Personal Musings category archive

If you are of the not not-white persuasion, consider, if you will, what it is like to know that, at any moment, there is a possibility, however slim, that someone might drive down your street and kill you, simply because you are not-white.

Until that thought no longer makes sense, America will continue to be stained by its original sin of chattel slavery and racism.

Aside:

Attempts to downplay racism as a factor in driving around and shooting random black folks because they happen to be not-white are, quite frankly, crap.

And everyone knows they are crap, including the downplayers.

Today I was at a meeting with two other persons, both of whom happen to be not-white.

Both of them grew up in the place we Southern Boys refer to as “up North” (for reasons not needing to be stated, their forebears fled the South generations ago).

The conversation turned to Trayvon Martin.

They have no direct experience of Jim Crow. Not having lived it, they don’t really get it.

For some fool reason, they expect to be treated like real live human beings wherever they may happen to be. They didn’t get the message that the color of one’s skin changes everything.

I am damned glad that they didn’t get that message, and I damn that message.

That messages destroys good and celebrates evil.

I must stop now, for all I have left is profanity.

Some years ago, the fashion amongst management consultants was to prattle on about “corporate culture.” That fashion, or at least the terminology, has likely changed–management consulting is the damndest profession for putting old wine in new bottles (while doubling the price) that I’ve ever seen–but the concept is valid: organizations do have cultures.

At Philly dot com, Rod Napier considers corporate culture, pederasty, and prelates:

Two iconic Pennsylvania figures, Joe Paterno and Anthony Bevilacqua, passed away this year. Both the longtime Penn State football coach and the former archbishop of Philadelphia had remarkable careers of public service and achievement that ended in scandal – scandals that will forever shadow their legacies. Both men saw themselves as close to God, but both were also treated as gods by those around them. And that may have had more to do with the scandals than has so far been appreciated.

(snip)

The cultures of their respective organizations – cultures they tolerated, if not outright fostered or even demanded – probably tended to discourage the people around them from plainly stating the most unpleasant truths at hand. The most likely scenario is that these men never heard the completely unvarnished truth, because they created or tolerated cultures that did not encourage people to tell them difficult truths.

He certainly has part of the story.

The other part is that, despite evidence before them, “leaders” in these situations usually don’t want to know the truth. They convince themselves that, as long as the cash, converts, and bowl bids roll in, they convince themselves that everything is just hunky-dory, much like the spouse who refuses to notice the affair that is the buzz of the town.

Mr. Napier may explain some of their behavior, but explanation is not excuse.

If you feel like you have continually to prove to others that God is on your side, He probably isn’t.

Is this a dog or the lead guitarist for Z. Z. Top?

The prosecution rests.

Television, the power of babble.

Once upon a time, I thought it shock rhetoric to gain publicity; but, as I watch the antics over birth control and women’s health care from the old white men who run the Republican Party and the Catholic Church, I begin to muse that the thought of being in the presence lady parts which are not under their direct, dictatorial control does, indeed, induce in those old white men some sort of visceral Freudian terror, which compels them to seek control said lady parts.

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The surest sign of being a Hollywood has-been is an appearance in a Super Bowl half-time show.

(Philadelphia–ed.) Prosecutors are calling the Archdiocese of Philadelphia an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a clergy-abuse case – and say the Catholic church fed predators a steady supply of children.

Penn State on an international scale: Protecting insiders outweighed all other considerations.

There’s a kerfuffle on the left coast about whether Algebra II should be required for high school graduation:

(The Palo Alto math faculty’s) counterpush against raising graduation standards to include Algebra II has angered educators and parents who believe schools, including districts like Palo Alto with strong college-going cultures, are failing poor and minority students by expecting too little of them.

The parents point to startling statistics: In the Palo Alto and Gunn high schools’ 2011 class of seniors, only 15 percent of African-Americans and 40 percent of Latinos completed the prerequisites for the University of California and California State University with a C or better. That compares with 79.5 percent districtwide meeting those so-called A-G requirements.

When I went to school, the “tracking” system was popular. My little high school had academic and general tracks. “Academic” students got the languages, almost all math courses, and all the sciences. If they took shop or typing, it was usually a one year elective; “general students” got less in the way of languages and sciences and more in the way of shop, secretarial skills (typing and shorthand), and how to be a housewife home ec.

Tracking has gone out of fashion; too often, it seemed subject to misuse (the Wikipedia article gives a fairly even-handed description of the objections to it).

I got the whole math deal: two algebras, geometry, trig, and pre-calc (we did not have a calculus class). Algebra I, geometry, and trig were pieces of cake. My mother was my Algebra II teacher; I remember that class for other reasons.

But the pre-calc, well, the stuff wasn’t making any sense to me. When it came to proving that one equals zero, I could do it by rote, but I didn’t see it (to my daughter the math teacher, it’s as obvious as a shark in a swimming pool; she must have gotten the math gene from her mother).

I’m inclined to think the math faculty is on to something. I suspect that Algebra II is not for everybody.

I do know this: since I graduated from high school over four decades ago, I have used Algebra I skills (solve for one variable) precisely five times–that’s more than once per decade!–and Algebra II skills never.

Afterthought:

And don’t tell me Algebra taught me logic. Geometry and Boolean Algebra, maybe. Algebra taught me that X is horizontal and Y is vertical.

Have you noticed how many Wall Streeters’ rationales for their rapacity boils down to “I’m rich; that proves my actions are virtuous”?

At Psychology Today, Steve Baskin agonizes over “What hath Zuckerberg wrought”? A nugget:

. . . learning how to connect with other humans requires experience with the multitudinous aspects of non-verbal communication. Communicating well is actually an acquired skill that requires practice.

Tweeting, texting and emailing do not provide such practice. Not only are they devoid of the tone and body language necessary for clear communication, but they also lead (I fear) to the pruning of these skills.

As my two or three regular readers know, I am not a fan of Facebook or Twitter. They turn their users into commodities for sale to marketers, while propagating useless idiocy with the same ease with which they propagate useful idiocy–er, information.

Nevertheless, I cannot shake the feeling that, 600 years ago, Baskin would have been agonizing over “What hath Gutenberg wrought.”

White folks, including me, aren’t very good at talking about race with not-white folks. I know that one way I tried to deal with it in the earlier days of desegregation was to ignore ignore it–that is, to be silent.

I have learned that that amounts to ignoring history and reality.

I never pretended that I was somehow “colorblind”; being colorblind does not follow from growing up in a Jim Crow world. Rather, I didn’t know how to bring the subject up in personal terms (though I must say that, thanks to some of my friends, I’m getting better at it).

I have, indeed, been troubled by those who claim that they are “colorblind,” especially when they support policies that clearly are not. For example, persons will claim that they are against affirmative action* because they are “being colorblind,” in the face of the truism that perpetuating existing inequities created through discrimination is ipso facto discriminatory, because it lets the effects of discrimination live on.

At Psychology Today, Monnica Williams attacks the myth of racial and ethnic “colorblindness.” A nugget:

Let’s break it down into simple terms: Color-Blind = “People of color — we don’t see you (at least not that bad ‘colored’ part).” As a person of color, I like who I am, and I don’t want any aspect of that to be unseen or invisible. The need for colorblindness implies there is something shameful about the way God made me and the culture I was born into that we shouldn’t talk about. Thus, colorblindness has helped make race into a taboo topic that polite people cannot openly discuss. And if you can’t talk about it, you can’t understand it, much less fix the racial problems that plague our society.

Whites tend to view colorblindness as helpful to people of color by asserting that race does not matter (Tarca, 2005). But in America, most underrepresented minorities will explain that race does matter, as it affects opportunities, perceptions, income, and so much more. When race-related problems arise, colorblindness tends to individualize conflicts and shortcomings, rather than examining the larger picture with cultural differences, stereotypes, and values placed into context. Instead of resulting from an enlightened (albeit well-meaning) position, colorblindness comes from a lack of awareness of racial privilege conferred by Whiteness (Tarca, 2005). White people can guiltlessly subscribe to colorblindness because they are largely unaware of how race affects people of color and American society as a whole.

Be careful when you hear someone espouse “colorblind” policies. It’s more of the code. It means they don’t want discrimination to go away.

_______________

*The EEO enforcement folks where I used to work were adamant that “affirmative action” does not mean selecting the unqualified over the qualified; it means, after the unqualified are weeded out, giving preference to a member of a protected class.

Where I have seen affirmative action improperly implemented–and I have seen that often–it has happened out of managerial misunderstanding or, much more common, incompetence.

As a result of the Penn State pederasty case, the past few weeks seems to have produced a rush of persons admitting that they were sexually abused as children.

Jennifer Marsh, hotline director at the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, said she had had to add more counselors to handle the growing call load. Online text contacts, which guarantee more anonymity, have rocketed 54 percent.

Many callers mention Penn State and Syracuse and they often seek advice on how to report potential molesters or stop abuse, Marsh said.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before in terms of response on the hotlines,” she said.

Calls to the Childhelp national child sexual abuse hotline are up about 20 percent since charges were filed against Sandusky at the start of November, said Michelle Fingerman, the hotline’s director.

Calls by adults who were victimized as children are up by almost a third, she said.

“We’re just picking up the phone more often, and the calls are longer. They are really more intense,” Fingerman said.

Americans attitudes’ about sex are seriously bent. We are unable to talk about “it,” while at the same time we make celebrities of persons (think Paris Hilton) simply for being able to do “it,” as if no one else ever has or will.

These attitudes help keep victims silent and abet victimizers (and their attorneys), who play on them to keep victims cowed and docile. In a recent column, Monica Yant Kinney described how predators (and their attorneys) use shame to exact silence.

Evil flourishes, not in the locker room showers or in the vestries, but in the silence.

The energies expended over two centuries to change a gospel of love into a canon of hate are most impressive.

On the second night of winter, it is not right to be opening windows at midnight because the house is too warm.

Also, climate change is obviously a hoax.

I’ve been walking around outside in short sleeves.

I’m not trying to prove anything. I’ve been around too long to care about proving anything.

It’s because it’s short-sleeve weather.

This is not a right thing to be able to do in mid-December in these parts.

. . . and a small newt is an eft.

Therefore, if there is a newt about, you have already been efted.

H/T Susan for the thought.

(Misplet word corrected.)

I pay attention to current events, more or less.

I inherited the habit from my news junkie father.

So where was I when the punditry decided that Newt the Gingrinch has a rep for being an intellectual?

As I read this press release (pdf), which someone forwarded to me, it occurred to me that it is notable that so many of wingnut outfits explicitly describe themselves as “Patriot” in their names.

Perhaps it is because, if one considers what they advocate, one would never know . . .