Chris Rock and that “Black” President Thing…

Message to undecided Republicans!

The New Jim Crow – The Conservative “Race War”

The present blooming fantasy of white victimization has roots in the peculiar violent institutions of the 19th-century American South. In the distant mirror of history, it’s easy to spot the irony and the guilt: even before the Civil War began, whites worried that their slaves would rise up and repay their masters in kind — filch the fruit of their labor, rape them, and beat them, sometimes to death. As soon as the balance of power shifted and news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse circulated throughout the former slave states, those fears ran amok. 

A common recruiting method of white supremacist groups is to play on their potential member’s percieved “victimization” by minorities. Ergo – that they are failures in life because black/brown/yellow/green folks were “given” jobs or opportunity over them because of race. As I have said before the conservative side of the American political spectrum has absorbed a lot of ideas from the racist right, and mainstreamed them into conservative mantra and consciousness.

The narrative is pretty much laid out in the video below -

One of the most flagrant results of this was the perversion of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under the Bushit Administration as a vehicle to track down and prosecute incidences of “reverse discrimination. That is, discrimination against whites by minorities. The problem being that after 8 years and spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money…

Only one verifiable case was ever found by said lawyers. This despite over 13,000 cases of classical discrimination being filed a year by minorities.

Reality and logic play no part in this from a group of folks who believe the presence of two, self styled “Black Panthers” at a Pennsylvania polling place during the 2008 Presidential Election was enough to sway voters across the country to vote for a black man – and that such constituted a “massive” level of voting fraud…

Despite consistent and massive efforts by Republicans in 2000 and 2004 for limit minority voting though denying the availability of voting machines, and “erasing” large number of minority voters from the rolls in Florida based on “faulty” data.

The right wing’s “racial services machine” though the “7 Sisters”, a group of right wing foundations which pour hundreds of millions of dollars a year into conservative think tanks and causes – supports this sort of racial narrative to the tune of an estimated $100 million a year. These groups have funded the publication of books by folks such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray “The Bell Curve”, Sowell’s contributions to  Townhall, WorldNetDaily,OneNewsNow and the Jewish World Review,  Dinesh D’Souza whose book “The End of Racism“ oddly enough inadvertently makes the case for racism’s continued existence, and Jared Taylor’s “The Color of Crime” using faulty logic and fake statistics to make the case for black on white crime. Fox News advances these narratives though such commentators as Sean Hannity, and as of late Bill O’Reilly.

Black conservatives are well funded to support the narrative that whites are under attack by “Speakers Bureaus” such as Project 21, and trusty, safe black conservatives like Sowell, whose recent article fully supported the existence of a “war” by black folks against white folks based on anecdotal evidence…

The problem being, just like the “New Black Panther Party” (having nothing to do with the original Black Panthers and consisting of perhaps 50 members nationwide) controversy, and the “Reverse Discrimination Controversy” – there is no statistical evidence to support that in any way that whites are being targeted by roving gangs of black or brown folks attacking white folks in any numbers beyond random.

Conversely – spending $100 million a year in investing in racist narratives…

Totally deconstructs the idea that racism is no longer a factor in American life.

The “white victimization” industry promoted by right wing media, and their well paid quasi scientific cohorts has very real consequences.

These cases are similar to the hue and cry raised over the “Central Park Jogger” case in the 90′s – where gangs of black youth, supposedly “wilding” were convicted of the brutal beating and rape of a woman jogging in Central Park. The tragedy of the victim was compounded by the fact that the courts convicted 5 innocent kids of the crime, adding additional victims to the carnage - who had been convicted largely due to the media hype, and assumption of guilt by the media and police who beat “confessions” out of the youths…

And of course, most recently the Trayvon Martin murder.

In Conservative Media, A “Race War” Rages

It was near midnight on April 14 when the Chevy Cavalier carrying Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami rolled to a stop at a red light in Norfolk, Va. As the pair waited, one of a crowd of teenagers on the sidewalk threw a rock at the passenger seat window, prompting Forster to get out of the car and confront the aggressor.

That’s when the beating began.

White American Voters – Cain, Obama, Immigration – The Split

How do you explain the entirely different world seen by white conservatives and that seen by the rest of us?

Some recent studies get into that, racial politics, and immigration…

 

Two Worlds of Whites

On the day after Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg described the modern Democratic coalition as diverse America and the whites who are comfortable with diverse America.

That appears to be even more true today. The line between whites who are comfortable with the racial and ethnic change transforming America into a “world nation” and those uneasy about it increasingly looks like one of the most important boundaries of the 2012 campaign.

The big Pew Center for the People and the Press generational survey released last week offers powerful evidence on that point. Overall, in the Pew survey, 47 percent of non-Hispanic whites agreed with the statement that “the growing number of newcomers from other countries are a threat to traditional American customs and values.” Exactly 50 percent of whites disagreed.

Like an Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey released earlier this summer, Pew found that whites comfortable with the demographic changes now underway express very different attitudes than those uneasy about it on President Obama, the role of government, and the choices in the 2012 election.

Among the whites who find the increasing number of newcomers troubling, Obama’s approval rating in the new Pew survey stood at just 21 percent with 70 percent disapproving. The president runs much more strongly among whites comfortable with the changes: 45 percent of them approved, while 47 percent disapproved.

Both whites comfortable and uneasy about the trends say they prefer a smaller government offering fewer services to a larger government offering more services. But the uneasy whites prefer a smaller government by 40 percentage points; among the whites comfortable with the change the gap is only 17 points.

Most dramatic was the divergence between these two groups of whites in a hypothetical Obama-Mitt Romney race in 2012. Whites who consider the demographic change a threat prefer Romney over Obama by a crushing three-to-one: 72 percent to 24 percent. In stark contrast, among whites comfortable with the change, Obama led Romney 52 percent to 44 percent.

As I wrote in a column this summer analyzing the similar Heartland Monitor findings, these trends don’t “mean that opposition to Obama is primarily, or even largely, driven by racial resentment. But it does suggest that attitudes about the nation’s changing racial composition now overlap and reinforce the more familiar ideological divides, such as differences over social issues and the role of government, that separate the two parties’ electoral coalitions.” Obama may sharpen these differences by embodying, in such a personal way, the demographic changes reshaping American life.

For a closer look at the mammoth Pew study – in particular, for a look at the intersection between generational and demographic change – check out Friday’s National Journal magazine.

The Black History of the White House

Interesting stories here about the history of the White House, slavery, and race in America.

Very interesting portion in the beginning about George Washington holding 9 slaves in the White House during his Presidency.

Juan Williams Blasts NPR

Jusan Williams of “Faux News”…

Accuses NPR of being an “all white operation”?

When did they discover Glenn Beck’s Daddy was black? Bill O’Reilly? Hannity? The “blonde bombe” squad?

Juan Williams, Fox News contributor, blasts former employer NPR as ‘all-white operation‘

Ousted NPR pundit Juan Williams ripped his former employer — which is taking heat after an embarrassing sting — for showing the “worst of white condescension” when it fired him last year.

“I think when it comes to NPR’s decision to, without any reason, throw me out the door, I think that for them, especially for some of the people who created NPR, it’s an all-white operation,” said Williams, who works for Fox News.

Williams said NPR “felt they had never had much success” with black or Hispanic journalists and did better with white women.

Williams made the comments to the Huffington Post before Tuesday’s release of a sting video that showed an NPR exec calling Tea Partiers “racist.”

The website published the interview Thursday as part of a series that examines black journalists’ experiences in the media industry.

NPR canned Williams, 56, in October after he told “The O’Reilly Factor” he gets “nervous” when he sees people in airplanes wearing “Muslim garb.”

NPR has said Williams’ comments about Muslims “undermined his credibility as a news analyst.”

About the firing, Williams said: “I think they acted very unfairly, and largely in a condescending manner…”

“If you stop and think about some of the things that were said in the midst of that controversy, the idea that I should have a relationship with a psychiatrist or I need a publicist to tell me what to say … It just suggests … they think I was sort of some sort of infantile mentality, or childlike person…”

“I think the worst of white condescension to black people was evident in some of those comments.”

Another Republican Initiative…Another Bigot.

Just like in Arizona – people from Hate groups now have access to state legislatures through Tea Party and Republican majorities. So expect a lot of Jim Crow legislation. Further, taking advantage of legislative majorities in a number of states, there are laws all Republican state legislatures are in lockstep trying to pass. One such law is a law prohibiting the use of Sharia Law in consideration of a court case. It’s nonsense – but Republican bigots are hot to attack Moslems – and just about every other minority group with punitive legislation. It’s time to fight back, just as the Unions are doing in Wisconsin, Indiana, and several other states…

Tea Party Republican Conservatism -- The Rise of the Fourth KKK

 

Meet the White Supremacist Leading the GOP’s Anti-Sharia Crusade

Last week, legislators in Tennessee introduced a radical bill that would make “material support” for Islamic law punishable by 15 years in prison. The proposal marks a dramatic new step in the conservative campaign against Muslim-Americans. If passed, critics say even seemingly benign activities like re-painting the exterior of a mosque or bringing food to a potluck could be classified as a felony.

The Tennessee bill, SB 1028, didn’t come out of nowhere. Though it’s the first of its kind, the bill is part of a wave of related measures that would ban state courts from enforcing Sharia law. (A court might refer to Sharia law in child custody or prisoner rights cases.) Since early 2010, such legislation has been considered in at least 15 states. And while fears of an impending caliphate are myriad on the far-right, the surge of legislation across the country is largely due to the work of one man: David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based white supremacist who has previously called for a “war against Islam” and tried to criminalize adherence to the Muslim faith…

But it’s not just Muslims who draw Yerushalmi’s scorn. In a 2006 essay for SANE entitled On Race: A Tentative Discussion (pdf), Yerushalmi argued that whites are genetically superior to blacks. “Some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones,” he wrote.

Yerushalmi has suggested that Caucasians are inherently more receptive to republican forms of government than blacks—an argument that’s consistent with SANE’s mission statement, which emphasizes that “America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white.” And in an article published at the website Intellectual Conservative, Yerushalmi, who is Jewish, suggests that liberal Jews “destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite.” Unsurprisingly, then, Yerushalmi offered the lone Jewish defense of Mel Gibson, after the actor’s anti-Semitic tirade in 2006. Gibson, he wrote, was simply noting the “undeniable Jewish liberal influence on western affairs in the direction of a World State.”

Despite his racist views, Yerushalmi has been warmly received by mainstream conservatives; his work has appeared in the National Review and Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace. He’s been lauded in the pages of the Washington Times. And in 2008, he published a paper on the perils of Sharia-compliant finance that compelled Sen. Minority Whip John Kyl (R-Ariz.) to write a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox.

 

That Post-Racial America

The demographics of the United States are changing rapidly, making a number of assumptions and stereotypes utterly wrong.  Among them -

You will never see this on Faux news but – More poor now live in the suburbs than in urban environments.

Low-density suburbs

 

The United States is no longer the “Land of Opportunity” - economic upward mobility between generations is lower in the United States than in Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, and France. British kids born to fathers in the bottom fifth of U.K. national earnings have less than a 30 percent chance of ending up in that earning group themselves, while U.S. kids have more than a 40 percent likelihood of remaining stuck at the bottom.

Worse - By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

However – in this here “post racial” America, where we are in vast majority doing worse than our parents…

Segregation Drops to Lowest Level in a Century

America’s neighborhoods became more integrated last year than during any time in at least a century as a rising black middle class moved into fast-growing white areas in the South and West.

Still, ethnic segregation in many parts of the U.S. persisted, particularly for Hispanics.

Segregation among blacks and whites fell in roughly three-quarters of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas as the two racial groups spread more evenly between inner cities and suburbs, according to recent census data.

The findings are expected to be reinforced with fresh census data being released Tuesday on race, migration and economics. The new information is among the Census Bureau’s most detailed releases yet for neighborhoods.

“It’s taken a Civil Rights movement and several generations to yield noticeable segregation declines for blacks,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who reviewed the census data. “But the still-high levels of black segregation in some areas, coupled with uneven clustering patterns for Hispanics, suggest that the idea of a post-racial America has a way to go.”

The race trends also hint at the upcoming political and legal wrangling over the 2010 census figures, to be published in the spring. The data will be used to reallocate congressional districts, drawing new political boundaries. New Hispanic-dominated districts could emerge, particularly for elected positions at the state and local level. States are required under the Voting Rights Act to respect the interests of minority voting blocs, which tend to support Democratic candidates.

Milwaukee, Detroit and Syracuse, N.Y., were among the most segregated, all part of areas in the Northeast and Midwest known by some demographers as the “ghetto belt.” On the other end of the scale, cities that were least likely to be segregated included Fort Myers, Fla., Honolulu, Atlanta and Miami…

 

 

Get a Clue! White Momma – Black Children…

Get a freaking clue, folks!

Surely we aren’t all Tea-Bagger morons.

As for Ms. Ruby, I hope you have a support network to help you with the inevitable identity questions which start in junior High, and go though High School. It’s not an easy thing – but it certainly isn’t something that is insurmountable for a caring and alert parent. A Beautiful group of babies… Indeed!

Transracial Adoption Leads to Stares: How One Mother Deals

There is a natural curiosity about a Caucasian woman holding the hands of three African kiddos at a Chinese restaurant. Visually, things don’t quite jive. Transracial families are still, in most places, an oddity, and staring comes with the territory. This is what I tell my three children, all adopted from Ethiopia.

Two years ago, when my children first arrived, people stared at us wherever we went — a water park, the mall, the grocery store, the train station, the beach. During our first summer as a family, people seemed to be riveted by the striking beauty of my eldest; the dark shade of her skin made even more luminous by the summer sun.

The problem is compounded because my daughter has a penchant for lo mein.

The Chinese restaurant that my daughter insists on dining at has been the site of the most overt staring offenses. At one dinner in particular, the family behind us (whom she was facing) was staring at her, which included two little girls whispering. While she tried to ignore it, she said that the situation was hurting her heart. I leaned over the booth and politely waved at the staring family.

1 in 5 Black Men Marry Interracially Today

While black-black Marriage still makes up 75% of all marriages involving black folks, the numbers are changing rapidly.

What the report doesn’t say is if the number of black women marrying men of other races is increasing, of by how much. At this rate in 20 years or so, the concept of a “black” community in the United States will disappear outside of the “encapsulated” urban communities. Indeed, “blackness” is slowly migrating from a racial definition to an “ethnic” definition.

I would like to see statistics on the education and socio-economic level of black folks who are marrying outside of their own racial group. What I would bet is this is dominated by a high percentage of working class blue collar and educated, professionals.

Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

“When you add in the prison population,” said Prof. Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center, “it pretty well explains the extraordinarily low marriage rates of black women.”

Among all married African-Americans in 2008, 13 percent of men and 6 percent of women had a nonblack spouse. This compares with nearly half of American-born Asians choosing non-Asian spouses.

“The continuing imbalance in the rates for black men and black women could be making it even harder for black women to find a husband,” said Prof. Andrew J. Cherlin, director of the population center at Johns Hopkins University.

The study, to be released Friday by the Pew Research Center, found that intermarriage among Asian, black, Hispanic and white people now accounts for a record 1 in 6 new marriages in the United States. Tellingly, blacks and whites remain the least-common variety of interracial pairing. Still, black-white unions make up 1 in 60 new marriages today, compared with fewer than 1 in 1,000 back when Barack Obama’s parents wed a half-century ago.

While the increased rate of intermarriage reflects demographic changes in the American population — a more diverse pool of available spouses — as well as changing social mores, they may presage a redefinition of America’s evolving concepts of race and ethnicity.

“The lines dividing these groups are getting blurrier and blurrier,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, an author of the Pew analysis.

For instance, of the 2.7 million American children with a black parent, about 10 percent also have one nonblack parent today. Because many mixed-race African- Americans still choose to identify as being black — as Mr. Obama did when he filled out the 2010 census — the number of multiracial African-Americans could actually be higher…

The Pew analysis found that among newly married couples, 14.6 percent were mixed in 2008, compared with 11.2 percent in 2000 and 8.3 percent in 1990. (Among all people currently married, 8 percent of marriages were mixed in 2008, compared with 6.8 percent in 2000 and 4.5 percent in 1990.)

Of all 3.8 million adults who married in 2008, 31 percent of Asians, 26 percent of Hispanic people, 16 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites married a person whose race or ethnicity was different from their own. Those were all record highs.

Displaced By Slavery – Children of Former Slaves and Slaveholders Meet

Was in the local grocery store the other day. When the woman at the counter saw my last name, she chuckled – that’s my last name too. We could be cousins. I told her, if you are from a certain part of Virginia, we probably are. Stunned by my frankness she asked about the family. I told her some of the background, and how the family had spread all the way down the Shenandoah Valley into Kentucky. I explained to her the origin of the family name being an Irishman who had settled in the Valley in the 1830s and worked as a coal miner. I explained that the family was fairly large, and the last time anyone had done a reunion – they had counted up several thousand relatives.

Visibly shaken, she said the town which she was from. I explained to her my grandfather had been born in that Town, but didn’t explain the circumstances. I’ve got to go by the store to pick up a prescription tomorrow… Should be an interesting discussion.

When kin of slaves and owner meet

I don't know if they are physically related - but these two could pass for sisters in my view.

Betty Kilby was gripped with apprehension. Descendants of the white family that enslaved her kin were coming to dinner.

She scrolled through a mental Rolodex of relatives who might flip out. Her brothers had already asked her: Why would you want to meet the family of those who held our loved ones in bondage?

“When they ask that question,” she says, “you kind of scratch your head. It makes sense. Why would you want to do that?”

As the dinner neared, she thought of her grandparents, who had toiled in the fields of rural Rappahannock County, Virginia. “Out of all the crazy things I’ve done,” she thought, “this has got to be the craziest.”

Betty had faced down racism, and white people, before. She was one of the first African-Americans to attend a desegregated school in Virginia. She’d even written a book about it.

But this dinner, though weeks in the making, would test her in a new way.

‘Knew we were connected’

It was a surprise for Phoebe Kilby to learn that her family owned slaves. It wasn’t something her father ever mentioned.

But Phoebe had read newspaper articles about African-American Kilbys living in Virginia, near the farm where her father grew up. Her curiosity sent her on a search of old courthouse records — deeds, wills, census documents.

She soon learned her family owned five slaves.

And when she read Betty Kilby’s book, the puzzle fell together.

“I just knew we were connected,” Phoebe said.

But how does the descendant of a slave owner reach out?

“It’s a hard thing to do out of the blue,” Phoebe said. “What do you say to somebody? And how are they going to react to you? Are they going to be angry? Are they going to say, ‘I never want to talk to somebody like you?’ “

On January 15, 2007, she sat down at her computer and fired off an e-mail to Betty. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“My name is Phoebe Kilby, and I am white,” the note began.

“Martin Luther King had ‘a dream that … the sons of former slaves and slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of Brotherhood.’ Perhaps, we as daughters can contribute to fulfilling that dream.”

Watch a CNN reporter’s reconciliation journey in Mississippi

Days went by. No response.

“At first, I thought she doesn’t want to talk to me.”

It turned out a computer glitch meant Betty never received the e-mail. Two weeks after she sent the first note, Phoebe tried again.

“Hello, cousin,” Betty responded.

The two spoke briefly by phone and made a plan to meet.

Betty was mega-busy on a book tour, giving speeches about love and brotherhood. At schools, black children would ask, “How come you don’t hate white people?”

“I tell them hate is like taking poison. The only person you hurt is yourself.”

Without much thought, Betty invited Phoebe to the family dinner. “I thought, what kind of hypocrite would I be if I could not sit down at the table of brotherhood with Phoebe?”

Still, she and others in her family couldn’t help but wonder about Phoebe’s motives. Were the descendants of the slave master coming to steal from them one last time?…

White Wealth – Black Debt 1984-2007

This comes from a combination of factors, both within and outside of the control of black wage earners. Income stability is a huge issue in the black community, with unemployment, and long term underemployment being both chronic and 2-3 times the rate experienced by whites. A second factor contributing to this is generational wealth. A third, is simply ignorance about financial investment and handling money. Lastly, is the existence of predatory and racially biased lending, forcing black people to pay considerably more for major loan based purchases such as autos and homes.

The one thing each of us can control is financial literacy.

White Wealth and Black Debt Shot Up in “Growth” Years

The wealth gap between Blacks and Whites has grown by fourfold over the course of Generation X’s lifetime, exploding to $95,000, a study released today found. And the debt burden among African American families has nearly doubled.

The study comes from Brandeis University’s Tom Shapiro, who’s among the pioneers in measuring economic equality by considering overall household wealth—your assets minus your debts—rather than just income. Shapiro’s research team looked at data from a decades-long, national survey of family economics and discovered that, between 1984 and 2007, the wealth gap saw unprecedented growth, as assets among high-income White households shot up while debt among all Black households did the same.

The visuals show it best. This first chart shows median assets by race (charts are from the report):

But a second chart breaks it down by income levels:

So rich White people got really rich at the close of the 21st century. It puts the neo-liberal growth years into a new light–all that growth went into very few pockets. Meanwhile, Black folks’ debt shot up, too, as the lending market got less regulated and more perilous for working families. As Shapiro and his coauthors write:

Among those with no financial assets, credit is often an emergency resource. Summing all assets and debt, one in ten African‐Americans owe at least $3,600, while their debt burden was about half of this in real terms in 1984 ($2000). In sum, many African Americans hold more debt than assets. [Emphasis added]

The problem of debt growth can’t be overstated. Yes, all Americans have drowned in the fees and trap doors federal regulators never thought twice about until this year. But Shapiro’s research points to why financial regulation is about a lot more still: Black neighborhoods in particular are awash in predatory financial products, ranging from subprime home loans to check cashing joints, and that has helped propel a lopsided and unsustainable economic trajectory.