Showing posts with label post-racial America. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label post-racial America. Show all posts

  • Recently, Abagond wrote about how the mainstream American media handles riots involving black Americans and riots involving whites. Anyone who's keeping score can see how there's a glaring double standard in the way those events are covered.

    Take a close look at the 1965 Watts riots, the 1967 Detroit riots, the 1992 L.A. riots and the recent Baltimore riots and you'll find a couple of common threads:

    1. These riots and many others like them have been about black America's ongoing frustration over genuine injustices directed towards the black community and ignored by white society - discrimination and police brutality being the two biggest injustices.
    2. Every time these riots happen, mainstream American media frames them as yet another demonstration of black America's innate criminality and lust for violence - a narrative that's played well among legions of upstanding white Americans ever since the Stono Rebellion and perhaps even before.

    Now take a look at the above photo, a snapshot of the riots that occurred shortly after the end of the 2013 U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, CA. According to the L.A. Times, this one broke out after a fight led scores of young, largely white and quite possibly intoxicated revelers to indulge in a bit of the old ultraviolence. Why? There's no injustice here, except that maybe they'll have to go home at some point.

    Notice how the media didn't dismiss this as just another display of primal Caucasian rage, nor was it tamped down with the same sort of heavy-handed show of force exemplified by Baltimore and Ferguson.

    That's the thing. Riots led by largely white participants over largely innocuous things (your favorite sports team lost, your favorite sports team won, your favorite event just ended, you're drunk, others are drunk so let's tear shit up) are never treated with the racial disdain that the highly uncommon riots that occur in black communities receive.

    There's no condemnation of white Americans as a whole, nor are there any calls for the Caucasian community to restrain itself and seek non-violent means of expressing itself. They're not denigrated as "thugs," accused of being "out of control" or used as fodder for unreconstructed fantasies of putting them back in their rightful place. Even the language becomes different - these are "disturbances," not "riots."  They're not "thugs," but "young partygoers" and "revelers" who just happen to be "over-exuberant."

    No one thumbs through Wikipedia to find the perfect MLK quote to tut-tut black Americans with for having the temerity to burn buildings (in their own neighborhoods, mind you), throw rocks and generally act out of anger and frustration. Even the good Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood perfectly what happens when the concerns of a frustrated people are constantly put on ice.

    Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non­-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view.

    I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.

    These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

    It's no secret that mainstream America tends to be hard of hearing when it comes to the fears, concerns and strife black Americans have faced in this country, at least when said plight is couched in non-violent terms. It's only when those terms suddenly turn violent that mainstream America starts paying attention, only to learn the wrong lessons from what they've seen and heard and quietly hope that "those people" can leave them alone and go back to suffering in silence.

  • Yours truly has learned something these past few months watching and reading up on current events, especially those affecting black Americans:

    1. The value of a black life in the United States remains marginal, at best. At worst, that value is nonexistent.
    2. At any given moment, said life can be put to an end at the whim of a white American, whether under color of law or as a concerned citizen who "feared" for their safety and well-being.
    3. The value of a black life in the United States is determined and enshrined by mainstream America's view of the black community, and then verified and validated in its treatment at the hands of law enforcement and other institutions throughout the nation.
    4. Said law enforcement members have been given card blanche to respond to the black community and other ethnic and social minority groups as aggressively as possible.
    5. Respectability politics has long since proven to be absolutely ineffective in improving the black community's image in mainstream America's eyes or preventing further life-ending incidents at the hands of law enforcement and concerned citizens.
    6. When confronted with the above, many mainstream Americans will resort to blaming the black community for these problems based on a strict adherence to the Just World fallacy and their belief of black Americans as a morally bankrupt people. They'll also support law enforcement officials and concerned citizens who've put black lives to rest, at least as far as polite society will allow.
    7. Overt racism is still taboo and a serious faux pas in polite discussion. However, coded talk remains perfectly acceptable and preferred among many.

    The entire black blogosphere has undergone an airing out of grievances and a sharing of thoughts, feelings, experiences and the pain suffered by many within the black community. There have been protests, marches, demonstrations, the works. There have been a few indictments and even a few cases where authorities have quickly acted, if only out of self-interest and self-preservation.

    Still, the killings and the beatings continue.

    Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones - the list goes on. And it's one that grows longer with each passing day.

  • Another day, another dead black American, another outrage.

    These days, black Americans are being murdered like clockwork by men and women charged with protecting the public. Except protecting and serving the public takes a back seat to a whole host of corrupt behaviors, none least the brutalization and wanton murder of black individuals.

    Judging by history, these things are to be expected. Bigotry against the dreaded Other has always been iron-clad policy, even in today's so-called "post-racial" environment. Institutional enforcement of said bigotry has also been de rigueur, especially when fears of being overrun by said Other has always lurked in the back of mainstream America's collective mind since colonial times.

    So Freddie Gray's death at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department is, in history's grand scope, nothing out of the ordinary. The only remarkable thing about it is the reaction it elicited from the city's black residents.


    And even that response doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Protests and demonstrations have been the default method of expressing outrage by a people who feel otherwise powerless to prevent these atrocities from happening, The attendant rioting and looting is another side of that response, mostly done by those whose sheer anger and fury explode into a whirlwind of fire and shattered glass, interspersed with opportunists in search of a quick profit from chaos.

    Mainstream America has always looked at these displays with a bit of bemusement, especially when burned-out businesses and overturned cars come into focus. If anything, these displays are treated as proof positive of law enforcement's raison d'etre - to prevent so-called lawless elements from initiating these displays in the first place.

    So it's not out of the ordinary for a white American to see a phalanx of police officers in full riot gear facing down a lone demonstrator and dismissing the entire thing as the taxpaying public getting it's money's worth. In a way, they would be absolutely correct.

    It's also not out of the ordinary for the mainstream American media to write off the entire exercise as just another mass exhibition of black America's latent criminality. Acknowledging the unreconstructed public's confirmation bias happens to be a great way of raising viewership, even if it's at the expense of a people who suffer day in and day out.

    It's no wonder that mainstream American media outlets are more interested in slow-panning property damage and opportunists with stolen goods in hand. It's those sort of things that make for good ratings and even better outrage porn among unreconstructed minds.


    There's no arguing that Freddie Gray in no way deserved what happened to him. No human being deserves to be brutalized to the point of paralysis, coma and eventual death. There's never an excuse for it and there never will be.

    Regardless, what happened to Freddie Gray is just one of a long, depressing and seemingly unending line of atrocities committed mainly by law enforcement officials throughout the U.S., with the occasional "concerned citizen" or vigilante delivering a helping hand*. The slave patrols, "heroic" klansmen and angry mobs of "respectable Christian" whites might not be taking part in these modern-day tragedies, but their spirit remains in full effect.

    * As seen in the murder of Trayvon Martin





  • There's a lot I could say about this. Like how racism is far from dead and will likely never die. Or how many corners of mainstream society still harbor prejudicial thoughts about minorities, but at least have the decency to keep them out of earshot of polite society. Or how an organization founded in the very heart of the Confederacy in antebellum times still perpetuates the same attitudes and beliefs that were present at the time of its foundation.

    I could talk about all of that. Instead, I'll just pull a quote from a segment of Larry Wilmore's Comedy Central show, The Nightly Show:

    “They also kicked the fraternity off campus, so don’t worry, you won’t be seeing any more of those frat boys - until they’re your congressmen.”

    Imagine all the crazy shenanigans Trent Lott got up to during his time in Sigma Nu, except no one thought enough to capture it all on Double 8 film.

    And that's the thing. No matter what the University of Oklahoma does to people like Parker Rice, these guys will inevitably land in places and positions of power and prestige, where their actions and beliefs will invariably shape and mold the processes and systems our society deals with on a regular basis.

    Could you imagine Parker Rice on a Senate subcommittee deciding the fate of an education or healthcare initiative? I can and it's a scary feeling.

    So while everyone pats SAE and OU on the back for performing the damage control required of them by their PR departments, keep in mind that you might be seeing some of these people again in another 10 or 15 years. I suggest you start jotting down names and committing them to memory.

  • Michael Brown's death and the subsequent protests in the city of Ferguson, Missouri have laid bare a few simple, troubling facts about living in this country as a black American:

    1. You are always considered a danger or a threat until proven otherwise.
    2. As a possible threat, you are subject to the wishes and whims of law enforcement, the courts and the penal system.
    3. Even ordinary citizens can deal with you as they see fit if they consider you a threat, as codified in both de facto and de jure forms.
    The above has had an effect on how the black community sees and deals with law enforcement, as highlighted in Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest piece. When you know the police are more likely to see you as a threat rather than as a person in need, you're less likely to want to interact with them in any way, shape or form. Out of necessity, community-driven self-policing becomes the norm.

    But the reason for LEO insistence on treating black Americans as a clear and present danger has little to do with criminal stats or personal experiences - those are often used as pretextual justifications for their behavior. Instead, it's a bit deeper than that:

    The police departments of America are endowed by the state with dominion over your body. I came home at the end of this summer to find that dominion had been. This summer in Ferguson and Staten Island we have seen that dominion employed to the maximum ends—destruction of the body. This is neither new nor extraordinary. It does not matter if the destruction of your body was an overreaction. It does not matter if the destruction of your body resulted from a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction of your body springs from foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be be destroyed. Protect the home of your mother and your body can be destroyed. Visit the home of your young daughter and your body will be destroyed. The destroyers of your body will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

    Ownership of and authority over the black body is something that stretches as far back as the beginning of the slave trade, when the purchase and use of involuntary African labor came into vogue. It was most apparent during the heyday of the plantation system, with the southern planter class and their allies in control of black labor and black movement. The black body was theirs to do as they saw fit.

    This attitude did not vanish once the plantation system - at least in its slavery-supported form - vanished. The loss of control over the black body also meant a grievous economic loss. When black Americans began taking advantage of the Reconstruction period, there was a realization that this loss of control could be permanent. The fight against Reconstruction, the imposition of Jim Crow laws throughout the south and the use of those laws to create a new prison-supported plantation system marked the re-imposition of control over the black body.

    Today, mainstream America struggles to maintain authority over the black body, to do as they see fit with it. Even if it means warehousing your body in a secure facility for decades on end. Or bruising your body to the point of disfigurement and paralysis. Or simply destroying your body outright.

    It doesn't take a united organization to exercise that sort of control over the black body. Such tasks are often outsourced to ordinary individuals - people who have their own agendas, but nevertheless inherently understand the need for policing the black body. Jason Zimmerman did his part to re-impose societal control over the black body - he understood clearly what society subconsciously asked of him once he saw those black teenagers behaving in a way that suggested a lack of control.

    LEO behavior in Ferguson, L.A., N.Y.C. and points elsewhere are part and parcel with the continuing need to control the black body, whether for the benefit of the scared white suburbanite, the unrepentant Lost Causer, the workaday man or woman who doesn't want to lose their job or home to "those people," the businessmen who see black bodies as a goldmine of dependable cheap labor or the politician who uses black bodies as a "tough on crime" liferaft to keep his or her career afloat.

    Control of the black body has always been good for business and good for society. Yours truly doesn't expect that to stop anytime soon.

  • It's been established throughout history that there's nothing scarier to many Americans than the sight of a black man with a gun, let alone a large group of black men armed to the teeth.

    In light of Michael Brown's death at the hands of an overzealous police department in a racially charged tinderbox of a town, it looks like I'll have to amend that, as follows:

    It's been established throughout history that there's nothing scarier to many Americans than the sight of a black man.

    Of course, it's not so much "fear" than it is an ingrown, almost reflexive need for "control." Today's highly-militarized law enforcement are the runaway slave patrols of the new millennium - if they're not busy funneling a growing number of able-bodied black men and women into the prison-industrial complex and the permanent underclassery that it entails, they're busy with displays like these.Walking around in full military-surplus gear. Firing tear gas into private homes. Aiming AR-15s at innocent passersby.

    Make no mistake: this is state-sanctioned terrorism. It's something black America has long since been intimately acquainted with, from the moment the first batch of African slaves were dragged off the boat.

    Throughout slavery.

    After Reconstruction.

    During the Jim Crow era.

    During the Civil Rights era.

    During the so-called era of "colorblindness" and "post-racial America."

    Up to today.

    And yes, there are people out there who not only support this state-sanctioned terrorism of black souls (because they're assumed to be criminals who probably definitely deserve it), but they revel in it.





    It's a small taste of the shit sandwich black America has had to deal with for generations on end. And there's no end to it in sight.

    This and other acts of state-sanctioned terrorism is a cancer. This is the cancer that is slowly but surely killing this nation. It metastasized early on, up to the sloppy and life-threatening surgery that was the American Civil War. It went into remission with Reconstruction, but flared up in its full glory with Jim Crow. Chemotherapy came in the form of the Civil Rights movement and after that, everyone thought it would finally stay in remission and eventually disappear.

    But like any virulent cancer, it never leaves. It just bides its time until the conditions are right to spread. And spread, it has. And it keeps spreading.

    The cancer won't go away until America is finally ready to acknowledge that black life has the same worth as a white life, and that a black life deserves just as much protection. Until then, this country will remain in hospice, slowly awaiting the day when the cancer swallows it whole.



    Tell us something we don't know.

  • Ever since the ink dried on the idea that maybe, just maybe that America's non-majority members have been getting a bit of a raw deal from their culturally hegemonic counterparts, there's been a major degree of pushback. Most noticeable is the pushback against white Americans not only coming face-to-face with their own privilege, but also the feeling that they're being made to apologize profusely for it at gunpoint.

    And that's where young, bright-eyed Princeton student Tal Fortgang comes in. In a recent Time article, he laments the assumption that he, as a young white male in a society where being a white male is widely considered "de rigueur," benefits from such a privilege. To counteract said assumptions, he outlines the various struggles his family endured in order to attain their very own piece of the American Dream for themselves and their offspring:
    Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

    Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

    Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.

    Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential. Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
    Tal Fortgang: good kid, great head on his shoulders, but he's a Star Wars stormtrooper shooting at Jedi here. The kid is missing the point, but how? Well, let's start with what wheatdogg over at Little Green Footballs has to say about it:
    All right, Tal Fortgang, you’re a clever lad, and a credit to my alma mater. You make some good points, noting that your immigrant grandparents fled the Nazis, and that a working class Jewish kid does not neatly fit in the “white male privilege” cohort.

    I get that your father’s parents and your parents did not come from money, and your being at Princeton is a testament to their hard work and your presumed intelligence. In that, you and I are a lot alike.

    But, holy shit, Tal Fortgang, you are still clueless. Before 1950 or so, Jews were not even admitted to Princeton. You’d be singing a different song if you had applied back in 1914.

    And despite the lofty prose of this excerpt, the opportunity to claw one’s way up the social ladder still depends on your gender, your skin color and your mother tongue. You are committing the same sin of over-generalization as those who lump you in the “white male privilege” group by virtue of your pale skin.
    One of the interesting things about white privilege is that it all depends on outward appearance, at least up to a point. This explains why your average Appalachian can only dream of leaving his or her Eastern Kentucky confines to purchase their own vacation getaway estate on Cape Cod or schmooze with the likes of
    Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild and company. Nevertheless, it's also why a man of color still gets odd looks whenever he attempts to integrate himself into the white collective. Getting the "swarth" out of the Italian or the "unruly papist" out of the Irish is one thing, but no one's quite figured out how to get the "negro" out of a Negro without sufficiently sullying the collective's pristine appearance.

    Tal is understandably fed up with being lumped in a group by virtue of his outward appearance. Scores of young black men would likely sympathize with him on that particular account. But at the end of the day, Tal remains the right shade in a land where being the right shade lends you a far greater amount of slack and far less scrutiny than being a highly-visible outlier. It's this fact that goes sailing over Tal's head as he goes further into detail:
    That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still be conquering them now.
    One can only assume the bolded is supposed to be a dig against black American claims of the system being institutionally predisposed to retaining men and women of color at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. The remainder of the message serves to remind these same folks that there are plenty of whites around who don't truck with that "white privilege" mess and have even laid their lives down in defense of freedom and civil rights.

    But the fact that Tal can easily shed his Jewish vestments and effortlessly blend into the bland background that makes up most of American society is utterly lost on him. This literal "fade to white" ability helps when it comes to snagging various opportunities that those without it have to fight tooth and nail to get.

    Speaking of which, it reminds me of a story someone told me of how some black Americans had to make their fortune during the heyday of Jim Crow: "you have to sneak by them." And many black Americans have had to "sneak by" people and institutions that would have denuded them of their wealth and livelihoods if given half the chance. Tal's grandparents may have had to sneak by the Waffen-SS to survive, but at least they didn't have to sneak by the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement officials interested in convict leasing once they got here.

    To recap, Tal Fortgang makes several critical mistakes in his piece:
    1. Assuming that everyone wants him to prostrate himself in apology over white privilege as opposed to simply recognizing that it's there and being conscious of it.
    2. Assuming that people want him to apologize for being white, period.
    3. Co-opting the struggles of his grandparents as his own in an attempt to deflect accusations of enjoying white privilege.
    4. Ignoring his own privilege of being in a highly selective university, especially one where a broad range of doors tend to effortlessly open for its graduates. Being a Princeton student and a future Princeton grad already gives him a tremendous leg up. As mentioned earlier, it's a different level of privilege that recognizes money, lineage and of course, where you went to college.
    When it's all said and done, Tal Fortgang still benefits from privilege, albeit not white privilege in particular. After all, it's highly doubtful that Time, of all places, would commit his story to pixel where it could be seen by millions of readers had it been written at Fisk University and not the Princeton Tory.
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