SodaHead - Chocolat-In the universe I trust.'s Blog

High-IQ society Mensa takes in two-year-old girl

2009-05-01T13:49:56Z

+4 raves

Paul Harris May 01, 2009 12:00am CHILD genius Elise Tan-Roberts, aged two years, four months and two weeks, has just become the youngest member of the high-IQ society Mensa. Elise has an estimated IQ of 156. That puts her comfortably in the top 0.2 per cent of children her age. Here's the best bit, though. She seems to be a sweet little girl with charming parents who simply want her to be happy. Elise was little more than five months when she looked her father Edward Tan-Roberts in the eyes and called him "Dada". She was walking three months later and running two months after that. Before her first birthday she could recognize her written name and by 16 months she could count to 10. Yesterday she did it again in Spanish. "What's the capital of Russia?" asks her mother Louise, 28. "Moscow!" comes the instant reply. Indonesia? "Jakarta!" It is tempting for outsiders to speculate if this is a well-rehearsed performance instilled by pushy parents. But it seems to have taken Louise and Edward, of North London, as much by surprise as anyone. Until she started to communicate, all they noticed was a tendency for her to stare, as if soaking up information. Later, at her play group, a mother gave her a toy animal and told her it was a rhinoceros. "That's not a rhinoceros," Elise said. "It's a triceratops." Inspired by the story of Georgia Brown, who also joined Mensa when she was two, Louise and Edward took her last month to see education psychologist Joan Freeman. After subjecting her to a complex, 45-minute IQ test, she said Elise was "more than very bright and capable – she is gifted". She was accepted for Mensa where only an IQ of 148 and above qualifies. The average IQ is 100. Professor Freeman concluded Elise's "superb memory" was the source for her "excellent learning and progress". Yet the major disappointment for her parents has been that no state schools they contacted wanted anything to do with Elise until she reaches 4½. Yesterday as Elise danced in the sunshine at her local park, Edward, a 34-year-old motor consultant and car-buyer, told me: "Our main aim is to make sure she keeps learning at an advanced pace. "We don't want to make her have to dumb down and stop learning just to fit in. I just want her to be happy and enjoy herself." So what's next, quantum physics maybe? "Give her another couple of weeks." Elise was born in in December 2006 and can boast influences from England, Malaysia, China, Nigeria and Sierra Leone in her background. Louise works part time as an account manager. Elise's love of music and dance has encouraged the couple to put her name down for education in that area. They have added her to the long waiting list for the Young Actors' Theatre.

The White Whine

2009-03-24T20:17:05Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+13 raves

White Whine: Reflections on the Brain-Rotting Properties of Privilege Timwise.org April, 20 2004 By Wise, Tim To truly understand a nation, a culture, or its people, it helps to know what they take for granted. After all, sometimes the things that go unspoken are more powerful than the spoken word, if for no other reason than the tendency of unspoken assumptions to reinforce core ways of thinking, feeling and acting, without ever having to be verbalized (and thus subjected to challenge) at all. What's more, when people take certain things for granted, anything that goes against the grain of what they perceive as "normal" will tend to stand out like a sore thumb, and invite a hostility that seems reasonable, at least to those dispensing it, precisely because their unspoken assumptions have gone uninterrogated for so long. Thus, every February I encounter people who are apoplectic at the thought of Black History Month, and who insist with no sense of irony or misgiving that there should be no such thing, since, after all, there is no White History Month--a position to which they can only adhere because they have taken for granted that "American history" as told to them previously was comprehensive and accurate, as opposed to being largely the particular history of the dominant group. In other words, the normalcy of the white narrative, which has rendered every month since they popped out of their momma's wombs White History Month, escapes them, and makes the efforts of multiculturalists seem to be the unique break with an otherwise neutral color-blindness. Sorta' like those who e-mail me on a semi-regular basis to insist, as if they have just stumbled upon a truth of unparalleled profundity, that there should be an Ivory Magazine to balance out Ebony, or that we need a White Entertainment Television network to balance out BET, or a NAAWP to balance out the NAACP. Again, these dear souls ignore what is obvious to virtually all persons of color but which remains unseen by those whose reality gets to be viewed as the norm: namely, that there are already two Ivory Magazines--Vogue and Cosmopolitan; that there are several WETs, which just so happen to go by the names of CBS, NBC and ABC; and that the Fortune 500, U.S. Congress and Fraternal Orders of Police are all doing a pretty good job holding it down for us white folks on the organizational front. Just because the norm is not racially-named, doesn't mean it isn't racialized. Likewise the ongoing backlash against affirmative action, by those who seem to believe that opportunity would truly be equal in the absence of these presumably unjust efforts to ensure access to jobs and higher education for persons of color. We are to believe that before affirmative action things were fine, and that were such efforts abolished now, things would return to this utopic state of affairs: to hell with the persistent evidence that people of color continue to face discrimination in employment, housing, education and all other institutional settings in the U.S. So if the University of Michigan gives applicants of color twenty points on a 150-point admission scale, so as to promote racial diversity and balance out the disadvantages to which such students are often subjected in their K-12 schooling experience, that is seen as unfair racial preference. But when the same school gives out 16 points to kids from the lily-white Upper Peninsula, or four points for children of overwhelmingly white alumni, or ten points for students who went to the state's "top" schools (who will be disproportionately white), or 8 points for those who took a full slate of Advanced Placement classes in high schools (which classes are far less available in schools serving students of color), this is seen as perfectly fair, and not at all racially preferential. What's more, the whites who received all those bonus points due to their racial and class position will not be thought of by anyone as having received unearned advantages, in spite of the almost entirely ascriptive nature of the categories into which they fell that qualified them for such bonuses. No matter their "qualifications," it will be taken for granted that any white student at a college or University belongs there. This is why Jennifer Gratz, the lead plaintiff in the successful "reverse discrimination" suit against Michigan's undergraduate affirmative action policy, found it a supreme injustice that a few dozen black, Latino and American Indian students were admitted ahead of her, despite having lower SATs and grades; but she thought nothing of the fact that more than 1400 other white students also were admitted ahead of her and her co-plaintiffs, despite having lower scores and grades. "Lesser qualified" whites are acceptable, you see, while "lesser qualified" people of color must be eliminated from their unearned perches of opportunity. This is the kind of racist logic that people like Gratz, who now heads up the state?s anti-affirmative action initiative with the financial backing of Ward Connerly, find acceptable. This kind of logic also explains the effort of whites at Roger Williams University to start a "white scholarship fund," on the pretense that scholarships for students of color are unfair and place whites at a disadvantage. This, despite the unmentioned fact that about 93 percent of all college scholarship money goes to whites; despite the fact that students of color at elite and expensive colleges come from families with about half the average income of whites; despite the fact that there are scholarships for pretty much every kind of student under the sun, including children of Tupperware dealers, kids whose parents raise horses, kids who are left-handed, kids whose families descend from the founding fathers: you name it, and there's money available for it. While there are plenty of whites unable to afford college, the fault for this unhappy reality lies not with minority scholarships, but rather with the decisions of almost exclusively white University elites to raise the price of higher education into the stratosphere, to the detriment of most everyone. But to place blame where it really belongs, on rich white people, would be illogical. After all, we take it for granted that one day we too might be wealthy, and we wouldn't want others to question our decisions and prerogatives come that day either. Better to blame the dark-skinned for our hardship, since we can take it for granted that they're powerless to do anything about it. Whites, as it turns out, take most everything for granted in this country; which makes perfect sense, because dominant groups usually have that privilege. We take for granted that we won't be racially profiled even when members of our group engage in criminality at a disproportionate rate, whether the crime is corporate fraud, serial killing, child molestation, abortion clinic bombings or drunk driving. And indeed we won't be. We take it for granted that our terrorism won't result in whites as a group being viewed with generalized suspicion. So Tim McVeigh represents only Tim McVeigh, while Mohammed Atta gets to serve as a proxy for every other person who either has his name or follows a prophet of that name. We take it for granted that our dishonesty will be viewed in purely individualistic terms, while the dishonesty of others will result in aspersions being cast upon the entire group from which they come. Thus, Jayson Blair's deceptions at the New York Times provoke howls of indignation at any effort to provide opportunity to journalists of color--because after all, diversity and quality are proven by this one man's exploits to be incompatible--but Jack Kelley's equally egregious fabrications and fraud at USA Today fails to prompt calls for an end to hiring white guys as reporters, or for scrutinizing them more carefully, or for closing down whatever avenues of opportunity have helped keep the profession so white for so long. We take it for granted that we will never be viewed as one of those dreaded "special interest" groups, precisely because whatever serves our interests is presumed universal. So, for example, while politicians who pursue the support of black, Latino, gay or other "minority" voters are said to be pandering to special interests, those who bend over backwards to secure the backing of NASCAR dads and soccer moms, whose racial composition is as self-evident as it is unmentioned, are said to be politically savvy and merely trying to connect with "normal folks." We take it for granted that "classical music" is a perfectly legitimate term for what really amounts to one particular classical form (mostly European orchestral and piano concerto music), ignoring that there are, indeed, classical forms of all musical styles, as well as their more contemporary versions. We take it for granted that the only controversy regarding Jesus is whether or not he was killed by Jews or Romans; or whether the depiction of his execution by Mel Gibson is too violent for children, all the while ignoring a much larger issue, which is why does Gibson (and for that matter every other white filmmaker or artist in the history of the faith) feel the need to make Jesus white: something he surely could not have been and was not, with all due apology to Michelangelo, Constantine, Pat Robertson, and the producers of "Jesus Christ Superstar." That the only physical descriptions of Jesus in the Bible indicate that he had feet the color of burnt brass, and hair like wool, poses a slight problem for Gibson and other followers of the white Jesus hanging in their churches, adorning their crucifixes (if Catholic), and gracing the Christmas cards they send each December. It is the same problem posed by the anthropological evidence concerning the physical appearance of first century Jews from that part of Northern Africa we prefer to call the "Middle East" (and why is that I wonder?). Namely, Jesus did not look like a long-haired version of my Ashkenazi Jewish, Eastern European great-grandfather in his prime. But to even bring this up is to send most white Christians (and sadly, even many of color) into fits, replete with assurances that "it doesn't matter what Jesus looked like, it only matters what he did." Which is all fine and good, until you realize that indeed it must matter to them what Jesus looked like; otherwise, they wouldn't be so averse to presenting him as the man of color he most assuredly was: a man dark enough to guarantee that were he to come back tomorrow, and find himself on the wrong side of New York City at the wrong time of night, reaching for his keys or his wallet in the presence of the Street Crimes Unit, he'd be dispatched far more expeditiously than was done at Golgotha 2000 years ago. But never fear: we needn?t grapple with that because we can merely take it for granted that Jesus had to look like us, as did Adam and Eve, and as does God himself. And indeed, most whites believe this to be true, as proven by every single picture Bible for kids made by a white person, all of which present these figures in such a way. Consider the classic and widely distributed Robert Maxwell Bible Series for children, popularly known as the "blue books," which are found in virtually every pediatrician and OBGYN's office in the U.S. In Volume I, readers learn (at least visually speaking) that the Garden of Eden was in Oslo: a little-known fact that will stun Biblical scholars to be sure. It would all be quite funny were it not so incontestably insane, so pathological in terms of the scope of our nuttiness. What else, after all, can explain the fact that when a New Jersey theatre company put on a passion play a few years ago with a black actor in the lead role, they received hundreds of hateful phone calls and even death threats for daring to portray Jesus as anyone darker than, say, Shaun Cassidy? What else but a tenuous (at best) grip on reality can explain the quickness with which many white Americans ran around after 9/11 saying truly stupid shit like "now we know what it means to be attacked for who we are?" Now we know? Hell, some folks always knew what that was like, though their pain and suffering never counted for much in the eyes of the majority. What else but delusion on a scale necessitating medication could lead one to say--as two whites did on CNN in the wake of the first O.J. Simpson verdict--that they now realized everything they had been told about the American justice system being fair was a lie? Now they realized it! See the theme here? That's what privilege is, for all those who constantly ask me what I mean when I speak of white privilege. It's the ability to presume that your reality is the reality; that your experiences, if white, are universal, and not particular to your racial identity. It's the ability to assume that you belong and that others will presume that too; the ability to define reality for others, and expect that definition to stick (because you have the power to ensure that it becomes the dominant narrative). And it's the ability to ignore all evidence to the contrary, claim that you yourself are the victim, and get everyone from the President to the Supreme Court to the average white guy on the street to believe it. It is Times New Roman font, one inch margins, left hand justified. In other words, it is the default position on the computer of American life. And it has rendered vast numbers of its recipients utterly incapable of critical thought. Only by rebelling against it, and insisting on our own freedom from the mental straightjacket into which we have been placed as whites by this system, can we hope to regain our full humanity, and be of any use as allies to people of color in their struggle against racism.

What is Juneteenth? African-American History

2009-02-25T19:03:53Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+5 raves

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance. Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All or none of them could be true. For whatever the reason, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory. General Order Number 3 One of General Granger’s first orders of business was to read to the people of Texas, General Order Number 3 which began most significantly with: "The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer." The reactions to this profound news ranged from pure shock to immediate jubilation. While many lingered to learn of this new employer to employee relationship, many left before these offers were completely off the lips of their former 'masters' - attesting to the varying conditions on the plantations and the realization of freedom. Even with nowhere to go, many felt that leaving the plantation would be their first grasp of freedom. North was a logical destination and for many it represented true freedom, while the desire to reach family members in neighboring states drove the some into Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Settling into these new areas as free men and women brought on new realities and the challenges of establishing a heretofore non-existent status for black people in America. Recounting the memories of that great day in June of 1865 and its festivities would serve as motivation as well as a release from the growing pressures encountered in their new territory. The celebration of June 19th was coined "Juneteenth" and grew with more participation from descendants. The Juneteenth celebration was a time for reassuring each other, for praying and for gathering remaining family members. Juneteenth continued to be highly revered in Texas decades later, with many former slaves and descendants making an annual pilgrimage back to Galveston on this date. Juneteenth Festivities and Food A range of activities were provided to entertain the masses, many of which continue in tradition today. Rodeos, fishing, barbecuing and baseball are just a few of the typical Juneteenth activities you may witness today. Juneteenth almost always focused on education and self improvement. Thus often guest speakers are brought in and the elders are called upon to recount the events of the past. Prayer services were also a major part of these celebrations. Certain foods became popular and subsequently synonymous with Juneteenth celebrations such as strawberry soda-pop. More traditional and just as popular was the barbecuing, through which Juneteenth participants could share in the spirit and aromas that their ancestors - the newly emancipated African Americans, would have experienced during their ceremonies. Hence, the barbecue pit is often established as the center of attention at Juneteenth celebrations. Food was abundant because everyone prepared a special dish. Meats such as lamb, pork and beef which not available everyday were brought on this special occasion. A true Juneteenth celebrations left visitors well satisfied and with enough conversation to last until the next. Dress was also an important element in early Juneteenth customs and is often still taken seriously, particularly by the direct descendants who can make the connection to this tradition's roots. During slavery there were laws on the books in many areas that prohibited or limited the dressing of the enslaved. During the initial days of the emancipation celebrations, there are accounts of former slaves tossing their ragged garments into the creeks and rivers to adorn clothing taken from the plantations belonging to their former 'masters'. Juneteenth and Society In the early years, little interest existed outside the African American community in participation in the celebrations. In some cases, there was outwardly exhibited resistance by barring the use of public property for the festivities. Most of the festivities found themselves out in rural areas around rivers and creeks that could provide for additional activities such as fishing, horseback riding and barbecues. Often the church grounds was the site for such activities. Eventually, as African Americans became land owners, land was donated and dedicated for these festivities. One of the earliest documented land purchases in the name of Juneteenth was organized by Rev. Jack Yates. This fund-raising effort yielded $1000 and the purchase of Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas. In Mexia, the local Juneteenth organization purchased Booker T. Washington Park, which had become the Juneteenth celebration site in 1898. There are accounts of Juneteenth activities being interrupted and halted by white landowners demanding that their laborers return to work. However, it seems most allowed their workers the day off and some even made donations of food and money. For decades these annual celebrations flourished, growing continuously with each passing year. In Booker T. Washington Park, as many as 20,000 African Americans once flowed through during the course of a week, making the celebration one of the state’s largest. Juneteenth Celebrations Decline Economic and cultural forces provided for a decline in Juneteenth activities and participants beginning in the early 1900’s. Classroom and textbook education in lieu of traditional home and family-taught practices stifled the interest of the youth due to less emphasis and detail on the activities of former slaves. Classroom text books proclaimed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 as the date signaling the ending of slavery - and little or nothing on the impact of General Granger’s arrival on June 19th. The Depression forced many people off the farms and into the cities to find work. In these urban environments, employers were less eager to grant leaves to celebrate this date. Thus, unless June 19th fell on a weekend or holiday, there were very few participants available. July 4th was the already established Independence holiday and a rise in patriotism steered more toward this celebration. Resurgence The Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s yielded both positive and negative results for the Juneteenth celebrations. While it pulled many of the African American youth away and into the struggle for racial equality, many linked these struggles to the historical struggles of their ancestors. This was evidenced by student demonstrators involved in the Atlanta civil rights campaign in the early 1960’s, whom wore Juneteenth freedom buttons. Again in 1968, Juneteenth received another strong resurgence through Poor Peoples March to Washington D.C.. Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s call for people of all races, creeds, economic levels and professions to come to Washington to show support for the poor. Many of these attendees returned home and initiated Juneteenth celebrations in areas previously absent of such activity. In fact, two of the largest Juneteenth celebrations founded after this March are now held in Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Texas Blazes the Trail On January 1, 1980, Juneteenth became an official state holiday through the efforts of Al Edwards, an African American state legislator. The successful passage of this bill marked Juneteenth as the first emancipation celebration granted official state recognition. Representative Edwards has since actively sought to spread the observance of Juneteenth all across America. Juneteenth In Modern Times Throughout the 80’s and 90’s Juneteenth has continued to enjoy a growing and healthy interest from communities and organizations throughout the country. Institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Henry Ford Museum and others have begun sponsoring Juneteenth-centered activities. In recent years, a number of National Juneteenth Organizations have arisen to take their place along side older organizations - all with the mission to promote and cultivate knowledge and appreciation of African American history and culture. Juneteenth today, celebrates African American freedom while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. As it takes on a more national and even global perspective, the events of 1865 in Texas are not forgotten, for all of the roots tie back to this fertile soil from which a national day of pride is growing. The future of Juneteenth looks bright as the number of cities and states come on board and form local committees and organizations to coordinate the activities. Communication and networking is vital. A sharing of lessons learned throughout all organizations will help expedite this growth while minimizing waste and risks. The JUNETEENTH.com website can play a vital role in these efforts.

Jack Johnson --First Black Heavyweight Champion

2009-02-25T13:28:44Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+4 raves

Arthur John Johnson (March 31, 1878 – June 10, 1946), better known as Jack Johnson and nicknamed the “Galveston Giant”, was an American boxer and arguably the best heavyweight of his generation. He was the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World (1908-1915). In a documentary about his life, Ken Burns notes: "For more than thirteen years, Jack Johnson was the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth." Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas as the second child and first son of Henry and Tina "Tiny" Johnson, former slaves, who both worked blue-collar jobs to earn enough to raise six children and taught them how to read and write. Jack Johnson had five years of formal education. Johnson's boxing style was very distinctive. He developed a more patient approach than was customary in that day: playing defensively, waiting for a mistake, and then capitalizing on it. Johnson always began a bout cautiously, slowly building up over the rounds into a more aggressive fighter. He often fought to punish his opponents rather than knock them out, endlessly avoiding their blows and striking with swift counters. He always gave the impression of having much more to offer and, if pushed, he could punch quite powerfully. Johnson's style was very effective, but it was criticized in the white press as being cowardly and devious. By contrast, World Heavyweight Champion "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, who was white, had used many of the same techniques a decade earlier, and was praised by the press as "the cleverest man in boxing".[1] This evidenced a stong racial bias in the media. By 1902, Johnson had won at least 50 fights against both white and black opponents. Johnson won his first title on February 3, 1903, beating "Denver" Ed Martin over 20 rounds for the World Colored Heavyweight Championship. His efforts to win the full title were thwarted, as the world heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries refused to face him. Blacks could box whites in other arenas, but the world heavyweight championship was such a respected and coveted position in America that blacks were not deemed worthy to compete for it. Johnson was, however, able to fight former champion Bob Fitzsimmons in July 1907, and knocked him out in two rounds.[1] Sydney Stadium during the Johnson-Burns match on December 26, 1908. He eventually won the world heavyweight title on December 26, 1908, when he fought the Canadian world champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, after following him all over the world, taunting him in the press for a match. The fight lasted fourteen rounds before being stopped by the police in front of over 20,000 spectators. The title was awarded to Johnson on a referee's decision as a T.K.O, but he had severely beaten the champion. During the fight, Johnson had mocked both Burns and his ringside crew. Every time Burns was about to go down, Johnson would hold him up again, punishing him more. The camera was stopped just as Johnson was finishing off Burns, so as not to show Burns' defeat. After Johnson's victory over Burns, racial animosity among whites ran so deep that even a socialist like Jack London called out for a "Great White Hope" to take the title away from Johnson — who was crudely caricatured as a subhuman "ape" — and return it to where it supposedly belonged, with the "superior" white race. As title holder, Johnson thus had to face a series of fighters billed by boxing promoters as "great white hopes", often in exhibition matches. In 1909, he beat Victor McLaglen, Frank Moran, Tony Ross, Al Kaufman, and the middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel. The match with Ketchel was keenly fought by both men until the 12th and last round, when Ketchel threw a right to Johnson's head, knocking him down. Slowly regaining his feet, Johnson threw a straight to Ketchel's jaw, knocking him out, along with some of his teeth, several of which were embedded in Johnson's glove. His fight with "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien was a disappointing one for Johnson: though scaling 205 pounds (93 kg) to O'Brien's 161 pounds (73 kg) , he could only achieve a six-round draw with the great middleweight. n 1910, former undefeated heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries came out of retirement and said "I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro".[2] Jeffries had not fought in six years and had to lose around 100 lb (45 kg) to try to get back to his championship fighting weight. At the fight, which took place on July 4, 1910 in front of 22,000 people, at a ring built just for the occasion in downtown Reno, Nevada, the ringside band played "All coons look alike to me". The fight had become a hotbed of racial tension, and the promoters incited the all-white crowd to chant "kill the nigger".[3] Johnson, however, proved stronger and more nimble than Jeffries. In the 15th round, after Jeffries had been knocked down twice for the first time in his career, his people called it quits to prevent Johnson from knocking him out. The "Fight of the Century" earned Johnson $225,000 and silenced the critics, who had belittled Johnson's previous victory over Tommy Burns as "empty," claiming that Burns was a false champion since Jeffries had retired undefeated. [edit] Riots and Aftermath The outcome of the fight triggered race riots that evening — the Fourth of July — all across the United States, from Texas and Colorado to New York and Washington, D.C. Johnson's victory over Jeffries had dashed white dreams of finding a "great white hope" to defeat him. Many whites felt humiliated by the defeat of Jeffries and were incensed by Johnson's comments.[1] Blacks, on the other hand, were jubilant, and celebrated Johnson's great victory as a victory for the entire race. Black poet William Waring Cuney later highlighted the African-American reaction to the fight in his poem "My Lord, What a Morning". Around the country, blacks held spontaneous parades, gathered in prayer meetings, and purchased goods with winnings from backing Johnson at the bookmakers. These celebrations often drew a violent response from white men. Some "riots" were simply African-Americans celebrating in the streets. In certain cities, like Chicago, the police allowed them to continue their festivities. But in other cities the police and angry white citizens tried to subdue the celebrations. Police interrupted several attempted lynchings. In all, riots occurred in more than twenty-five states and fifty cities. At least 23 blacks and 2 whites died in the riots, and hundreds more were injured. A few white people were injured when they tried to intervene in a crowd's beating of a black man.[1] On April 5, 1915, Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard, a working cowboy who did not start boxing until he was almost thirty years old. With a crowd of 25,000 at the Veda do Racetrack in Havana, Cuba, Johnson was K.O.'d in the 26th round of the scheduled 45-round fight, which was co-promoted by Roderick James "Jess" McMahon and a partner. Johnson found that he could not knock out the giant Willard, who fought as a counter puncher, making Johnson do all the leading. Johnson began to tire after the 20th round, and was visibly hurt by heavy body punches from Willard in rounds preceding the 26th round knockout. Johnson is said (without proofs) to have spread rumors that he took a dive,[citation needed] but Willard is widely regarded as having won the fight outright. Willard said "If he was going to throw the fight, I wish he'd done it sooner. It was hotter than hell out there". Film of the bout A number of leading American film companies joined forces to shoot footage of the fight and turn it into a feature-length documentary film, at the cost of $100,000. The film was distributed widely in the U.S. and was exhibited internationally as well. As a result, Congress banned prizefight films from 1912 until 1940. In 2005, the film of the Jeffries-Johnson "Fight of the Century" was entered into the United States National Film Registry as being worthy of preservation. Johnson was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954, and is on the roster of both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and the World Boxing Hall of Fame. In 2005, the United States National Film Preservation Board deemed the film of the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight "historically significant" and put it in the National Film Registry. Johnson's story is the basis of the play and subsequent 1970 movie The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones as Johnson (known as Jack Jefferson in the movie), and Jane Alexander as his love interest. In 2005, filmmaker Ken Burns produced a 2-part documentary about Johnson's life, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, based on the 2004 nonfiction book of the same name by Geoffrey C. Ward. Johnson's skill as a fighter and the money that it brought made it impossible for him to be ignored by the white establishment. In a time in which African-Americans enjoyed few civil rights and in which lynching was an accepted extra-legal means of social coercion in many parts of the United States, his success and defiant behavior were a serious threat to the racist status quo. In the short term, the boxing world reacted against Johnson's legacy. But Johnson foreshadowed, in many ways, perhaps the most famous boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali. In fact, Ali often spoke of how he was influenced by Jack Johnson. He identified with him because he felt white America ostracized him in the same manner because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. In his autobiography, Ali relates how he and Joe Frazier agreed that Johnson and Joe Louis were the greatest boxers of all. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Jack Johnson on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. Sixty-two years after Johnson's death, in September, 2008, the United States Congress passed a resolution to recommend that the President grant a pardon for his 1913 conviction, in acknowledgment of its racist overtones, and in order to exonerate Johnson and recognize his contribution to boxing.

The Black Power Salute

2009-02-20T01:28:53Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+2 raves

The birth of Jazz Music

2009-02-20T01:05:56Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+5 raves

Believe it or not, Jazz was started by Negro Spirituals sung on plantations by slaves. The songs sung at the slave's secret church meetings had certain rhythms and different notes (called blue's notes) that made them different from traditional music. The songs were also used to pass along secret messages that only the slaves knew the meaning of. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" meant follow the North star tonight to escape to the north and become free. As the spirituals began to evolve little by little, different elements were added that soon became jazz in the form of what it is today. Jazz had its beginning in song. Its roots lie deep in the tradition of Negro folk singing that once flourished through out the rural South land of the United States before the civil war. The Negro, in those days, owned only a few crude musical instruments which he made for himself from boxes, barrels, and brooms. His voice was his principal means of musical expression. Songs of work and play, trouble and hope, rose on rich and rhythmic voices every where in the South – from peddlers crying their wares to the country side, from work gangs on their wariness in their unpainted cottages over looking the cotton fields, from the way side singing with the sounds of Sabbath praise. For the rhythms the Negro musicians looked to their African heritage, building much of their music over the rhythms of African drums. Drumming styles long familiar to the African, but new to the Western ears, gave this new music a swinging, dancing character of its own. Blues singers wandered through the South with battered guitars and worn harmonicas, singing songs they invented, adapted, or borrowed. This then was the music in which pioneer musicians gave jazz its first voice and defined its musical form. Many of the old time musicians never heard the word jazz, which was not used to describe their music until about 1920.

Rethinking Superiority:

2009-02-19T14:34:21Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+4 raves

Reflections on Whiteness and the Cult of "Progress" By Tim Wise September 15, 2005 As of this coming year, high school students in Philadelphia, PA will be required to take a course in African American history in order to graduate. In a recent column, I lent my support to the new prerequisite, and responded to those who have attacked the plan, most of whom have criticized such a course for being "divisive," or too narrowly focused, or otherwise a distraction from the presumably more important (and unrelated) work of reading, writing and arithmetic. Having grown accustomed to hostile e-mails in response to my internet-based essays, I was utterly unsurprised then by the missive I received, shortly after the first piece went up on my website a few weeks ago. Therein, the author attacked the black history requirement, offering reasons for his objections that I suspect were far more honest than those put forth by most, and which reasons were also considerably more racist in both tone and content. Indeed, his racial hostility virtually leapt off the page when he insisted among other things, that no sub-Saharan African nation had developed a wheel prior to contact with whites, and that ancient Egypt (which he grudgingly admitted was, as with modern-day Egypt, located in Africa) wasn't really African in the sense of being a black nation. Finally, he self-confidently proclaimed that "blacks have contributed between nil and zilch" to American history, and thus were unworthy of any classroom attention, let alone an entire course dedicated to their non-achievement. To be more specific, my detractor insisted that blacks have contributed no technological advances, no scientific discoveries, or other inventions that would merit a class on Black History. There is much one could say here, and perhaps some will question why I would even bother to respond at all. Yet the regularity with which such bombast finds its way into my web browser suggests that letting it slide will hardly make such views go away. At the very least, this kind of vapid argumentation points up a number of disturbing conclusions about the people who forward it, and those who believe it--and let us be clear, with regard to the last bunch, the numbers are far greater than are willing to say so openly. Bottom line: racists almost always tell you more about themselves than the people they seek to denigrate, and this is no exception to that rule. First, let us take note of what appears to be an ironclad truism: namely, that those who rush to herald the superiority of their own group have themselves rarely accomplished anything. Rather, they seek to live vicariously off the achievements of others with whom they share nothing more than some distant national or ethnic lineage. They are singularly unimpressive, in most cases, when it comes to professional or personal greatness, however defined--and certainly as defined by their own terms. Along these lines, I feel confident that had my e-critic ever done anything in the fields of science and technology, such that he could point to his own life as evidence of white superiority, he would have told me so. But of course, it is never the inventor who proclaims his or her work to be evidence of ethnic or genetic superiority; it is not the great playwright or sculptor who announces to the world that their art signifies the racial or cultural supremacy of the group to which they belong. Only life's losers seek out evidence of their own brilliance or potential in the works of others. Only those who secretly harbor suspicions of their own inferiority feel compelled, as a general rule, to insist upon how much better than you they are. Real superiority, measured along whatever axis one may choose, tends to demonstrate itself, without the need of cheerleaders. As for my electronic adversary, it's not as if anything he said was new. Racists have long sought to dismiss the contributions made by folks of color--not only those made to science, art and literature, but even the importance of the manual labor to which millions were largely limited under slavery and apartheid. Several years ago, neo-Nazi David Duke dismissed the contributions made by black workers to the growth of the American republic, by suggesting that horses could have done the physical labor performed by slaves. Putting aside the matter of how horses can harvest crops or build levees, without which the homes and lands of the white planter class would have been washed away, there is another, more pressing issue. That others could have done the work in question hardly matters: the fact is, others didn't; black slaves did, and that makes all the difference. Lots of folks could do lots of things. I could pick up the garbage every week in my own neighborhood and haul it to the city landfill. But I don't. Three guys do: two black, one white, none of them, presumably with my level of formal education, but whose contribution to the community in which I live is absolutely indispensable; more so, indeed, than my own. That I could do their job is beside the point. I don't, and unless they do it, my block is screwed. But under the logic of elitists, their contribution is minor, while the stockbroker who may (against my wishes) choose to move into my neighborhood, would be considered a model and vitally important citizen. Getting back to the point: Had it not been for that unimpressive labor on the part of blacks, the American Revolution itself would not have happened, dependent as it was on profits from industries that relied on slave labor. In that sense, to suggest that blacks have contributed nothing to American history, is a logical absurdity because in the absence of black labor there would have been no USAmerican history to which they (or anyone else) could have contributed. As for black folks' supposed lack of achievement in terms of technology, science and the like -- as well as the utterly specious claim about the lack of the wheel in pre-slavery Africa -- I could spend several thousand words referring readers to the evidence on this subject, compiled by African and European scholars alike, which demonstrates both the racism and absurdity of such arguments. But for those truly interested in this material -- and that would exclude pretty much anyone inclined to take my critic's diatribe seriously -- you would be better served to seek out the information yourself, seeing as how it will be far more adequately presented therein than I could do here. You can begin with the works of Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Asante, and Walter Rodney, among others; and for those whose racism leads them to dismiss black scholars on these subjects, you can always examine the voluminous writings of Basil Davidson: one of the most respected Africa scholars in modern history, who is decidedly both white and British. But for my purposes, I would suggest a different approach to these kinds of slurs on persons of African descent: one that does not focus on a tit-for-tat comparison of the accomplishments of whites and blacks, Europeans and Africans, in an attempt to tally up the ledger and proclaim one or the other the historical victor. Nor would this approach spend considerable energy seeking to prove even those things which are eminently provable: that indeed there were several African civilizations (including sub-Saharan) in existence while Europeans were still, for all intent and purposes, shitting in the woods. Rather, I would argue that the entire basis for comparison offered by racist commentators is flawed; the paradigm under which greatness is being assessed is problematic, and the premises underlying the slanders upon Africa and the accolades for Europe are wrongheaded. In short: the Europhile interpretation of what constitutes cultural superiority and accomplishment is itself subjective, and more than that, terribly stultifying as a measure of human worth. To suggest that we should gauge the legitimacy of a culture based upon its technological achievements is to elevate the importance of things over and above the importance of people. It would require that we extend the label, superior, to any culture with advanced technological prowess, even if that technology were put to use in such a way as to exterminate others, or ultimately in such a way that led to the extinction even of the culture that created it. We would be forced to conclude that any technological advance whatsoever, no matter how dysfunctional, makes the group to which its creator belongs superior and more worthy of praise than others. So instead of viewing the creation of nuclear weaponry (a technological "contribution" to be sure) as evidence of a fundamentally pathological and destructive tendency among the whites who brought it forth, we are expected to praise the genius behind it, taking no note of the consequences now made possible by such "progress." By contrast, hunter-gatherer societies that nurture respect for one another, mutual interdependence, compassion and cooperation -- and who by and large engage in little or no predation against others or the land base upon which they depend -- would be considered inferior in this cosmology. That such an approach for ordering societies as better and worse is tendentious, to say the least, should be obvious, but won't be to those who have bought into the white supremacist view of things. Furthermore, the "great man" paradigm of historical analysis -- which is what my attacker's e-mail was promoting -- by definition constitutes an assault on the dignity and worth of the vast majority of the globe's inhabitants, including almost all citizens of even the most advanced nation-states. After all, few of us will ever invent anything of note, compose a symphony, discover a cure for a deadly disease, or manage to accomplish any of the other things that the "great man" theorists extol as the only important human victories. By the standards of ruling class history, most Americans, of whatever race, are essentially useless, and have accomplished nothing. Likewise, entire cultures (and not just black and brown ones) come up short in such an analysis. Iceland, for example, has lots of folks who would be considered white, and very few who wouldn't be, yet they have hardly made a huge mark in the worlds of science, technology, or literature; so too for any number of Central European nations. What we think of as European Civilization is really quite limited: composed of the historic, scientific and artistic achievements of only a handful of nations, and even then, involving only a small fraction of the persons of those states, most of whose citizens have been little more than peasants for the bulk of recorded history. Thus, if we suggest that "technological achievements" or contributions are what mark a people as having history worth knowing about, then we would have to teach almost nothing about Finland, as with Cameroon: a coupling most racists would reject, but which their own taxonomy of relevant history makes necessary. Beyond all this, it was actually the next part of the angry e-mail that struck me as especially worthy of discussion: the part after its author claimed that blacks had contributed nothing to American history. This was the part where he proffered the opinion that rather than contribute, blacks had "merely survived American history." The snide remark was made as if to suggest that survival, even of the hideous racial history of this land -- from being bought and sold, to raped, to having fingers cut off for learning to read, to being lynched, or relegated to the lowest-rung jobs and living in the poorest neighborhoods -- counted for nothing. As if surviving such history (even if we accept the nonsensical proposition that this was all that black folks had managed to accomplish) was no more impressive than chewing gum and walking at the same time. Imagine, to survive attempted cultural and physical genocide does not, on this view, merit wonder or amazement, let alone a class to discuss how such a thing could be possible: this, in a nation that has made surviving a few weeks on an island with television cameras and emergency medical assistance at the ready something for which the last person standing should be rewarded one million dollars. In a nation where surviving the consumption of raw pig snouts or bull testicles might well win you $50,000 on Fear Factor. Since when has survival been seen as such an unimpressive accomplishment? Does not surviving the concerted attempt to destroy or at least subjugate one's people say something about the character of those who manage the feat? Does not leading a struggle for freedom, and the advancement of human dignity not suggest that the persons in question have made a substantial contribution to the nation in which they live, and indeed the world? By what moral, ethical or practical standard could one fairly argue otherwise? Interestingly enough, it was once believed that survival of one's racial group demonstrated the group's superiority, and as such, blacks would die off, unable to make it in a world where their biological defects would cause them to go the way of the dinosaur. Whites, it was argued were superior, and this was proven -- or so the argument went -- by the way in which whites survived any obstacle thrown in our path: the journey to the new world, harsh winters in the colonies, wars with the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or with Mexico. What marked peoples of color as inferior was their presumed inability to survive, especially blacks after emancipation, who were thought incapable of fending for themselves absent the guiding hand of their masters. Now, seeing as how predictions of black extinction have fallen flat, and given the ways in which African Americans have thrived when given full opportunity to do so, racists have, by necessity changed their story. Now survival, as my electronic interlocutor would have it, means nothing, and is certainly not the evidence of superiority that his predecessors in the cult of white supremacy thought it to be. How very convenient for him: changing the tune to fit the bias. To suggest that surviving the predatory ways of one's captors and oppressors counts for less than the oppressor's success at developing gadgets and commodities (but even then, only after having stolen the land, labor and mineral resources of other peoples first), is to turn technology into a fetish. It is to conclude that the person who creates instruments that clear-cut forests more speedily, that remove minerals from the Earth more expeditiously, and then belch poisonous by-products into the air once the minerals are converted to energy, is superior and worthy of more praise than the person who merely survives the destruction, but contributes far less to it. By the logic of such objects fetishism, we should praise Dow for giving us Napalm, and view them as more worthy of historical praise than the Vietnamese civilians who merely survived the trenches burned into their backs by the product of all that white male genius. We should spend more time in class ruminating on the technological aptitude of the folks who create torture devices -- think shock batons or genital clamps hooked up to car batteries -- than we should to the victims of their torture, who do nothing except occasionally survive the depravity of the first bunch. Oppenheimer gets the praise, while the citizens of Hiroshima become a historical footnote. It all makes sense, once you accept the internal logic of a culture fascinated by death and destruction; especially its ability to produce both with such amazing alacrity. Mere survival isn't nearly impressive enough, as it doesn't portend the kicking of anyone's ass, and what good are people who don't destroy and displace others? Mere survival implies passivity, it's too feminine (God forbid) in a culture that values and venerates the masculine, and even then in only its most pathological manifestations. Men (real men at least) don't just survive. Real men create, they build, they destroy others who get in their way; they steal others' land, rape others' bodies, make the world over in their image, consider themselves God, and then proceed to act as though their delusional messianism were an indication of strength rather than their own spiritual depravity. How cut off from your own humanity must you be so as to suggest that technology and other inventions are the ultimate measure of human worth? After all, a robot is capable of making any of the things that those who worship technology might consider evidence of cultural superiority. But no robot can be programmed to lead a struggle for human freedom, democracy, or liberty. No robot can be made to raise a child into an adult, or write a novel filled with pathos and irony, or any human feeling whatsoever. No robot can nurse a sick puppy back to health, solve any of a thousand moral dilemmas faced by real people everyday, write a screenplay that can make us cry, or devise something as lofty as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To thus consider technology, ultimately stuff, as the evidence of a culture's superiority, is to engage in the ultimate in auto-dehumanization. It is to utterly miss the point of creation: whether seen as a God-given gift or an act of nature. Surely, superiority in any meaningful sense is located less in one's ability to create and destroy, than in one's ability to empathize, and to stop doing the things one is doing that wreak havoc on the planet and one's neighbors. To develop the capacity to kill and maim on a grand scale is not a sign of superiority. To be capable of saying you're sorry, even for making the effort, might well be, but good luck finding anyone among the masters of the universe willing to do that. And so as not to engage in too extreme a version of anthropocentrism, no robot can accomplish even that which bees accomplish everyday: pollinating plants that bring forth fruit, nuts and berries, and thereby keep the chain of life trotting along. In other words, even creatures to which we typically extend little if any credit for their intelligence, are more important to life on this planet than even the most impressive pile of technological junk upon which we are fixated at any given moment. And if that pile of junk threatens our survival -- either because the extraction of the minerals needed to produce it has degraded the ecosystem, or because the machine itself has as its purpose the bringing of death, as with guns, bullets or bombs -- then we might more properly view its creators as either crazy, evil or both. We should certainly not consider them superior, unless our twisted concept of superiority involves the ability to extinguish life on the planet; unless the will to omnicide has come to represent, for us, the pinnacle of human achievement. Sadly, perhaps that's the problem: perhaps we really do define superiority this way. The ability to rape the Earth, to destroy that which either God, or nature (or both) have given us, places us, in some sick way, above God, at least in our minds. By our actions we seem to be saying that although God may have been able to create the world in just six days, we can and will destroy it, if not as quickly, just as completely. The last time God tried to destroy the world he failed with that 40-day and 40-night flood thing. But what kind of destruction is that? That's some minor league deity bullshit: we've brought on global warming. Checkmate, bitch. So by all means, go out there and have a nice extra-hot summer, from which you can seek relief by downing a glass of water, containing dangerous levels of mercury. Just make sure to slap on some SPF-50 first-which we brilliant white folks also created-and don't forget to thank us for saving your ungrateful life.

Blame Shifting and Buck-Passing, Conservative Style

2009-02-19T14:17:41Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+3 raves

Personal Responsibility for Thee But Not for Me: Blame Shifting and Buck-Passing, Conservative Style By Tim Wise August 9, 2007 Conservatives love to parade as the apostles of personal responsibility. Whenever the issues of poverty, racism, or crime come up, for example, those on the right are quick to demand "personal responsibility" from the poor, from people of color, or from criminals. If you're struggling economically, don't blame the system: just work harder. If you find yourself behind your white counterparts, don't blame racism or discrimination: just work harder. And if you commit a crime, go to jail: no whining about the environment in which you grew up, or whether you were abused as a child, or the fact that you might be mentally ill. The right is like this with all kinds of issues: Got AIDS? You shouldn't have had promiscuous sex. Unplanned pregnancy? You shouldn't have had promiscuous sex. Struggling to feed your kids? Maybe if you hadn't had all that promiscuous sex, you wouldn't have kids to feed--ever think about that? Sounds principled, if a little mean. It's a shame the folks who say this stuff don't really believe it. For when it comes to personal responsibility, right-wingers almost never take their own advice; they almost never apply their sermonizing to their own flock. So when Rush Limbaugh developed a serious Oxycontin habit, all the talk about the moral weakness of drug users and abusers suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by claims that he had become addicted, as if by a disease: the same diagnosis the right regularly eschews for street junkies. He also obstructed investigators who wanted to see his medical records, to determine if he'd been doctor shopping for surplus pills. There's certainly no "personal responsibility" in that: after all, he'd be the first to tell a suspected criminal, or suspected terrorist who was fighting a search of his home (or an investigation into his book-buying habits), that if they had nothing to hide, they shouldn't mind having their privacy invaded. When Richard Nixon did his thing, his defenders (the same people who'd been preaching law and order to black folks in cities wracked by riots in the late '60s), quickly ditched personal responsibility, opting instead for the old standby: "He didn't do anything that every other President didn't do. The only difference is, he got caught." When Ronald Reagan got caught selling arms to the Iranians and diverting the money to the Nicaraguan contras, the right rushed to pass the buck to others: Ollie North, Cap Weinberger, anyone but the Gipper. Even Reagan's Alzheimer's became an excuse, as in, "Well, the old man didn't know what was going on, so you can't blame him." On a more collective level, although the right tells poor folks to work harder if their incomes are too low, they have their own version of buck-passing when it comes to inadequate pay. If they are unsatisfied with their income, rather than look in the mirror and say, "Dammit Braxton, work harder," they blame taxes and the politicians who raise them, for "confiscating" their hard-earned cash. Apparently when paychecks are depleted thanks to taxes, that's theft, but when paychecks are depleted thanks to the skimming off of surplus value (also known as profits), so that workers are paid less than the value of the products or services they produce or provide, that's just good business. Of course, to the person holding the depleted pay stub, it probably doesn't feel much different. The right refuses to take any personal responsibility for global warming, so that even if they admit the phenomenon is happening, which is rare, they blame nature, rather than industrial activity. Sort of the way Reagan blamed trees for pollution, rather than addressing the role humans were playing in fouling the air and water. And so right-wing men, in particular, go right on driving gas-guzzling Hummers while claiming to support the "war on terror" in the oil rich Middle East, never noting the irony. Recently, three developing stories have driven home the hypocrisy of the right when it comes to their paeans to personal responsibility. The first comes from Utah, where a coal mine collapse has trapped six miners in a shaft 1500 feet below the Earth's surface, and three miles from the mine's entrance. They will likely be dead by the time rescuers reach them. The owner of the mine, Bob Murray--a reactionary businessman the likes of which we haven't witnessed since Scrooge or Mr. Potter, from It's a Wonderful Life, has spent more time bashing the United Mine Workers since the cave-in, than anything else. And as for his responsibility for the tragedy? Are you kidding? The fact that two of his mines have injury rates one-quarter higher than an already awful industry average means nothing. The fact that the mine in Huntington that just collapsed was cited for over a hundred "significant and substantial" safety violations, serious enough to cause death, just since 2004, means nothing. The fact that one of his standard mining practices is to strip off all the coal from a shaft--including the part that forms the pillars that actually keep the roof up--matters not. No personal responsibility here. No sir, instead Murray blames an earthquake, which, strangely, seismologists can find no evidence of having happened, and which no one else in the vicinity seems to have noticed. The second story comes from Florida, where State Representative, Bob Allen, who has a nearly perfect voting record in the eyes of the so-called Christian right (and who actually authored the state's Lewd or Lascivious Exhibition Act), was just arrested for offering to give an undercover cop a blowjob in a public bathroom. Allen entered the restroom, at a park in Titusville, Florida, then peeped over the wall of the bathroom stall at the officer, then pushed open the door to the stall, after which fairly brazen act he made the proposition of oral gratification. Once arrested, did Allen take personal responsibility? Of course not. Though he didn't pull a Ted Haggard--that far-right gasbag of a phony Christian preacher who had regular trysts with a male escort while taking crystal meth and then lied about it--Allen's explanation for what happened wasn't much better. According to Allen, black people made him do it. "This was a pretty stocky black guy," Allen said, "and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park." He went on to say that he feared he "was about to be a statistic," and would have said anything just to get away. So there you have it: fear of black men forced him to offer that blowjob, and to peer over the stall wall, and to push open the door, to get closer to the big black man who scared him so. And it was that fear, that utter terror that caused him to no doubt cast his eyes downward at the object of his petrified affection: oooh, scary! But, you know girl, in a good way. And the third story--and oh yes, I have quite deliberately saved the best for last--also involves right wing men and the penises (or is it peni?) that they so clearly covet, despite their heterosexist and homophobic rantings. To wit, Glenn Murphy Jr., the recently elected 33-year old head of the Young Republican National Federation. Murphy has just resigned from his position--to hear him tell it because of an unexpected business opportunity--just days after it was revealed that he was likely to face felony charges of having performed oral sex on a sleeping man, quite without the man's permission. Murphy and the victim, along with the victim's sister had apparently been at a Young Republican function in Indiana, after which soiree, the three went back to the sister's house to crash. At some point in the middle of the night, the victim says he woke up to find "Murphy holding my dick with one hand and sucking my dick with his mouth." (These Republicans--such language!) Anyway, the victim shoved Murphy aside, Murphy ran out of the house, and later called the victim to "explain" himself. Was the explanation one that involved taking personal responsibility for forcible sodomy, not to mention his own sexual and political hypocrisy? Of course not. Instead, Murphy says he somehow "found himself on the floor," next to the victim, in a strange but no doubt happy coincidence, and that the victim had started, while still asleep of course, to fondle Murphy's hair. Then Murphy, as if in a dream state of semi-consciousness, proceeded to caress the victim's leg, all leading up to the inevitable, and totally innocent "dick-in-the-mouth" thing. Then, once the victim failed to accept Murphy's explanation (imagine that), Murphy hired a lawyer who went to the victim to try and "work something out" (read: pay him off), so that the event wouldn't become public. Not a very "personally responsible" thing to do, to say the least. Interestingly, a police report from 1998, in the same community, indicates that Murphy did exactly the same thing then, although charges were never brought. After this earlier incident, Murphy went on to rise in the ranks (no pun intended) of the Young Republicans, culminating with his bid for National Chair. Last month, after his election, he explained his goals in a way that couldn't be more perfect, given the allegations against him. "I will essentially be the mouthpiece and effective leader for the tens of thousands of Young Republicans, 18 to 40 across the country." Of course that right-wingers would seek to shift responsibility from their own wrongdoing shouldn't surprise anyone. They've been doing it forever: as with those fundamentalist, Bible-thumping zealots who blame Satan for leading them into temptation. "Oh Lord, I was tempted by another--by the Devil, by that wicked trickster Eve, by the Serpent. Oh Lord, it wasn't me, it wasn't me! It's long past time that the right's obsession with personal responsibility was exposed for what it really is: a morally obtuse rhetorical cover for hypocrisy. Conservatives are hypocrites, about sex, about drugs, about crime, about their reading of Scripture (Southern Baptists have some of the highest divorce rates of any religious denomination in the nation, for example), about damned near everything. And until the rest of us challenge them openly on it, rather than being cowed by the power of their mega-churches and radio shows, their ability to keep peddling the politics of personal responsibility, even while practicing something very different for themselves will continue unabated. And the only responsibility for that will be ours.

The Oprah Effect:

2009-02-19T14:15:10Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

0 raves

Black Success, White Denial and the Reality of Racism By Tim Wise July 28, 2006 "What about Oprah?" So came the question from the middle of the crowded lecture hall, spat out from a contorted face whose owner had just sat through an hour-long talk, the substance of which I can only imagine he had found excruciating. Needing a bit more information before I could confidently respond, I replied the only way I could, up to that point: "What about her?" And then came the predictable soliloquy to which I have grown accustomed in the eleven or so years I've been speaking about racism around the country. It's the one that goes roughly like this: "If racism is really so bad, and blacks face so much discrimination, how come Oprah is one of the most loved people in America? How come she's been so successful, and has become so wealthy, and so powerful?" Before I could respond, the questioner continued by throwing in a few other folks of color whose success he believed trumped any evidence of racism as a real and persistent problem: to wit, Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby, and Colin Powell. I paused for a second, half expecting him to persist, perhaps by noting the professional accomplishments of Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Russell Simmons and J-Lo as ironclad confirmation that racism had been eliminated, but at this point he fell silent, convinced that he had made his case well enough, I suppose. The statistical evidence I had presented throughout my talk, not to mention the findings of several studies that have directly tested for racism in the job market, housing and elsewhere (and found it to be a substantial impediment to equal opportunity) were all irrelevant to him; they meant nothing in the face of individual success stories (1). Anecdote, in his mind, was not only proof; it was even better proof than social science research and quantitative data. That such thinking can survive a college education suggests that David Horowitz's concern about leftist professors brainwashing college students is more than a bit misplaced. Apparently, this guy's professors hadn't even convinced him of the most basic strictures of research design and accepted scholarly interpretation, let alone turned him into a mouth-foaming revolutionary. And speaking of Horowitz, the "What about Oprah?" trope was one he too had used in response to my work, when an AP reporter had asked him about me in 2005. According to Horowitz, I adhere to a "Marxist framework" when it comes to race, because I believe in a "collective effort by white people to keep black people down" (not sure where Marx ever said that, nor I for that matter, but I digress), and that such thinking can't explain the success of someone like Oprah. When the AP reporter asked for my response to this statement, I remember being speechless for several seconds, stunned that such a rejoinder was all this leading light of the nation's far-right had been able to muster--in fact, a little embarrassed for him that it was so. It's one thing to ask that kind of question when you're twelve, or even a college student. It's quite another to continue asking it while posing as a deep thinking conservative intellectual (no joke intended here, by the way). When Exceptions Prove the Rule So, what about Oprah? Well, here's an even better question, and one that pretty well answers the first: What about Madame C.J. Walker? When I asked the agitated audience member this question, he looked puzzled, naturally never having heard of Walker before, and not understanding why I would have offered this reply to his original query about Winfrey. I quickly explained the point: namely, that Madame C.J. Walker had become one of the very first African American millionaires, by way of tapping into a largely ignored market for black beauty products. She had worked hard, persevered against the odds and triumphed brilliantly: a real American success story! "Exactly!" interjected the man from the audience. How do you explain someone like her, he wanted to know, if racism is really that bad? Of course, what I hadn't shared up to that point was that Walker had become a millionaire in 1911: a year in which sixty-three black folks had been lynched in this country (more than one a week), and at a time when obviously all would agree overt racial oppression of African Americans was the norm. In other words, of course it's true that some black folks have done extraordinarily well in this society. No one ever suggested the impossibility of such a thing, even amidst crushing bigotry. But surely no one would suggest that Madame C.J. Walker's success, even at a time of legally-codified terrorism against black folks, should stand as evidence that anyone in the black community could have made it, and that those fighting against racism at the time were misguided; let alone that there was something wrong with all the other black folks, for having failed to replicate Walker's singular achievements. Yet the logic of a David Horowitz, or the young man questioning me that day, leads precisely in this direction, as if the fact of individuals having triumphed against great obstacles, ends all debate about a society's degree of fairness. As if the success of a few, who have risen from the bottom, serves as the final proof of equal opportunity, despite the evidence of all the other millions who have labored equally as hard, and yet, remained in roughly the same station as that into which they were born. As if we should conclude from the success of an Oprah that opportunity is equal, as opposed to wondering how many more Oprahs might there be, figuratively speaking, and how much more quickly might they have emerged, had the remaining obstacles been eliminated from their paths? As James Baldwin so presciently put it, some forty-five years ago, responding even then to the same "anyone can make it if they try" mantra commonly heard today: "...the inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few. A few have always risen--in every country, every era, and in the teeth of regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as free." Which point brings to mind the obvious question: if whites were so willing, even in 1961, at which time Baldwin wrote these words, to insist upon the meritocratic nature of what was, after all, an apartheid system, what orgiastic irrationality would lead us to ever believe that this was a particularly persuasive argument, or that those putting it forth had even the faintest inkling as to what they were talking about? Whites, as it turns out, have always said that racism wasn't that big a deal, and that the "determined will," as Baldwin put it, was sufficient to make all obstacles vanish in their wake, even when the evidence to the contrary was incontestable. You need only go back and read the Gallup polls of white racial attitudes even before the passage of civil rights legislation, to see this fantastical vision of America on full display. Therein you can find most whites, even in the early '60s, insisting that blacks had fully equal opportunity in education, employment, housing and the like--a position that all would recognize as borderline delusional now, but which prompted no concerns for the mental health of the white masses at the time (2). And then as now, those who sought to downplay or flatly ignore the reality of racism would point to the success stories--perhaps Sammy Davis Jr., or Sidney Poitier--as confirmation that all was right with the world, and that those crusading to end segregation were wasting their time. After all, with a little effort, all black folks could have an act at the Copa, or star in motion pictures, just as today, presumably, they can all have a talk-show empire, a clothing line, or become Secretary of State. But just as such argumentation was the textbook definition of foolishness in Baldwin's era (and before, seeing as how it reaches back well before his lifetime), so too does it fail the laugh test today, despite what progress really has been achieved. Until such successes become so common that we can no longer name all the power brokers with dark skin, their triumphs will stand as a stark reminder that exceptions can indeed prove the very rules against which they have been deployed. The Superstar Fallacy: Or Why Entertainers Aren't a Good Gauge of Social Fairness Of course, there's an even more basic flaw in the thinking of the "What about Oprah?" crowd. The simple fact is, very few people, of any color, ever become superstar celebrities, or high-ranking political officials. Very few people become millionaires, let alone billionaires. So to think that any person who has attained these heights of fame and fortune, by dint of their existence, says something about the larger society and its openness to talent, is by definition absurd. If these statistical outliers teach us anything about the larger society, it would be that their relative infrequency indicates their exceptionality, rather than suggesting how hard work and effort were all that really mattered. I mean, do we really think that Bill Gates worked that much harder than everyone else? And if others have also worked incredibly hard, why is it that almost no one approaches his level of wealth (indeed, many nations fail to do so)? To judge the openness of a society by examining the outcomes obtained by the elite is tautological in the extreme. It is to say, we know we live in a meritocracy because of the existence of superstars, and we have superstars because we live in a meritocracy--the ultimate in circular logic. Rather, to determine the larger social reality, we must examine the relative outcomes for the typical white person or family, compared to the typical person or family of color. Averages and medians tell us far more about the norm than the extremes at either end. To judge a nation by only looking at those at the top (or, for that matter, the bottom) is ignorance on stilts. Surely, conservatives would balk (and rightly so) if someone were to visit an Appalachian coal town, and then declare that what they'd seen had proven the U.S. to be a nation where opportunity was altogether lacking. Yet, they seem comfortable proclaiming opportunity to be as open as the top of Mt. St. Helen's after examining only those at the society's pinnacle. But what is more telling about the extent of equal opportunity: the fact that Oprah could buy and sell the land out from under most all of us, or the fact that the typical white family has eleven times the net worth of the typical black family, and eight times the net worth of the typical Latino family, thanks to past and present barriers to wealth accumulation, income and equal housing (3)? To ask the question is to answer it. Not to mention, the powerful persons of color my questioner had rattled off--or that others do when this issue is raised--are almost entirely from the worlds of entertainment or sports, which, important and culturally influential though they may be, are hardly like the industries in which most people find themselves. After all, when it comes to athletic ability, or musical aptitude, or any kind of performing art, one either "has it," so to speak, or one doesn't. Such areas of life are among the most meritocratic in any society, by necessity, as the standards used to judge ability in those areas are relatively objective. But in the regular private sector workforce, this is far from the case. Old boy's networks still skew opportunity to those with the best connections (found by several studies to be overwhelmingly white and male), and the criteria used to determine ability are inherently subjective: Will this person "fit in" with the company? Do they have "enough" experience? Will they be able to relate to the customer base? All of these evaluations are judgment calls, and, according to the evidence, the kind of judgment calls that are often susceptible to internalized race, class and gender biases (4). Whether or not a person can hit a three-pointer, carry a tune, or make you laugh, is not nearly as subjective, though of course, even there, success still depends on getting certain breaks, and occasionally, being in the right networks to be discovered. Not to mention, whites have always been willing to let black people entertain us, even at the height of segregation. The question is, how have we felt about blacks being our bankers, doctors, bosses, colleagues, neighbors, or in-laws for that matter? Only Certain Blacks Need Apply: The Importance of Making Whites Comfortable And there is something else too. With very few exceptions, those black and brown folks who have made it to the top of the nation's political or economic elite, have been those who have done one of two things: either parroted the line of whites, especially those in power, or avoided controversy altogether, taking few political stances on anything, such that they can be seen as having "transcended" their race. In other words, black folks will do just fine, so long as they don't remind us about the issue of racism, don't remind us of their blackness too often (or in the case of some, like Tiger Woods, deny it altogether in favor of some made up category, like "Cablinasian"*), don't wear their hair in an identifiable "ethnic" hairstyle, or "sound too black," whatever that's taken to mean. So Oprah is OK, because although she occasionally tackles racism on her show, and certainly never tries to run from her heritage, she is careful about not seeming to overdo it--and with good reason from a professional perspective. In fact, the one time she recently claimed to have been the victim of racism--alleging that she was kept out of a Paris boutique because of racial profiling by the staff--public reaction was swift and furious. Even those who had always liked Oprah were blasting her on chat room boards and talk radio, accusing her of "playing the race card," and alleging victim status, which they insisted she had no right to do (irrespective of what had happened), since, after all, she was so rich. And when Oprah decided to then tape an episode about racism, in part because of her experience in Paris, and in part because of having seen the movie, "Crash," she spent a significant amount of time talking not about racism, but challenging one of the film's stars, rapper Ludacris, about bad language in rap music--no doubt a more comfortable topic for her white viewers. Bill Cosby is fine too, so long as he's selling Jell-O, playing a nice, safe, affluent father figure on TV,** or even more so if he's criticizing other black folks for their shortcomings--his current trip, going on two-plus years now. But back in the early 90s, when he ruminated about the possibility that the government had created AIDS in a lab to get rid of folks deemed "undesirable," most never heard the statement at all (the media didn't think it newsworthy to spend much time on, apparently), and whites who did catch wind of his comments were outraged. Likewise, when Camille Cosby wrote a widely-circulated column after their son was killed, in which she blamed America for teaching his Russian-born murderer to hate (a column with which her husband showed no signs of disagreement), white folks blasted the Cosby duo for not appreciating all they'd been "given" in this country. And one can only imagine the storms of shit that would come down upon Cosby's head--irrespective of how much white folks loved Cliff Huxtable--were he to openly and publicly express the views he put forward in his doctoral dissertation, wherein he explained: "The 'American Dream' of upward mobility is just another myth...Far from being prepared to move along an established career ladder, black children are trained to occupy those same positions held by their parents in a society economically dominated and maintained by a white status quo (5)." Moving on, Condoleezza Rice is OK, because she does the bidding of white men in power, without seeming to ever question them (and even better, came from a family which saw no need for Dr. King's protest activities in Birmingham in 1963). Clarence Thomas is better than OK, because not only does he not question white folks about racism, he denies that it's an issue at all, and blames blacks openly for whatever problems they may have. So too Larry Elder, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and a gaggle of black conservatives whose acceptance by whites is inversely proportional to their support from others in the black community. In other words, the less you're identified with the black freedom struggle, historically or today, the better from the perspective of white America. Colin Powell is a textbook example here: so long as he was seen as a team player--especially on a white-led team--folks were touting him as a hero, and someone who might make a great Presidential candidate one day. After all, he had never been involved in any civil rights activism to speak of. Even better, when others were leading that fight--getting beaten in the streets of Alabama or murdered in Mississippi--he was killing brown-skinned folks on the other side of the world, "for America"--the same nation that wouldn't even guarantee federal protection for civil rights workers in the South, and in which the human rights of black people were being violated daily, while most white folks couldn't have cared less. Such is the stuff that white folks' heroes are made out of, apparently. But then let that black soldier suggest that he actually supports affirmative action, and let his wife suggest that the reason she doesn't want her husband to run for President is because of a fear he might be shot by some white racist, and let him show insufficient enthusiasm for his boss's war plans (even as he was willing to go and prevaricate about them to the UN) and watch how fast he gets kicked to the curb, first by the public--notice, no more talk of Presidential runs--and then by the Administration for which he worked, from which perch he unceremoniously retires, to be replaced by a black person who won't make waves. That the success of people of color has been so highly correlated with the pleasing of whites actually proves the ongoing salience of white power and the relative lack of its black and brown counterpart. After all, if people of color really had equal opportunity with white folks, there would be no logical reason to expect any significant differences in achievement between blacks with more liberal views as opposed to conservative views; no reason for the ideological one-sidedness of black conservative success (or merely apolitical success, a la Oprah, or Tiger, or Michael Jordan). If whites didn't have the ultimate power in this society, black folks who refused to play to the tastes of white audiences, and who indeed ignored such audiences altogether could prove every bit as successful as the Oprahs of the world. Certainly there are plenty of white politicians, advertisers and companies that routinely ignore the black demographic, either because it isn't necessary for their success, or they are simply too disconnected from it to know how to attract its members; yet they suffer no penalty as a result. But if blacks ignore what white folks want, need, and respond to (either as voters or consumers), they'll generally go nowhere, Madame C.J. Walker notwithstanding. Thus, hip-hop execs, black or white, pander to white youth who purchase the vast majority of hip-hop merchandise and rap CDs, so that even in one of the industries where African Americans probably have the most strength (albeit not as much as many think), the ultimate power still resides in the hands of whites. As a result, there is never a shortage of songs about black folks killing other black folks, slingin' drugs, or partying in the club--what better way to make young white boys in the suburbs feel "street?"--but political and revolutionary MCs, who are often far more skilled, stay mostly in the underground, without major label support, radio play or distribution deals. After all, very few white folks are looking to buy CDs talking about overthrowing their dads. Electoral politics are no different. Whites will vote for blacks on occasion, but only those blacks who make them comfortable. To this, many would say, so what? After all, no one can be expected to vote for a candidate with whom they disagree. And that's true, so far as it goes; but note the larger point. Black folks cannot stop white politicians from being elected if those politicians take stances with which the overwhelming majority of blacks disagree. On the other hand, to be elected anywhere other than the 'hood, black and brown candidates do have to please white voters or else they will lose and lose badly. If whites can control the outcome of elections in this way, but blacks can't, then the former has power and the latter doesn't. No better evidence of this fact exists than in the case of black voters in the South, who, frankly, might as well not have the right to vote at all, at least in Presidential contests. After all, given the way in which the Electoral College operates, the votes of black Southerners--who, let's remember represent roughly half of all blacks in the entire nation--don't count: they will always be outvoted by white conservatives, leading to Electoral College outcomes that are fundamentally no different than they would be if Jim Crow laws were reinstituted tomorrow. Green Isn't the Only Color That Matters: Racism and the Black Middle & Upper Class Of course, the underlying premise of the "what about Oprah?" line of questioning is itself false: namely, that people of color who are successful are somehow immune to racism. According to this line of reasoning, not only does the success of such individuals, or of the much larger black middle class, indicate that racism is pretty much a thing of the past, generally; but so too, it indicates that those who are members of the black and brown middle-class and above have become insulated from racism themselves. Yet, not only is racism a problem for those who haven't "made it," in the common parlance; indeed, it remains a problem, even for those who have: an important point to understand, given the tendency for even well-meaning people to insist that in the U.S., "the only color that matters is green." As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. Though it may seem counterintuitive, racism might actually be more of a unique burden for the black middle class and affluent, than for the black poor. After all, African Americans at the bottom of the class structure face economic obstacles that are related to racism--especially historically--but which now also operate as part of the class system, with or without the presence of racial bias. On the other hand, black middle class and affluent professionals, who have largely navigated the class structure successfully, regularly find themselves--despite that success, or even because of it--wondering if perhaps they might be racially profiled or stereotyped, assumed to be a bad credit risk, a criminal, or less capable, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary (6). Black professionals live with the knowledge that historically it has been precisely when persons like them began to "make it," that they were most vulnerable to attack. Lynching and mob violence by whites was often rooted in jealousy towards successful African Americans and black communities. The poor were "in their place" already, but the middle class and professional class of blacks were seen as having apparently forgotten theirs. Additional research confirms the damage that racism can do to the black middle-class. Specifically, research on black student performance--especially but not exclusively on standardized tests--has found that it is precisely those black children from upwardly mobile families, who place an extraordinarily high premium on education, who so often underperform, relative to their previously demonstrated ability. And why? Because, according to the available evidence, such youth are so desperate to disprove the negative stereotypes held about their group, that they experience additional anxiety in testing situations, thereby causing their scores to suffer (7). The pressure felt by the black middle and upper classes to achieve, above and against commonly held stereotypes about blacks as a group, may also explain, at least in part, the persistent health disparities between whites and blacks. Indeed, although poor folks of color receive even worse care than poor whites--hard to imagine, given the lousy care received by low-income persons generally--it is among those with more money and access where we see the largest racial disparities in health outcomes emerge. So, according to a study at Meharry Medical College, in Nashville, hypertension differences between whites and blacks virtually disappear when you exclude upper income whites and blacks from the sample. But when those who are doing quite well, economically, are included in the analysis, the racial gaps become stark (8). This suggests that for blacks who are middle class and above, even though they are likely to have decent health care coverage, they will typically fare worse than their white counterparts. Among the logical explanations for such disparities between white and black affluent folks, one might consider the stress experienced by African American professionals, striving to overcome negative stereotypes and prove themselves against a backdrop of racism and inequality about which they are acutely aware. So while the emergence of the black middle class may indeed signify progress on many levels, it nonetheless remains true that members of that middle class are in a far more precarious position than their white counterparts, not only with regard to educational and health outcomes, but also in regard to income, occupation, and net worth. Consider the position of the black business class, for example. For blacks seeking to start their own businesses, or who already operate their own firms, opportunity is far from truly equal. Studies have found that African Americans are less likely than whites to have their business loan applications approved, even when their collateral and credit records, as well as other factors, are comparable with their white counterparts (9). Likewise, even with affirmative action requiring good faith efforts to include so-called minority contractors in government-funded initiatives, folks of color receive a miniscule proportion of said work: about six percent of federal contract dollars, despite owning fifteen percent of all businesses in the U.S. (10). Unequal access to the most lucrative markets explains in part why black middle class businesspersons remain so much more vulnerable than their white counterparts. So, for example, the average white business takes in forty-five times the annual receipts of the average black-owned business, and eighteen times the average for Latino-owned businesses. (11). As for black workers generally, even those who are college educated and part of the middle class, typically earn less and are in less lucrative occupational positions than their white counterparts. According to Census data, black college graduates are only two-thirds as likely as whites to be employed in a professional or managerial position, while Latino college grads are only 44 percent as likely to be employed in such jobs (12). Black men with college degrees earn, on average, about $20,000 less annually than their white counterparts--a difference of almost fifty percent; whites with masters degrees earn about ten percent more than comparable blacks, on average, and whites with professional degrees (like medical or law degrees), earn, on average, about $30,000 more than their black counterparts, each year (13). These gaps persist, despite the fact that whites and blacks receive college degrees in the same disciplines at roughly the same rates (14), and even when their ages, experience levels, and prior academic performance records are similar (15). Most telling, on those occasions when black families have achieved middle class status, it is typically only after having worked far harder than whites in the same position. Indeed, the average black middle class family has to work twelve more weeks, per year, than their white counterparts, simply to earn the same as the average white middle class family. This generally means that black middle class families will be dependent on having two wage earners, to make the same as white families with only one (16). And sadly, when black folks do attain middle class status or above, they have a much harder time transmitting that status to their children intergenerationally. Research suggests that the children of black middle class professionals are more likely to move downward on the class ladder than to move up, and far more likely to move downward than similarly-situated whites (17). As if these disparities were not bad enough, income gaps are only one part--and typically the smallest part--of the overall picture when it comes to racial disparity, even amongst the white and black middle classes. When income disparities are relatively small, wealth gaps remain massive, in large measure because of accumulated advantages among whites going back several generations. Today's young black couples, even if professionally successful, are starting out well behind their typical white counterparts, because of the legacy of unequal access to wealth, going back many decades and centuries, and which has now provided inherited head starts to the latter, and headwinds to the former. So, for example, even white families with incomes below the poverty line are more likely to own their own home than black households with incomes that are 2-3 times higher (18). Likewise, white households with incomes below $15,000 annually (and as low as $7500), actually have a greater average net worth than black households with incomes as high as $60,000 per year (19). Various explanations exist for such disparities, not least of which is the way that the government itself subsidized white homeownership in the middle of the 1900s, via FHA and VA loans that were almost entirely off limits to blacks, and which created billions of dollars in equity for the new white middle class: wealth that is today being handed down to a new generation of white Americans (20). As noted before, the typical white family has nearly eleven times greater net worth than the typical black family, and eight times greater net worth than the typical Latino family. But even more tellingly, if we exclude home equity from the calculation of assets and net worth--since, after all, home equity is not as easily liquidated as stocks, bonds, commercial real estate, or other financial instruments--the median white household has almost twenty times the net worth of the median black household and twelve times that of the typical Latino household. And these gaps exist at every income level, including among those whose incomes suggest they are "making it." So, for example, in the middle class, whites have 5.2 times more net worth, on average, than blacks (nearly $60,000 as opposed to less than $12,000), and among the wealthiest fifth of income earners, whites average 3.2 times the net worth, of blacks ($208,000 compared to $65,000). In other words, typical members of the white middle class have almost the same net worth as typical members of the black upper-class, irrespective of the latter group's higher income and occupational status (21).*** Conclusion: So, What About White Denial? Taken together, the conclusion to which all of this leads is simple: the real question is not what individual black and brown successes mean in terms of the existence or non-existence of racism--they mean almost nothing with regard to that larger issue. Rather, the question is why whites are so quick to point to these anecdotal examples of achievement, as a way to deny what all of the quantitative data suggests is true, and which study after study for years has found to be the case: namely, that racism is a real problem, even for successful folks of color, and that the ability of some to achieve despite it, hardly negates that larger structural truth. Since there is no reason to assume that whites are incapable of separating truth from fiction in this regard, there must be some other factor motivating the phenomenon of white denial. There must be some need that is met by that denial, which makes it largely impervious to fact. Perhaps it is the psychological need to believe in meritocracy so as justify one's own successes and the social dominance of those from one's own group. Perhaps it is the related need to believe in meritocracy, even if one hasn't "made it," so as to allow oneself to hold on to the hope that with just a little more effort, things will all work out. Perhaps white denial stems from the very real material advantages that have come from the system of white privilege and racial subordination of folks of color, and which whites fear either consciously or subconsciously would be threatened in a more equitable system. After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are, at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: to do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests), or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity, but perpetuate a system of inequality. Of course, the sad fact is that by holding on to the faith in meritocracy--in this case as a way to justify racial inequities that have pretty well worked to our benefit--whites also commit ourselves to the perpetuation of an economic order that is disempowering and harmful for most everyone, including, ironically, most of us. After all, if you believe that anyone can make it if they try, but then notice that you're constantly struggling to make your bills, save for your kids education, or retirement, and never seem to have enough money at the end of the month (which is the case for millions of whites in this country), you have no way to explain your seeming inadequacies except by way of internalized self-blame and self-doubt. Oh sure, outwardly you can blame affirmative action for a while, or immigrants, or taxes, the benefits of which you're convinced go only to "those people," whose skin tone is several shades darker than your own. But in the back of your head the voice keeps reminding you that people who aren't living up to their expectations need only to buckle down, pull themselves up, and stop complaining. In other words, belief in meritocracy becomes over time a psychological dagger pointed at the very heart of all but the elite in a society. For everyone else, it becomes a way to keep them in line, encourage them to blame only themselves when their job is unfulfilling, their wages inadequate, their benefits pathetic, their lives an overscheduled, hypertense mess. In short, meritocracy is a fraud, belief in which fraud is not only tailor-made for justifying the maintenance of racial inequality, but economic inequality as well. In the long run, the vast majority of whites--as with folks of color--would be far better off facing the facts, and losing their faith in this utterly stultifying system to which they have pledged allegiance. It's one thing, after all, for Oprah to believe in meritocracy. It's quite another for a young white man in a cash-strapped community college, who uses her as proof of society's fairness, to do so. *While one can certainly respect Woods' desire to honor all parts of his heritage, on both sides of his family tree (which includes Irish, American Indian, Thai, and African American), his decision to call himself "Cablinasian" ignores a fundamental racial reality in the U.S.: namely, that whatever one chooses to call oneself, or whatever it is that one thinks one is, racially speaking, one is still most likely to be perceived as (and treated as) whatever others think you are. And in this country, no one sees someone who is part black as a complex multiplicity of ethnicities and heritages. Rather, those who can be seen as black are black, in every functional sense. If one is black and anything else, one tends to be seen as black. In fact, racism operates in such a way as to more or less ensure that one will be viewed as a member of whichever group is least "desirable" in one's particular mix, in the eyes of the dominant culture. So if Tiger Woods goes on the wrong side of New York City, at the wrong time of night, and fails to wear his Nike cap, or forgets to bring along his caddy, and then fails to flash that trademark smile of his when confronted by the Street Crimes Unit...well, let's just say, he could easily end up like Amadou Diallo in the morning, "Cablinasian" notwithstanding. **None of my comments about Cosby are intended to detract from his true comedic genius. But he himself has long acknowledged that the reason he was so readily accepted was because he was "not controversial." Most people, he once happily told critic, Rex Reed, "don't even think of me as a Negro" (see, Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right, Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind? Basic Books, 2005: 46). It is also worth noting that Cosby's original concept for the show that would become "The Cosby Show," and which would become one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time--featuring an upper-income family, in which the parents were a doctor and lawyer--was originally not to have the couple be affluent professionals. It was only after concerns were raised to the effect that a working class black family wouldn't resonate sufficiently with white audiences, that the concept was changed. ***In response to those who would claim that the differences in wealth and net worth between whites and blacks are due to whites saving more, and blacks engaging in too much conspicuous consumption--an argument that has been made by white and black conservatives alike, with some regularity--note that, in fact, black families have equal or higher savings rates than whites, at each level of income. The only reason that net savings is higher for whites is because, in the aggregate, whites are better off, and more affluent folks tend to be able to save more, by definition. But when income levels are controlled, so that we are comparing only similar white and black families, blacks actually have the same or slightly higher savings rates (see, Edward Wolff, Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership, 1983-1998. Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Working Paper No. 300, April 2000: 9; also, Francine D. Blau and John W. Graham, "Black-White Differences in Wealth and Asset Composition," Quarterly Journal of Economics, May, 1990, 321-339; also, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. Routledge: 1995). NOTES: (1) For references to these studies, confirming the existence of racism in the modern era, see my book, Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge: 2005), and also below, note 4. (2) For information on the way in which whites denied racism's salience even in the early 60s, see my previous article: "What Kind of Card is Race?" (April 24, 2006), available at: http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/whatcard.html (3) Shawna Orzechowski and Peter Sepielli. 2003. Net Worth and Asset Ownership of Households: 1998 and 2000. Current Population Reports, P70-88. May. United States Census Bureau, Washington D.C.: 2, 13, 14. (4) Barbara Bergmann, In Defense of Affirmative Action. Basic Books, 1996: 72-74, 79; Stephanie A. Goodwin, "Situational Power and Interpersonal Dominance Facilitate Bias and Inequality," Journal of Social Issues. (Winter, 1998); Alice O'Connor, et al., The Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999; Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action. Cornell University Press: 1991; Edward W. Jones, Jr., "Black Managers: The Dream Deferred," in Differences That Work: Organizational Excellence Through Diversity, ed. Mary C. Gentile. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, January 1994: 65, 74-75; Marc Bendick, Charles W. Jackson, and Victor Reinoso, "Measuring Employment Discrimination Through Controlled Experiments," Review of Black Political Economy. 25, (Summer 1994); LeAnn Loder, et al., Racial Preference and Suburban Employment Opportunities. Chicago: Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and the Chicago Urban League, April 2003; Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skills and Hiring in America. NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001; Stephen Steinberg, "Occupational Apartheid in America," in Without Justice for All, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999: 224; M. Bertrand and S. Mullainathan, "Are Emily and Brendan More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." http://gsb.uchicago.edu/pdf/bertrand.pdf, November 18, 2002; Alan B. Krueger, "What's in a Name? Plenty if You're a Job Seeker," New York Times. December 12, 2002; Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology. 108, 5 (March 2003): 937-75. (5) Michael Eric Dyson, 2005: 68, see reference in double asterisk, above. (6) For the ultimate examination of the ways in which the black middle-class experiences and deals with racism, see Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living With Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience. Beacon Press, 1994. (7) For information on the operation of stereotype threat, see, Claude Steele, "A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance," in Confronting Racism: The Problem and the Response, ed. Jennifer L. Eberhardt and Susan T. Fiske. London: Sage, 1998: 219; also, Claude Steele, "Race and the Schooling of Black Americans," Atlantic Monthly. 69 (April 1992): 68-78; also, Claude Steele, "Stereotype Threat and African American Student Achievement," in Young, Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement Among African American Students, ed., Theresa Perry, Claude Steele and Asa Hilliard III. Beacon Press: 2003: 109-130; also, Douglas Massey, et al., The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities. Princeton University: 2003; also, Shana Levin, "Social Psychological Evidence on Race and Racism," in Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Colleges and Universities, ed. Mitchell J. Chang, et al. Stanford University Press: 2003, 99. (8) Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. Dutton: 2004, 133; also, "Transcript: Race and Health: In Genes or Injustice?" The Gene Media Forum, November 14, 2001. (9) Fix, Michael and Margery Austin Turner, 1998. A National Report Card on Discrimination in America: The Role of Testing. The Urban Institute, March: 104. (10) Fred Pincus, Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth. Rienner: 2003, 18. (11) Ibid. (12) Linda Faye Williams, The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America. Penn State Press: 2003, 359, Figure 7.1. (13) U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 2006. The National Data Book, Table 217, and calculations by the author. (14) "Business is By Far the Most Popular Major for African American College Graduates," Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Weekly Bulletin, July 27, 2006. (15) William M. Hartnett, William M. "Income gaps persist among races," Palm Beach Post, October 20, 2003; also, Patrick L. Mason, "Race, Cognitive Ability, and Wage Inequality," Challenge. May-June, 1998. (16) Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Costs of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality. NY: Oxford University Press, 2004: 7. (17) Oliver and Shapiro, 1995--see reference above, in text for third asterisk; also, Bernard Wasow, "Class Warfare Fact and Fiction: Myth 4: Over the Course of their lifetimes, Americans are highly likely to enjoy upward economic mobility," The Century Foundation, www.tcf.org. (18) Oliver and Shapiro, 1995: 109. (19) Paul Starr, "Civil Reconstruction: What to do Without Affirmative Action," American Prospect. Winter 1992: 7-16. (20) For information on how white housing opportunity was subsidized by the government, at the same time opportunities for persons of color were being restricted, see, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid. Harvard University: 1993; also, Oliver and Shapiro, 1995. (21) Orzechowski and Peter Sepielli. 2003, see note 1.

Racism, White Anxiety and the Projection of Personal Inadequacy

2009-02-19T14:13:54Z

Chocolat-In the universe I trust.

+7 raves

Facts? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Facts: By Tim Wise The electronic messages I receive from overt racists would be hilarious were they not so sad, so indicative of an inability to do basic research, interpret data once discovered and then fashion an intelligible argument. That the American educational system is failing may be a matter for open debate, but on this score--its success or failure at turning out people who can think critically--its inadequacy is almost beyond the scope of rational disagreement. They come in different types, these dispatches from the land of white racial narcissism: But whether raw and ignorant (as in the almost daily and angry reminders of my romantic fondness for black folks--this hardly being the way in which they phrase it), or cool and calm (as with the pseudo-scholarly claims of proven genetic differences between whites and everyone else), there are several things the racists have in common. First and foremost, these include the tendency to only see what they want to see, while studiously ignoring any evidence that gets in the way of their worldview. So just last night I received a note from someone seeking, as with so many others, to justify their contempt for people of color by claiming: "Here in Manchester, New Hampshire we historically had a very low crime rate. Now with the influx of minorities in the last few years the crime rate has soared. We have perhaps a two percent minority population in the area and they commit roughly half our crime. That's not hysteria or imagination. Its (sic) a fact in the newspapers and on the nightly news." Therein, the writer is making several claims which deserve examination, and which upon said examination prove to be utterly without merit. They are: 1) An increase in the number of persons of color in Manchester has resulted in a significant increase in crime over the last several years; 2) People of color commit about half the crime in Manchester, despite being only around two percent of the population, and this we know because; 3) The media tells us so, via their daily representations of criminal activity and criminal perps, both in print and broadcast mediums. First things first: that people who write things like this, and who normally are quick to distrust anything they see on television, would cite the nightly news as the definitive source for understanding crime, and who commits it, seems a bit disingenuous to say the least. More to the point, relying on media representations of criminality is almost guaranteed to result in less understanding of the problem, rather than more. To begin with, papers and TV only cover a statistical handful of crimes committed. What's more, according to multiple studies of news broadcasts (especially at the local level) people of color are over-represented in stories about crimes, relative to the share of crime for which they are actually responsible. Crimes committed in a given area by whites are less likely to receive coverage, either because they are more easily covered up (the relative insularity of suburban and upper-middle class communities tends to protect residents from having their misbehaviors catalogued publicly), or because media outlets, being concentrated in larger urban areas, choose the easiest route, which means covering crimes closest to their stations and offices. Even more importantly, the argument put forward by the racist from Manchester was simply wrong. In point of fact, crime in Manchester has not risen, but fallen over the past several years--the precise time when the population of persons of color in the city was increasing. In other words, the position taken by the racist isn't only false, it is the exact opposite of reality. Though the percentage of folks of color there is still pretty small (about ten percent of the total) the numbers have increased in the last decade, even as crime has declined. According to FBI data available here, most serious crimes in Manchester are down, many of them considerably, since 1997, even though the population has risen. This means the crime rate (crimes divided by population) has fallen even further. The murder rate has fallen, as has the rate for rape and sexual assault. Although robberies are up since 1997, they have fallen over the last two years and seem headed downward again. Aggravated assaults are higher than the late 90s, but are also falling since 2004. Burglary has fallen dramatically, as have larceny and motor vehicle theft. In all, during the period of increasing minority presence in Manchester, the number of serious crimes (Index Crimes in the parlance of law enforcement) has dropped from roughly 5,000 incidents annually to just under 4,000, all while the overall population was growing. If the number of crimes have fallen by about twenty percent, even while the population grew by more than five percent, this means the crime rate in Manchester is down by roughly a fourth since the late 90s. Hardly a reality that supports the racist worldview of the person writing to me, or others like him. After just a five minute Google search (so simple, even a racist can do it) I also stumbled across an article in which police in Manchester note that drugs have become far less of a problem than was the case fifteen or twenty years ago when the city was whiter. So the more black and brown folks, the less drugs apparently. Which makes sense actually, seeing as how all the available data indicates that whites are equally or more likely to use drugs than either blacks or Latinos, contrary to popular perception. After collecting the definitive data on crime in Manchester and sending it to the person who had taken the time to share their ignorance with me, a reply came back, which, although entirely expected (after all, true believers, be they religious or racial zealots are rarely willing to learn anything), was nonetheless disturbing. To wit: "My argument is that the color of crime is black and you can play with the numbers all you want but like I said my eyes and ears do not deceive me." So there you have it. Facts don't matter. Data doesn't matter. Eyes and ears, filled with the partial and inaccurate representations of crime in the mass media (not to mention racist websites and organizations like American Renaissance, which sites my detractor apparently visits as often as most people move their bowels) are what matter. That the color of crime, in Manchester and nationwide, is not in fact black takes literally a matter of minutes to ascertain. As for Manchester, although I could find no information as to the racial makeup of criminals in the city, the fact that crime had been dropping, even as the number and share of persons of color in Manchester had been growing, certainly seems to mitigate against the notion that blackness and crime are synonymous. Additionally, I was able to find a list of registered sex offenders in Manchester, which noted the race of the perps in question. As of early 2007, there were 237 registered offenders on the list, and all but eighteen (meaning, ninety percent) were non-Hispanic whites. So whatever the color of the guy who just robbed the liquor store may be, the color of the guy who's flashing your kids in the park (or worse) is decidedly more pasty in tone. Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but the white criminals in Manchester are not only more numerous, they also seem to be of a particularly stupid sort, as with the man who, in early July, robbed a bank dressed as a tree. Apparently, the middle aged white male (come to think of it, the same demographic as that which disproportionately frequents white supremacist websites--coincidence? Methinks not) robbed the Citizen's Bank in Manchester, with tree branches attached to his body with duct tape. He also had glasses and a blue shirt, both of which probably tipped off the tellers to the fact that he was not really a tree. Nice try though. Nationally as well, although the crime rate for blacks is higher than that for whites--according to the research because of conditions of extreme poverty, and the dysfunctions that regularly flow from living in highly concentrated, overpopulated urban spaces--the fact remains that African Americans commit only about one out of four violent crimes in the U.S. According to the annual victimization surveys taken by the Justice Department (which give a more complete picture of total crime, by taking into consideration crimes that go unreported to police), blacks in 2005 committed twenty-four percent of all violent crimes in the nation, where the race of the perp was known: about 1.2 million incidents, out of approximately five million in all. Even if we assign a good percentage of the white perps' crimes to Latinos (most of whom are classified racially as white in the data), this would still leave the responsibility for the majority of violent offenses on white folks, even using the most restrictive, Hitler-friendly definition of the term. So, the color of crime is not black, but mostly white, and not just for corporate misconduct, where we might expect this to be the case, but even for regular violent crimes. And since whites are about five times more likely to be personally victimized by another white person, it is especially absurd for whites to spend our time--as so many of the folks who write me obviously do--worrying about black or brown criminals hurting us. While they panic at the sight of even a few persons of color on their block, white kids are vandalizing the neighborhood, white men are driving drunk to and from their homes, white folks are molesting children, dealing drugs, cooking up meth, or burying two dozen people under their houses (serial killing being one of our specialties as well). A little perspective is in order, but rarely to be found for those whose racial animosities, insecurities and resentments blind them to the truth. And so I expect to receive messages like this one again, probably several before the end of the week, none of which will be any better thought out than the one before it. And all of which will demonstrate, even if only subtly, the deep-seated psychological dysfunction at the heart of racism: the fear that one is not, in fact, superior, but rather inferior. White supremacists, I'm starting to realize, don't really believe what they're saying--not deep down, that is. They look around and see that light skin is a recessive trait the world over, that indeed they (we) are the odd ones on the planet in terms of pigmentation. They see the economies of the white west faltering, slowly (or perhaps not so slowly), being challenged by that of China, among others. They see people of color excelling in any arena where they are given full and equal opportunity (not enough arenas, to be sure, but still); they see a popular culture in which people of color are among the nation's most revered symbols of what's hip, in spite of the profound inequities that still plague the larger social systems and which tend to favor whites. Cool is not Elvis or James Dean, or Cary Grant, or Frank Sinatra anymore: it's P-Diddy, or Jay-Z, or Russell Simmons, or whomever. White women are more likely to hang on the words of Oprah than their mostly white husbands (Ok, so neither of those may be such good things, but you get the point). They see a world in which global white supremacy is everywhere being challenged. In which the white world's militaries are incapable of subduing a rag-tag bunch of insurgents, with darker skin. In which they themselves have accomplished little, despite all the good things to which they felt entitled as white people, mostly men, all these years. By lashing out, calling other people by racial slurs, or seeking to pathologize them (as if they were the inferior ones), white supremacists can protect themselves from the insecurity that truly gnaws away at them. For if there is one thing I've learned over the years it's this: truly amazing talents never need to tell others how truly amazing or superior they are. They just go out, do the work, and demonstrate their excellence silently. They need no cheerleaders. Those who publicly proclaim how great they are, on the other hand, are almost always trying to convince themselves. And apparently, given their persistence, they are finding the job harder than they imagined.