Tag Archives: race

Worthless “Black Privilege”

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My eyes roll into the back of my head….

I’d trade my “athletic ability for survival and also for reward” in for trans-oceanic economic and military power and the lack of a 2nd Amendment.

I’d trade in my “overall and general privilege to put blame elsewhere and be rewarded for playing the victim” in for a time machine to go back in time and find a way to stop European businessmen from buying our ancestors in West Africa.

I’d trade in “regional and national organizations for the advancement of Black People” for reparations.

I’d trade in “Black President” for a new U.S. Constitution which creates a parliamentary republic, a social contract that is much more empathetic to the less-advantaged classes of our society, and features contributions by (and for the equities of) people of color, women, LGBT people and the working class.

Unlike better-minded Euro-Americans, this person wants these things that we “have”. Please, let’s trade.

Clash of Civilizations with a Side of Trade War

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You know how difficult it is to be atheist, secularist and pro-migration right now?

The Euro-American Christian far-right are having their long-awaited post-9/11 moment against the general Muslim population in this heavily-unemployed majority-Christian country while the Muslim far-right are having their long-running moment against Christians and other religious minorities in heavily-unemployed majority-Muslim countries.

The Christian far-right wants to lower themselves to the Muslim far-right’s standards, and by whatever means necessary. Fears of sharia law, ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood run rampant in the Christian far-right at the same time as fears of “Zionists” and “Crusaders” are trumpeted by the Muslim far-right in North Africa, West Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, they’re running roughshod over the lives and rights of both co-religionists and minorities, but mostly co-religionists who don’t follow their doctrines to a T.

I just wonder: are we going to do a clash of civilizations AND a trade war at the same time?

Between Milo Yiannopoulos and Kim Burrell

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Between Milo Yiannopoulos and Kim Burrell, similarities:

* They have something attractive about them (Milo is a twink who styles himself as the epitome of White gayness, Kim has an amazing jazzy voice for gospel music which makes her a sought-after “friend” for singers of the urban milieu);
* They cash in on others’ social advances (Milo likes Black penis in bed “so he can’t be racist”, Kim cashed a check from openly-bisexual singer Frank Ocean to guest on his album);
* They are otherwise reactionary personalities (Milo is openly disdainful against Black people protesting police brutality, Kim is apparently disdainful against gay and bisexual people);
* They preach to their respective choirs (Milo to reactionary nationalists, Kim to social conservatives in the Black church).

Neither individuals share my headspace much. They’re not even shames or disappointments.

And yes, Tariq Nasheed, Milo has been protested greatly for his unoriginal anti-Black and anti-Trans screeds. Pay attention.

(White/Cis/Het/Male) Class-first Politics

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So I’m reading this one tweetstorm from an Irish venture capitalist on how to take back power from conservative and white nationalist politics.

Sounds like an interesting thread, but then I see this:

“Let me tell you what you can’t defend: illegal immigrants, Muslim immigration, most identity politics, pronoun-style feminism, world peace.”….

“Things you cannot attack: foreign wars, the police, mass surveillance, 1984-style use of the internet, and expect key escrow and worse.”…..

“All that territory is ceded. There’s simply no way a right wing government will tolerate mass outcry about those issues, or serious dissent.”

Earlier in the thread, he suggests exploiting fault lines between Confederate and Christian demographics and appealing to the latter because they’re the largest demographic in this country. Later in the thread, he suggests the defense of abortion access should be the best cause around which the center and left should rally.

So, if I’m reading this right, intersectional social justice should be put on hold or outright discarded from the program until left-wing politics return to electoral vogue.

Outcry over deaths of unarmed PoC at the hands of police will have to be muted because far-right government. Defense of LGBT employment and public accommodations access will be extremely lowkey because far-right government. Illegal immigration, DREAMers and war refugees will take several way-in-the-back seats because far-right government. Diversity, visibility and empowerment of historically-marginalized demographics in corporate/government/nonprofit boardrooms and employment will be de-prioritized because far-right government. Racial anything – gerrymandering, voter suppression, overpolicing – will be placed on the backburner because far-right government.

But that’s all “identity politics” of the minority. It’s all expendable and trifling to the majority’s fight.

 

Is it Mere “Blackness” or a Violent “Southernness”

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So I was reading an article on Vox critiquing this book by Barry Latzer, “The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America”, which blames African-Americans’ import of “violent black culture” for the rise in urban crime following the end of the Great Migration in the 1960s.

Then the article mentions that Latzer ties “Black culture” to violent White Southern culture, also known as the “Southern culture of honor” studied by Richard Nesbitt and Dov Cohen. The article mentions that this hypothesis has been touted by Thomas Sowell.

Really? Thomas Sowell? The Black supply-side conservative academic who has compared President Obama to Hitler more than once?

Oy.

So apparently, Sowell wrote in the title essay of his 2005 book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” that “black ghetto culture” is a relic of the highly dysfunctional white southern redneck culture which emanated from the “Cracker culture” of Northern England (among the livestock herders of the border between England and Scotland) and the Scots-Irish of Northern Ireland. Sowell attributes the following to this entire cultural lineage from England to Southern Black America:

“an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship,… and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.”

Sowell contrasts this cultural lineage against the cultural lineage which emanated from farmers and more urbane types in lower England to what became New England, which emphasized a “Protestant work ethic”, literacy, civic participation, entrepreneurship in a wider number of economic activity, and quieter religious observance. He extends this latter culture – positively – to African-American antebellum New Englanders and Afro-Caribbean migrants.

Sowell, Nesbitt and Cohen all attribute to both White Southern and Black Southern cultures a greater degree of possession-driven violence and aggressive mentalities, both of which negatively impacted Black Southern culture through violent racist, anti-Black regimes and led Southern African-Americans to import this violent culture to urban areas in the North in the 20th century.

But I didn’t know that Sowell is of this opinion that “Black American culture” or “ghetto culture” as we know it now is a relic of White Southern culture. I know that he tends to spar against liberal strawpeople to make his point and preach to the choir, but I would say that his indictment of Black American culture can just as well be an indictment of White Southern culture and its political manifestations against generations of African-Americans in the South.

You can strip the VRA of its protections against racial animus in voting rules.

You can gut welfare, affirmative action, voting protections and municipal rights.

You can excuse it all by saying that “slavery and racism are over, so pull yourself up by your own bootstrap!”

But don’t you ever take away that sweet, sweet Electoral College from “Middle America”.

How Afro-Cubans Fought the Cuban “Jim Crow”

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“During the war years Spain sought, with considerable success, to divide Cubans along racial lines by portraying itself as the defender of white “civilization” and the rebels as black barbarians pursuing the goal of an Africanized, Haitianized Cuba. Once the rebels had been defeated, Spanish policy changed direction, making an open bid for Afro-Cuban support by gradually repealing the caste laws. Spanish officials did not act spontaneously but, rather, under pressure from a well-organized civil rights movement based in the social clubs, mutual aid societies, and civic organizations of the Afro-Cuban middle class. Under the leadership of journalist and political activist Juan Gaulberto Gomez, in 1887 these organizations formed an islandwide Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la Raza de Color to coordinate the civil rights struggle. Between 1878 and 1893 Afro-Cuban activists obtained government edicts outlawing restrictions on interracial marriage; segregation in public education and public services; and the keeping of official birth, death, and marriage records in volumes separated by race.”
—
Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000
By George Reid Andrews

#Cuba #AfroCubans

White Racist Persecution Complex

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White Supremacists/Nationalists/Alt-Right folks LOVE to compare themselves and their plight to that of African-Americans in their demand for “ethno-states”. They devalue actual, living, breathing Euro-descended people in the process.

The thing is, if the slave trade hadn’t happened, if our African ancestors’ families were not forcibly broken up, would we even be describing ourselves as “Black” or even “African-American” in the first place?

We would have been Yoruba, or Asante, or Dahomean, or Kongo, or whatever other ethnicities we would have brought with us to the Americas. We would not have been put through such a genealogical ringer in which only the words “nigger”, “Negro” or “colored” matter in their description of one of a similar skin color.

Instead, our post-slavery ancestry is all we really have. Even the angriest Black Nationalist is doing a lot of (slipshod but well-meaning) compensation for what was taken from us in over 246 years of slavery on the North American continent.

What similar trauma troubles those who yearn for “White Pride Worldwide” or “A White Homeland for Ourselves and Our Children”?

What great historical, enduring cataclysm happened to Europeans or to people of European descent that would see a minority clamor for a militarized “safe space” in the 21st century?

Was it 9/11? Was it the refugee crisis ensuing, eventually, from Euro-American adventures in Iraq + the chaotic proxy war in Syria?

Or was it the Ashkenazi minority and their sufferings of Christian European hypocrisy over millennia? Even now, the genocidal resentment against Ashkenazi Jews among White Supremacists is just as rabid as it is senseless and unfounded in logic. “Show us where the big bad Jew hurt you.”

Nothing has been lost from White rule. It’s still a White Man’s world. It’s still a White Man’s country.

These White Supremacists – the National Policy Institute, for one – are acting like they’ve been losing so much ground for so long, and that Trump will gain back what they’ve imagined as losing.

But their imagined traumas simply don’t compare. And the pain they wish to inflict upon not only people of color but also other White people for flouting their ideals is unjustified and unjust.