“That Conversation about Race” category archive
“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.
________________
*This sentence was slightly edited for clarity at 11:20 a. m. EST.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
At The Seattle Times, a holocaust survivor sees parallels between Germany then and the Unites States now. Here’s a bit of the letter he sent to his Senators and shared with columnist Jerry Large:
Wassermann wrote that the entire Nazi ideology is in place and wonders how far it will go here. “We can hope that our government of checks and balances will be more resistant than the Weimar Republic was. Don’t count on it.”
Follow the link to learn more.
Do not follow the link if you wish to pretend to yourself that today’s events are politics as usual.
Playing the Race Card 0
Thom discusses how the Republican Party chose to become the party of the New Secesh. It happened a long time ago, folks.
The Poisoning of Flint, Reprise 0
The no account just can’t be held accountable.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Henry A. Giroux sees a dark future of reaction and repression in the United States. Here’s snippet:
The repressive racial state is certain to intensify and expand under Jeff Sessions — a strong advocate of mass incarceration and the death penalty, and a white nationalist spokesman for the Old South. The Nation’s Ari Berman observes that Sessions is “the fiercest opponent in the Senate of immigration reform, a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, and has a long history of opposition to civil rights, dating back to his days as a US Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s.”
Sessions has a long history of racist rhetoric, insults and practices, including opposing the Voting Rights Act and addressing a Black lawyer as “boy.”
Much, much more at the link.
How Stuff Works, Contracting the Franchise Dept. 0
Will Bunch listened to something Donald Trump said during his victory lap and finds a lesson for the polity. Here’s a bit of his article; follow the link for the rest (italics in original; bold added):
That’s right — the next president of the United States, and the future guardian of our democratic norms, praising citizens who didn’t exercise their right to vote because it helped him politically. That’s appalling, but it’s also something that Trump, still a political neophyte even after winning politics’ biggest prize, does a lot. He blurted out a basic truth of modern 21st Century elections — that Republicans win when they find ways to keep anyone who’s not part of their heavily white and older voting base away from the ballot box. It’s just that no other GOP stalwart would ever say this out loud.
Michigan Nestles in the Poisoning of Flint 0
The government of Michigan chooses profits over people.
This is what happens when you “run the government like a business.”
“No Comment” 0
There’s a reason that I do not read the comments at news sites.
Driving while Black . . . (Updated) 0
. . . is a dangerous thing to do. Here’s a bit from a report at The Root:
Pursuits are among the most dangerous police activities. They have killed more than 6,200 people since 1999. Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but are 28 percent of those killed in pursuits whose race was known.
Among the findings (which strongly confirm a disparity and a likely bias in policing):
- Blacks have been killed at a disproportionate rate in pursuits every year since 1999. On average, 90 black people were killed each year in police chases, nearly double what would be expected based on their percentage of the population.
- Deadly pursuits of black drivers were twice as likely to start over minor offenses or non-violent crimes. In 2013 and 2014, nearly every deadly pursuit triggered by an illegally tinted window, a seat-belt violation or the smell of marijuana involved a black driver.
- Black people were more likely than whites to be chased in more crowded urban areas, during peak traffic hours and with passengers in their cars, all factors that can increase the danger to innocent bystanders. Chases of black motorists were about 70 percent more likely to wind up killing a bystander.
Oh me, oh my, I wonder why.
Much more at the link.
Addendum, Just a Little Later:
If these folks had been Not White, do you think police would have peppered them with spray or with bullets?
Be honest, now.