“That Conversation about Race” category archive

Just listen.

Mary Bishop tells a secret.

White Americans have a secret we need to share.

It’s the ugly, racist things other whites say to us all the time because they assume we agree with them.

It’s time we stand up to every one of those comments and say no. We do not agree.

When we fail to do so, we perpetuate the racial poison most of us consumed as children.

Doing what she recommends, by the way, is what led to the aforementioned shouting match in the barbershop. Bigots don’t take kindly to having their bigotry called out, because, with rare exceptions, they refuse to admit that they are bigots.

Follow the link for more.

Der Spiegel considers America’s denial of its own history. Here’s a bit; follow the link for the rest.

The United State excels at dealing with the injustices of other countries. They often even help other countries to cope with their shameful past. Germany will always be grateful to the US for sending American troops across the Atlantic to defeat the Nazis. And for insisting that the Germans be held accountable for the crimes they committed. The Nuremberg trials gave Germans the opportunity to own up to what they had done. They could no longer deny it.

The US has been less successful, however, in conducting the same process when addressing the dark parts of its own past.

Isaac Bailey minces no words about the meaning of the Stars and Bars that flies at the South Carolina capitol grounds to black South Carolinians.

But that flag at the State House has been beyond demeaning, a taunting middle finger from the graves of those who would enslave us.

Follow the link.

Chauncey Devega considers how decisions about what is news shapes perception. Here’s a small, but telling bit from his typically long and tightly-reasoned post:

Experts on the topic have repeatedly demonstrated that the American news media lies about race and crime. For example, black men are over-represented as criminals relative to actual crime statistics; white criminals are shown on the evening news at rates far lower than the actual data would suggest is accurate; white people are much more likely to be shown as victims of crime while people of color are far less likely to be depicted as such. The Americans news media also humanizes white criminals (showing them in business suits, talking about their families and mental health) and dehumanizes black people (showing black suspects doing the “perp walk” or in handcuffs of shackles).

He left out a phenomenon that I’ve repeatedly noticed and find particularly galling. Black folks are much more likely to be pictured on the television and in print wearing orange.

Aurin Squire tries to understand the means by which conservatives are convincing themselves that the fellow who killed nine persons while declaring that he was doing so because they were black was somehow not motivated by race. Here’s one little example from the article.

At this point, Roof’s bigotry has become clear in myriad ways. Yet as late as this afternoon, when cornered by a reporter and asked if the shooting was racially motivated, presidential candidate Jeb Bush said “I don’t know.” This means Bush is either incapable of basic logic, or he has willfully decided to blind and deafen himself to one of the nation’s biggest problems.

Read it.

I do not think that the Republicans’ self-deception can be wholly attributed to bigotry on the part of every self-deceiver. Rather, it’s a matter of perpetually putting party over principle.

Nixon’s odious southern strategy is the centerpiece of the Republican Party’s appeal in the South. Maintaining that strategy is no longer a tactic; it’s a two-generation-old habit, deeply ingrained in Republican reflexes.

Another idea, also related to the southern strategy, is this: in attempting to appeal to the Southern bigot vote and its dupes, symps, and fellow travelers, Republicans have spent so much effort overlooking, ignoring, apologizing for, and explaining away racist acts that they can no longer recognize racism, even when it stands before them and shouts, “Here I am. Look at meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Listen all the way through, if you can. I couldn’t.

Extra bonus quote of the day from Elon James White:

To be black in America is to live in a constant state of trauma . . . .

Just listen as Elon and the crew explain what was so wrong about Rachel Dolezal’s con.

I am not competent to comment on it, but they are.

I have energetically ignored stories about Rachel Dolezal and the Spokane NCAAP chapter. All I could see was a cascading calvacade of stupid, and I wanted not to be in its path.

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Thrasher thinks there may be nevertheless be a lesson in the lunacy, and not the lesson you might expect. Here’s a bit:

We’ll likely never know Dolezal’s reasons for passing herself off as black – whether it was somehow out of the love for the adopted brother whom she raised, the opportunities in the civil rights movement of which she took advantage, or some mental illness through which she believed, as strongly as she wanted others to believe, that she really was African American and the biological child of the black man she told people was her father. Many are, and may remain, put off by the sight of a seemingly fair-skinned white woman who passed herself off as a light-skinned African American woman and became a local leader in one of the nation’s most venerable black civil rights group. But like it or not, she’s exposed how shaky and ridiculous the whole centuries-old construct of individual “race” is.

In the eye of the beholder:

China Hand tries to make sense of the minstrel show. A snippet:

I think there was more to blackface minstrelsy than a) making black people look foolish, subhuman, & not needing or missing basic human rights or dignity and b) thereby allowing white America to reconcile itself to its blithe disregard of the horrors of racism, birthed by slavery but perpetuated by de jure and de facto legal, economic, and social repression after the Civil War.

There was that. Well, there still is that, but a closer look at the minstrel show reveals that the flip side of southern black inferiority was northern white superiority which, in turn, unexpectedly fed back into ideas of southern white superiority.

Read it.

Chauncey Devega dissects the lie.

Read it.

Via Raw Story.

Gins and Tacos points out the misreading.