“That Conversation about Race” category archive
Rewrite! 1
As a Southern Boy, from when I first became aware, I have watched as racists rewrite history so as to blame the victimized for being victims. Hell, from my first lessons in Virginia history in elementary school in the 1950’s, where the arrival of the first African slaves at Jamestown in 1619 was taught as part of “the Red Letter Year,” I was subjected to such rewritten racist propaganda–it was only later that I started to winnow out the lies (a process which, by the by, continues).
Consequently, I can say from first-hand experience that this is nothing new.
“Trump’d Again” 0
Warning: Language, imagery.
A Day at the Museum 0
Cordell Faulk visits the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. A snippet (follow the link for the rest):
Right there, in all their blunt starkness — above chains used for adults — was a set of shackles used to restrain children during the passage from Africa to the New World. They were just very, very small — unspeakably small. . . .
One more time: When you hear persons lament the “Lost Cause,” ask them this: “What, precisely, was the Cause that was Lost?”
All That Was Old Is New Again, Reprise 0
Soloman Jones channels Santayana:
If I have learned anything from watching this moment unfold, it is this: We must remain vigilant on the issue of race. Racism, after all, is America’s original sin. Its painful effects filter through the gaps in time, punishing the children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.
But racism isn’t the only thing that has brought us to a moment when the future will cede ground to the past. We are here, quite frankly, because of our tendency to forget the past.
Read the rest.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
Werner Herzog’s Bear points out that “massive resistance” wasn’t just a “Civil Rights” movement thing:
“If You Don’t Talk about It, It Must Not Exist” 0
At the Des Moines Register, Derrick Keith Rollins, Jr., reflects on how Donald Trump got elected, despite (or more likely because of) his blatant appeals to racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and all around hate-fullness. Here’s a bit:
First, we’ve refused to talk about it.
For the last 30 to 35 years, the strategy by mainstream popular culture — i.e. white culture — could largely be summed up as: “I don’t see color.”
Follow the link for the complete article. It is worth your while.
Finding Comfort by Overlooking the Obvious 0
The corporate media seem to have concluded that Donald Trump’s victory came from support by the “white working class.” The are using the phrase “working class” to avert the eye from the key word in that phrase: “white.” Chancey Devega explains:
Historically, to be white was to be the quintessential American. In the United States, whiteness also proceeds from an assumption that white people are always and forever to be dominant and consequently the most powerful of all racial groups. This is white identity politics as both a practice and ideology. It is also the not-so-subtle meaning of Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again!”
Follow the link for the rest of Devega’s article.
“It Was Joke, Son, a Joke” 0
Tony Norman marvels at the ability of those who get called out for racist remarks to discover suddenly that they were just trying to make a funny.
Flagging Interests 0
Writing at The Roanoke Times, Halford Ryan wonders what would be the results were the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar groups admit to themselves, as well as to others, what the Confederate Battle Ensign, to which they vow such fealty, stood for. (Oh, they know all right. They know also that admitting that they know would be really bad PR.)
In a related story, Badtux muses on how the South never stopped rising again.
Twits on Twitter 0
Afterthought:
I find it amusing when persons try to explain that events clearly founded in racism really aren’t racist after all because, well, they won’t believe their lyin’ eyes..
How Stuff Works, White Supremacy Dept. 0
Solomon Jones lays it out. A snippet:
Then, after doing so, the rich have routinely stood by as America’s working poor fought to protect their place in the pecking order.
That’s where hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan come from: The false belief that whiteness cancels out the reality of poverty. That whiteness makes one superior to a black person who is better educated and economically thriving. That embracing the notion of whiteness can turn back the clock to a time when one’s advancement was based on the color of one’s skin.
Do read the rest. He lays out the con quite nicely.
In a tangent thereunto, this morning before I got up, I was thinking about the long game: what happens if the United States chooses to violate its oft-stated, nay, ballyhooed position as a refuge for the poor, the tired, and you know the rest, its commitment to the rights of others and to expel immigrants and anyone else with brown skins?
“Why!” I realized, “they have to leave lots of stuff behind.” Whatever else the anti-immigrant movement is, it is most certainly a con so that haters can steal stuff.
The Art of the Con 0
Farron thinks that the Nativists are restless.
Afterthought:
One you open Pandora’s box, it does not close easily.
White Christmas 1
In a typically long and densely reasoned post, Chauncey Devega explores the Christmas imagery of the movie, A Christmas Story. That’s the story woven from several of Jean Shepherd‘s stories, which opened to disappointing reviews and receipts, but which has since become a Christmas staple of television.
Some of the lessons he draws might surprise you. Here’s a bit.
(snip)
Black people are present in “A Christmas Story.” There are several black children in Ralphie’s elementary school classroom and, like their white peers, they participate in pulling a prank on their teacher. There are also some black folks watching the Christmas parade. There is a black man in Black Bart’s gang, which attacks Ralphie’s home in a fantasy sequence and are beaten back by his deft use of that Red Ryder BB gun.
The black characters in “A Christmas Story” are present but remain peripheral. They have no real voice or agency. They are shown in an perfectly inoffensive and neutral fashion. They are “present” in much the same way as the minor white characters who are not members of Ralphie’s family or his circle of friends.
Follow the link for the rest.
Full Disclosure:
I am a big fan of Jean Shepherd’s writing. When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, I’d catch his radio show on the skip from WOR-AM in New York City whenever the atmospheric conditions were favorable. In his own way, he captured the essence of growing up as boy (and, as Devega points out, quite specifically a white boy) in America in the late 1940s and 1950s. As a white boy who grew up in America in the 1950s, I realized that when I discovered his stories (I was maybe twice Raphie’s age when I did) and can attest to it today.
Jean Shepherd did not pretend to write profound fiction or social realism; he was a humorist. Nevertheless, that does not in any way impeach attempts to draw social lessons from his work. Heck, popular culture often tells more about day-to-day social reality than the ponderous works of self-proclaimed serious artistes.
I don’t remember there being any persons of color in any of his short stories–and I read almost all of them–and I do not think that reflects on Shepherd in any way other than that he was a product of his times. Because of segregation de facto and de jure, employment and housing discrimination (repeat after me: “Redlining“), when Shepherd was growing up in America, a white person outside the South could be born and grow to maturity without ever seeing, not to mention interacting with, a black person or a brown person or an Asian person, except for possibly seeing one of them on the Ed Sullivan Show.*
To the extent minorities were present in the movie, they were a creation of times of the movie, as Devega points out, not of the times of the stories, and I commend Devega’s analysis of the phenomena to your attention.
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*This sentence was slightly edited for clarity at 11:20 a. m. EST.