Tag Archives: race

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.”

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

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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”.

I found this article via Global Voices, and I was very much interested in the reaction by other Jamaicans and Jamaican-Americans to the article. The article states that Afro-Caribbean people who move to the United States worry less about racism than African-American descendants of antebellum slavery, and ultimately recommends that we should “take it easy” rather than worry much about perceived racial issues. The reactions largely respond with citing the racially-charged histories of even the Black-majority states in the Caribbean (where, apparently, it’s not always the case that being raised in a comfortable Black demographic majority inoculates against skin-color biases). #Jamaica #Caribbean #race

Religion, descent and the one-drop rule

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This morning, I thought about how religion uses patrilineal or matrilineal descent as a means of indicating whether one has been born into the religion of his or her most immediate ancestor(s), and how, in the case of Judaism and Islam, such stipulations have been contorted by both adherents, non-adherents and detractors from a simple Abrahamic membership inheritance issue into an ethnoracial issue in those societies which observe an Abrahamic religion on a majority basis.

Continue reading Religion, descent and the one-drop rule →

Freemasonry, religion and Furry fandom, race and culture

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Reading Lewis Lofkin’s writings on American Deism, I thought over the night about how English (or "Regular") Freemasonry maintains a ban on religious or spiritual discussion – save for (upon initiation) whether an initiate believes in any Supreme Being – inside a lodge. I think that this ban on religious elaboration places a mask on possible religious expressions, intrigues and possible bigotry.

Maybe it is a good idea, and perhaps this is comparable to how the furry fandom has placed such a heavy and long-standing emphasis on disguising one’s own ethnocultural or ethnoracial identity under a fursona (be it manifested on a furry media archive via an avatar or in the average real-life furry meetup/convention via a fursuit). By hiding such distinctions under the furry equivalents of tribal initiation masks and nomens mysticums, the more divisive flareups around race and ethnicity are, theoretically, avoided or subsided.

StrangePatternsAboutRacePart1

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I just came to another one of my realizations today.
The nations that have emphasized race and racial separation more are the more prosperous first world nations, while those that have traditionally de-emphasized race and racial separation (with such things as mixed-race marriages, to the most massive scales in Latin America) are the nations that are at the more blunt end of the economic stick.

I mean look at it: the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, apartheid-era South Africa (as far as the whites were concerned). all of these nations have white majorities and have a finely-tuned race consciousness, and look at their economies: better than most other nations.

yes, south africa had a black majority, but if they werent employed as unskilled mine labor, they were forced out of the country into those “homelands”, which were basically a cross between concentration-camps and indian reservations.
basically it was like the white-minority gov wanted to act like the blacks almost didnt exist in south africa. especially in front of the tourists from the US and UK.

Anyway, also, look at australia. If there’s no other nation that is stuck on race and ethnicity, its that country. Which is why, up until the 1960’s, they had a “White Australia” policy, where they only allowed immigrants from European nations to immigrate and attain citizenship in Australia. And its funny how they went to such great lengths to stem any immigration from Asia, India, or Africa. One of them was where they only tested the white immigrants for English language proficiency. But when it came to an immigrant from, say, China, not only did they have to have a “strong” and “legitimate” reason for immigrating to Australia (even if they were skilled workers or students), but even if he or she was proficient in English, they commonly went as far as testing him or her in another European language that they were sure that he or she didnt know a lick of- JUST to keep him or her from gaining even a chance at Australian citizenship. And i guess its because of that feature of their history, but even today racial sentiment is high as hell, especially concerning the aborigines.

I remember this documentary of the late Edward Koiki Mabo, the guy who single-handedly opened up so many doors for the Aborigine Australians by taking a case to the High Court of Australia that said that the land of Australia was not “terra nullius” (unsettled, unpeopled land), but aboriginal land that belonged first to the aborigines (the case was finally won only a few months after his own death in 1993). The day after they re-buried his body in Townsville, Queensland, with a brand-new tombstone, some shitbags came by in the middle of the night and defaced the tombstone (even finding time to take his face off of the tombstone and replace it with a bullet hole). the survving family was totally fucked up about it, so they had to rebury him for a 3rd time, this time in his Native Torres Islands off the coast of Northern Queensland. But see? Look at their economy. one of the best and most favored on the planet, and their standard of living is high like in the US.

And of course, on the other end, look at Argentina. Argentina, back during the colonial days, had imported large amounts of slaves from Africa, often times via Brazil. In fact, Africans made up about 30% of the entire population of Argentina at one point in the early 19th century. However, Argentina (especially Buenos Aires) didnt want these lowly slaves to be seen or heard, so they took such measures as sending as many Afro-Argentines to war against Paraguay at one time. And furthermore, they also brought in as many immigrants as possible from Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, even the UK, for the sake of flooding the place with whites. And combine that with the free-interrace mentality they have concerning Afro-Diasporians (oh, we have no concept of race! so lets go ahead and fuck each other!) and today, Afro-Argentines (and Afro-Chileans) are basically non-existant as far as numbers are concerned.

Same thing was tried in brazil, but not to that far an extent as Argentina and Chile. why? Im sure it would be impossible to “white-out” (called “blanqueamento”) the population of the nation that imported the largest amount of slaves of any nation of the Americas. And either way, all three nations have some sorry economies, chile’s being better than the other two. And strangely, Chile didnt import alot of slaves, but prolly a few token slaves from Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, or Brazil.

So now I wonder about the United States: if this is the pattern that has been naturally, yet misunderstandably, established within the last 502 years of the official beginning of the TransAtlantic slave Trade, then if the US turns from race-conscious to race-ignorant as a whole, then maybe its economy will fall down to the levels of Brazil and Argentina?

Its confusing, I know….