“That Conversation about Race” category archive

At Philly dot com, UPenn Professor John L. Jackson Jr. reacts to the reaction to a recently highly-publicized (because it involved a white member of the Philadelphia Eggles) incident of n-word. A nugget:

For many Americans, if you aren’t donning a white sheet and burning a cross on some black family’s lawn, you can’t really be a racist. Racism is supposed to be a 24/7 preoccupation. Hitler is your hero, and you openly sneer at anyone different from you.

That is certainly one version of what racism looks like, and its adherents are still out there. But racism has never worked exclusively that way, not even during chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation, though society’s institutional commitments to racial inequality have always been nonstop assaults on black bodies and spirits – and on the very humanity of its white beneficiaries.

The genteel racists are everywhere. One needs only to be willing to see them.

Do follow the link and read the rest.

I’ve heard this tune so many times before.

Fall semester won’t start for several weeks, but Georgia State University has already received a handful of complaints about a new student club — the White Student Union.

Freshman Patrick Sharp said he started the club so that students of European and Euro-American descent can celebrate their shared history and culture and discuss issues that affect white people, such as immigration and affirmative action.

These groups are always about “white culture,” (where culture = supremacy).

(And I see no way how pulling this at an HBCU is anything other than deliberately provocative.)

As Elon James White would say, I call shenanigans.

Frances Thomas has a marvelous letter to the editor of the Philly Daily News about American racism’s historical roots.

I cannot excerpt or summarize and do it justice.

Just read it.

The world of those who get it and that of those who do not. From Cleveland dot com.

Someone who can look at Trayvon Martin’s death and not see him as a martyr to white racism lives in a different world from me.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., contemns right-wing attempts to turn Trayvon Martin into a thug.

This (individual identity–ed.) is what was stolen from Trayvon even before his life. It is stolen anew every time some pundit bloviates upon the perceived criminality of young black men to justify his killing. That perception is rooted more in stereotype and fear than actual fact, but put that aside and ask yourself this:

What man or woman among us would be willing to let the rest of us judge them based not upon who they are and what they have done, but solely upon our perceptions of people like them? There is, for instance, a perception that methamphetamine use is concentrated among white people in red states — in other words, Sean Hannity’s audience. May we treat all white people in red states accordingly? Will they go for that deal? Of course not.

Yet we daily crucify young black men upon that cross and pretend to moral righteousness in the doing. Trayvon is not the first victim. He’s not even the latest.

I always thought that a thug is someone who would stalk a random innocent kid in the darkness because he didn’t like the kid’s looks and then slay him for no good reason.

Deborah Orr, writing in the Guardian, on the other side of the Big Pond, sees what Americans are unwilling to see.

The death of Trayvon Martin was rooted in bigotry, as was the exoneration of his stalker.

It was a contemporary version of a phrase I heard often in my youth:

It was only a n****r.

So an unarmed kid dies as he walks while black from the store to his father’s house, and the jury was all “Zimmerman was such a nice well-intentioned boy and, after all, it was only a n*****r.”

A snippet:

Only protest from the public ensured that Zimmerman was tried for killing Martin at all. Only protest from the public has ensured that this killing has been seen through the prism of race. Yet to an outsider, it is obvious that Martin died because he was black, and that Zimmerman walked free after killing him for the same reason.

Even though equal civil rights for black Americans are still so new, their achievement still so clear in living memory, the US just can’t see what the rest of the world sees – that inequality so entrenched in the history of a state doesn’t disappear in matter of decades; on the contrary, the baleful fruits of generations of inequality can be used to justify the very prejudice that promoted the inequality in the first place.

If your eyes are open, you know I’m right.

Over there, on the right, where well-behaved sidebars belong. ——->

Visit the site.

Via BartCop.

In a typically long, tightly reasoned post replete with citations, Chauncey Devega explains that

While talking on the phone to his friend Rachel Jaentel, Trayvon Martin apparently called George Zimmerman, the man who followed him in a vehicle, exited it with a gun, and pursued him against police instructions, a “creepy ass cracker.” In a twist of thinking, and an inversion of what studied, learned, and reasonable people understand about the realities of race and power in America, for colorblind conservative racists, George Zimmerman has been magically transformed into a victim of “reverse racism.”

Such a troubled relationship to the truth would be the stuff of a great comedy sketch if these serious matters did not involve a young person shot dead by a wannabe cop who imagined himself as possessing a license to kill.

The truth can also be inconvenient: by virtue of his actions and character, George Zimmerman is in fact a “creepy cracker.

Do please read the rest to watch Devega rip apart Zimmerman’s defense’s ludicrous attempts to invoke mythological “reverse racism.”*

________________

“Reverse racism” means

I’m white; you’re not.

Therefore I should be treated special.

I wasn’t, and that’s your fault for being.

There’s more to it, but that’s the gist.

No longer in the chips:

Caesars Entertainment Corp. has severed its business relationship with Paula Deen, the embattled celebrity chef who admitted making racial slurs in the past.

Too much of a gamble for them, I guess.

(Later: Also, no longer in Walmart.)

In other news, Chauncey Devega continues to explore the confluence of casual racism, Paula Deen, and nostalgia for the Lost Cause (that the Supreme Court seems determined to revive, but that’s another story).

His post recalled for me the time I sat in the barbershop with my father while a local farmer renowned for his public profanity* spewed out stories about “his n*****s” and how he took such good care of them, so long as they did a good day’s work.

Deen’s use of the phrase “our local African-Americans” is potent. As always, language does political work.

Paula Deen’s nostalgia for Jim and Jane Crow is a yearning for a world that was based upon legal violence and casual cruelty towards black Americans.

(snip)

“Our” is a description of a set of historical material circumstances wherein whites quite literally owned black people as human property. “Our” also sketches out the boundaries of controlling one’s own personhood and liberty–black Americans were denied this right from slavery through to the end of Jim and Jane Crow in the South and elsewhere.

Deen’s “our local African-Americans” can be abused and violated in an arrangement more akin to a White racial fiefdom than a proper democratic polity. If white folks felt benevolent they could also offer protection and defense to “their negroes” from those other white people who would do them even greater harm. Both arrangements robbed Black Americans of their agency and freedom.

Read the rest. As with all of Devega’s work, you will learn something.

_____________________

*Remember that, in that time and place, “locker room talk” tended to stay in the locker room.

This gentleman took a perverse pride in his ability to “talk sh*t” with anyone, everyone, everywhere, all the time. I heard stuff from him that I had never heard before, not even in the high school locker room.

When out-of-town family was in town week before last, I gave a driving tour of the area.

A pickup truck sporting the Stars and Bars across the rear window passed us on Granby Street.

“Aha,” says I, “There goes a bigot.”

Because, really, if you flaunt the Stars and Bars, it conveys only one message.

And it’s got nothing to do with “Southern culture,” grits, or cooking with fat meat.