Out of Bounds on Campus

White folks have been “appropriating” from black folks for 400 years in America. Black folks have been “appropriating” right back just as long…

Starting with “Christianity”.

If you go to Texas, the impact of such cross group appropriation is hard to miss. There are probably as many African American words and concepts appropriated into the American lexicon as Hispanic. We use a lot of terms in our language which are derived from Spanish, celebrate a non-existent Spanish “Holiday”, eat Mexican Food, and sit on the beach with a Corona. Indeed, our Language, our styles, our customs are a melange of all the peoples who have come, been brought to, or existed in America before the first Europeans managed to wander here and survive long enough to multiply.

A black, apparently college student, woman objecting to a white man wearing dreads…In California no less.

WTF?

Somebody please sit this campus Nazi down and educate her! “Appropriation” is in equal part admiration. It is how black folks Blues, Jazz, R&B, Hip Hop, and Rap became international icons, copied an imitated around the world. If it wasn’t for white folks, Blues would be a dead art form. Mal-Appropriation is a different animal, of which we have numerous examples in Black Americana. I really don’t give a good damn about a white boy wearing a Tupac T-Shirt, although I do hope some enterprising black T-Shirt maker sold it to him. 60% of all Hip Hop is bought by white folks. Without that market “Two Chains” would have to change his name to “One Chain” or no chains at all…

These campus students are getting to be as racist as Trump people.

 

A Conservative Racist Mal-appropriates “Authentically Black”

The racist POSs are at it again. This one by Jonah Goldberg, best known for the white supremacist rag, “The Jewish World Review”, and contributor to the white supremacist conservative toilet wipe, the National Review. Eventually this scumbag is going to piss somebody off so bad, they going to hang Size 13 Broghans up where the sun don’t shine so far…

The black woman who gave birth to the folks who migrated to Europe 50,000 years ago, is going to wake up and kick his a** again, for causing somebody else to have to disturb her.

National Review Writer: Ben Carson ‘More Authentically Black’ Than Obama

National Review writer Jonah Goldberg is usually in the position of dismissing racism as a paranoid fantasy. But on Friday, the conservative magazine’s senior race reporter had some news: “Dr. Ben Carson is black.”

Goldberg, in a column on the magazine’s website, criticized the media for not talking enough about Carson’s race, suggesting that “it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.” Forget the ample discussion among the media about Carson’s race and Republican politics — if Goldberg hasn’t come across it on Breitbart, it doesn’t exist.

But here’s the kicker: Like Rupert Murdoch — who recently made waves by saying Carson would be a “real black president” — Goldberg said he thinks the retired neurosurgeon is “more authentically African-American” than President Barack Obama.

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

And they say conservatives don’t get race.

 

Twisted – Freddy Gray and MLK

 

Yeah…I got a problem with this. Putting Freddy Gray, a victim of out of control police violence in Baltimore next to Martin Luther King seems a bit of appropriation that just doesn’t belong here. Martin developed a philosophy, moved a nation with his words, and fought against the forces of Jim Crow oppression, and ultimately gave his life. He stood up, knowing exactly the extent to which racist forces in America would go, suffering imprisonment and beatings for the simple act of non-violent resistance, and ultimately being murdered. Gray was a street kid and a drug dealer. Which doesn’t make his murder right at the hands of Baltimore Cops…But he “ain’t no hero” in terms of what he may or may not have accomplished while alive. He is a small part of a black community which suffers in small part due to his illicit acts.

Injustice in this case was a purely personal event.

Seems folks worry more about the racial background of a few folks working to end this type of injustice…Than the fact those folks are working for the betterment of the entire American community.

And no – I am not buying into the black-on-black crime racist meme – because all crime in a largely segregated America is intra-racial. Crime is more a statement of opportunity, than any wall painted large of cultural or racial dysfunction. The most dangerous thing for the BlackLivesMatter movement is an identification with the victim, instead of a disgust and opposition to the crime, and it ever happening again. I don’t think (and I hope) that is any secret to the folks at BlackLivesMatter.

3 year old Mckenzie Elliot, whose murderer has yet to be brought to justice.

 

“He shouldn’t be up there with Martin Luther King”: A mural of Freddie Gray with the civil rights leader provokes disgust, on my ride-along with the Baltimore Police

The streets are quiet tonight in West Baltimore. I’m in the backseat of a car on a ride-along with two Baltimore City police officers in late May, nearly a month after the riots following the death of Freddie Gray. There have been 26 murders this month to date, a number that will leapfrog to 43 before May draws to a close.

The media is calling this a “surge in violence” and touting theories to account for the spike, everything from officer apathy to a plethora of looted prescription drugs flooding the market and causing gang violence, but tonight the streets of West Baltimore are largely deserted. We see one group of young men hanging on a corner and a few kids pedaling around on bikes, but otherwise it’s eerily quiet.

I’ve come on this ride-along because I want to see for myself what’s happening on the streets in the wake of the riots. Many of stories told by the media have sympathized either with the protesters or with the police, thus setting up an “us versus them” dynamic that feels reductive.

I don’t buy into this good guy/bad guy type of narrative. I don’t believe that the majority of the rioters were bad people or that the majority of police officers are bloodthirsty brutes. What I believe is that most of the rioters were good people engaging in bad behavior and that most of the police are good officers doing the best they can while working in deeply flawed system, a system that revolves around the “War on Drugs,” a system that targets poor, black neighborhoods.

We ride by the burned-out CVS and the boarded-up buildings. We slow down next to the huge mural that has been painted on the side of a row house in Sandtown-Winchester, close to the spot where Freddie Gray was first arrested. Two chimney-like structures divide the mural into three panels. In the center is a huge painting of Freddie Gray’s face; on the left Martin Luther King Jr. is depicted marching with a group of protesters, and on the right, Freddie Gray’s family also marches.

We all stare at the mural in silence for a moment. It reminds me of the statue that towers outside of Baltimore’s Penn Station, which features two bisecting body profiles, one male and one female. Baltimoreans either love or hate this polarizing piece of art. Whenever I look at it, I both understand it and question it, which is the same way I felt when the riots occurred.

The riots made no sense to me and yet, they made perfect sense. For years, I’ve heard stories from young, black men about their experiences with the cops — young men who have been pulled over without cause, who have been illegally searched, who have been spoken to disrespectfully. Some have been physically assaulted.

I have also been witness to some of these acts on a handful of ride-alongs that I went on several years ago with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). I went with the goal of writing about the fraying relationship between the BPD and the black community, but every time I tried to put pen to paper, the task felt impossibly complex.

On one of the ride-alongs, I watched a car full of young black men dressed in bright polo shirts and cocked ball caps get pulled over for a minor traffic infraction. The driver of the vehicle handed over his license and explained that he was a college student, and that he and his friends were on their way to meet some friends.

The young man was polite and respectful, but it was easy to see that getting pulled over like this was not a new experience for him. There was a lilting impatience in his voice, the slightest tinge of angry exasperation that he attempted to keep tucked away. After the young man answered a few questions, the officers let him off without issuing any sort of traffic citation.

I remember watching him drive off and wondering what he would do with the remnants of that anger that he’d kept so neatly tucked beneath those polite answers. I have long wondered where that young man and all the others like him put their anger over this kind of degradation.

But I stopped wondering on the day of the riots; when I saw the images of young people lobbing bricks, stomping on cars and looting stores. There, I thought, the anger is right there.

The riot was a release. A giant exhale on a long held breath that has been waiting for the proverbial arc of justice to bend toward it.

“He shouldn’t be up there with Martin Luther King,” one of the officers finally says of the Freddie Gray mural, a note of disgust in his voice.

These officers, one Caucasian, one Hispanic, knew Freddie Gray long before the media ever uttered his name. At the station where we started the night, there were photographs of Gray hanging on the wall. In the photos, he was surrounded by a posse of baby-faced young men who mugged for the camera. In one picture, Gray held up his middle finger. There were handwritten numbers above the head of each of the young men and below a list of names that corresponded with the numbers.

When these officers look at this larger-than-life mural with Gray in the center, they see a drug dealer next to the greatest civil rights leader of all time and they can’t seem to make sense of that.

“Put that little girl up there. McKenzie. Not him,” the officer says.

He is referring to 3-year-old McKenzie Elliot, who was killed in a drive-by shooting last August. “Why weren’t there riots for her? That, I would understand.”

McKenzie Elliot and Freddie Gray — the former was presumably killed by drug dealers (although nobody has been arrested despite the fact that the crime occurred in front of multiple witnesses), the latter indisputably died in police custody….More…

 

 

Another Republican Pulls the MLK Card

Don’t you just love it when the folks who were standing on the Pettis Bridge with pipes, chains, and sticks to beat the Civil Rights protesters (including MLK!), try and misquote or appropriate “What would MLK say”? To racist purpose.

Here, Republican candidate afterthought Mike Huckabee tries the appropriation game…

Mike Huckabee: MLK would be ‘appalled’ by Black Lives Matter movement

Appearing on Meet The Press, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee refused to condemn the state of South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag, instead saying the state can’t possibly be racist because they elected an ‘Indian’ governor.

Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee believes Martin Luther King, Jr. would be “appalled” by the Black Lives Matter movement — telling CNN that racism is “more of a sin problem than a skin problem.”

During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday evening, the former Arkansas governor touted the “all lives matter” mantra and said he was troubled that the movement focuses on one ethnicity. Huckabee added that the late civil rights leader would feel the same.

“When I hear people scream, ‘black lives matter,’ I think, of course they do. … But all lives matter. It’s not that any life matters more than another,” Huckabee said. “That’s the whole message that Dr. King tried to present, and I think he’d be appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others.”

Huckabee’s remarks come as the Black Lives Matters movement ramps up its presence on the campaign trail — pushing candidates to more aggressively take on the issues of police violence and institutional racism.

That Meet the Press.