“That Conversation about Race” category archive

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.

I have no doubt that, if the victim had not been Not White, he would still be alive.

I’m a Southern boy.

No doubt whatever.

Chauncey Devega wonders, why is no one distressed by white-on-white crime?

He has a typically long, detailed, and tightly-reasoned answer, but, really, you know, it’s quite simple.

If it’s white-on-white crime, it’s colorblind crime, so the “white” part is irrelevant.

The Daily Show takes a shot.

Via Raw Story.

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.