race Archives - Page 13 of 16 - Ramblin' with Roger

White people need to talk about white privilege

Black people talking about systemic injustice towards them is far stronger when yoked with white voices joining in.

I’ve studiously avoided writing about the shooting death in Ferguson, MO of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black and apparently unarmed, by a white policeman, mostly out of a desire not just to repeat, or refute, what others have said. What’s indisputable, however, is that Americans are divided racially on the shooting.

Some (seriously) blame President Obama because he hasn’t brought that “post-racial” country they were expecting, which they believe he promised. In fact, almost every time he’s attempted to talk about racial issues, it has not gone well with a good chunk of the American public.

So I don’t want to discuss the particulars of Brown’s shooting (six times, including twice to the head), because this merely instigates the scapegoating phenomenon; Michael Brown was not the perfect victim, so we’ll attack Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin, or whatever dead black kid is currently in the news. (Want to find an innocent, dead, black kid? See, e.g., John Crawford III, who on August 5, 2014, “was gunned down in an Ohio Walmart after customers saw him walking around with a ‘weapon’, which turned out to be an air rifle he picked up in the store.”)

I might want to mention the way police procedures have changed in the past couple of decades. For instance: New Report Exposes Growing Militarization of American Policing; also, 4 Reasons the Police Are Suddenly Terrifying and Rise of the Warrior Cop Plus It’s Perfectly Legal To Film The Cops. As usual, John Oliver has a solution to the problem.

And even white kids can get killed by cops in America: 20 Year Old Executed by Police, Allegedly for Wearing Headphones, Unable to Hear Orders. Whereas Iceland grieved after the police killed a man for the first time in its history last year.

What finally crystallized things for me was a comment a friend of mine made recently. She has three friends, all white women, married to men of color. They are finding themselves in that position of having to participate in “having the talk” with their mixed-raced children. And they are, to a woman, feeling ill-equipped to discuss it, because the narrative is not based on their own experience.

Listen to How Do You Have ‘The Talk’ with Your Black Child If You’re not Black Yourself? It’s about seven and a half minutes long.

To the broader issue, read Different Rules Apply and I Finally “Get” White Privilege and I’m Sorry. Because sometimes it takes a white dude to talk about racism. Or a white woman to do so.

Assuming, of course, they can. The Atlantic suggests that self-segregation – white people mostly talking to white people – makes it so hard for them to understand Ferguson and other issues on the racial divide.

Still, black people talking about systemic injustice towards them is far stronger when yoked with white voices joining in. It has always been thus, at least in America. Just, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, men supporting women’s equality, and straight people promoting gay rights frankly provide the sense that it’s not just “their” issue”, “their” problem”, it’s OURS.

13 o’clock: racism in reverse?

Americans increasingly view traditional partisan issues, such as health care and taxes, through a racial lens. To the extent that some view Obama’s positions on these issues as racially motivated, disagreements with the president may stoke fears of racial competition.

Every Black History Month, I put together some recent articles about the race for the adult education class in my church, and how the reason we still have Black History Month is because there’s still weird stuff going on. This year was better/worse than ever, with items like the issue of some noted cases of Shopping While Black or even Working While Black.

Hey, that Duck Dynasty guy said HE never saw any racism when he was growing up with black people, so it’s a good chance that racism never really existed at all.

But this really bowled me over: Study Finds White Americans Believe They Experience More Racism Than African Americans.

There’s a saying that “the new racism is to deny that racism exists.” If that is the case, it may explain a study conducted by researchers from Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. Their findings claim that self-described white Americans believe they have “replaced blacks” as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.

The authors say that their study highlights how the expectations of a “post-racial” society, predicted or imagined in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency, has far from been achieved.

The study finds that while both Caucasian and African Americans agree that anti-black racism has decreased over the last 60 years, whites believe that anti-white racism has increased. Moreover, the study finds that the majority of Caucasians believe that anti-white racism is a “bigger problem” than what African Americans face.

An astounding 11% of Caucasian respondents assigned the maximum rating of 10 to the seriousness of anti-white discrimination. Compare that with only 2% who reported the same of anti-black racism. Caucasians, the study found, often believe that racial equality is “a zero sum game,” where one group gains at the expense of others.

A white pastor friend of mine doesn’t understand this. She sounded like Deborah Foster, who wrote A Guide to White Privilege for White People Who Think They’ve Never Had Any. Foster, who is also white, wrote: “I say I experienced prejudice rather than racism because I firmly believe that racism must be bigotry combined with institutional power.”

So what is THAT all about?

Here’s one of several examples: Rand Paul compares not getting his way to Jim Crow and internment camps.

Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” [Senator Rand] Paul [R-KY] said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”

And the recent State of the Union, where President Obama noted that he would use executive orders when Congress failed to act launched a whole new wave of distress, though Jon Stewart eviscerated the mock distress of the Republicans in Congress.

Despite the fact that the number of executive orders by Obama is consistent with other Presidents, the NARRATIVE is quite different.

Want more “proof”? Obama Administration Mandates Racism in Schools. What’s THAT about? It’s about the Obama administration claim that:

that African-American and Hispanic students are more harshly disciplined than whites for the same infractions.. the guidelines… about school discipline will actually encourage racial discrimination, undermine the learning environments of classrooms and contribute to an unjust race-consciousness in meting out discipline.

Last year, in the Black History Month session at my church, I was finding EXACTLY that trend, with locale bringing criminal charges against (black) minors for things such as talking back in class, e.g.

The call by Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, to end mandatory minimum sentences also fuels this narrative. Now the fact that there is a systemic racism in the US criminal justice system is obviously irrelevant to the discussion.

Indeed, according to conservative media darling Ted Nugent, Trayvon Martin [was] ‘emboldened’ by Obama, whatever the heck that means. Moreover, Obama did not show proper outrage when three kids, two of them black, killed a white Australian living in Oklahoma. Indeed, Pultizer Prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker suggested Obama’s utterly innocuous comments about Trayvon Martin [looking like his son, if he had had one] “nourished the killing passions” of the accused murderers of Chris Lane in the Sooner State. Or as the Daily Kos put it: Fox News bravely exposes President Obama’s blatant support for murdering white people.

The New York Times has a whole section called Racism in the Age of Obama. One article reads:

National survey evidence suggests that anti-black attitudes have largely persisted through the 2012 election and may even have become slightly worse. Attitudes about the president and his policies could be spilling over onto attitudes about blacks. Further, paradoxically, perceptions that American society has moved beyond race might also liberate prejudiced individuals to openly express their biases.

An additional development since 2008 also portends poorly for race relations. Americans increasingly view traditional partisan issues, such as health care and taxes, through a racial lens. To the extent that some view Obama’s positions on these issues as racially motivated, disagreements with the president may stoke fears of racial competition. This too has the potential to make racial issues more salient for a segment of the public.

The term “backlash”, or in the alternative, “blacklash, has often been used to describe race relations in the US since the election of this President. From another Times article:

Both the word “Obama” and the president’s image have become tools for harassing and otherwise discriminating, in the workplace and in places of public accommodation, against blacks and against whites in romantic relationships with blacks.

Add to this the well-documented overreach by the National Security Agency, non-racial in my mind, but perhaps not in others’, and there’s your perfect storm.

Thus, a retired general is willing to lead a coup against Obama.

In any case, if blacks are less well off, it must be self-inflicted; after all, Oprah’s a billionaire. One Colorado legislator suggested that poverty rates among blacks is higher because they eat too much chicken.

To prove that we are post-racial, here are 19 things conservatives insist on comparing to slavery
The national debt
Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare
Abortion! Abortion!
Gay marriage
Fair Housing Act
Food stamps
Public education
Social Security
Income tax
Medicare
Contraception
FEMA
Affirmative action (e.g., by SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas)
Illegal immigration
Climate change
Gun control
The TSA
Public employee unions
Any and all Great Society programs

The Daily Kos sarcastically put it like this:

For five long, hard years, not a single day has passed without former “Choom Gang” member Barack Hussein Obama rubbing his blackness in America’s (white) face.
So, it wasn’t all that surprising when he blackened Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—the GOP’s most celebrated holiday—by hanging around a soup kitchen, getting people hooked on government cheese.

No doubt, President Obama is living the dream—the dream of his Kenyan anti-colonialist father; meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck (enslaved) in a nightmare.

It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Jay Smooth did a great video about the difference between individualized and systemic racism, how we focus too much on what Paula Deen might have said, and too little about incarceration rates among blacks.

That said: Top 10 Myths About Black America – A Must Read include
1 There are more Black men in prison than in college.
2 Black people, particularly Black men are lazy
3 Black people abuse the Welfare system and are swelling it beyond capacity…

21 Things You Can’t Do While Black

27 Things You Had To Deal With As The Only Black Kid In Your Class:
Since I WAS the only black kid my my class for most of K-9, (a total of two other black kids for a total of a year and a half), I did hear these:
People told you you “sounded white.”
People asked you things like: “Do black people tan?”
“You know, I don’t even really see you as black.”

But it’s not all bad. I was touched by A [White] Woman Comes To Terms With Her Family’s Slave-Owning Past

Kate Byroade… always knew her ancestors had once owned slaves, but had been told again and again, particularly by her Southern grandmother, that the family’s slaves had been treated well…

“At first this seemed OK to me because it was OK to her,” Byroade continues. “But eventually I understood that the domination of another person’s free will was unacceptable.”

Or this story about a racially diverse church in South Los Angeles, despite, the fact that: “It is estimated that in 9 out of 10 U.S. congregations, more than 80% of the parishioners represent one racial group. And about half of all churches are racially homogeneous.”

Finally, I recommend to you the video Reverse racism by Aamer Rahman. It’s not very long, but I thought, spoke the truth.

September Rambling: overcoming adversity

One of my oldest friends is going to be working with Paul McCartney!

Why is September a slow writing month? Haven’t even gotten to look at many interesting links I have set aside to peruse later, then “later” never comes. Jaquandor’s having writing problems too, but it appears to have been rectified, according to his Facebook posts.

Arthur has had a woeful time on HIS blog, but maybe it’s the way it is after seven years of blogging. Or maybe he’s just excited about the fact that on Friday, November 1, he and Nigel are going to the registry office in Auckland, New Zealand to change their civil union to marriage. Mazel tov!

My friend Claire’s annual blog post.

SamuraiFrog was in a wedding. He was extremely anxious about it, but he did very well! Still, he’s still dealing with some stuff; good luck, guy.

My ABC Wednesday buddy Leslie on her beau’s improving health, but also her own self-described klutziness.

Phil Hansen: The art of the imperfect.

The oddest Facebook conversation I had about the owner of Barilla pasta and his anti-gay comments, which has spurred calls for a boycott, forced me to write: “It is necessarily true that one does not know the bigotry of every CEO. I don’t know how that translates to ‘since I don’t know what they all think, I’ll ignore this one’s bigotry.'”

An interview with Mark Evanier. Stories of his father featuring Harry the Gonif and ambulances. Plus a story about David Frost NOT about Richard Nixon.

I’ve been napping all wrong…

A suspected surrogacy scam revealed something remarkable. Plus, an arm and a fin.

Arthur shares his Labor Day message and an ad I like.

Dustbury manages to write about Microsoft Windows and the 1908 Chicago Cubs in the same post.

The Evolution of Alex Trebek’s Mustache.

COMIC BOOKS:
Back in the early 1950s, comic books were the Grand Theft Auto of the day, a “fall guy” along with rock ‘n’ roll for a nation looking for simplistic explanations for complex societal problems.

Evanier on coverless comics and the early days of Marvel Comics. BTW, Mr. Frog is still writing about those old Marvels.

Polite Scott is back with his medical reviews of current comic books. And you don’t even have to have read the comics to appreciate the analyses.

I imagine we’ve all felt a bit like Dougie McCoy.

MUSIC (mostly):
One of my oldest friends is going to be working with Paul McCartney! Here’s his NEW song.

Bobby McFerrin’s science lesson.

Comedian Gary Owen on “Black Churches”; and Lyle Lovett: Church.

Noshville Kotz, with apologies to John Sebastian.

The Fox by Ylvis. And I STILL don’t know what to make of this video. Maybe seeing the parodies of it, compiled by Chuck Miller, will help.

Chuck has also unearthed The Ballad of Albany and found a composer of the song. http://www.nippertown.com/2013/09/27/other-voices-other-rooms-119/#sthash.1wlWkrbF.dpuf

Before he was famous, Jimmy Buffett was in this faux band called the Now Generation. Here are amazingly “inspiring” versions of These Boots Are Made for Walking and Come Together.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

Arthur and Jason spent episode 91 of the 2political podcast responding to comments I left on their previous episode. “Jason also talks about his experience after being attacked and robbed, including dealing with the criminal justice system.”

GOOGLE ALERTS (not me)

Ex-reporter lifts lid on his wrestling career. Roger Green’s book, titled Memoirs of a TV Wrestler, is available to download. “It is a no-holds-barred semi-autobiography, which lifts the lid on the wrestling business during the 60s and 70s.”

So to the age-old trick of putting an attractive lady beside a ‘hand’ (hello Roger Green, ex of Evo and now Radical marketing man) in a fast car and making both her and the tyres squeal.

March on Washington, a half century later

When Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball in 1947, that did not mark the end of racism and segregation.

It’s likely you’ll see a LOT of stories about the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Every single one will marvel at how much progress has been made in America in the area of race, since 1963. Almost all will point to a black President, the current Attorney General, and two recent Secretaries of State as examples. The divergence in opinions come on this point: some will claim that we have “reached the promised land,” making sure to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. from that day a half-century ago – as though he were the only speaker there – while others will suggest that we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

When President Obama suggested that we look at race again in light of the Trayvon Martin case, that Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, some, such as Touré at TIME, thought it was a brave personal observation. He wrote: “The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or excuse-making or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence.”

Others labeled Obama “racist-in-chief”, playing the “race card” and worse. When Former Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough lit into Fox News talk-show host Sean Hannity last month for suggesting that Martin was a messed up teenager who “had it coming” when he was killed by George Zimmerman in their February 2012 confrontation, the bile cast on the Morning Joe host, Martin, his parents, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, among others, by a website I follow was toxic. The always dreadful Ted Nugent said that Martin had been ‘Emboldened’ By Obama, “the first black president as a ‘Black Panther’ running a ‘gangster’ government.”

Here are four charts suggesting Obama’s right about being black in America. Being profiled is, more than anything, disheartening, I can tell you. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon, Lavar Burton, the original Kunte Kinte of Roots fame, noted how he had taught his sons to keep their hands open and out of the car. Meanwhile, a white guy on the same show noted that he had once locked his keys in the car, so he tried to break in; a New Orleans police officer stopped him, saying, “No, you’re not doing it right.”

There’s this show on ABC called What Would You Do? It’s a hidden camera show that looks at human psychology. I don’t watch it, but I find it interesting that several of their experiments involve race. A most powerful one involved actors pretending to be bicycle thieves. From this story: When a white young man appeared to be taking a bike, most people didn’t question it. Yet when the African-American actor took his place, “the reactions were more pronounced. At one point, a crowd assembled around the purported thief and confronted him directly. One man pulled out a cellphone and said he was calling the police, which he was about to do until the cameramen filming the event stepped forward.”

When Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball in 1947, that did not mark the end of racism and segregation. It took over a decade before every team had at least one black player. It was 1987, when Al Campanis, general manager of the DODGERS, which was Jackie’s team, rationalized on national TV why there weren’t more blacks in baseball management; I watched it live, stunned. As a direct result, the sport was far more aggressive in making sure minority candidates at least got interviewed for a management position. They took an AFFIRMATIVE ACTION to rectify a system, not of overt racism, but merely cronyism, hiring the guys one already knows.

And speaking of which, the US Supreme Court seems destined to gut the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, under the mistaken belief that everything is all better now. The economic inequities would otherwise. Almost 400 years have passed since blacks came to America, and that there is still work to be done does not negate the progress. Nor does the progress suggest that Martin, if he were still alive, and his colleagues, some of whom still alive, and their successors, would be resting on their laurels, satisfied that the work is done.
***
Leonard Pitts: Living in a time of moral cowardice.

If you could somehow magically bring [Martin Luther King, Jr.] here, that tomorrow would likely seem miraculous to him, faced as he was with a time when segregation, police brutality, employment discrimination, and voter suppression were widely and openly practiced.

Here is tomorrow, after all, the president is black. The business mogul is black. The movie star is black. The sports icon is black. The reporter, the scholar, the lawyer, the teacher, the doctor, all of them are black. And King might think for a moment that he was wrong about tomorrow and its troubles.

It would not take long for him to see the grimy truth beneath the shiny surface, to learn that the perpetual suspect is also black. As are the indigent woman, the dropout, the fatherless child, the suppressed voter, and the boy lying dead in the grass with candy and iced tea in his pocket.

Dealing with that “white privilege” conversation with humor

These are examples of showing, in a satirical way, how white privilege is so ingrained. As Hayes points out at the end, if you had substituted “black” for “white”, it would sound like normal American media chitchat.

One of the things that many right-wing Americans are fond of saying, and there are variations in the wording, is that there are a bunch of “professional black people” stirring up trouble between black and white people. By “professional black people,” I don’t mean black people who are doctors and lawyers and the like. Rather, their profession is BEING a black person. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are ALWAYS cited, and Barack HUSSEIN Obama has been recently added to the mix.

The general narrative is that, racially, things are FINE in America, that we have a post-racial society. I mean, we have a President who’s black! What more proof does one need? Well, none for the Supreme Court, which decides to gut the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action.

Every suggestion that things are NOT hunky-dory has a pushback. The difference in unemployment, wealth, and health care? That’s black laziness, and it’s self-victimization to even discuss it. Trayvon Martin’s shooting? He was a thug. Etc, etc.

In the last forty or fifty years, I’ve been to a number of talks, workshops, etc., in which the notion of “white privilege” shows up, and almost invariably, the air goes out of the room. White privilege, Wikipedia says, “refers to the set of alleged societal privileges that white people benefit from beyond those commonly experienced by people of color in the same social, political, or economic spaces (nation, community, workplace, income, etc.). The term denotes both obvious and less obvious unspoken advantages that white individuals may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These include cultural affirmations of one’s own worth; greater presumed social status; and freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely. The concept of white privilege also implies the right to assume the universality of one’s own experiences, marking others as different or exceptional while perceiving oneself as normal.” You can find a whole category on the topic in the Huffington Post.

The reason it sucks the air out of a room, particularly early on, is that it has led to either a rejection of the notion altogether or a wallowing of white guilt with nowhere to go with that. Here’s a decent list about privilege (and no, it’s not just racial).

A popular trope out there is that the (non-monolithic) black community, or Muslim community, is need of Rising Up and Keeping Its Folks in Line. Even black people, such as Bill Cosby, say it. But the great thing about white privilege is that no one would be ridiculous enough to say that about white people.

Until now.

If you’ve heard too much about the “pathology” of black people, you might appreciate Cord Jefferson of Gawker.com showing this Video of Violent, Rioting Surfers Shows White Culture of Lawlessness. But it was astonishing when Jefferson is interviewed on an episode of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC to discuss that video. They play it straight, like any other “talking heads” interview on the news programs. It works on multiple levels for me.