Who is a racist?
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
Nobody admits that he/she is a racist. Nobody. I can rattle off ten or more incidents that have happened over the last decade and after each, what's the first thing you hear? He or she "is a good person. There's not a racist bone in his/her body."
I understand the driving force behind the denials; as James Baldwin says, “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.”
After Imus's dehumanizing comments about black female college basketball players, his colleagues came out to remind us of all his good deeds. "Who? Him? Not a racist bone in his body."
Paula Deen had a fascination with slavery. So much so that she wanted a real plantation-style wedding with real slaves. Black men and women dressed to impressed as they serve her guests, but she was not a racist. She is a good God-fearing Christian.
George Zimmerman racially profiled Trayvon Martin, ran – panting, out of breath - after him so as to prevent him from “getting away,” shot the teen, didn’t offer help, has no remorse for what he did, had his lawyer further racially profile the dead victim, but yet he wasn’t a racist. Said his parents: “He is absolutely not a racist.”
Who in the media is a racist?
Is Gary Tuchman of CNN a racist? Or is he just an inept journalist whose lack of professionalism just happened to play into a racist narrative? Tuchman managed to do a “comprehensive” report on the killing of unarmed teenager Tony Robinson, in which he made sure that we understood that the black teen was no angel; that he had pled guilty to robbery, had assaulted people on the night he died, and that he was just an evil, scary youth. One whole segment to dehumanize Robinson, not a word that the teen suffered from anxiety and depression and was previously diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Not one word that the cop had killed in the line of duty before. (Note that Tuchman, in response to criticism, did a second piece in which he mentioned the cop's history.)
How about the Morning Joe crew who, in a stunningly offensive episode, declared that those angels who were chanting about lynching n****rs would not have done so were it not for black rappers. Black rappers influencing those God-fearing little darlings, corrupting their morals, and it is up to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to lay the blame where it squarely belongs; anywhere but on the occupants of that bus.
Are they racists?
Speaking of those young role models on their Greek fraternity bus, said the parents of one boy:
"He is a good boy... While it may be difficult for those who only know Levi from the video to understand, we know his heart, and he is not a racist,"
Aha! Not a racist.
Actually, I am heartened by the apology from one of the identified students:
"For me, this is a devastating lesson and I am seeking guidance on how I can learn from this and make sure it never happens again. My goal for the long-term is to be a man who has the heart and the courage to reject racism wherever I see or experience it in the future,"
If I can channel my inner Rachel Maddow for a minute:
"To be a man...who has the heart...and the courage..."
The young man's words remind me of one of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou. Said the wise woman:
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”
So, were the young people on that bus racist, weak, or both? Does it even matter? The result would be the same, wouldn't it? Which one of them on that bus would seek to help the man or woman slated to be lynched for some imagined slight? Maybe for having the audacity to think that they could belong in a Greek fraternity or sorority? In the spirit of the moment, can we be sure that they wouldn't join the frenzied quest to get their little piece of blackness?
"We know his heart, and he is not a racist,"
Mychal Denzel Smith defines racism this way:
Racism is a system of oppression, one that creates a society of first- and second-class citizens by denying rights and access to resources to non-white people. Racism is a system of power created by and maintained through public policy. Racist rhetoric or action is anything that reinforces/upholds that system.
I am sorry to have to say this to you, Mr. & Mrs. Pettit, but yes, your son is a racist...and so are all of those who joined in that rousing rendition of the fraternity song. Your son is also weak, lacks courage. That's the bad news. The good news is that there is still time for him and the others to redeem themselves. For the sake of humanity, including themselves, I hope that they do succeed. As a parent myself, I am pulling for them.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Don't know Jamaican author Marlon James? Shame. The New York Times Magazine: From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself.
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I had just left my parents’ house in Portmore, a suburb outside Kingston, for my own apartment in the city: a one-bedroom studio, barely 600 square feet, with yellow shag carpeting, a tiny terrace enclosed in jail bars, a bedroom looking out on somebody else’s bedroom and a ceiling I could reach. I locked myself away from the neighbors with two deadbolts.
At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn’t know. The silence left a mark, threw my whole body into a slouch, with a concave chest, as if trying to absorb impact. I’d spent seven years in an all-boys school: 2,000 adolescents in the same khaki uniforms striking hunting poses, stalking lunchrooms, classrooms, changing rooms, looking for boys who didn’t fit in. I bought myself protection by cursing, locking my lisp behind gritted teeth, folding away my limp wrist and drawing 36-double-D girls for art class. I took a copy of Penthouse to school to score cool points, but the other boys called me “batty boy” anyway — every day, five days a week. To save my older, cooler brother, I pretended we weren’t related. At home, I lost myself in Dickens’s London, Huck Finn’s Mississippi River or Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. One day after school, instead of going home, I walked for miles, all the way down to Kingston Harbor. I stopped right at the edge of the dock, thinking next time I would just keep walking.
The University of the West Indies was a door: wide open. I found friends who seemed to have been waiting all summer for me to show up. I walked into the library with a back issue of Spin, and somebody asked if that was the one with Tom Waits. I’d known people who were geeky, sarcastic, well versed in the Smiths and “The Wrath of Khan,” but they had never been my friends before. Now I was dragged into word wars because one friend said “Time Bandits” was the greatest movie ever, when everybody knew it was “Life of Brian.” There were cheap liquor, potato chips, ironic quips, mix tapes. But when college ended, I returned home, got a job in advertising and shut myself down again. The people I had left behind were waiting for me when I got back.
The entrance to my cubicle was blocked by a boss with curious eyebrows who asked why all my magazines showed men on the covers, what GQ meant, where was Playboy? Every man in the office had a woman on the side, whether he was married or not, and even monogamous men were considered gay. Memories of childhood returned as nightmares: I was a kid again, frightened by school, praying to God every night, please let me wake up in another body. One that walked and talked right. That did not play house with a boy in the neighborhood that time when he was 8 and I was 9 and ruin him and myself.
One day I bought “Steppenwolf,” by Hermann Hesse, in a bookstore. Early in the book, an irrefutable argument for suicide jumped out and grabbed me by the neck: the scene in which the protagonist, having given himself his own expiration date, realizes that he can put up with anything, tolerate everything, suffer through all things because he knows when he’s going to check out. I hadn’t thought about killing myself since I was 16.
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How America still blames racial hatred on the hated. The New Republic: Waka Flocka Flame Didn't Make Anyone Say the N-Word.
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Black people aren't being massacred by the state. But they are still being blamed for their own deaths at the hands of police, part of a broader American tradition of blaming black people for the violence, racism, and discrimination perpetuated against them. We received two more reminders of this tradition on Wednesday morning, with Senator John Cornyn’s blithe dismissal of President Barack Obama’s concerns about voter suppression and in an embarrassing episode on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" about the racist frat video.
"Morning Joe" host Mika Brzezinski reserved her outrage not for the two expelled students but Atlanta rapper Waka Flocka Flame, who backed out of an encore performance at the fraternity chapter over his disgust at the video. “If you look at every single song, I guess you call these, that he’s written, it’s a bunch of garbage,” Brzezinski said. “It’s full of n-words, it’s full of f-words. It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself.” Co-host Joe Scarborough and The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol ignored that one of the expelled students wrote in his Tuesday apology that "Yes, the song was taught to us." They jumped in instead with fossilized arguments about hip-hop’s largely white audience learning racist terms not at home, but by listening to rap music.
What Cornyn did was considerably less clumsy and more insidious, but no less important. In an extensive interview with Yahoo’s Meredith Shiner, the senior U.S. senator from Texas addressed Obama's weekend speech in Selma, where the president advocated for a fix to the Voting Rights Act. As Shiner noted, Cornyn, who enforces voting discipline in the U.S. Senate, became the first top GOP Congressional leader to say that Congress should not take up legislation to amend the Voting Rights Act. He echoes Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’s justification for undermining the act: "I think," Cornyn said, "we’ve come an awful long way."
Cornyn said there are “some who want to continue to drive divisions and create phony narratives,” but he wasn’t referring to the false alarm Republicans sound about voter fraud:
Waka Flocka
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Tech hubs are expanding fast across Africa. Economist: Homes for Africa’s tech entrepreneurs.
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Africa may be prone to chronic power shortages, weak infrastructure and economies still overly-dependent on commodities. But it is also being seen by technology firms as a new frontier for innovation: herds of new tech start-ups and small businesses are being birthed across the continent.
Almost as innovative as their plans for providing mobile money or clever new applications for hailing taxis are their methods of overcoming some of the continent’s main impediments to technology innovation: expensive internet access and the high costs of renting office space with reliable power. Their solution has been to take a leaf from the books of entrepreneurs in places such as Silicon Valley and the Old Street roundabout by setting up “hubs” or co-working spaces. A recent World Bank report conservatively estimated there are over 90 hubs across Africa; in reality there are many more.
While co-working spaces are heralded in the rich world as trendy, open spaces conducive to networking and brainstorming, in Africa they serve a far more practical purpose:co-working spaces mitigate the exorbitant costs of setting up and running an office in Africa.
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The senseless shooting of two police officers threatens to end a reform movement that was just beginning. Slate: A New Danger in Ferguson.
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Chief Jackson announced his resignation with a press conference at the police station, and when protesters gathered to meet him, it was a celebration as much as a demonstration. And for good reason: Despite major setbacks, activists—with a strong assist from the federal government—had begun to bring accountability to the city of Ferguson and had started the hard and painful process of institutional change.
Because the shooting happened during the protests—albeit hours after Jackson’s resignation, when they were waning—there’s a strong chance they’ll be associated with the protesters, even if the shooter wasn’t involved in the demonstrations or the movement writ large. Already, area police officials are calling it deliberate. “This is really an ambush,” said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar during a Thursday morning news conference, later clarifying to say that he didn’t “know who did the shooting. … But somehow they were embedded in that group of folks.”
And while he didn’t want to condemn the full range of people protesting—“That’s not an indictment on everybody that’s out there certainly expressing their First Amendment rights”—he also thought something like this was inevitable, given the anger of the protests and some of the participants. “When you look at the tenor of at least some of the people involved in the protest or civil unrest, it can be troubling,” he said. “I think it’s a miracle that we haven’t had any instances similar to this over the summer and fall.”
Police are investigating, but at present we have no idea who shot the officers, or why. And it’s that lack of information that makes this a dangerous moment for Ferguson reform. Fixing the city, or even just ameliorating its problems, requires good faith and buy-in from all stakeholders, from Ferguson police and city officials to community leaders and the persuadable white Ferguson residents who are neither involved in the movement nor actively opposed to it. Indeed, both Department of Justice reports were valuable because they laid neutral ground for action. Almost everyone could acknowledge that former Officer Darren Wilson was innocent of legal wrongdoing and most everyone could agree that the city was corrupt and unfair.
The shootings may shatter Ferguson’s nascent detente.
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