering and racing after a man who was breaking into his car around the corner from the police station he worked from, on East 123rd Street; Officer Dunton, one of three white officers in an unmarked police car patrolling the neighborhood, saw him racing down the street with his pistol in the air, and emerged from the car to shout, “Police! Drop the gun.”

Officer Edwards, according to the account, turned to face his unwitting colleagues, his gun pointed their way.

Several witnesses told the police that Officer Edwards never said a word. But one witness, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case, said Officer Edwards might have managed to begin to say one word — “Police.”

...

When Officer Dunton learned that he had just fired on a fellow officer, he was shattered, said a person familiar with the accounts of the two officers who had been riding with him.

“He took this news very hard,” said the person. “The color drained from his face, he was shell-shocked, in disbelief. He was physically shaking. You never want to shoot your gun, and when you shoot your gun and find out it’s a guy on your own team, it’s devastating.”

Remembering George Tiller

I've read two beautiful pieces today about George Tiller's horrific murder and its implications for our nation's struggle over the issue of abortion.  I have complicated feelings on this heinous act and this issue that I haven't yet worked through, but it seemed wrong not to comment.

Or at least acknowledge that there is some sanity out there.

To wit, E.D. Kain over at the terrific League of Ordinary Gentleman says:

In any case, this is not only a blow against life - and specifically the life of George Tiller, who has been brutally ripped from this world and from the lives of his loved ones - but against the pro-life cause. And not just the specific political cause, either, but against life itself. Against all causes for life - be they anti-war or anti-abortion or anti-death penalty.

My homegirl Sister Toldja gives a beautiful, haunting, eulogy where she struggles with her understandable anger, saying:

While Dr. Tiller was a man, his death is another casualty in the long-standing war of The World vs. Women. There are so many people (male and female) who believe (consciously and subconsciously) that women are somehow inherently incapable of being the makers and shapers of their lives. That left to our own devices, women are susceptible to destroying their existence or living without the appropriate level of morality.