“That Conversation about Race” category archive
Now You See It, Now You Don’t 0
Another great moment in out of sight, out of mind.
Blank Check 0
One more time: Persons who whine about “political correctness” want permission to offend without penalty.
All That Was Old Is New Again 0
A member of the Minneapolis city council has blamed peaceful protesters shot by white supremacists for getting themselves shot. Here’s a bit from a detailed story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
That’s part of the problem with these protests: the longer they go on, the more participation there is from across the country,” Johnson said. “The longer it goes on, the worse it gets.”
When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, the defenders of the segregationist status quo liked to blame “outside agitators” for getting themselves shot and buried in dams.
I’m trying to figure out whether blaming “inside agitators” is a step forward, a step backward, or a just a step sideways.
“You’re Just Trying To Make Me Feel Guilty” 2
Another View, a marvelous show on one of our local public radio stations, tackled the topic of “white privilege” on last week’s show. From the website:
Follow the link and listen.
Now.
You’ll then understand why I titled the post the way I did.
Also, mark your calendar to listen to the Friday, November 13, show. The monthly round table is always entertaining. The host skillfully gives the panelists enough leeway to speak freely without letting them get completely out of hand.
One of the topics is scheduled to be the the highly commendable revolt of the Missouri football team over unchecked racism at their campus. That episode should rip and snort in all the right places.
Aside:
When I was in elementary school, history books called 1619 the “Red Letter Year.”
Satanic Writes 0
A copy of The Clansman, written by a Baptist preacher often described as the “Billy Graham of his day” in terms of his popularity, resided on my parents’ bookshelf. I don’t know that they ever read it. Likely they had inherited it, but no doubt they knew of it. It was probably a fixture in many Southern white households of a certain day.
I was never tempted to read it, I can’t say why. My hand hovered over it many times, but I did not pick it up.
It’s a book that still influences today. It was the source for D. W. Griffith’s vile movie, Birth of a Nation*, a propaganda piece for Jim Crow created by scions of the Secesh. Many of today’s images of freed slaves and their descendants (think watermelons and fried chicken) can be traced to that book and movie.
Yesterday, I listened to the podcast of last Friday’s Another View, which featured a discussion of Birth of a Nation. You should listen too.
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*The “nation” in question was the terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan, which D. W. Griffith thought was a Good Thing. ‘Nuff said.
That Conversation . . . . 0
We don’t need “that conversation.” We have had enough damned “conversations.”
We need racist white folks–not the ones who wear hoods and proudly claim their racism, but the ones who chat oh so politely at their country club gatherings about “those people you know who I mean”–to stop lying to themselves and each other and the rest of us about their own racism and the hypocrisy attendant thereto and see themselves for what they are.*
Image via Job’s Anger.
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*No, I don’t think it’s going to happen either.
And Now for Something Completely Different 0
An evening poem in free verse.
“They’re Being Uppity, That’s Why” 0
Chauncey Devega discusses why the right fears and smears “Black Lives Matter.” (The relevant part starts at about the 18-minute mark.)
Via Indomitable.
Misdirection Play, “Black Lives Matter” Dept. 0
From the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass:
James E. Causey calls out a misdirection play much in the news these days, one used to distract from one real issue by talking about another one (emphasis added).
Follow the link for more.
Schlemiel, Schlimazl, Schmart One 0
Dick Polman comments on Jeb Bush’s decision to play the “Asian” card. Here’s a bit.
Well, that clears things up. He hadn’t meant to smear Hispanics. He was trying to smear Asians.
And this guy is supposed to be the smart Bush.
“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night”* 0
I have never visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, though I spent a year in Charlottesville a long time ago. Desiree S. Melton, though, was recently there and noticed that something was missing: even a quasi-honest treatment of chattel slavery.
Here’s a bit of her reaction (emphasis added):
Follow the link.
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*If you know the Canon, you know that this post’s title refers to something that didn’t happen.
Fox News: Weaponizing Hate 0
Excerpt:
Conservatism and racism in the post-Civil Rights era are one and the same.
Via We Are Responsible Negroes.
Privilege 0
Katie Elmore realizes that the most insidious aspect of privilege is that the privileged don’t notice that they are the privileged.
I can start by taking a good hard look at the woman in the mirror. I’m a white woman, born and raised in the South. I have benefited my entire life from all the privileges my whiteness allows me, usually never stopping to consider this unearned advantage. Is it possible that I am part of the problem? Indeed it is.
I am not a racist. I would never shoot anyone. I do not own a gun. I’m a pacifist to my core.
(snip)
The fact remains, unless I acknowledge my own white privilege, and unless I speak out against the scourge of racism, I am not blameless.
From my own experience, I bear witness that, even if one is not knowingly a racist, even if one consciously spurns racism and bigotry completely, growing up surrounded by racism taints one for life. The stereotypes, the mental pictures, the snap-judgements, the gut-reactions, they are always there, however much one knows that they are based on lies.
Do please follow the link.
Sunday-Go-To-Meeting Clothes 1
When I was growing up in the days of Jim Crow, I remember my father’s going to pay his poll tax so he could vote.
As he was not-black, it was routine transaction. Also, as he was not-black, when he had come of age, he had passed his literacy test. Being white was all you needed to pass the literacy test.
The voter fraud fraud is the poll tax and literacy test in updated, modern Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
Yesterday, I met someone who had the temerity to defend the Stars and Bars as a memorial that the soldiers who lost their lives defending the “Southern way of life” deserved. She followed that by arguing that the Civil War was about “economic systems,” not about slavery, conveniently forgetting that the Southern “economic system” was slavery.
She repeated the lies Southerners have told themselves and others for the last 150 years so as not to admit that secession was about slavery and nothing else and that the Confederacy was conceived and birthed to defend an evil, the lies that speak of “honor in battle” and dress the Secesh in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
I don’t lose it often, but I lost it.
Vociferously.
Twice.
And I regret it not a bit.
Lies must be called out lest they live forever.
I have had my fill of those who dress the Secesh, past and present, in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.