posted by Mike Jefferson

That’s a photo of Brian Milligan with his girlfriend, Nicola Fletcher. He’s white, she’s African American. Young and in love. Here’s the short version of the story: 

On August 18, Milligan was beaten nearly to death on a Buffalo street by a group of black males because he was dating Fletcher. By all accounts, that’s factual. He’d been threatened many times by various black males for “being in the wrong place” and “being with the wrong girl.” But they were in love…until August 18th when the threats manifested into reality.

Though this story is still developing, it offers an useful opportunity to look at the subject of “hate crimes” in the context of hypocrisy, racism, and free speech/thought.  Given Sam’s definition of racism as “believing that some person or group is superior or inferior than another person or group because of some identifiable physical characteristics that they can not change,”  I think most everyone would agree that this particular crime, and true hate crimes in general, are amongst the most egregious forms of racism.

But what about the hypocrisy surrounding this event?    In my experience, hypocrisy is a foolproof indicator of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty.   And let there be no mistake, there is a great deal of hypocrisy in this incident of a white boyfriend being assaulted for dating his black girlfriend.  I’ll admit that I may have missed some of the details of the case but to my knowledge Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (nor any other Civil Rights activist, for that matter) have not been to Buffalo to protest this hate crime.  Sharpton doesn’t miss many opportunities to publicly demand justice in hate crime cases.  And to be fair to Sharpton, I haven’t heard  a peep out of any of the race baiters, black or white.

At this point, you probably think I advocate having the Feds roll into town and arrest everybody involved for violation of Federal Hate Crimes law.  You’d be wrong.  Make no mistake, I think the punks that ganged up like a pack of animals to beat one lone guy nearly to death need to be locked up.  Or forced to face a real fighter mano-a-mano, but then we’d have to clean up the mess that would be left.  And then they need to be locked up for what they DID (e.g., assault, attempted murder–take your pick) and not WHY they did it or WHAT they thought.

Our constitution actually demands that people be allowed to wallow in their ignorance.  They just can’t act on their ignorance when it adversely affects others.  Let me clarify that. With a few exceptions, you can say and believe and read and write most anything you want. And your thoughts and words can be really, really dumb–like rock dumb. But when your stupidity infringes on the safety of others, as it inevitably will do, like when you decide to blow up a tree stump in your back patio with five sticks of dynamite, then “the man” will come knocking on your door.

Hate crime laws cross the line by attempting an end around “double jeopardy” in criminal cases that are not properly prosecuted the first time.  [Double jeopardy is prosecuting someone twice for the same crime.] They came about because of some missteps of justice in the past where crimes were committed against individuals but the guilty were not brought to justice.   These miscarriages of justice were often attributed to racism.   But instead of doing the hard work of fixing the corrupt judicial systems, the “powers-that-be” decided to exert more federal control over the populace and punish thought rather than deed.

The problem is, if you have an interest in freedom of speech, you might want to recognize that hate crime legislation is just one more step down the slippery slope of constraining this important right.

And so I cry “foul.”

On another note, if black and brown people want to be treated as equals, then why do so many cry “foul” when hate crime laws are applied to them? Is it only white people who hate? Is it only white people who victimize others because of their ancestry? In the case of Brian Milligan, it took nearly two weeks for some prominent members of the black community in Buffalo to stand behind this young man. This occured when a number or preachers excoriated their parishioners for not helping to find the culprits:

“The story [finally] touched a nerve with several members of Buffalo’s African-American community, including a local pastor who leads a predominantly black church in Buffalo. ‘At first, it didn’t affect me the way that it would have if I heard it was a black teen attacked,’ said the Rev. Darius Pridgen, who spent years fighting for civil rights for African-Americans. ‘But after I saw his father on TV pleading with the community to find the assailants, I decided I had to go after the people who beat this kid.’ Pridgen said he felt that the community has turned a collective blind eye to the beating. So he gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon at the True Baptist Church on a Sunday after the attack, appealing to his congregation to help find the culprits. ‘He didn’t deserve to be beaten this way,’ Pridgen recalled saying at the service. ‘If you believe this, put your hands together.’ If it was a black teen, Pridgen said, ‘We would have been protesting with flags and everything else.’” [CNN]

By the way, this is where the hypocrisy enters the story. You either walk for justice for everyone or you don’t walk at all. People know who these attackers are…and I want to ask them what they’d say to the white people whose silence protected white thugs who attacked a black or brown man.

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posted by Sam Richards

Do you have any idea how many times you’ve been lied to and didn’t know it? Really…think about it. How often does your silly, gullible self accept something as true because…well…because you believed the source? And how often have you passed on the lie to others? It’s painful for me to even think about it in my own case.

So I recently received an email from a friend that contained a video of a story that Fox News broadcast a while back. The tag line said that I needed to watch it to understand a terrible injustice brought about by liberals, illegal immigration, and political correctness — not necessarily in that order. It was one of those emails that I receive once or twice per week. Take a look at the video for yourself (it’s only a 36 second clip):

If your first response is to tilt your head to the side and scratch the back of your skull while having a dazed and confused look on your face, then you know exactly how it affected me. The thought that went along with said reaction, however, was the same one that I had when I was a kid and someone offered me the opportunity to see some freak such as a “bearded lady” at the local carnival — “this simply sounds too crazy to be true.”

Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to conduct an investigation to see if I could get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened. I started by reading some of the comments that were being made on YouTube. They were pretty scathing: “Round ‘em up and send ‘em home,” said one patriot. Another brain surgeon in the making chimed in, “This is what happens when we elect a black man as president.” (The politically correct violation that is referenced in the video occurred a couple of years ago, by the way, long before Obama entered our national spotlight.) Clearly, these blockheads were not searching for the real story and so I would not find it there.

So I plugged some combination of words such as “Oregon Mexican firefighter fired” and quickly found what I wanted: a statement from the State of Oregon’s Department of Forestry that explained the matter in considerable detail. It took me all of about 45 seconds to read, but what it revealed was very depressing (given the number of people who watched and believed the original story). I’ll summarize it for you here:

Oregon’s Department of Forestry contracts private fire crews. (Remember conservatives, privatization = cost savings = free market capitalism.) If these companies choose to hire non-English-speaking firefighters for a crew, then they must have bilingual crew leaders because while English is the official language of firefighting in the U.S., crew leaders MUST be able to communicate with their crews for purposes of safety. If a private company hires Mexican firefighters, then English only speaking crew leaders can’t lead that team. If they hire only English-speaking firefighters, then the crew leaders need only have the ability to speak English.

It makes sense that so many people hate liberals and Mexicans and political correctness with stories like this floating around on the WWW. Who wouldn’t be clamoring for the microphone to add to the shouting chorus of red-blooded citizens who want to preserve the United States for the “real Americans” (not to be confused with Native Americans, of course).

So how many times have you been duped by such an email or a rumor? How often do you find yourself saying, “No way. This can’t possibly be true. I have to tell everyone I know so this outrage will stop.” And how often do you follow that up with, “This sounds fishy and so I’d better explore it before I pass it on down the rumor mill.”?

This stuff cuts both ways, mind you, because misinformation enters the public discourse from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum. (This story originally aired on Fox News, but left-wing blogs and web sites picked it up and carried it as though it was true, by the way.) My gut inclination tells me that the right is slightly better at putting out misinformation than the left, but only because they have more money to do so. I think that both are equal in terms of their scruples about lying–but the right-wing is better at it and more flagrant about it than the left-wing. My personal opinion, folks. Perhaps that’s just because more of their political operatives have written tell all books about their strategies and misdeeds. (If you haven’t read any of these and you fancy yourself a conservative, then perhaps you ought to take a look.)

An addendum: One respondent who is a firefighter noted the utmost importance of communication while fighting fires and pointed out that non-English speaking firefighters would be problematic on English speaking crews. I absolutely agree and would maintain that Mexicans who do not speak English should NOT be on crews with U.S. firefighters who only speak English. To which I respond…no kidding.

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posted by Sam Richards

Clearly slavery is one of those touchy subjects for people in the United States. White people don’t fully understand it’s lasting legacy and often have the idea that after the Civil War ended in 1865, slaves were free to climb on up the mobility ladder as far as they wanted to go. People of color, African Americans in particular, are generally more cognizant of how white supremacy has continued to affect the life paths of the descendants of former slaves. They are much more likely to understand the ways in which black Americans were rarely offered the opportunity to compete fairly for the “prizes” that awaited white Americans at the finish line of the race to embrace the American Dream.

The problem is that with all of this talk of the legacy of slavery we forget that the institution has never ended for nearly thirty million people around the world. And we forget that all of us help to keep these “modern day slaves” in bondage when we purchase goods that they have manufactured. And by “all of us” I do mean to include the living descendants of slaves.

In keeping with my iconoclastic image, I just want to put this out there for people to chew on…

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posted by Bryson Nobles

Probably.  The 2009 definition of racist seems to be:

a person who carelessly says or does anything race-related within earshot of a race member other than their own that at least one person with an active imagination could take exception to, irregardless of the merits of the statement.

So maybe Glenn Beck is right; maybe Obama IS a racist.  But then so is he just by saying it. 

And now so am I. See how that works?  It’s all a bit ridiculous actually.  What is even more ridiculous is Glenn Beck is now popular for his aggressive opinions (while Kanye is crucified – damn, more racism), in the same country that put people in jail for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts just 4 years ago.  But…somehow this is cool (damn, more racism).

Isn’t it also a stretch to call Obama “racist” because of his past, and maybe privately maintained, connection with radical Reverend Wright.  Well, let’s consider this: George Bush is a white guy from Texas, an Ivy League alum, who likes to hunt and comes from a family with a very high social status because of his grandfather’s dealings and his father’s career.  For my money, the odds of him having a “Reverend Wright” in his life, a relationship that he’d feel publicly obliged to denounce if it came into the public arena, is extremely likely. Is that a racist conclusion?  But hey…what are you gonna do?

What’s more interesting is WHY Obama is a being called a racist.  I had an odd suspicion that Obama could be the beginning of the end of racism.  But not like most people think.  I saw Obama’s presidential win as an ethnic “win” for white people.  As my imagination would have it, white intellectuals have never quite been able to overcome the “black people can’t be racist because they don’t have power and authority to oppress or exclude white people” response in the race dialogue.  Enter Obama.  Black, check!  Power and authority, check!  Oppression of republicans in the predominately white Congress and exclusion of tax benefits for the wealthy (whites), double check!!  We have a winner.

Add to that that everything is about race with him, even when it’s not, and the conversation is bound to happen.  I think that it could be a blessing is disguise however because the day we find white people calling black people racist at the same rate the blacks say it about whites, it is probably losing its impact.  There was once power in the exclusive rights to label people racist.  But, as sure as white people abandon the suburbs when black people arrive, so too will black people abandon labeling folks racist for ironically the same reason – they both lose their value.

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posted by Chenjerai Kumanyika

What’s good? This is crazy. DON’T WATCH THIS WHOLE VIDEO (unless you’re hooked on politics like me) but skim through it quickly to get the details on this ACORN investigation. You can get the main idea by watching the first 3:00 minutes and then watch from 5:30 -6:15.

A little background: The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a community-based organization in the United States that advocates for low and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues. They’ve got some problems though because some of their employees are more than happy to engage in shady activity…

Wait!! Before you go off with predictable shock and awe comments at ACORN’s actions-stop. Breathe. Briefly inform yourself about ACORN.

Then consider a couple of things.

1.  Some of the main things that ACORN does are to help people find housing through direct actions and lobbying for fair housing legislation.

2.  According to the Washington Examiner, ACORN received $53 million dollars from federal tax coffers since 1994 (note that most of it goes to housing for poor people – click HERE if you’re interested) That’s a lot of money. And…

3.  Wall street has received over $500 billion dollars in federal aid for to heal their wounds from gaming the housing system.

4.  Private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan such as KBR and Blackwater have cost taxpayers billions in excessive, padded billing costs.

So the political media circus is taking full advantage of this. Folks on the right are gleefully holding this up as an example of everything that we fear about the Obama Administration – excessive social programs, corruption, tax payer money going to thieves, and black people. (By the way, ACORN has fired the employees on this video and called the incidents “an attempt at ‘gotcha journalism.’”) Folks on the left are going to try to defend ACORN’s larger purpose without looking like hypocrites. Obama says he has bigger things on his mind. Yeah…like what?

Now go off. I did.

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posted by Sam Richards

This isn’t up here for people to respond to as a blog assignment. But I just couldn’t resist sharing it as a way to point out how incredibly difficult it can be to be a white man. Lord have mercy on our poor, struggling souls. “I wear bright socks.” From the hair styles I’m thinking that this is from the mid 1980s. I can only hope that somebody gave these fine blokes some lovin’, especially the Viking.

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posted by Sam Richards

So Harry Allen has an interesting critique of white racist rants about Kanye West that spread across twitterlandia in the hours (make that minutes) after the tantrum he threw at the VMA ceremony. If you’re not aware of what that means, it’s a yearly gathering of corporate created celebrities (along with a few organically talented artists) who hand out awards to one another so that the corporate owners can more easily entice unsuspecting consumers to shell out more of their hard-earned cash to consume the images-words-songs that very few of those celebrities created in the first place (because their not truly artists). Whatever…

So Mr. West has a moment of psychiatric infamy and the rest is FB and T history.

Back to Harry Allen, who trolls the Web and finds tweet upon tweet of insulting and racist comments about Kanye and asserts that these tweets represent the underbelly of whiteness — public faces of respectability and politeness followed by sudden bursts of racist ranting when one of their/our own (in this case, Taylor Swift) is publicly insulted by persons black or brown.

The tweets are pretty raw and clearly go into the “WTF Are They Thinking?” folder. It’s amazing that white people feel as comfortable as black and brown comedians to attach their name and face (and Twitter ID) to the n-bomb with such gusto and glee. Check out Harry Allen’s blog entry, which you can read here.

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posted by Laurie Mulvey

Girl suffers burns over seventy percent of her body after lying 16 minutes in a coin operated suntanning bed.

Let’s not forget about skin darkening practices—and the premature aging, painful burning, sun poisoning and skin cancer that result because light-skinned people often don’t feel good about themselves when they’re “too white.” As a white person myself, this is a refrain I’ve heard many times—and one that taught me that it was normal to put oil on my skin and swelter in the summer sun even though the act made me cranky and uncomfortable. But I thought I was moving closer to a standard of beauty that I needed to attain. So I did it—as do many like me.

Collage of skin cancers

And let’s not forget about the orange-y complexions that result when white people bake themselves in space age tanning ovens all winter to maintain their “color.” What do we make of this? What do we think white people are trying to accomplish while dark skinned people have the idea that they should be lighter? Who are white people emulating?

And what keeps all of us from ever really juxtaposing these practices of whitening and darkening our skins? Are we afraid to conclude that human beings are just sad creatures who are never satisfied with what they have inherited no matter what the power politics and hegemonic context in which they live?

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posted by Sam Richards

In my twenty years of teaching about race I think I can count on my ten fingers the things that I’ve heard or read that I thought were utterly and unquestionably “racist.” That’s a word that gets kicked around far too liberally and to which people apply far too many non-sensical definitions. Anything they don’t like, for example, is often called “racist” if it involves human physical or cultural differences in any way.

So here’s the technical definition of the word: believing that some person or group is superior or inferior than another person or group because of some identifiable physical characteristics that they cannot change (because they’re fixed, bodily features). That’s it. Simple. So people with curly or kinked hair are superior or better or preferable because they have curly or kinked hair. Generally there is some justification association with the identified characteristic (e.g., kinked hair causes increased blood flow to the brain and increased blood flow leads to greater intelligence). I’ve never heard anyone make that argument, by the way, although I’m sure that it has been articulated.

There is nothing in this academic definition that presupposes that less powerful groups–and in the West that would be black and brown people–cannot be racist because they lack the ability to limit the collective abilities of more powerful groups. It’s just a straight-up definition that can apply to anyone, even the most marginalized and disenfranchised people in any society.

So along comes the issue of skin whitening. White skin is better than brown skin is the belief spread round the planet. Why? Because it’s more beautiful. There’s rarely some sort of practical argument linked to this particular preference, aside from making the case that lighter skin will lead to greater opportunities in a society of people who hold dark-skinned people with distrust or even in contempt. That’s pretty practical given the many hundreds of studies that conclude that the darker the skin the more numerous the hurdles people face in every facet of social and political life.

Watch this CNN video about the proliferation of skin whitening creams. It’s so blatently “racist” (i.e., grounded in the belief that people with lighter skin are better than those with darker skin) that the defenders of the practice look foolish in their justifications.

So what to do? We can’t legislate this kind of activity. If people want to go so far as to bleach their skin, then who am I to stop them. Of course, what if they’re going to unknowingly do serious bodily damage to themselves? And what about the fact that people who play into this image that “white is better” make it more difficult for the people who are happy to live with the skin that was endowed to them by their creator–but who nonetheless suffer the consequences of racism that are strengthened by the perpetuation of this practice?

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Hypocrisy occurs when we use standards to evaluate other people’s thoughts and actions that we do not use for ourselves — largely as a way of feeling good about who we are and what we are doing. While there may be no way to avoid being hypocritical, it’s quite revealing when we don’t judge our own actions as harshly as those of others.

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Returning to Tuesday’s class in which I discussed the dynamics of cultural transformation and how such transformation generally occurs on the fringes of collectivities…

When we encounter the “change makers” in a culture, more often than not they’re people who have moved away from the mainstream and sought out ways to think outside the box. Most of us, most of the time, aren’t doing that; we’re smack dead in the middle of schools of fish carrying us through the well travelled and comfortable waters (that we don’t even see as H2O). Einstein wasn’t a professor or a student in some top physics program when he envisioned his theories, for example. Those professors would have scoffed at his imaginative discoveries and likely would have lured him into their unimaginative clutches for fear of not belonging. But his independence from the judgement of those he admired allowed him to follow his own call and create a new way of seeing the world.

As I think about all of the sub-cultural groups into which I’m embedded and that cajol me to continue to be a supporting actor in my own life, I’m constantly struck by how much I think inside the boxes that are all around me. I dress like my colleagues; I eat most of the same foods and dishes as others around me; I carry the thoughts that are similar to those of my friends; my music is a mix of the styles to which I’ve been exposed. That’s an interesting example, by the way. I was recently listening to classical Chinese music and it didn’t arouse my senses. So I kept listening…and still nothing. Why not? What am I missing by not hearing a synthesis between those melodic tones and the others that clearly appeal to me. I could be sitting on the most intriguing and dynamic fusion of sound that I could ever encounter, one that would open in my mind some amazing breakthrough idea about life — but I don’t hear it because maybe, just maybe I’m too stuck in the center of some familiar cultural system.

I understand that this is normal, that this is inevitable, that this happens to everyone. But I’m searching for dynamic wisdom…for something much larger than myself Maybe that’s just me.

Check out this video:

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In this electronic image of a poster with head shots of U.S. Presidents, take a look at the “photo” that was selected for Obama. Let me help you. Check out the lower right-hand corner. The image was a joke sent out in an email by an aide in the Tennessee state legislature. I think you can assume that the aid was a GOP staff member–but don’t be fooled to think that there are no Democratic aides that would make a similar blunder.

This goes into the file labeled, “What in the world were they thinking?” I’m torn between assuming, on one hand, that the people who end up in this file are just a few knuckleheads AND that this is emblematic of the depth of racism in our society on the other. (People really do seem to make a lot of racist jokes…or so I’ve heard.)

Here’s another one for the file.

Shortly after the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Boston police officer and member of the Massachusetts National Guard sent out an email–and to lots of people, I should add–in which he called Gates a “banana eating jungle monkey.” Ouch.

By the way, there is a sub-folder in this file that is titled “What the F are they thinking?” and this one probably goes there. The police office, Captain Justin Barrett (he’s not a twenty year old rookie), asserted that he felt remorse and was sorry for the email and that he is not racist because, afterall, he has friends from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. “It was a poor choice of words,” Barrett said. “I didn’t mean it in a racist way. I treat everyone with dignity and respect.”

Can I disentangle this just a bit. It seems to me that if I went to a KKK meeting and asked someone in a hood to define “negro,” they just might say something like, “Negro? Why yes, son, that would be a ‘banana eating jungle monkey’.” What else would they possibly say that would be acceptable to the racist hoards waiting to reclaim the country from the brown skinned barbarians?

Here’s another one for the WTF file:

Unfortunately, this guy only had the funds to pay an entry level, mail order public relations clean-up person and so he couldn’t come up with something more convincing than blaming it on supporters of Charles Darwin. That was a pathetic attempt to spin this slip and it went nowhere. My god, brother, have some respect for our intellect.

I find myself saying some pretty off-the-hook things at random moments and yet I never seem to slip into this level of racist banter. I guess since I don’t have the thoughts, the words never leave my lips. But I have to wonder if this how many of us think in our private moments. And then when these private moments get loose in the public domain, they spin about until we’re all dizzy with the feeling of impending dread of having to suffer another media circus.

Sometimes the “attack of the racists” goes a bit too far — like the condemnation of the poor schmuck who a few years back correctly and unwisely used “niggardly” in a meeting among colleagues. He got hammered pretty hard because his office mates didn’t know what the word meant. (Of course, he might have been baiting them because without the “dly” the word is pronounced just like the N-bomb.)

Other times, however, I suspect that people who engage in what is so obviously offensive and racist behavior clearly deserve what they get. “We don’t give a damn if it’s part of your cultural heritage; we don’t do that any more.” Sure there can be a very fine line between these two reactions, and I don’t want to be the judge of who crosses it. But sometimes enough if enough.

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