Ultimately, I don’t think I’d be suited toward the strictures of marriage. I’ve advocated in my own little ways for marriage equality, but I think that the level of marriage requires an equal amount of romance and a sense of attraction with which I can’t keep up.

Always interesting when right-wing political types claim to experience persecution and intolerance from the powers that be (or activists) for their conservatism. Liberals hardly claim such for their liberalism. Socialists hardly claim such for their socialism. But conservatives claim such for their conservatism. Why?

The story of another direct action to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds back in 2002:

“Assuming the guise of his nom de guerre, the Reverend E. Slave, [Emmett Rufus] Eddy donned a black Santa suit, carried a ladder bearing the names [of] black rights organizers to the South Carolina State House, set it up next to the flagpole, climbed to the top of the flagpole, cut down the Confederate flag, shouted ‘this is for the children,’ and lit it on fire, as state police heckled him from below and tried to douse him with pepper spray.”

For anyone who’s interested: there is MORE than just a presidential election this year. 35 seats in the Senate and all 435 seats in the House are up for grabs in 2016.

Think of this as a bigger version of the midterms. Everything’s at stake. If you or your party mess this up, you mess everything up.

Argument by pro-CSA flag person: “we did not agree with big business and government intervening with our daily lives. We wanted to live for family, our faith, and a simpler way of life. ”

Because *of course* it would be better to live under a stratified aristocracy in which the majority of people of European (read: British) descent lived in severe rural poverty, a few owned most property, and economic mobility was slow like molasses. But hey, at least they weren’t black like those slaves and trouble-making freed Negroes over there, so we’re alright, Jack!

Really, I would LOL at this sympathy for the “simpler way of life” of the South if the sympathy weren’t so… you know… sad.

On #RachelDolezal

Politics, Uncategorized,

#RachelDolezal:

  1. 1) Tumblr’s “transracial” meme might have come to life.
  2. 2) The case of this woman may get to the heart of how externally-enforced that “blackness” and “whiteness”, as polar opposites, have always been. The one-drop rule. Good hair/natural hair. Adjusting early and silently to living within the external confines and internal networks of the African-American community. To have lived the experience, known it from within, entrenched oneself within the network and its effects for so many years, advocated for the dignity of the adopted “ethnic family”, effectively ceded the societal higher ground for a platform which is still constructing itself, is an experience which is odd, complicated and ethically gray. She may have experienced racism or colorism against her person because of this, and she reacted proactively against racism by joining/leading her local NAACP chapter. That’s how deep that Ms. Dolezal was. She subverted the personal tyranny of birth and blood to live as, and experience the good and bad of, the African-American experience.
  3. 3) I don’t begrudge those who actively “pass” as skin-color-related ethnicities, whether one “passes” as being of European or African descent (see Walter Francis White of the NAACP, and how he infiltrated the KKK). I just don’t like it when that pass, or even one’s advancement in social class, is used as a means for raging against the dignity of suspect class(es).
  4. 4) Euro-Americans who intermarry with slave-descended African-Americans, for example, often experience a closer interaction with the ramifications of race and skin color relations, being privy to many of the interior conversations which happen within African-American families. Anti-racist activists are privy to similar levels of interior conversations. Dolezal was even more privy than that, and she lived and breathed it.
  5. 5) I also disagree with Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing) in her comparison on Twitter with women who fake cancer to receive sympathy, since (a) it’s not a “disease” unless we consider the history of cultural perception of dark skin and African descent as a “problem” (b) one may consider oneself pregnant to the point of symptoms of a false pregnancy and (c) she freaking LIVED this and didn’t discard it at the end of the day. This is why I don’t call this a case of “blackface”, but of “passing”. Heck, this is the difference between drag and transgender. Do you take it off at the end of the day, or do you wake up, live your day, go to bed (or, as Diane Sawyer asked Caitlyn Jenner, “do you dream”) as the identity that you’ve crafted for yourself? And when your experience entitles you to interior conversations with people of like station in life, do you exploit those convos for personal gain while trumpeting your identity or do you pay it forward by working in their network and improving their lot in life? I’m fascinated by this experience and how people are taking it.

We’re Just Getting Started in Fixing Ourselves

Uncategorized, , , ,

After a conversation I had last night, plus a thread posted by Pariah, I just realized something.

When people ask African Americans to “get over it”, for us to move beyond slavery and Jim Crow, I wonder if they’re aware of just how long we lived under both. Not just on this continent, but this hemisphere. The first African slaves were brought to the Americas in 1501 (in modern Haiti/Dominican Republic and Brazil); the first person to be declared a slave in North America was in the Virginia colony in 1644. Slavery was last abolished in the Americas in 1888, in Brazil; in the United States, in 1865. This is a difference in hundreds of years. For the United States, it’s a difference of 221 years. Thanks to “partus sequitur ventrum”, a 1662 policy in Virginia which mandated the inheritance of slavery regardless of one’s portion of White English parentage, multiple generations were born, raised and died in slavery. That’s a culture.

Jim Crow: Reconstruction ended in 1877, thus signifying the beginning of the Jim Crow regime. The last outstanding vestiges of Jim Crow were federally dismantled by 1968, the year MLK was murdered. That’s a difference of 91 years. Again, multiple generations were born during this period, even those who were locked into the underclass thanks to the state-level “one-drop rule”. A large portion of our living population was born prior to 1968. That’s a culture. 221 years of chattel slavery, followed by 91 years of violent civil and economic segregation. We’re asking or demanding people who went through a generational culture of state/economic violence, only 47 years out, to “get over it”? 47 years? That’s just two generations away!

So if you wonder about how long it will take for us to “get over slavery” or “get over Jim Crow”, you will probably get an answer from us African-Americans some 312 years from 1968, in the year 2280. Because that’s how long it will take for us to build a longer history and culture than both slavery and Jim Crow combined. That’s how long it will take for generations of culture under both systems to be subsumed into a history of civic equality (if not equity), to adapt even further to this system on our individual terms, to form nostalgias which harken to far more than just those two systems. Until then, don’t expect us to “get over it”.

So I just realized that Joe Pass’ “A Time for Us” is a jazz guitar take on Henry Mancini’s “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet”. I also notice the difference in lyrics: Mancini’s original focuses on “shining hope” for a new world, while Pass’ take says “The Time for Us is NOW”. Both lovely songs.