Tag Archives: race

Lack of Self-Respect Among Black Republicans

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He told the New Times that he had hopes of helping the Trump campaign avoid the mistakes that Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) made in his failed presidential run in 2012. Romney, said Jackson, waited until too late in his campaign to start outreach to nonwhite voters.

“I have been saying repeatedly that you cannot go into black community in the 9th hour of a campaign and ask them to vote for a GOP candidate,” he said. “The party has done a piss poor job of courting the black vote over 50 years. So you have to have more vested interest in time and in your financial effort for the whole campaign, not just in the last 100 days.”

Source: Head of Trump’s black outreach in Florida says ‘piss poor’ campaign doesn’t care about blacks – Raw Story

Thinking about it, I can understand an immigrant from Haiti like Rep. Mia Love of Utah becoming a GOP politician. Because she is an immigrant, she gains from the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps because we’re a nation of immigrants who sought a better life here” doctrine. I don’t find it strange that she follows through on that, first as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and later as a House rep from Utah. She doesn’t even need the Congressional Black Caucus because she rhetorically hates its very existence, despite joining it after joining Congress in 2015 (oops).

But what do African-Americans of antebellum slave descent gain from joining the GOP at this moment of political history? The prevailing consensus in the GOP is that our history is an inconvenience to be glossed over (even glamorized) and not “focused upon”; that our contributions are to be honored but not the trauma which produced those contributions; that our current plight, only 2 adult generations out from the end of Jim Crow, is a result of our “personal lifestyle choices” and not of systemic origin; that we should ditch the Mexicans in order to make more room for (everyone else but) us in the low-skill, high-labor jobs of agriculture, mining, manufacturing and even service industries (which may or may even not be “real jobs worthy of a living minimum wage”); that we should ditch LGBT people and Planned Parenthood clinics in order to make our divorce rate drop, men return to their wives, children have more children, and women stop being so liberated as to make informed choices for their bodies; and other insults to our intelligence.

None of that is appealing to me. None of this makes sense. Maybe if I got into a car accident, got a bad case of amnesia, adopted a new name and identity as a Nigerian immigrant from Lagos, integrated myself into the Nigerian American community like Rachel Dolezal did with African-Americans in Spokane, became religious, set up a business and then decided to go into politics as a moderate Republican Congressperson from Atlanta, this message would be a bit more appealing for me to campaign on and live by. A bit.

Then I would be lauded by those who don’t know any better as another rare Black politician who “never slaved on the Democratic plantation” and joined the party of Lincoln “bcuz freedom.” And Fox News, Breitbart and the National Review would love me for every word I publicly utter.

But that ain’t happening in this timeline of reality. I’d have to shut part of my brain off to join the present GOP even if I were a descendant of antebellum slaves who was anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-welfare or at least just pro-free-market. I’d have to shut off part of my brain to vote for the real estate developer or anyone who endorses him. And most Black Republican descended from antebellum slaves, except for Rep. Mia Love, don’t even sound original to me in their adoption of GOP talking points, especially when those talking points emanate from some angle of gratuitous anti-Blackness and class bigotry. Maybe they’re honest, but not original or nuanced.

We’re looking for empowerment for our families’ and neighbors’ lives that we didn’t have when “things were simpler” and “Black businesses were better” under Jim Crow. The GOP’s austerity and anti-civil rights policies simply don’t provide empowerment for most African-Americans, and they seem to be harming the Euro-American community across the country, too (see Kansas under Brownback, Indiana under Pence, Wisconsin under Walker, Michigan under Snyder and North Carolina under McCrory). The latter may get tired of it soon enough, if they can jump off the nativist train first.

MLK’s description of the 1964 Republican campaign of Barry Goldwater applies just as much to this year and the subsequent landslide that is about to happen against the GOP nominee.

Again.

 

Black America Measured as the Next U.S. State

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I remember reading this article from The Atlantic from a while back which thoroughly measured the economy and infrastructure of Black America as its own nation-state.

However, I don’t know if anyone has ever thought about if Black America were its own state within the Union – a majority-minority state demographically dominated but never self-governed at the state level by people of African descent.

But what if it were? What would be the prevailing politics of this state?

Let’s call it the 52nd state in the Union – the State of New Afrika. The 51st would be Puerto Rico.

In the State of New Afrika, how would Black Democrats govern and represent their districts? How would Black Republicans?

What would be the state of law enforcement in New Afrika? How much control would the majority-Black state government have over its majority-Black cities?

State governments have perhaps more control over the function of cities and their residents than the federal government does. The provision of funding for public schools, for law enforcement, for prisons (public or private), for water resources, for roads, for recreation, for environmental protections and so on. No city in the United States except for the District of Columbia (subject to Congress) has such a broad control over their infrastructure. The federal government is also hobbled in its ability to reach cities because of state government control.

So if Black America lopsidedly dwells in metropolitan areas, but these metropolitan areas’ statuses are ultimately determined at the state level where the majority of leaders are not of the same economic, ethnocultural or regional background, what does that say about how much control we actually have over our local communities and our welfare?

 

Two memes that I wonder about: the racial draft and the race card.

The first is used as a collective building of power and influence by bartering people for their perceived benefit and affinity (or lack thereof) to an ethnic group, and the second is frequently criticized as being used by those who use and flex the perceived power of one’s identified ethnicity as rhetorical self-defense.

The race card and the racial draft are both rhetorical components of ethnic power. We use both in conversation regarding almost-entirely-imaginary scenarios.

Police Abolition?

For the love of all that is just, don’t look at the comments. It’s a Fox News video.

I wouldn’t go as far as abolishing the police, but we should consider more non-armed LEOs.

In fact, non-armed officers already exist. They’re known as Community Service Officers, or CSO. CSO are non-sworn civilians who, besides filing reports, are dispatched largely for cases which don’t involve known direct suspect information. They are not deputized to arrest suspects, do not carry handcuffs, and do not carry weapons belts.

CSO typically number in the single digits in the police departments which employ CSO. I think they should be increased in number.

Do we have any CSOs here in Columbus’ Police Department?

Idiotic Assumptions About Crime in Poor Black Communities

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There is something wrong with the premise behind the statement “Black lives don’t matter to #BlackLivesMatter” and (mis)using FBI stats to back it up, as the always-ill-informed Milo Yiannopoulos has done.

It assumes that African-Americans are not doing anything to reduce violent offenses in predominately African-American urban areas, despite the evidence to the contrary that Yiannopoulos simply ignores.

The “solutions” to “Black-on-black crime” put forward by those most extremely critical of the anti-police brutality protests are usually embarrassingly parochial, petty and emphasizing upon a moral policing of African-Americans which would never reasonably happen to White Americans.

The “solutions” are usually harder militarization of the inner-city police, harder prosecution of the Drug War, re-introducing religious control into the public school system and civil government, encouraging corporal violence against children, shaming single parents, and powerless obeisance to the force of arms.

None of these will bring back the manufacturing jobs. None of these will address our mental health crisis. None of these will fix our collapsing infrastructure. None of these will empower us with democratic power. None of these will address how, as an ethnicity descended from slaves, we ended up here in the wrong way. None of these will fix our education system’s lack of scale. None of these will address how we feel trapped in our own cities in the underclass.

They’re just crap solutions. Meaningless, nostalgic platitudes to violently-flawed bygones. Hypocritical des to a hypocritical culture which masks its violent stench as it condemns Black people for our terrors.

And what’s worse is that the same people who propose these “solutions” do not institutionally benefit from these solutions either! They screw over other White people!

Sad!

My First #BlackLivesMatter Protest

I can also say that I’ve now participated in a #BlackLivesMatter protest.

It’s one thing to see it on video. It’s another thing to be there in person –

to see Black people from all backgrounds carrying children, wearing dashikis and suspenders, holding up their fists and open palms in fulsome protest under the gray, heavily-cloudy sky;

to see smiling onlookers wave and thumbs-up as you walk the pavement screaming #HandsUpDontShoot up and down the road;

to vocally worry about what’s going to happen to you when you cross the asphalt Rubicon in the face of assembled LEO cars;

to see colleagues of yours arrested by heavily-armored LEOs amidst flashing blue and red lights;

to see the genuine pain and anguish coupled with retellings of Black civilian survival tactics on the streets of Everytown, USA;

to see Euro-Americans walk with us and be in the midst of civil disobedience for Black lives;

to speak with your stutter from the top of your head on the history of the country and what is at stake –

all under the shadow and binoculars and unmarked vehicles of the militarized police force of Columbus, GA.

Get as much video and photo as possible.

Why Did Fannie Lou Hamer Integrate the Democrats and Not the GOP?

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From a comment I posted to John Jackson’s thread:

“If the GOP were the more effective alternative for African-American voters to the racist Southern Democrats in the post-WWII South, why did people like Fannie Lou Hamer attempt to integrate the Mississippi Democrats (who were atop an effective one-party state since Reconstruction) and not the recently-reestablished Mississippi GOP (re-born 1956)?

Why did her MFDP become the focus of attention in the 1964 Democratic Convention when they sought a seat at the Mississippi delegation table, when the free-market GOP championing Barry Goldwater was available that year?

In relation to what [some guy] said earlier, where were all this “free stuff” that Democrats were handing out for the 90+ years that Democrats had one-party rule throughout the South, and were Southern White people being given this free stuff that Black people were clearly prohibited from accessing? Southern White people, with high rates of regional illiteracy and racial privilege, “pulled the lever” for Democratic governors for over 4 generations, and never pulled that lever for a GOP governor, so what changed?

That’s what I’m curious about. What changed in the South that Democrats went from being “my (racist) grandpapy’s party” to being the party of “free stuff”, from a racist kleptocratic party in the South to the “socialist party” in opposition for the next century?

Was it FDR’s New Deal? Truman’s integration of the military? Johnson’s ban on bigoted poll taxes or his Great Society? I don’t think that it is the viability or non-viability of the GOP’s free-market policy or its anathema to “free stuff” that is the issue.

Otherwise, many would have been more attracted to the GOP as a party on a Booker T. Washington/Marcus Garvey/Malcolm X “do for self” nationalist pro-business basis. But that didn’t happen, and so you didn’t have traditional Black Republicans get into federal office after Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who was the last gasp of the type of Black GOPer who was promoted aggressively by the Radical Republicans to Southern statewide office in Reconstruction.

Now it’s all “bootstrap”, “anti-big-gov” and militarist types like J.C. Watts, Mia Love, Allen West and Tim Scott since the civil-rights movement era.

What happened, and why can’t the GOP relate to the Black Nationalist “do for self” trend in the same way that the Democrats have been able to relate (somewhat) to the Black social-democratic tendency?”

That “All Lives Matter” protest

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That “All Lives Matter” protest was led by *drum roll please* Glenn Beck and Chuck Norris. Auntie Alveda King tagged along.

I also noticed the pictures of Frederick Douglass. None of these individuals have the fortitude to read his 4th of July speech without putting revision to it, I’m pretty sure. But why only pictures of Douglass and Lincoln? Could someone have had a Malcolm X picture somewhere? Does he leave a sour taste in some mouths when he damned the fundamentals of this system? “Justice” “Courage” What about “Reparations”? What about “Human Rights”? And does their “Justice” come at the barrel of a police’s firearm?

This is very Christian. An assertion that everyone can only come together if they only complied to this “(Judeo-)Christian” framework of society. Not even race, #BlackLivesMatter. Not even class, #Sanders2016.

Religion, or should I say “FAITH” as the religious tribalists who run most local governments would assert and unconstitutionally mollify. And of course, the proceeds of this march didn’t go to any communities affected by police excess or to community institutions, but the current real-life cause celebre of the Christian victims of ISIS’ genocide in Syria and Iraq. Not the Yazidi victims, not the Shia victims, not the moderate Sunni victims, not the Kurdish victims, JUST SPECIFICALLY the Christian victims. Not even, arguably, the Christian minority affected by displacement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who rank low in the hierarchy of Middle Eastern “save the Christians” needs. Just those a cozy distance away from the “rapture practice” zone of Israel/Palestine.

Everything about this march says a lot more about the inconsistencies of reactionary Christian U.S. politics toward ethnicity, foreign affairs, undermined populations, and their own comfort zones.

This is a funny march. Obtuse as shit, but funny. The fact that Glenn Beck organized it is just eyeroll-worthy. It doesn’t show the love that “All Lives Matter” asserts to high heaven.

The Fake “Black Genocide”

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Christian anti-abortion folks who harp about a “black genocide” are some of the most uncaring, hard-hearted, shame-projecting liars.

  • As if any of them care one bit about AfAm women’s lives, equities or freedoms as much as their uteri.
  • As if any of them care that the fetuses which develop into infants will grow up into less-than-desirable AfAm women and men.
  • As if specifically *our lives* matter to the anti-abortion activists.
  • As if any of these activists think of AfAm women outside of the “welfare queen” “poppin’ out babies” stereotype.
  • As if any of these activists consider that birth control, condoms and other tools of hygiene should receive more investment and less demonization.
  • As if any of them are not the ick-attracted authoritarian jackasses who never offer solutions beyond “ban abortion” and “make sex sacred”.
  • As if you care much about the growth of the AfAm population for as long as abortion has been legal in this country, but that’s an inconvenient truth which disrupts your feigned “black genocide” martyrdom.

Seriously, I wonder why the Southern Baptists ever allied with you lying jackasses after their racist hissy-fit over integration. But you lie about a lot of things to get your ban in place, especially about AfAm women, their bodies and the women and men who love both.

You are as fake as the Exodus, Willie Lynch, the “War on Christmas” and American exceptionalism. We won’t live by your savior narrative. Look at yourself, and say no to #misogynoir. #BlackLivesMatter