racism Archives - Page 5 of 32 - Ramblin' with Roger

Yogi Berra and March madness

Segregated by Design

A quick Ask Roger Anything response for my old colleague Walter:

Here’s a baseball question for you, Rog. Someone supposedly asked Yogi Berra if he had been to a favorite restaurant lately. His reply was, “ Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.” Did he really say it?

He did, and repeatedly. But he didn’t say it first.

Per Quote Investigator, a site I recommend; “Berra has stated on multiple occasions that he did make this remark.” But check out a New York newspaper humor column called Sparklets from the December 1907 edition. “Oh, don’t go there on Saturday; it’s so frightfully crowded! Nobody goes there then!”

Yogi Berra was describing a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Or maybe New York City or St. Louis. The key term might be “popular” or “crowded,” depending on Yogi’s recollection at the time.

BTW, I was very angry when the Yankees fired him as manager when the team lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1964 World Series.

Links

Race in US History: 4 Facts Every American Should Know

Segregated by Design, a 17-minute video narrated by Richard Rothstein explaining the concepts of his book about redlining, The Color of Law.

Colorado’s Boebert Slammed for Invoking God After Mass Shooting Then Fundraising Off Their Deaths.

Prison Laborers Are Paid Pennies to Maintain the Prisons They’re Incarcerated In.

Sen. Raphael Warnock: “Politicians Are Trying To Cherry-pick Their Voters”

The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson – How one man went from attending President Barack Obama’s inauguration to dying in the mob protesting Donald Trump’s election loss during the Capitol insurrection.

What Makes a Good Conspiracy Theory?

Why you can’t compare Covid-19 vaccines.

Krispy Kreme giving away free donuts for showing vaccination cards.

Our Taxes Subsidize as Much as 74 Cents of Every Dollar Donated by a Billionaire

Is an Intelligent Cancel Culture Discussion Possible?

Weeping with WandaVision.

Yaphet Kotto, Magnetic Actor With A Long And Varied Career, Dies At 81.

Marvelous Marvin Hagler, middleweight boxing great, dies at 66.

JEOPARDY guest hosts so far, including Oz.

Masked Singer’s The Snail unmasked.

I Am Tola (short story).

The lost tourist, who thought Maine was San Francisco.

Tadpoles: The Big Little Migration.

Now I Know: A Unique Way to Get Some Jewelry on the Cheap and Long Distance Love Birds and A Wales of a Mistake and A Fishy Way to Get a Free Meal.

Self-Help

The No-BS Guide to Setting Healthy Boundaries in Real Life and How to Set Healthy Boundaries: 10 Examples + PDF Worksheets.

How to Deal With Difficult People: 11 Steps.

Change Your Home to Boost Your Mental Health.

Eat Healthy on a Budget.

Wash Dishes For Better Brain Health.

Vlogbrothers: How Will Post Pandemic Behavior Change?

MUSIC

Reworking the ‘Hamilton’ Track to Promote Vaccines. I’m Not Throwing Away My Shot and Not Gonna Delay My Shot! and Parody: Pro-Vax vs Anti-Vax.

Journeys by Linda Robbins Coleman.

Amanda Jones.

Marine Band Showcase.

Coverville 1350: Covers of Bands Born in 1971 and 1351: Alice In Chains Cover Story and Alice in Wonderland.

Sir Eglamore – Kate Rusby

Train In The Distance – Paul Simon.

The Spirituality Of Van Morrison.

In the Mood – Henhouse Five Plus Two.

Philosophy of the World – The Shaggs (full album, 1969). Is this the WORST album ever made?

March rambling: 151 fictional species

Upstate NY climate haven?

What is the only country with Catalan as an official national language? What is the only officially bilingual province in Canada? Answers below.

United Methodist conservatives detail plans for a breakaway. Their leaders have unveiled plans to form a new denomination called the Global Methodist Church, with a doctrine that does not recognize same-sex marriage.

North Dakota Is About to Kill the National Popular Vote Compact.

Daily Kos very comprehensive guide to the 117th Congress, members, and districts.

Upstate NY cities named among the best climate havens as the world grows hotter.

Jeff Sharlet: All That We’ve Lost (COVID).

24 Cybersecurity Statistics During the Spiraling Panic Around COVID-19.

Wait at Least Seven Weeks After COVID for Surgery.

Heather McGhee – “The Sum of Us” and The True Cost of Racism | The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Judge blisters prosecutors as he releases 3 wrongfully convicted Black men after 24 years.

The African/American Table.

Vernon Jordan, Civil Rights Activist And Power Broker Dies At 85.

Roger Mudd, the longtime TV newsman, dies at 93.

Five things worth knowing about the Mars Perseverance Rover.

Tyranny of Choice.

Why spacing out is good for you.

Vlogbrothers: How Much Hope is OK?

Snow Days May Never Be the Same. As I’ve noted, boo, hiss!

Before You Blow Up on YouTube | The Cautionary Tale of Jani Lane.

How to Delete Your Old Online Accounts (and Why You Should).

Deep Nostalgia photorealism on the MyHeritage site. Creepy.

Does Alcohol Really Burn Off When Cooked?

Cherry Blossom Cam – U.S. National Park Service in DC. The predicted peak blossom time is April 2-5.

Pokémon at 25: How 151 fictional species took over the world.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. Or maybe we are.

Now I Know

Attempted Mann-Slaughter and Squashing the Garden and The Blues for Some Boo-Boos and The Soviet Plan to End the Weekend and The Not-Quite-Vice-President Who Was Almost Accidentally President and The Rock-Paper-Scissors Lizards and Arresting The Chief and Why Blue Means Stop in Hawaii and The Other Harvard Makes a Bad Sale and The Genoa Exception.

MUSIC

Mr. Biden (Bring My Vaccine) – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

String Quartet in G Major – Florence Price

William Tell Overture (ending) – The Great Kat

Karelia Suite and Finlandia by Jean Sibelius.

Coverville 1348: This Day in Covers: February 25, 1976, and 1349: David Gilmour and “Girl” Groups.

Aquarius – Peter Lawford.

Let’s Hang On – Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

The Rebecca Jade section

Home Made, Parts 10 and 11.

Panda Remix.

Remind Me.

Concert of Pat Metheny music, Live(ish) From SpragueLand: Episode 16, The Fields, The Sky.

Answers

Andorra; New Brunswick.

Edgar exercise: slavery, BLM, Obama

black people are not a monolith

For my last Times Union blog post this month, even after my goodbye piece, I reposted the first part of my February 5 piece from this blog, about asking three different people (living or dead, famous or not) ONE question.

Edgar, a contrarian who most TU bloggers became familiar with, wrote:

I’d ask Antonio Johnson how it felt to be an African American AND the first American owner of a slave (John Casor).

This actually did happen. “John Casor, a servant in Northampton County in the Virginia Colony, in 1655 became the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared as a slave for life as a result of a civil suit.”

This predated the large-scale codification of slavery in the future United States by race, in the 1670s and later. Would Johnson’s singular act cause him distress over what became mass enslavement of black people in the years to come? Interesting question and of course unanswerable.

I’d ask Republican President Lincoln how it felt to free Democrats slaves.

Since formerly enslaved people had not yet received the right to suffrage, I don’t know what “Democratic slaves” means. That said, I’ve been recently helping my daughter with American history. It’s clear that Lincoln wanted the states of the Confederacy to rejoin the Union as soon as was feasible. His second Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, WAS a Democrat.

Black Lives Matter

I’d ask Martin Luther King if he approved of the violence perpetrated by members of the “some lives matter, depending on skin color” movement which has abandoned his highly effective peaceful protests against racism.

As is his wont, Edgar has twisted the meaning of Black Lives Matter. That said, he asks a legitimate question about tactics. Yes, there were non-violent actions on the part of demonstrators back in the 1950s and 1960s. The other side – i.e., law enforcement – was often not as pleasant. See Selma, March 7, 1965, e.g. And when America saw the actions of Southern police, the nation was outraged.

“Some 2,000 people set out from Selma on March 21, protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces that [Lyndon] Johnson had ordered under federal control.’

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 took over a year, and it involved legal maneuvering. The Little Rock Nine integrated the high school in 1957 with the help of federal troops. In other words, the force of law and/or people with weapons.

MLK’s nonviolent campaign was much less successful when he moved North. And he died by violence.

Black Lives Matter started in 2013 and was largely ignored. It wasn’t until America could finally be ready to see for itself a black man being murdered by a white cop that people seriously started saying, “Oh, THAT’S what they’ve been talking about!” A whole lot of people of various races demonstrated for BLM in 2020. Most of them were peaceful.

Some folks were not. They may have calculated that it was 65 years since Rosa refused to give up her seat, and over half a century since Martin was murdered. How long, and by which tactics, will we be free?

King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” What do you do when you keep saying it, and they’re still not hearing it? I suspect MLK would understand, even if he disapproved of the tactic.

Barack

And of you, I’d ask, do you think that, in your lifetime, we’ll have had a black president… as a bonus question.

When Barack Obama walked the streets of Chicago, people saw a black man. From the NIH: “African Americans in the US typically carry segments of DNA shaped by contributions from peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.” Obama’s racial profile is different from most black Americans. But to suggest he isn’t black is disingenuous. And a boringly divisive trope.

It’s been my theory that some thought that he, as a child of a white mother, wouldn’t be too black. But he kept disappointing them by doing “black” things such as singing Al Green and promoting Hamilton, a musical with a mostly black cast.

Know that many white parents – Halle Berry’s white mom, for one – made sure their children would know how to negotiate this country as black persons, if only because that’s how they’d be perceived in America anyway.

Ibram X. Kendi said recently on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah that black people are not a monolith. We have a diversity of experiences. Barack Obama’s is one experience. And Edgar doubting his “legitimacy” as a black person does not make it less so.

We’re in this water, it’s in us, on us

Mahogany Mermaids

In this Now I Know piece about Fred Rogers, Dan Lewis quoted Greg Carr. “That’s the most intimate thing,” the chairman of Howard University’s Afro-American studies department noted. “I’m in this water, you’re in this water, it’s in me, on me.”

What are we talking about? Swimming together, wading in the water together, black and white. In a New York Times article – behind a paywall – there’s a relevant 2018 article. “Racism at American Pools Isn’t New: A Look at a Long History.”

And the issue isn’t limited to pools. There has been a contentious history even of public beach access. “Well into the 20th century, northern municipalities in the US treated beaches as spaces for enforcing the kind of Jim Crow segregation commonly associated with the post-Reconstruction South… Municipal shoreline policies were directed towards racial and class exclusion, yet often used ‘ostensibly race-neutral laws’ to achieve their aims.

“Sometimes, Black beachgoers were explicitly told they could not access a beach or were confined to an undesirable area. Other times, municipalities used elaborate means to enforce Jim Crow on the shoreline while obscuring their racist intentions.

“One New Jersey town, for example, required beachgoers to buy a ticket to access one of its four beaches. But when Black beachgoers bought tickets, they were given tickets to Beach 3 only. ‘Across America, this was how many black children first encountered the color line: during summer and at the beach.'”

Read about the St. Augustine, Florida wade-in, June 1964. The photo above is from that event.

Unspoken rules

The Windy City area provides a striking example. “Though never segregated by law, Chicago’s beaches were long segregated in practice. With the start of the Great Migration during World War I, Chicago’s growing African American population confronted sharp limits in access to beaches, enforced by violent responses from whites.

“In 1912, for example, a Black child was attacked after attempting to bathe at the white 39th Street Beach, nearly causing a riot. Into the 1950s and 60s, African Americans visiting white beaches met conflict and violence upon entering – and apathy from park police.”

The 2020 article notes that change is difficult and slow. “Today, methods of regulating beach access in metropolitan Chicago are subtler, but they continue to produce discriminatory outcomes and beaches largely segregated by class and race.”

The couplet within a song performed by Pete Seeger in 1963 called If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus is relevant here:

If you miss me at the Mississippi River, and you can’t find me nowhere.
Come on over to the swimmin’ pool, I’ll be swimmin’ over there.

Plays a cop on TV

Which brings us back to Mr. Rogers. He notes that François Clemmons, an actor and opera singer, played “Officer Clemmons, a recurring character on the television show… Every once in a while, Clemmons would visit his neighbor. There shouldn’t be anything even remotely noteworthy [about them wading in a small pool together in 1969], except maybe for how high they rolled up their pants relative to the water level.

“For the kids watching, there may not have appeared to be anything out of the ordinary… But for the adults, it was borderline scandalous — or perhaps would have been, had they been watching.

“The vestiges of such discrimination were still present… Just weeks before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect, for example, a motel manager infamously dumped cleaning supplies into a pool, intending to get swimmers — black and white together — to exit the pool.”

Clemmons notes in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? xenophobes “didn’t want black people to come and swim in their swimming pools. My being on the program was a statement for Fred,” and one they both hoped kids would pick up on.

Don’t Go Near the Water

The result of the narrative is why, statistically speaking, black Americans don’t swim. Thus, black youth are at higher risk of drowning.

In 2015, Jessica Williams reported for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart a satirical piece. “Assault Swim – Progress in Community Policing,” noting the risk of Swimming While Black.

Thus, this recent story resonated very much with me. N.C. swim team brings Black women to the pool for competition and camaraderie. “How often do you see this? You don’t ever see Black women swimming in a pool together,” said one member of the Mahogany Mermaids.

“I’m in this water, you’re in this water, it’s in me, on me.” Wade in the Water, children.

How Long ’til Black Future Month?

The Jetsons

Waiting in a doctor’s office back in November, I finally got around to reading the New Yorker for January 27, 2020. The article that struck me most was Dream Worlds by Raffi Khatchadourian.

The subject was the science-fiction writer N. K. Jemisin. “In 2018, she released ‘How Long ’til Black Future Month?’ a collection of short stories.” I haven’t read them. In fact, I was not even familiar with Nora Keita Jemesin until this 20-minute read. She is fascinating.

“Jemisin mastered an outsider’s art of adaptation.” This is a skill lots of black people have developed. “Shifting between Alabama and New York, where she spent summers with her father, she adjusted to the jarring differences across the Mason-Dixon Line, both social and personal… Childhood, she told me, was ‘a schizoid experience.’ In Mobile, she shifted across racial divisions, too, attending a predominantly white school that had been forced to desegregate…”

“How Long ’til Black Future Month?” takes its name from an essay that Jemisin wrote in 2013. “It begins with two memories of watching ‘The Jetsons’: first as a girl, excitedly taking it all in, and then as an adult. ‘I notice something: there’s nobody even slightly brown in the Jetsons’ world,’ she wrote. ‘This is supposed to be the real world’s future, right? Albeit in a silly, humorous form.”

Representation

“‘The thing is, not-white people make up most of the world’s population, now as well as back in the Sixties when the show was created. So what happened to all those people, in the minds of this show’s creators? Are they down beneath the clouds, where the Jetsons never go? Was there an apocalypse, or maybe a pogrom? Was there a memo?’” One of the aspects of equality involves representation in the work.

Another was trying to break down the stereotypes surrounding black people and the science fiction genre. About a decade ago, Octavia “Butler’s sense of invisibility was still sorely felt. One of her blogposts was “‘If you’re a person of color who is into science fiction, speak up. We’re doing a headcount of how many of us exist.’ And it was a huge number… In fact, the post was titled ‘The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-in.'”

Backlash

“Amid a reactionary backlash, Jemisin became a target. In 2013, she gave an impassioned speech about race in the genre, noting that a white supremacist had just run for president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Though he lost, he had secured ten percent of the vote, prompting her to criticize the ‘great unmeasured mass of enablers’ who had been silent. The former candidate, in turn, called her an ‘ignorant half-savage’ in a racist screed.

“As the cultural divide sharpened… conservative writers began interfering with the Hugos, using a loophole to shape the list of nominees. Until it was closed, two years later, people protested by selecting ‘No award’ on ballots. ‘The Fifth Season’ won its award just after the loophole was closed.

“Accepting her third Hugo, Jemisin stood at the lectern, with the rocket-shaped award beside her, and declared, ‘This is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers, every single mediocre, insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me could not possibly have earned such an honor, and that when they win it’s ‘meritocracy,’ but when we win it’s ‘identity politics.’ Holding up the award, she added, ‘I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining rocket-shaped finger in their direction.'”

I like the idea of Black Future Month.