The (Not-So) Simple Life
Commentary by Chitown Kev
I wish that ESPN’s Jemele Hill didn’t have to say anything at all about Donald Trump’s white supremacy, even though, true enough, an overwhelming preponderance of the evidence points to the fact that The Occupant’s election and administration was founded on the basis of explicit appeals to white supremacy.
I would much rather that Ms. Hill’s commentaries be confined to things like sports reporting and shining shoes and trolling The University of Michigan sports teams and writing checks with her mouth that her alma mater can’t cash and other stupid sh*t.
Even as a little shorty, it simply occured to me that organizing a society simply based on skin pigmentation was a pretty stupid way of organizing society...it’s one of the reasons that some of the more extreme forms of ‘’black nationalism’’ never held any appeal to me.
But...social engineering based on skin pigmentation and the supremacy of ‘’white’’ skin pigmentation is what the Virginia colony was based upon.
And, as pointed out most recently, yet again, by Atlantic national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates, white supremacy is a permanent, permeating and, at times, suffocating part of the existential landscape of the United States of America.
Take, for example, the controversial editorial recently published in Nature magazine as reported by Undark.org’s Michael Schulson
The unsigned editorial, which ran on September 4 under the headline “Removing statues of historical figures risks whitewashing history,” struck many readers as being inept, poorly timed, or outright offensive. In response, Nature took the rare step of tweaking the online version of the editorial and changing its headline. (The old version was removed, though Divya Persaud, a planetary scientist, preserved it as a PDF.)
The journal also posted selected reader reactions and appended a lengthy apology that described the original version of the piece as “offensive and poorly worded.”
Not everyone is satisfied with the journal’s response, though, and the incident leaves open unanswered questions about editorial practices at Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific publisher. More broadly, it brings up familiar questions about how scientists and scientific institutions should grapple with the long history of racism in science and medicine.
Yes, one of the statues that the Nature editorial spoke of preserving lest history be ’’whitewashed’’ is that of J. Marion Sims. Sims was the recent topic of Miss Denise’s Sunday, August 27 FP post.
Often when the issues of racism and white supremacy are raised in the liberal/progressive blogosphere, a finger (rightfully) is pointed at toxic religious belief as the primary cause of lingering belief in white supremacy
Yet the Nature editorial on the legacies of scientists and medical doctors like J. Marion Sims and Surgeon General Thomas Parran (appointed by FDR) serves as a reminder that racism and white supremacy continues to be as permanent and permeating a part of the disciplines of science and reason as they are of religion.
I have never assumed that a decrease in religiosity would result in a decrease in and/or the eventual eradication of the doctrines of racism and white supremacy.
As someone who reads a lot of literature, I can certainly point the stain of white supremacy even in some of my favorite authors, who might be otherwise illuminating and readable on other subjects.
Racism and white supremacy are, indeed, postulates (in a Euclidean sense) that describe and, to a degree, determine, what we define as American.
I would like for that not to be a true statement about what it means to be an American.
And the only way for any African American to become as fully a realized human being as possible, the postulate of white supremacy must be disproven at every available opportunity.
Disproving the postulate of white supremacy may not always be comfortable.
A lot of times, I would rather be doing other things.
But...the American Postulate of White Supremacy never rests...therefore, neither can I in regards to it.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The writer Ashley C. Ford and her mentor, Roxane Gay, discuss the professional advice they’ve gotten and how to cope with criticism. The Atlantic: 'The Black Writing Community Is Very Small'
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When Roxane Gay describes herself as a teenager, she uses phrases like “a complete mess.” Almost 30 years later, she’s the best selling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a beloved voice on issues of gender, race, and poetry.
Throughout her career, Gay has turned to peers such as the fiction writer Tayari Jones—who once advised her to cultivate relationships with fellow black writers—for guidance. Gay has also been keen on returning the favor: One of her mentees is Ashley C. Ford, a senior writer at Refinery29 and the author of an upcoming memoir about growing up in Indiana.
Ford says her relationship with Gay is a mentorship without pressure. That may be because Gay’s rule when giving out advice is to let mentees be themselves, instead of imposing her idea of who they should be. I spoke with the pair for The Atlantic’s series on mentorship, “On the Shoulders of Giants.” The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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If one set out to crown a symbolic epicenter for the 400-odd year odyssey of white supremacy in the US, they would be hard-pressed to do better than Montgomery, Alabama.
It was at the statehouse in Montgomery that Jefferson Davis was first inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy in a bid to preserve the institution of slavery and in defense of the inferiority of the black race. It was here too, nearly a century later, that Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat, and a young Martin Luther King launched his first direct action campaign: The Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Indeed the official city seal tells some of this story in ironic juxtaposition, nesting its claim as “Cradle of the Confederacy” inside that of “Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement”.But there’s a deeper racial history here too, one that often gets buried in favor of the hagiography of leaders and legends like Davis, Parks and King. Montgomery was also for a time the central hub of the domestic US slave trade, and that’s part of why writer and activist Bryan Stevenson thinks is a perfect place for a “new kind of museum” entitled From Slavery to Mass Incarceration that will that will trace the untoward history of racial capital through generations and simultaneously shine a light on the legacy of US racial terrorism.