Excellent Commentary on state of American Politics

A must read, courtesy of John Cole at Balloon Juice -- You Are Blind as a Bat, And I Have Sight

A Conversation With Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Hear an extensive interview with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (A Must Listen).

Direct Audio Link

The topics cover race, Obama's otherness being used against him as a weapon by the Republican Tea Party, post-racial America, anthropology, genealogy...etc.

Great discussion. A couple of Tea Partiers even call in....resulting in some interesting exchanges.

Yes, Race Does Matter

I have mentioned the okcupid report before on this blog.... I even overshared about my own experiences with racial barriers (outright discrimination) in horrible world of dating- this was before I even knew about this report. See the post "White Men Only". The report validated my own experiences...and let me know that I wasn't crazy.

Going through the actual report from the original site was eye opening. Take a look for yourself.

The data on Black women was very interesting and raised a whole set of other questions about race, dating, Black women, etc.

Overall...the picture for Black men wasn't very good. I'm pretty much screwed (and not in the good way of course).

Bigots at Tea Party Rally

More isolated incidents.... taken from a rally last year in California. America is in denial about what the Tea Party and the GOP stand for.

Just in case you were wondering about WHY the NAACP did its Tea Party Resolution

Here's something from Jill Tubman to explain:


The Tea Party’s leaders’ claims of race-neutrality ring hollow given their racially-inflammatory words and strategy. I exposed the Tea Party’s double-talk here at some length yesterday. Here’s new video from Think Progress (courtesy of Eric Wingerter over at the NAACP – thanks) from actual Tea Party rallies among their rank and file members out that highlights the rampant racism motivating the their critique of the Obama Administration.

Republicans Let Their Racism Show in Attack On Thurgood Marshall

I guess Elena Kagan is such a blank slate that Republicans have to find others to attack.... even the dearly departed. They were apparently so desperate this week that they dug up a class paper that Kagan wrote decades ago, before she even entered law school. Of course they failed miserably with that effort.

But what annoyed me most was the way that Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee used Kagan to attack Thurgood Marshall - a giant and American hero. Listen to the highlights of the hearings from last week, where Marshall is repeatedly brought up, attacked and diminished by Republicans. The effort was led by Senators Lindsey Graham, John Kyl, and Jeff Sessions. Their racism was plain to see and it was clear that they were playing to their base - their white Southern audiences back home. By targeting Marshall, they were attacking civil rights, desegregation, and equal justice...all the things he stood for. In their attacks (in front of at least one Marshall family member) they painted Marshall as a radical...as a judicial "activist". Marshall's opinions as a judge -upholding the idea of fairness, equal rights, etc- were out of the mainstream (although there is no evidence of that whatsoever). What they were really criticizing was Marshall's career before he became a judge. They were basically saying that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was not decided correctly and was a result of Marshall's work as an attorney & agitator, and a result of an activist Supreme Court which overturned years of segregation. They suggested that since racism, esp. Jim Crow, was the law of the land, and was well established, settled law.... someone like Thurgood Marshall was a radical and activist because he came along and stirred things up by daring to challenge what had been legal precedent prior to May 1954. In other words, these Senators were sending the not-so-subtle message that Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that upheld segregation in schools, should have been allowed to stand as it was settled law. Racist to the core.

Why has the national corporate media allowed this to go almost unchallenged? I saw the segments on MSNBC...but I have not heard much from any other outlet. Unreal.

Senator Al Franken provided a pretty good rebuttal - see video.
Besides Al Franken.... few Senators/House members have spoken out against this blatant racism.

See Thurgood Marshall Jr's response. Hear an interview with Thurgood Marshall Jr. from NPR.

This comes on top of efforts by racist jackasses like Glenn Beck who want to hijack the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington as a way to mock Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights struggle. Beck says he wants to "restore honor" and dignity to America..... as opposed to MLK, advancements in Civil Rights, and that nigra being elected President.

Alabama Teacher Gives Interesting Math Lesson

Just read for yourselves.

I think I have Tea Party fatigue, racist/bigot fatigue, and politics fatigue. 2 & 1/2 more years of this s---?

Black Kids Still Showing Bias Towards White or Light Skin

CNN project basically rehashes the famous doll test.

Why do we always seem to see the same results?

Rand Paul on NPR - ADA and Racial Discrimination Should be Dealt With Locally

Hear Rand Paul's NPR interview from yesterday...where he reiterated his views... on the same day that he tried to downplay his position on Maddow. I guess he's like John McCain. Some days, he's a maverick, and other days (depending on the political winds) he's not. Paul is a part time racist then in the same way I guess.

Wow... It is amazing how America has moved to the extreme right. Hear interview. This is, in part, the result of the Conservative media controlling the narrative for so long.

Paul says he has a Tea Party mandate... (in other words, he believes a mandate from the racist Tea Party = A national mandate). What is sad and scary about that is.... he may be correct. With the nations swing to the right... and with the idiocy of the American electorate... anything is possible.

There is a good chance that this man will be in the Senate after the November elections. A Tea Party Senator.

See a previous more detailed post on this from Rikyrah.

Arizona Threatens To Cut Off L.A.'s Electricity

This would be in retaliation to the L.A. boycott of Arizona's racist immigration law.

What The ***k?!!!!

See for yourself.

I say let em secede. Cut off Federal funding to these jackasses. As a matter of fact. They can have the South if they want it. Can't stand the South. Never liked it. (although I am not ready to give up Florida or Texas.... two of my adoptive home States). I would be ready to fight for Texas or Florida. But the rest, they can have. lol

Arizona Quickly Modifies Immigration Law To Get Around Legal Challenges

The Arizona legislature modified their racist and unconstitutional immigration law earlier this month because they knew that the original law wouldn't hold up in Federal court. The move was made in anticipation of a mountain of lawsuits that would have likely made the legislation null and void in the Federal appeals courts.

The original law would have allowed (and in many cases required) police in Arizona to use an immigration check as the reason to make initial contact with an individual. Now the law states that officers can check immigration status as a consequence of some other violation of the law or some other contact, which could be just about anything. The provisions in the modification, for the most part, always existed. This is currently part of normal police practice across the country. Police officers already contact immigration authorities to report suspects who may be undocumented, when the issue comes up as a consequence of other violations of the law. So if that's the case, why have a law that codifies what is already the normal practice? Because that was not the original intent of the law. Arizona is trying to be slick with this move.

The changes will help the State defend against legal challenges, and will make the law tougher to kill in the courts. However, the law is still racist and unconstitutional. The law will still require some level of racial profiling. It still violates equal protection rights. It would still require a certain segment of the population to show proof of citizenship, while not requiring the same from others. The only way that this law could be constitutional, would be if everyone in Arizona were required to carry proof of citizenship and all were scrutinized equally. Gov. Brewer herself tried to claim that she didn't know what an immigrant looked like (in an attempt to blunt criticism.... and to try to show that the law would be applied to everyone....of course that's a lie. Of course this whole issue is about Mexicans). It is inherently racist...even with the changes....the changes only lessen the degree of the racism. The law also tries to trump Federal laws and Federal jurisdiction, another problem for Arizona as it tries to come up with a defense. Unfortunately those who want to challenge the law will have a steeper hill to climb.

The modifications were aimed at fixing some of the 4th amendment problems. But the problems with the 14th amendment are still there. Fortunately, this law was so horribly bad to begin with, that there are a number of routes to kill it. The modifications only plug one hole in the dam. This is why I believe the law was never really meant to be practical. I think it had more to do with Arizona wanting to send a message to Washington.

Read the Text of the Actual Law with the Modifications

Police Officer Shoots Himself, Tries to Blame Black Suspect

Philadelphia police officer Robert Ralston reported last month that he had been shot by an unidentified Black man (how convenient). But his story slowly began to unravel. Luckily with today's forensic technology and with good investigative work, the truth usually comes out in these cases. It turns out that Ralston made up the whole story. Fortunately no one was hurt during the manhunt for the suspect who didn't exist.

I was immediately reminded about Susan Smith who drowned her children in 1994, and then blamed it on a Black man. I was also reminded of a case that was worse than the Susan Smith debacle - the case of Charles Stuart, who murdered his pregnant wife in Boston back in 1989, and blamed a Black man (remember that?). That case almost ripped Boston apart. There have been other lesser known examples of this over the years, but these are the two incidents that always come to mind for me because they are seared into my brain.

When Racism Masquerades as Something Else

(The following is an excellent commentary from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Carlos Dews puts into focus the current political climate, particularly the Tea Party...calling it what it really is. Dews' commentary is supported by facts from The University of Washington).

Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.

By Carlos Dews

[Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome]

'The nigger show."

I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.

I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."

The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth. I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.

More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.

That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.

But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president.

Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."

Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.

The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.

Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.

During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."

My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism. More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.

My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.

However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.

Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.

It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.

by Carlos Dews, author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, the Italian journal published by the Aspen Foundation Italy.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour Also Ignored Slavery in His Confederate Heritage Proclamation

They Are Yearning for the Days of the Old Confederacy

After he defended Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for omitting slavery from his States Confederate remembrance, it turns out that Haley Barbour made the same glaring omission in his State's proclamation. He seemed to go out of his way to purposely leave out any mention of slavery. I suspect they may be doing this to rile up their supporters. Both Governors may be interested in running for President or VP in 2012. This may be red meat for the Conservative Tea Party base.

Yes, there are definitely more important concerns that we should be focused on... and Republicans would probably love it if we were distracted by Barbour's antics. However, these reports, along with the other comments and activities by the Right point to a certain kind of state of mind that I believe should be illuminated. I think it says a lot about how they view the world, what they believe in, and who they really are. Eugene Robinson points this out very nicely in his commentary on the subject.

These kinds of political antics are taking place at the same time that we are hearing reports about segregation in Mississippi schools. Post racial my ass. I'm not even sure what year this is. I had to check the calender, not sure if I had slipped back in time into some other decade. But the calender says 2010. Notice the overriding pattern? There is a larger context to all of this. It pisses me off when apologists for the radical Right discuss these matters in a vacuum.... in separate little pieces, ignoring patterns and the larger context. Facts tell us one thing, but some in the mainstream corporate media suggest that we should ignore what is right in front of our faces. They want us to believe that the sky is pink, and that the earth is flat....that what we are seeing is just a figment of our imagination. It's not just the wider context of current events that they seem to ignore, they also love to ignore historical context, as Eugene Robinson pointed out.

What's even more annoying than all the talk about the loony Tea Party, the radical Right, and their romanticizing of the Confederacy, is the fact that thickheaded American voters are going to put these jackasses into office, certainly at the State and Congressional levels, in November of this year and in 2012, despite these reports, and despite solid recent history that shows their policies failing. This whole thing (the Right's activities over the past decade and their use of propaganda, especially since 2007) says more about the deficiencies of Progressives and their complete lack of an effective media infrastructure, than it says about how crazy the Right is. If you can't effectively mount a defense against such incredibly crazy propaganda and effectively educate the American public (which is in desperate need of good information and deprogramming).... then to me, this may be the more pressing issue. It points to an emergency within the Progressive movement in this Country. If there is no effort to fix it and fix it soon- with a complete revamping of Progressive strategy, infrastructure... and with policies like the Fairness Doctrine - then this Country is going to be in serious trouble. Progressives & Democrats are certainly going to pay a price.

I'm losing more faith in this Country and the World with each passing day.

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell Forgot About Slavery in Proclamation of Confederate History Month

I don't think he actually forgot. There is a tradition by some on the Right to leave slavery out as a core reason for the Civil War simply because they don't hold the view that Slavery was very important.

Nikki Giovanni gets to the point....


McDonnell knew exactly what he was doing. It wasn't an innocent mistake. It was classic Southern Strategy stuff. But when he started to notice a backlash... he tried to make amends.
Unfortunately, I don't see this as having much of an impact nationally. Stupid voters will still vote overwhelmingly Republican in the next two major election cycles, no matter what. If anything, this dust up makes McDonnell look like a more appealing candidate for White Conservatives if he has any national political ambitions. But stories like this do serve to show the mindset of those on the Right who are in leadership.

Like I mentioned on my Republican media page a year ago (see sidebar) there is this desire by some on the Right to re-establish some sort of new Confederacy in this Country... if not a physical one... definitely an ideological one.

Nice Huffpost commentary

New University of Washington Survey Shows that Race Is Influence for Many Tea Party Supporters

Results from a University of Washington Survey on the Tea Party Movement shows that Race isn't the non-factor that some in the mainstream media have been suggesting.

"The tea party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race,"said Christopher Parker, a UW assistant professor of political science who directed the survey.

It found that those who are racially resentful, who believe the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks, are 36 percent more likely to support the tea party than those who are not.

Indeed, strong support for the tea party movement results in a 45 percent decline in support for health care reform compared with those who oppose the tea party. "While it's clear that the tea party in one sense is about limited government, it's also clear from the data that people who want limited government don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care," Parker said.

He directed the Multi-State Survey of Race and Politics, a broad look at race relations and politics in contemporary America. The survey reached 1,015 residents of Nevada, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and California. All were battleground states in the 2008 presidential election with the exception of California, which was included in the survey to represent the West Coast. See summary of report.

I have believed from the beginning that race was part of the health care debate. Many who didn't support Health Care reform held their position partly because they believed that the provisions of reform would disproportionately benefit the poor in this Country.... and by extension (since a large proportion of the poor are minorities) would benefit Blacks and Hispanics. To many whites, especially whites in the South, this was just unacceptable.

The information coming out now appears to support what I had believed all along.

This also backs up the argument I made last year about the role racial prejudice was playing in the Republican's anti-Obama campaign (of which the Tea Party plays a central role). Also see post from the Daily Kos. James Carville of all people tried to suggest that race was not an issue behind the anti-Obama campaign. The Carville report has since been shot down repeatedly by other surveys, reports and commentaries. The report was nonsense from the beginning.