racism Archives - Page 32 of 32 - Ramblin' with Roger

R is for Redskins

I also puzzled over the Major League baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, less over the name, and more over what I consider the bizarre caricature of Chief Wahoo.

It’s football season in America – I mean, using the ball to the left, NOT the ball to the right.
When I was growing up, my father and I would watch, on our local CBS-TV affiliate, all the games of the New York Giants of the National Football League, who actually played in New York, not New Jersey, at the time. Their main rivals were, and are, the Philadelphia Eagles, the (hated) Dallas Cowboys, and the Washington Redskins. Even then, I found the nickname of the Washington team peculiar. Most teams were named for animals – Lions (Detroit NFL) and Tigers (Detroit baseball) and Bears (Chicago NFL), e.g. The ones that were named for people tended to be about geography (New York Yankees-baseball) or occupations (Pittsburgh’s baseball Pirates and NFL Steelers). “Redskins” seemed somehow unseemly, and this was long before I’d ever heard the pejorative term “politically correct.”

So, I was a little surprised to read here and elsewhere that the team’s owner had meant it as an honorific. This writer talks about the term’s historical usage, going back to the writings of American novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose “use of redskin as a Native American in-group term was entirely authentic, reflecting both the accurate perception of the Indian self-image and the evolving respect among whites for the Indians’ distinct cultural perspective, whatever its prospects. The descent of this word into obloquy is a phenomenon of more recent times.”

Nevertheless, for some time, it has been the source of controversy, as American Indian Sports Team Mascots notes. In fact, only last year, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Washington Redskins can keep the team name. “Seven native Americans had sued to force the Washington Redskins to change the team name,” but the Court “let stand a ruling that their challenge came too late.” still, this article explains the issue well.

I also puzzled over the Major League baseball team, the Cleveland Indians, less over the name, and more over what I consider the bizarre caricature of Chief Wahoo. Here’s an article about the Indians’ mascot.

I suppose the Atlanta Braves baseball team name bugs me less than the incessant use of the tomahawk chop, more obnoxious when I heard it in Fulton County Stadium in 1995 than the video suggests.

And what of the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame? This does not seem to be an issue. Then again, everyone’s Irish in America, especially in March.

What thinkest thou?

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

M is for Mockingbird

A marathon reading to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s classic novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and raise funds for Literacy Volunteers of the Greater Capital Region will take place on Saturday, November 6, 2010 from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Townsend Park Bakery LLC, 238 Washington Ave., Albany.

2010 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. If you are unfamiliar with this classic, which won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize, read here, and the affiliated links. But basically, it’s about a young white girl named Scout, a/k/a Jean Louise – the “tomboy” narrator of the tale – growing up in a U.S. Southern town in the 1930s with her older brother Jem, whose lawyer-father Atticus Finch ends up defending a black man accused of raping a white woman, and the repercutions the trial has on all involved, indeed on the whole town. The case was almost certainly inspired by the Scottsboro Boys trials of the 1930s in Alabama, where nine black teenagers allegedly gang-raped two white women, a crime that never actually occurred.

The story is probably best known through the popular 1962 movie adaptation starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, Brock Peters as the accused, Tom Robinson, and Mary Badham as Scout, Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The film also featured a young Robert Duvall, in his film debut, as the mysterious and misunderstood Boo Radley, a role some have compared to his part in the 2010 film Get Low.

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but lost to the epic Lawrence of Arabia. It won three awards: Peck for Best Actor Award (his first Oscar win, fifth nomination); Horton Foote for Best Adapted Screenplay; and the team of Art Directors/Set Decorators. Hear one of the most famous speeches from the movie, as well as its musical theme from the Oscar-nominated score by Elmer Bernstein.

From Wikipedia: In 1995, the film was listed in the National Film Registry. It also ranks twenty-fifth on the American Film Institute’s 10th-anniversary list of the greatest American movies of all time, and #1 on AFI’s list of best courtroom films. In 2003, AFI named Atticus Finch the greatest movie hero of the 20th century.

Atticus Finch is considered not only one of America’s most beloved lawyers but also one of the greatest cinematic fathers.

Earlier this year, I got a chance to see a play adaptation of the story at Capital Rep in Albany. While not as strong as the movie – how could it be? – it was nonetheless enjoyable.

For the 50th anniversary, CBS Sunday Morning reported on the celebratory events taking place in Harper Lee’s hometown. Notably absent was the reclusive Ms. Lee herself, who never wrote another book because she felt it could never be as good as her first one.

An interesting dichotomy: To Kill A Mockingbird is taught all over the country – here’s a readers’ and teachers’ guide – but also one of the books most banned or challenged.

A marathon reading to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s classic novel TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD – To Kill A Saturday – and raise funds for Literacy Volunteers of the Greater Capital Region will take place on Saturday, November 6, 2010, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Townsend Park Bakery LLC, 238 Washington Ave., Albany, NY. Rumor has it that I will be one of the readers.
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And now for something completely different: Mockingbird – Carly Simon and James Taylor.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

L is for Loving Day

As late as 1987, a full 20 years after the Loving v. Virginia ruling, only 48% of Americans said it was acceptable for blacks and whites to date. That number has since jumped to 83%, according to the Pew Research Center.

I can’t believe I missed it. OK, until I read about it in TIME magazine, I’d never even heard of it, though it’s been going on for a half dozen years. There’s a group that has called for Loving Day Celebrations around June 12th each year “to fight racial prejudice through education and to build multicultural community.”

The celebration is named for Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who had the audacity to fall in love with each other. Unable to get married legally in their native Virginia – he was white, she was black – they got hitched in Washington, DC and “established their marital abode in Caroline County”, Virginia.

Ultimately, on “January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge” stemming from their interracial marriage, “and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

“‘Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.'”

The Lovings moved to DC, and in 1963, took legal action against the state of Virginia. Meanwhile, Mildred Loving also wrote to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy for assistance, and he referred the Lovings to an ACLU lawyer who took the case pro bono. The Lovings lost at every court, with the primary reasoning being that “because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race.”

However, their case made it to the US Supreme Court, and on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled, in Loving v. Virginia, that the anti-miscegenation laws of Virginia and 15 other states were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court, concluded:

These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

These convictions must be reversed.

Interestingly, the polling I’ve seen suggests that at the time of the ruling, less than 30% of Americans favored mixed marriages. From TIME:

As late as 1987, a full 20 years after the case, only 48% of Americans said it was acceptable for blacks and whites to date. That number has since jumped to 83%, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2010, the center estimated that 1 in 7 new marriages in the U.S. is now an interracial coupling. In 1961, the year Obama’s parents married, only 1 in 1,000 marriages included a black person and a white person; today, it’s 1 in 60.

In statistics for 2008, 14.6 percent of all marriages were between spouses of different races.

In 2010, there is a Republican running for Congress, Jim Russell, who wrote in 2001, “In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.” I wrote about him extensively here, and he is hardly alone. So I guess the Loving Day folks still have much work to do.
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Pete Seeger – All Mixed Up

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

Is That Racist QUESTION

The bar in the Holiday Inn outside Fenway Park that systematically failed to serve me on Flag Day, 1991, even as others got drinks – THAT I’m sure was racism.

So here’s the scenario: a woman (white) goes into a Muslim market, where she is given the cold shoulder until she asks for some halal products. Then people are quite friendly. And the woman says later, “It seems that racism exists everywhere.” I give an understanding nod, even as I’m thinking to myself, “Is that really racist behavior?” Or is it the action of a group of people who are merely suspicious of strangers, of someone new (and, to be sure, different)?

There are plenty of times I’ve been in that situation: unfamiliar churches, different neighborhoods, stores. Sometimes I’ve gotten less than desirable outcomes, but I didn’t blame them all on racism. (The bar in the Holiday Inn outside Fenway Park that had systematically failed to serve me on Flag Day, 1991, even as others got drinks – THAT I’m sure was racism.)

Another white female friend of mine says she gets a distant vibe from a local convenience store where most of the workers and virtually all the customers are black. And she was quite angry about it. She claims not to have a racist bone in her body, and perhaps that’s true.

It occurs to me that most of us profile, in one form or another. If I were out at 1:30 a.m., a single young adult walking by would not worry me, but a group, no matter the race or gender, might make me nervous.

Back in the days of the segregated South in the United States, if a white person walked into a black establishment, one might reasonably worry that it might mean trouble. Muslims had lived peacefully in the US for years, even after 9/11, but it is only recently that many of them have said that, for the first time, they felt afraid in America; maybe it’s the same fear that made them wary of the stranger.

But what do YOU think?

My Pointless Twitter Encounter

We just don’t always treat each other fairly, and sometimes it is racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia or something else toxic.

I was tired from days of wedding celebrations. So, uncharacteristically, I went over to my Twitter feed and started reading, when I came across this:
Actually there is NO racism in America – and they have played that card one too many times – doesn’t mean a thing. with a couple of @s to a couple people. 8:13 AM

So I’m intrigued by this. Obviously, this is an ongoing conversation. I reply to her:
“There’s NO racism in America”? And who are “they” who “played that card once too often”? 8:18 AM

She responds:
They? Political Machine (including Media & Hollywood) – which you know this – so let’s stop the confused act 10:48 AM

Hey, this is no act. I didn’t know that racism was merely a creation of the powers that be:

So you’re saying racism is a media/Hollywood/political myth & doesn’t exist? This has not been my personal experience. 11:40 AM

A bit later, she replies:
So – YOU are saying – Challenges that ppl feel everyday – is RACISM? however does that track for you? Racism is a Political Term 6:24 PM

Ah, we ALL face challenges, ipso facto, there is no racism.
Humans treating other humans less well because of what, rather than who they are, that’s racism. Political term? OK. So what? 7:34 PM

Her next response annoyed me.
LOL – seriously? What Race is being treated less than humans? 7:41 PM

Well, I’ve spent too much time on this:
The old putting words in my mouth trick. never said what you suggested. I realize this is less than pointless. I retire. 7:55 PM

Her parting shot:
Putting words in your mouth? that is a trick honey- you need to go to a community where that would work 8:08 PM

Hmm. I suppose I was affected at the moment about something Rose wrote about discrimination, and probably even more so the story of a woman in a wheelchair who became all but invisible, and how she cleverly coped.

Also, last week, I was riding the bus, and a young teenager, presumably heading for school, was stopped by THREE Albany cop cars. All the folks on the bus were black, except for a couple of South Asians, and three of the black women assumed harassment of this young man, based on previous experiences with law enforcement. I never did know what the true story was in this case.

My point: we just don’t always treat each other fairly, and sometimes it IS racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, or something else particularly toxic. Is it all just some media agenda being played out? I’m thoroughly as unconvinced of that as I was unconvincing in changing my Twitter “buddy’s” mind.