...on whatever crosses my mind

Three Cents an Acre

Haitian Ambassador Raymond Joseph on Pat Robertson:

I wonder how Pat feels knowing we got something from that "pact with the devil." 

It is amazing how fantastically ill-informed we are about how our country came to be what it is.  Ambassador Joseph is so dope here because he's matter-of-fact.  The dignity in the face of the kind of disgusting bigotry of men like Robertson is, in my mind, Herculean.  I honestly get incensed when I hear stuff like what Robertson said and would have a hard time being as calm and respectful and rational as Ambassador Joseph is. 

Better man than I.  Hats off to you, sir.

On Politics and the Sorry State of Affairs (or, you know, the Democrats)

(x-posted at Forbes Avenue)

I've been having a hard time figuring out what to say about politics of late.

Part of it is that life gets in the way and a brotha ain't always got time to sit down and take stock of everything that is happening. And part of it is that I'm losing faith that we liberals always taking to the innanets is even effective.

But this was a big week, folks. Big education speech. Big health care speech. White folks still freakin' out about the fact that the president got some melanin. And one of the tried and true liberal visionaries lost his job, leaving Obama with pretty much no one on the Left with which to work.

Time to say something.

But what do I say that I haven't said already? I wrote a few months ago about my frustration with the Democrats? But I wanna take it a step further:

I do not believe there is a progressive movement in this country, which is why I think the Democrats are so ineffectual.

To wit: Brilliant reporting on how the Democrats fucked up health care from jump.

To wit:

Bill Maher: New Rules
by James2896

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 - June 29, 2009

Richard Kim writes a piece about why we should remember all of who Michael Jackson was, warts and all:

Our fascination with Whack-o Jack-o has never been only, or even primarily, with his prodigious skills. It was with the way he personified our culture's most central ambitions to whiteness, immortality, wealth, real estate and fame. Lodged somewhere between the superhuman and the alien, aspiration and disgust, Jackson was a grotesque reflection of our collective desires.

Yea, I think that's right (minus the needless use of "Whack-o Jack-o").

Bill Maher Reads My Blog...

...well, not really.  But he seems have figured out what I (and others) have been saying:

Word.

More on Bill Maher's Obama Critique

Bill explains what he means:

"If not now, when?"

I think this is the major point that Bill Maher has buried in his critique of Obama.  His comment that even his own audience, which suffered few jokes or critiques of Obama in the past, applauded that critique is instructive. 

I think that is saying something.

This is sort of what I wanted to get at yesterday in my post. The Democrats have two out of three branches of government and, mostly, the other team is on the ropes.  Now might be a good time to do what you said you would do when you got elected, Democrats.

I think the challenge for them is figuring out what the hell it is they want to do and then figure out how to bring the entire party along.  The Blue Dogs are Democrats in name only. And despite what the Right will tell you, the rest of the party ain't all that liberal.  Especially not the leadership. 

Of course anyone who watches Bill regularly knows that he knows that the Democrats have no idea what they really want to do, mostly because there is no Democratic ideology (I'm coming to believe this more and more).  So rhetorically, he's conflating what Obama should/would/could do with what is really the role of Congress.  This works because, as you see, it gets him interviewed on MSNBC.  And there should be criticism of Obama.  But I don't think it is translating to people demanding what they want from Congress.

Bill has to get that applauding audience of his to transfer that frustration from Obama to Congress.

More:
Congress v. Obama: We're Kinda Screwed
Bill Maher Goes Hard at Obama

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.

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.

On Torture

I know a lot of stuff. 

But an area about which I know absolutely nothing is foreign policy, torture, and everything relating to the Middle East.

For this reason, I haven't blogged much on the torture stuff. For me it is very simple - the U.S. shouldn't torture. Ever. - but the national conversation includes a lot of stuff that makes me tend to wanna shut up about shit I don't know.

Luckily, my boy Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a beautiful post about why Obama should go on 'head and investigate the architects of the U.S. recent foray into torture:

I believe that while a good politician accomplishes what is possible, a great one expands the realm of possibility. He doesn't simply accept the lines of argument as their drawn and hew to the side with the most soldiers, he tries to redraw those lines to benefit his ideals. Obama's jobs isn't simply to spend his own political capital, it's to grow his capital, and by extension, the moral weight of his ideals. Perhaps pushing torture investigations would make passing health care harder. But this is the business he chose. This is the business of becoming great. And after what happened last year, we have the right to expect more of him. We have the right to demand more.

Indeed.

Barry - you listening?

Iowa for Gay Marriage

So Iowa is down with the gays.

Money quote from the eminently rational, reasonable Iowa Supreme Court:

“Equal protection under the Iowa Constitution is essentially a direction that all persons similarly situated should be treated alike. Since territorial times, Iowa has given meaning to this constitutional provision, striking blows to slavery and segregation, and recognizing women’s rights. The court found the issue of same-sex marriage comes to it with the same importance as the landmark cases of the past.”

Word.

White Paranoia Has a Face....Finally

 

Mascot for all the white guys out there mad that at non-white people's progress.  I almost want to say this post is half-joking, because that is sort of my intention.

But I suspect I'm right.