Russians Fed on White-Right racism

 

This is some of the “news” propaganda used by the Russians to flood racist white wing sites like Breitbart and Alex Jones wh accepted the material as “fact” without doing any checking. Numerous Russian originated fake articles flooded white wing news sites explaining why the white wing is so disconnected with reality’

 

SNL Skit – ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned Black’

 

Sandra Bullock Realizes She Adopted a Black Child

This one is a bit strange to me. All through the Adoption process nobody…I mean NOBODY explained the trials and tribulations of raising a black child in semi-post-racist America? Black Adoption Social workers fought tooth and nail only a decade or so against interracial adoption, in large part for the same reason. Uhhh…Sandra, and the rest of the white Hollywood elites who adopt black kids…Being rich in America doesn’t mean you won’t face racism, being stopped by a racist cop for driving your Maserati in the Hollywood Hill where you live…

Or possibly be assaulted by same bad cop, denied service at Hermes, or pay twice the interest rate when you replace said Maserati with a Jag despite you 800 credit score.

Sandra Bullock’s Fears For Her Black Son

Actress Sandra Bullock recently spoke out about the anxiety she feels for her adopted black son. The Our Brand Is Crisis star adopted the now-5-year-old Louis from New Orleans in 2010 when he was an infant and is reportedly in the final stages of adopting a baby girl, also from New Orleans. Back in 2010, there was speculation from some that the adoption was a PR move meant to soften the sting of her high-profile divorce from TV star Jesse James—hurtful reports that proved to be bogus, since she’d been trying to adopt for several years prior to the couple’s split. She hasn’t shared much about her life with little Louis, but that changed this week.

In the November issue of Glamour magazine, Bullock talks about her anxiety in anticipating the racism she knows her son will face. “You see how far we’ve come in civil rights—and where we’ve gotten back to now. I want my son to be safe. I want my son to be judged for the man he is,” the actress says. “We are at a point now where if we don’t do something, we will have destroyed what so many amazing people have done.”

She said that she is afraid she won’t be able to shield him.

“You look at women’s rights; it’s turning into a mad, mad world out there. But sometimes it needs to get really loud for people to say, ‘I can’t unsee this.’ If I could ride in a bubble with him for the rest of his life, I would. But I can’t.”

Bullock’s fears aren’t special or unique. Black mothers have spoken and written about the fear they have for their sons living and growing in a society that deems them a threat. And when, in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the president himself mentioned that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” and shared that, “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.”

Sandra Bullock operates from a position of white privilege. Those who consider themselves aware, who have the audacity to call themselves “progressive”—they have to start with recognizing that particular truth. Recognizing her son’s blackness and what that means for him is part of understanding who he is and how his experiences will be different from hers. All too often, white folks can only value interactions with black people that don’t demand that they recognize the racism that black people face; and inversely, they never have to acknowledge the societal privilege born of white supremacy.

Bullock didn’t say anything remarkable about race. She simply stated what is and should always be fairly obvious. But the weight of her statement gets magnified in the context of the current pop culture climate. If Matt Damon and Miley Cyrus are any indication, many white superstars are clearly invested in distorting or dismissing the reality of racism.…More...

 

Barack Obama, Sr. Ejected From America Due to Racism?

Hello from Port au Prince! DOn’t usually post when on travel – but I got a few free minutes and a good Internet connection!

Was Barack Obama Sr. eased out of Harvard, and America, for dating white women?

This morning, the Arizona Independent,a weekly paper, published the file kept by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (as the agency was then called) on a Kenyan student by the name of Barack Hussein Obama Sr. So far, the file, obtained via F.O.I.A., has mostly gotten attention for further substantiating the obvious: that Obama Sr. fathered a son who was born in Hawaii.

But as someone who has spent a lot of time studying post-colonial Africa—and particularly the fascinating and emblematic story of our president’s tangled lineage—I was most interested in how the file did shed some light on a real mystery, the one that inspired Barack Obama Jr. to write a book about his absent father, one of his earliest steps into public life. Why did the president’s father leave his son, and eventually America, returning to Hawaii for just a single childhood visit?

I think the file proves, fairly conclusively, that racism drove the president’s father from the United States. I went back and forth a bit with Ben Smith (whose blog post brought this file to my attention) over whether “racism” is really the right word for the bureaucratic attitudes and actions these documents contain. There’s no use of slurs or harsh language, certainly. What I think the documents reveal, though, is a subtle, institutionalized conspiracy that in a way seems more insidious than overt cross-burning racism, because almost surely none of its participants thought of their actions as discriminatory at all. In that sense, the file is an instructive artifact, not just of our president’s biography, but of our nation’s history of conflicted attitudes about race, foreign cultures, intermarriage and sex.

Hard as it may be to believe today, it seems clear from a close reading of the the file that the president’s father was driven from this country because of his messy personal life. And reading between the lines, it’s not hard to see a subtext of miscegenation.

First, a little historical background: the elder Barack Hussein Obama arrived in the United States in 1959, via an exchange program known colloquially in Kenya as the “Tom Mboya airlift,” after the politician who sponsored it, a Luo tribesman of his. (These sorts of ethnic connections matter in Africa.)

During his first year of studies at the University of Hawaii, Obama took a Russian-language class where he met Stanley Ann Dunham, the president’s mother. The earliest non-routine memo in Obama’s file is a 1961 memo in which the I.N.S. is warned by a foreign student adviser at the University of Hawaii (a “Mrs. McCabe”), who informed the authorities that Obama had married Dunham. Further, the informant noted that he had been “running around with several girls” and had been “warned about his playboy ways.” He had been confronted by school officials about another wife he had back in Kenya, from whom he claimed to be customarily divorced.

I have no intention of arguing that the elder Obama conducted himself honorably in his relations with women. However, having lived in East Africa, his explanation rings familiar to me. Even today, it is common for a well-traveled young person like him to have a first wife back in his home village. We call this “polygamy;” they see it as moving on with life.

First marriages fizzle out in Africa, as they do everywhere else. The difference is that culturally, legal divorce is very frowned upon: It’s viewed as shirking financial and familial responsibilities. Epidemiologists, who have studied this cultural pattern because of its impact on the spread of H.I.V., often say that Africans tend to have “concurrent” relationships, while Americans have “consecutive” ones. That’s a wild generalization, but the point is that Obama Sr. would not have viewed his first marriage back in Kenya as something disreputable. It clearly became worthy of investigation to school and immigration officials, though, after he started fooling around with white women.

After the 1961 report about Obama’s marriage to Dunham, the I.N.S. resolved to keep eye on him. Polygamy is not a charge meriting deportation, the memo notes, adding that “If the subject were convicted of bigamy we might get a deportation charge but not before.” But it recommends that Obama be “closely questioned before another [visa] extension is granted—and denial be considered.” This sets the tone of the rest of the file, throughout which the issue of his American wife back in Hawaii keeps popping up.

The birth of Obama’s mixed-race son—the one who would go on to be president—is duly noted, and then things go quiet for a couple of years. During this time, the president’s parents separated and Obama Sr. went to Harvard to study for a graduate degree. The relationship went on as a long-distance proposition for a little while, though it was over by Jan. 1964, when Dunham filed for a divorce that Obama did not contest.

The same month as the divorce, another note appears in Obama’s file. There seems to have been some kind of affair with a Kenyan exchange student (the file indicates a high school student, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a minor—African children often started school quite late in the 1950s and ’60s). The Unitarian Universalist Service, which had sponsored the woman’s scholarship, is up in arms about the relationship and an unpermitted overseas trip. “The suspicion exists,” says a memo, “that she may have gone to London for [redacted].”

We don’t know what the couple was suspected to have done, but since this was a decade prior to Roe v. Wade, we can guess. A related memo reports that an informant considers Obama to be a “very slippery character.”

Maybe he was. But again, what the I.N.S. really wants to know about is the elder Obama’s situation with his wife back in Hawaii. The authorities get in touch with Harvard and ask officials there to press him on his marital status. Obama tells the school that he is separated from Ann Dunham, who is reported to be now living in the Philippines. (Though that’s what the report says, it’s inaccurate: Dunham was still residing in Hawaii in 1964, where she met her second husband, who did eventually take the family to Indonesia.) (More)