“That Conversation about Race” category archive

Tendaji Ganges has always known he had an unusual name.

Tendaji is a Swahili word meaning “hardworking.” But for many years, Mr. Ganges didn’t have any idea where his last name came from. Traveling around the country and checking phone books, he knew only that there weren’t many other African-American families with that name.

Then, a few years ago, he and his younger twin brothers, Kelly and Larry, were contacted by Kenneth Finkel, former executive at WHYY-TV in Philadelphia. That’s when they learned that they are likely descended from slaves who were captured off the coast of Cuba in 1800 by a Navy warship, the USS Ganges.

The captain of the Ganges sent the captured “cargo” to Philadelphia, where a judge decided that they had been illegally captured, and gave them into the care of the Philadelphia Abolition Society to place as indentured servants. Indentured servants were indentured for a fixed period of time (commonly seven years–my degree is in history, remember) at the expiration of which they were released from servitude. Many early immigrants came as indentured servants, working off the cost of their passage in a fixed period of servitude–not in servitude for the duration of their lives and of the lives of their issue.

The story points out that, as officers and gentlemen,

Most naval captains who captured slave ships would take them to ports such as Charleston, S.C., where they could make a handsome sum from selling the slaves as “salvage,” he (Marcus Rediker, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh–ed.) said.

Read the rest. Learn more about America’s original sin, chattel slavery and (the continuing sin) theft of labor.

Stokely Carmichael:

I think the problem is that many people in America think that racism is an attitude. . . . So they think that what people think is what makes them a racist.

Racism is not an attitude. If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.

Via Contradict Me.

Clarissa Hayward argues that wishing for “that conversation about” is magickal thinking; what’s needed is action.

Each year during Black History Month, we try to have what pundits call a “national conversation about race.” If only we could get our beliefs and our conversations about race on the right track, the idea seems to be, then the rest will follow.

It would be nice if that were so. But it’s not.

(snip)

But think back to the middle decades of the twentieth century, when a national conversation about race did alter dominant beliefs. It was in the 1940s that scientists in the United States and elsewhere dismantled the 19th-century understanding of race as biological difference. It was in that same period that the strong association of racism with Nazism drove many white Americans to reject racial hierarchy as morally repugnant.

These changes did not radically alter how race was practiced in the United States . . . .

Do read the rest.

It’s a common plaint of the bigot that black and brown folks want something for nothing. Indeed, I recently saw a vile editorial cartoon (no link) that blatantly said that in picture form.

The reality is the opposite. Let the Gloomy Historian explain how it always comes back to theft of labor.

Sharecropping, convict lease systems, vagrancy, black codes, labor contracts, and Jim Crow segregation were all attempts by Southern whites to create a ‘power over’ situation with African-Americans which would be exploited. For good measure, the whites projected the words “lazy” and “parasite” onto their former slaves to perpetuate their preferred stereotypes.

(snip)

With these historical concepts in mind, it is easy to see why prejudice against African-Americans is so all-pervasive on the right. African-Americans are an easily differentiated minority that refuses to submit to oppression.

Do read the rest.

Noz wrote the post so I don’t have to.

I probably would not been as tactful as he was.

No, it wasn’t.

It never was and was never meant to be.

“Separate, but equal” was a racists’ lie, a scam, a con. And racists continue to lie, to scam, to con.

Could he possibly have blown the racism whistle any louder? (These people clearly do not listen to themselves.)

As Americans honored the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, a Republican candidate for Florida House District 68 said President Barack Obama should be hanged for war crimes.

“I’m past impeachment,” Joshua Black wrote on Twitter. “It’s time to arrest and hang him high.”

Other Florida Republicans are, as the expression goes, distancing themselves from the remark.

Because corporations can be trusted to do the right thing.

Words fail me.

Addendum:

Apparently, the screen grab has caused quite a stir, especially in that it did not reflect the desires of the local constabulary.

Reports from the field.

It ain’t pretty, is it?

Via cassandra_m. at Delaware Liberal.

When I was growing up in Jim Crow Virginia during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, many white Southerners thought of apartheid South Africa as their only friend, the only other country that truly truly understood.

Nelson Mandela helped rip that dream from them.

Be skeptical today of bigots bearing his praises.

They are saying what they think have to say, nothing more.

Addendum:

Then there are the folks who don’t care what others think.

They can’t handle the truth!

Jeez oh man.

Explain to me how this wasn’t blatant, primal American racism in a nice blue uniform.

Via Raw Story.

I’ve had an uneasy feeling about reports of the “knockout game” since I first heard them.

They sound too much like the “wilding” hoax of a generation ago, which led to a lynch mob-like conviction of five kids for something that they did not do. I see that Will Bunch also has qualms.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been encouraging more people to buy and read the Daily News. I wish the mayor had read — or read more carefully — a really good piece that my colleague Jason Nark published yesterday, hours before both Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey went before the hot TV lights. Nark said the police in Philadelphia and around the country have no idea if the so-called “knockout game” is even real or just an urban myth, and that while there’s one — yes, one — incident in Fox Chase that Philly cops think might have fit this pattern, they were quick to add that, as Nark wrote, “the attack is just a new name for an age-old phenomenon: random violence.”

Chauncey Devega sees the stories of the “knockout game” as yet another in a long tradition of attempts to dehumanize Not White persons and dress them in menace.

I will not try to rewrite what he has expressed so well. Here’s a nugget:

(By the way, both as a trained historian and as a Southern boy who knows bigotry when he sees it, Devega is quite right–when nothing else works, or even when everything else works, bigots foment fear. Fear is their friend, their tool, their go-to weapon against good will. And now back to the nugget, already in progress . . . .)

The knockout game hysteria fits these criteria: it features long-standing white supremacist fixations on “black criminality”, is focused on young people of color, resonates with fears by white people regarding America’s changing demographics while reinforcing the White Right’s vacuous lie that white people are “victims” of “reverse racism” in the post civil rights era, and is disseminated by the Right-wing media apparatus.

Moreover, the way that the knockout game moral panic has been circulated by the news media is a very chilling echo of how race and rumor were historically used to incite white racial pogroms, spectacular lynchings, and other types of terrorism against African-Americans. Of course, there is an important distinction: the knockout game is an example of wanton street thuggery by criminals; the lynching tree and racial terrorism were rituals of mass white violence against innocent black Americans.

Follow the links–both of them. Read the rest(s).

One more time, the next time someone romantizes “The Lost Cause,” ask him or her just what exactly was the cause that was lost.

If you aren’t sure yourself, listen to this.

Chauncey Devega points out that the image of racists as mouth-breathing sheet-wearning terrorists burning crosses is not only inaccurate, but also a misdirection play distracting from more subtle and insidious “polite” racists.

A nugget:

White supremacy is so much more complex and nuanced than such ironically comforting images. The latter does the practical work of colorblind racism in the post civil rights era by framing white supremacy as something absurd, anachronistic, and an outlier. This is a wonderfully comforting thought for white folks and others. An acceptance of the fact that white supremacy is quotidian, common, and manifests itself in America’s social and political institutions, collective psyche, and a deep sense of white entitlement and white privilege, is verboten for a country which wants to embrace a public narrative of racial progress while denying how far it has yet to go.

In all, for post civil rights America, the “nice” and “polite” racists are a much greater threat, in mass, than the “mean” and “vicious” ones.

I’m a southern boy; I grew up white under Jim Crow.

Some of the nicest, most courteous people I knew as I grew up were as racist as racist could be. They would have never said the n-word in public, maybe not even in private, and certainly not within hearing of a Not White person, but they were certain that the color of their skins made them superior to anyone of a deeper hue and that they were therefore entitled to deference.

The sense of entitlement to–the demand for–deference solely because of skin color is an essential element of racism.

Receiving that deference, including deference to claims of “I’m not racist” in defense of clearly racist actions and statements, is white privilege writ large.

Do read the rest.

Addendum:

And, in more news of the not racist . . .

Addendum-Dee-Dum-Dum:

In reference to the Addendum above . . . .

Addendum-Dee-Doo-Dah

Chauncey Devega points out that it was her own damned fault for being.

You know, if you will admit it, that he is correct.

As my two or three regular readers know, I grew up white under Jim Crow in the segregated but not very deep South.

The whole time I was growing up, only once did I hear someone talk like this.

The racists just can’t help themselves, can they?

The Inky has a more MSM take.

Be sure to read the transcripts. (You may have to use your browser’s “zoom” feature to read them clearly.)

Honest to Pete, you’d think folks smart enough to land jobs as “senior administrators” in a school system would be smart enough to know what they shouldn’t put in writing. It leads one to wonder whether they really cared about the students in their charge.

Via Atrios.