Lucky White Girl

Rich on "The All-White Elephant in the Room"

Here's an even better column on the controversial issue of candidates and their loud-mouth preachers.  Frank Rich says

... it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

...which means all these white Republicans seeking out endorsements from racist bigots like the Rev. John Hagee, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell better think twice about throwing stones at Obama.  What's more,

...the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house.

Thanks for the perspective, Mr. Rich!

CBS story on racial disparities in media coverage of missing/abused women

I was pleasantly surprised to see this is a CBS story:

Murdered Pregnant Women: The Racial Divide:

"Cases of maternal homicide involving minority women are underreported and underpublicized"

And by the way, that link goes to a blog called Black and Missing!! which is linked to down there under Tamika Huston's picture (whose link is dead by the way, I'll have to fix that.  The site that was dedicated to publicizing her disappearance later reported on her death and had lots of resources on taking action to change this.  Now the domain name's up for sale.)

Could this be a sign we're having an influence on mainstream media?  That they've started taking these stories seriously I think is thanks to the work of all the great bloggers out there who've repeatedly put stories like this in the spotlight.  Many of them are listed in my blogroll.  Check them out!

 

"Playing" Race

Wow, there is a really interesting story this morning about a new play that deals with the complicated questions of race and racial identity and what it means for us to play these race-based roles in everyday life.  It's called Yellowface by David Hwang.  This NYTimes review doesn't nearly do it justice, but man, I'd love to see this!  If anyone knows anything about it, please let me know!

Racial tension hits home, marchers take anti-racism message to DC

I was really sad to see this story in the Gainesville paper (yeah I still check in on what's happening in my hometown!). Bradford County is largely rural and small-town-ish.

Yesterday here in DC, in response to the increasing surge of these sorts of hate crimes, there was a HUGE march to the Justice Department of folks demanding that our leaders pay attention to this trend and take it seriously. Al Sharpton was here. I only caught a tiny bit of the news coverage on CNN I think it was and it seemed surprisingly positive for a change! I was glad to see that the march was noticed and the messages of the marchers taken seriously.

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On a personal note: things are still going well for me here. I went out for drinks with a couple of my co-workers last night and we met up with one of my new roommates and her co-workers. I had a blast. It's really, really good to work in a place where there's such good repoire among everyone! The more I think about it the more it makes sense that I had to save up 8 months of luck to get this job. I am very happy!

Hey Slick! Show us that twisty logic again!

Do you remember hearing about the controversial remarks by John Tanner, the Department of Justice's Chief of Voting about how voter id laws disenfrancise white people more than people of color?  According to his logic, it's because the disparities in health care in this country mean that "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first".  "So," he says, "anything that 'disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities".  He concludes that therefore white people are being more disenfrancised by voter id laws than are people of color.

Hmmm... stop.  Rewind.  Lemme see that move again, Slick!   You lost me there...

Mr. Tanner was trying to use a sound argument:  Namely, that white people tend to live longer than people of color because of the disparities in a white supremacist society means that white people tend to have better access to health care and such than do people of color.  (It's all about economics! says the Marxist)

but wait!  That's only half the story.  There's a sleight of hand trick here:

It's true that structural racism affects people's life spans but people aren't automatically disenfranchised by virtue of their being elderly.  They're disenfranchised by virtue of their being poor and elderly.  Poor people are less likely to have IDs and to have the documents such as birth certificates needed in order to get those IDs.  Why?  Because of racism.  People of color are more likely to be poor for exactly the same reason they're more likely to lack access to health care; because racism has very real economic consequences.   And anyway voter disenfranchisement is not something the Department of Justice should be condoning!

I applaud you for recognizing the disparities in our system, Mr. Tanner, but wow, what a way to shed some murk on the subject!

Rest in Peace, Mr. Bellencourt

Vernon Bellencourt, longtime leader of the American Indian Movement "respected by many, hated by some, but ... never ignored" (his famous quote describing the organization) died a few days ago.  He was 75.

Story in the Washington Post.
A Lifetime of Protest (from the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis-St.Paul)

Read blogs --you learn lots of depressing things about the world.

Just catching up on some of my blog reading and geez... while I'm a bit peevish about not hearing about this before now it just goes to show how important blogs and independent media are for keeping us informed of what's going on in the world...did you hear about this?  West Virginia rape/torture case?  And the fact that they decided that somehow it's *not* a hate crime?!!  Wow.  Unbelievable.  Reminds me of the Dunbar Village case in West Palm Beach a few months ago.  Here's an update on that by the way (you have to scroll down past weird formatting to see the article on that last link).  I have been following the Jena 6 case --lots of folks blogging about that and I'm glad the protests went so well (we had a small one here in Gainesville even) but lord all this news that goes beyond merely "bad" and is well into the "absolutely horrifying" category makes me so tired!  It's just overwhelming. The only way I have to cope is to tune out for a few weeks.  So just because I'm not blogging about some horrible news story doesn't mean I don't care about it or think it's not important; it's just because I can't do this all the time.  Really I've barely been hanging on as a blogger lately.  I just don't have the energy anymore. Anyone have any advice for not getting overwhelmed?

Some good blogs who keep plugging away at these issues:

Brownfemipower/Women of Color Blog
Writing is Fighting
SlantTruth
Rachel's Tavern

Obviously not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to leave links to others you know of, if you like.

Okay to hate X group of people?

A friend of a friend of mine who is a retired priest has often said that sex offenders are the modern world's lepers --the people that decent people (e.g. not psycho killers) believe it's okay to hate: the people who are society's outcasts, the scorned, the rejects.  In Biblical times people with leprosy, a highly contagious skin disease, were the lowest of the low.  People spit on them and ignored them and were not embarrassed by the disgust towards them that festered in their hearts.  It was just the socially-sanctioned thing to do and feel: one did not talk to, look at, touch or in any way associate with lepers.  Period.  (On the other hand Lot, who slept with his own daughters, was a pillar of ancient Hebrew society.  Go figure.)  No one cared about lepers; they were non-humans.  (Well Jesus did.  He'd walk right up, sit down and have a conversation.  He'd even touch them without gloves on!  The radical!  No wonder they crucified the guy!)

But I don't want to talk about Jesus in this post.  I want to talk about the phenomena of socially-sanctioned hate-- when it's socially acceptable to hate an entire group of people.  Who are today's lepers?  Why is it that still today we have people that otherwise decent, compassionate individuals are not ashamed to admit they detest.  This quote comes from a story in today's local paper:

"She said people don't want to [go to this place] because of all the ________  people there."

What kind of people do you think she's talking about?  Lepers?  Sex offenders?  People of color?  Which group of people is it okay to publically admit that you hate?  Thirty years ago a woman like this might have said without hesitation that, "[her kind of] people don't want to go to [the place she's referring to] because of all the black people there".  The racism of thirty years ago was socially sanctioned.  She's not now (and wouldn't have been then) mortified to be quoted in the daily paper saying something like this. 

In this case, the people's she's talking about are homeless.

Since she's not at all ashamed of her prejudice, I'll print her name here to be attached to her words.  Her name is Linda McGurn.   She's a rich downtown developer and she is proud to be a paragon of one of the worst characteristics of human nature: that part of us that fears and despises and dehumanizes large segments of the human population based on random biases within our culture.  Ms. McGurn, when your life is over and you lie looking back on all you've accomplished rest assured of one thing: No one will ever confuse you with a big-hearted person.

Who's Indian?

There's been a lot written about white people who want to shed their identity and "discover" that they're really something else.  While it's hard for most whites to suddenly claim to have African ancestry, it's somewhat easier to claim Native American ancestry.  The popularity of New Age spirituality in the 90s further increased the trend and the decade saw many white people attending pow-wows and partaking in sweats after having suddenly discovered a "Cherokee grandmother" in their closet.

The case of the Lumbees, however, seems different.  Their claims to "Indian-ness" go way beyond the 90s fad era.  Congress recognized them fifty years ago but they're not granted the full rights as a Native American tribe.  It's an interesting, complicated story with a lot of money from a finite pie of federal assistance funds at stake.  Here's a link to the NPR story.  Give it a listen.  It gives a whole new spin on the concept of identity and what identity means, doesn't it?  When the answer to the question, who are you? has a monetary influence, how does that reflect on our personal concepts of self-worth?

No more Chief Illiniwek

I forgot to blog about this.  I'm doing it now only because I've written so much about the racist mascot issue in the past.  Good for them --those who struggled for twenty years to get the university to drop this shameful Native Americans as fierce fighting animal imagery.  It's about time.  Welcome to the 21st century: where people are people and animals are team mascots.