Ask Roger Anything Archives - Page 21 of 24

The Scotland story

I did not anticipate that when she got back to town a few days later, she not only decided to go out with me, but to quit her job.

After the anniversary post, I noted that there was a sidebar story involving Scotland. Well, it’s mostly not. Shooting Parrots asked for it, as did Island Rambles, and so you all get it.

I need to explain that Carol and I went out from the fall of 1994 to the spring of 1996 then broke up, for good and reasonable reasons, it seemed at the time. She then went out with other people – her boyfriend was a particular jerk to her, but that’s another matter – and soon I was trying to get back with her. We were both in her brother Dan’s wedding to Tracy in September of 1996; that wasn’t awkward AT ALL…

Then in August 1998, I made this one last effort to woo her back. I remember kissing her at Five Rivers nature preserve in October 1998, much to her surprise. Then there was the party she helped plan for watching my first appearance on the game show JEOPARDY! on November 9. But she wasn’t there; her high-paid, but stressful job in insurance had her in Madison, Wisconsin that day.

So I did not anticipate that when she got back to town a few days later, she not only decided to go out with me, but to quit her job (which she did in February 1999), and go back to school to become a teacher again. (She had taught for two years in the mid-1980s.)

Soon enough, we decided that we would get married, but I didn’t ask her specifically, because her brother Mark was getting married to Leanne on January 1, 1999, and we did not want to upstage them. We got engaged at an Albany restaurant called Justin’s on January 16 and decided that waiting a long time to get hitched was not a great idea, given our ages, especially if we wanted to have children.

We threw together a wedding in less than four months, due in no small part to the help of my father, and, as noted, got married on May 15, 1999.

Now, Carol had planned a trip to Scotland in July 1999 with her friend Jeanne. (Sidebar: I went out on one date with Jeanne in October 1998, with the primary intent to make Carol jealous.) They had booked this trip before Carol and I were even going out again. We, as a “modern” couple thought it would be fine; we weren’t people who were “clingy” or “defined by our spouse.”

I’m in this old house I wasn’t that familiar with, the one she’d bought seven years earlier. Every creaky noise, which MUST have been there the two months I had been living there, sounded so loud I couldn’t sleep; I was pretty miserable. And while Carol had a reasonably good time, she was pretty unhappy without me for a week.

We’ve been away from each other since then, the longest when she went to Ukraine three years later, but no separation we experienced was as bad as that first one.

That purported gay/black antipathy thing

There DOES seem that there is a certain hostility by some black leaders towards what certain goofy people call “the gay agenda.”

Arthur at AmeriNZ asked a question earlier in the month:

Here’s something that worries me…: Racism. The spokesperson for the leading radical rightwing religious-political anti-gay hate group seemed to go WAY out of his way to praise black Democratic legislators in Illinois for not supporting the freedom to marry. That same hate group, of course, famously said that one way to defeat marriage equality was to deliberately create divisions between the LGBT and Black communities. All too often, LGBT people buy the racist propaganda hook, line, and sinker. And, it seems to me, some Blacks are too willing to buy the propaganda of mainly (or exclusively) white anti-gay groups.

So, I’m wondering two things. First, what do you think can be done to expose the racist lie of division for what it is, and second, how do you think we can persuade the two sides to ignore the (white) man behind the curtain who’s trying so hard to sow racial division?

One of the things that I’ve long believed is that “justice for all” ought not to be a meaningless slogan, but rather the reason people who don’t SEEM to be affected should support the rights of, for lack of a better phrase, the “other.” Whites should support black civil rights; men, women’s equality; straights, LGBTQ justice. (That’s one of the reasons I didn’t much like NYC mayor Ed Koch; he seemed to stir up hostility between blacks and Jews, when they had been traditional allies.)

Yet, in my freshman year at college, my next-door neighbor was astonishingly hostile to me, from the get-go. He was gay, and I always wondered if he had heard what I had heard somewhere or other, that black people did not like gay people, and therefore dismissed me out of hand.

To the specific point, there DOES seem that there is a certain hostility by some black leaders towards what certain goofy people call “the gay agenda.” I think some of it clearly comes from religious leadership. You saw this in the Prop 8 vote in California a few years back. All that so-called down-low behavior of some black men so closeted, they even hide it from themselves, comes from some cultural/religious disconnect.

I knew one openly gay black man – worked with him, actually – who was supposed to be coming home for Thanksgiving when he was about 21, but he felt his family wouldn’t understand his sexual orientation and would be unforgiving. They never knew where he was for decades. When they discovered that he died, 26 years later – from something I blogged about – they were devastated. Perhaps in the intervening years, their position on homosexuality had changed and having been in contact with his sister after his death, I believe it had.

Mostly though, and the video you linked to after the Illinois defeat of marriage equality actually touches on this, it’s a bit of an oppression competition. The gay rights movement has appropriated some of the language of the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and later, rightly so, I believe, but some black folks of a certain age just don’t like it. I kid you not, it sounds a little like “hey, they can pass for straight, but I can’t pass for white; we were enslaved, they weren’t.” And so on. It’s less an antipathy towards gays per se, as much as it’s a “make them wait their turn, keep them in their place, until WE achieve full civil rights” thing. This is incredibly parochial, and dare I say, stupid; “a high tide raises all boats,” and all that.

That said, I also do believe other nefarious forces are at work, quite possibly poised to embarrass one person: Barack Obama. The President comes out for marriage equality a year ago, and it passes, in one form or another, in a half dozen states, including in the Midwest. Where does it fail? In the state from which he was elected, Illinois. Can this be a coincidence? (Cough – Koch Brothers – cough.) Maybe, but I’m too cynical to believe it.

What to do about it? Oh, probably nothing. Let them just die off.

But you know what random thought flashed through my mind? That ad you pointed to with this back-and-forth:

“[Attractive young man] clicks to buy [a Kindle Paperwhite] and suggests [he and attractive woman sitting next to him] celebrate with a drink.

“‘My husband’s bringing me a drink right now,’ chirps she.

“‘So is mine,'” smiles he as they turn and wave at their male loved ones sitting together at a tiki bar.”

I’ve since seen the ad on the TV show Modern Family. Now if any of the participants were BLACK, you KNOW that would give the thing a whole ‘nother spin.

Ask Roger Anything and he’s likely to answer

Carrier pigeon is NOT recommended form of communication, due to the high cost negotiated by the Carrier Pigeons Union.

Welcome, ladies and germs. We come once again to that ENORMOUSLY exciting and popular game show, Ask Roger Anything, in which YOU, yes you, get to ask Roger… wait, let me check the rules again…oh, yeah, ANYTHING. And, here’s the good part, for you: he HAS to answer, more or less, truthfully.

This is not to say that he might not find a way to obfuscate the issue, but that’s his JOB. YOURS is to try to take him out of his comfort zone. That potential for tension, perhaps utter embarrassment, is why the game has continued for so long.

Why, oh why, would he – oh, we started in third person, might as well stay there – intentionally put himself in that position?
1. It’s tradition.
2. It’s fun.
3. Because he can.
4. He’s totally run out of usable ideas for his blog.
The answer is: ALL OF THE ABOVE! Well, except for maybe 4, but “usable” is in the eye of the beholder.

Any questions asked will be answered in the next 30 days in this here blog. You can leave comments at the end of this post, or e-mail RogerOGreen [at] gmail [dot] com, or Facebook. He will use your name unless you ask him otherwise. Anonymous folks will get nothing but snark, he suggests. Carrier pigeon is NOT recommended form of communication, due to the high cost negotiated by the CPU, i.e., the Carrier Pigeons Union.

You can always tell that he writes these things late at night when he’s sleepy, because he’s starts to lose…

Oh, one more thing: a post he wrote a couple days ago came on with Comments Are Closed. He has NO idea how that happened, and it took him a while to figure out how to undo it. He NEVER closes comments; comments are the raison d’être for him blogging. If you see that again, please let him know at the address above. (Thanks to Carver and Uthaclena, who noted it last time.)
***
Sad news about the deaths of Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson, and Tony Soprano himself, James Gandolfini, both creative forces, and both only in their 50s.

How come there’s no WHITE History Month?

We still need Black History Month because we still are learning about, and attempting to rectify, discrimination. Racism is NOT over; it has morphed into more devious manifestations.

Jaquandor, who continues to be western New York’s finest blogger, wrote, even before I asked him to Ask Roger Anything:
May I ask, what’s YOUR response to the question that ALWAYS gets asked in February? I’m referring, of course, to “How come there’s no WHITE History Month?” Anymore I just snort and say “That’s all the other ones. We just don’t announce it.” Problem with that response is, it doesn’t always get taken as the sarcasm it is.
He added:
I really hate hearing that question, with its pouty tone and its implication that racism is over and we need to just stop talking about it.

Let me tell you some of the things we talked about at my church in late January and February:

Education- A married couple, church members, and retired school principals Rose and James Jackson, talked about “Educating all of our children: The Albany Promise,” which is a cradle-to-career partnership introduced by SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher; James is currently a New York State Regent.

In the course of the conversation, the Jacksons noted that there were interracial public schools in the city of Albany, where previously blacks were educated in segregated schools, with black teachers. At the same time, the black teachers were excluded from the new schools. After a legal challenge, black teachers were allowed. But the result is that many private schools – Catholic and otherwise – rose up in the city. The segregation of public schools in the city long predated the “white flight” segregation of other urban areas. So the problems NOW in Albany schools have a largely unknown historic basis from 140 years earlier.

The environment – Activist Aaron Mair spoke on Building Health Advocacy Capacity in Environmental Justice Communities: A.N.S.W.E.R.S. Community Survival Project. He told how the primarily black Arbor Hill section of Albany became the dumping ground, literally, of the Capital District’s waste until the community responded in the last couple of decades; recent history. But Arbor Hill is not an isolated example; NIMBY often means dumping stuff in someone ELSE’S backyard, those with less political and economic power.

Racial designations – as I noted before, the very changeable definition of race was not determined by black people but by the Census Bureau and social scientists of the past. Some may not realize that it’s difficult for many African Americans to trace their ancestry before 1870, “when the federal census first recorded all black people by first and last names. Before this, only free people of color were listed by name in the censuses, except for a few counties that listed slaves by first and last names in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. However…there’s a wealth of information on black people kept by the federal government for the years immediately following the Civil War.” Again, a historical issue affecting the current day.

Justice – pretty much what I wrote about a couple of days ago, where race is STILL a major determinant as to who gets incarcerated and executed. I noted last year the book and video Slavery by Another Name, whereby black people were incarcerated on trumped-up charges so they can work in the factories and the towns could make money leasing them out. I’ve read that the current private contractor prison system that exists in some states works best financially at near-maximum capacity, so one has to wonder if selective enforcement is taking place in those locales. Not that black people are the only victims of America’s tiered justice system, and do NYC cops have arrest quotas?

In each case, I wanted to have a historical perspective on current issues. And with so much blather out there, that’s vitally important. Some yahoo just recently, as in March 2013, suggested at CPAC that slavery was defensible because slave owners provided ‘food and shelter’. That slaveholders fed their investment, their source of labor, is true, of course, but its application a distortion of the institution’s injustice and brutality.

When others suggest that slavery could have been prevented if blacks had guns, that might literally have a soupcon of accuracy amid its absurdity. BUT the US government had long conspired to keep guns OUT of the hands of blacks; in fact, as I’ve noted, the Second Amendment was ratified to preserve slavery. One can’t recognize that we are experiencing The New Jim Crow – title of Michele Alexander’s important book – if one is unfamiliar with the old Jim Crow.

The yahoos might even be on the Supreme Court. The racism deniers such as Antonin Scalia likened congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” as Rachel Maddow noted on the Daily Show; I cannot recall a statement by such an important citizen so lacking in historical understanding. I mean, generations of people died in this country trying to vote; what “racial entitlement” is he’s talking about? And the notion that the United States has “moved past” its history of racial discrimination has been disproven repeatedly by the attempts to disenfranchise not only blacks but Hispanics and the poor.

If the Mormon church rewrites its racist history, and you don’t know the racist history of the Mormon church, you could believe the revisionist narrative.

When I wrote about film and race, it created an interesting dialogue with SamuraiFrog over that very disturbing segment of the movie Holiday Inn and other issues. Not incidentally, as a direct result of my post, someone has sent me a copy of Song of the South, which I haven’t watched yet.

We still need Black History Month because we still are learning about, and attempting to rectify, discrimination. Racism is NOT over; it has morphed into more devious manifestations.

So in answer to your specific question, there’s no White History Month because, as you suggest, much of American history has covered that area, while much of black history, beyond George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, and a relatively few others, remains hidden. Moreover, the United States is peculiar about race. I wish the country had had the reconciliation conversation South Africa engaged in after the end of apartheid.

Ask Roger Anything – because you can

The challenge is always balancing the profound from the profane.

Not sure from whom I got the idea of allowing y’all to ask me stuff – maybe it was Jaquandor.

But I sure know WHY I do it. You might ask me something that – maybe – I always wanted to write about it. But perhaps I edit myself because I don’t know if anyone is interested in the topic. Or perhaps propriety gets in the way; I do HAVE some sense of propriety. REALLY. And YOUR requests will assist me in liberating this piece from the recesses of my brain, and my heart.

Last month, I discovered Scottish therapist Heather Bestel, who wrote: “Now my life really is quite wonderful, by design… But it’s not always been like this. There have been times in my life when I have been depressed, alone, confused and suicidal. I grew up with a shameful secret.” I found this in a comment to a blog post, Don’t Cross the “What Not to Blog” Line. I don’t THINK I do, but you can judge that for yourself.

Understand that ALL questions are welcome. I think Jaquandor noted that he’s surprised what he ISN’T asked, and I tend to agree. All questions WILL be answered eventually, within 30 days of the asking. That’s true even if I have to obfuscate a bit, which is always the challenge in balancing the profound from the profane. Hey, you don’t want to come here and find a black page, now do you?