Whitesplaining In the Press

When color is the likely determinant of how a criminal is presented in the media.

 

Identical crimes – the white accused get pics in suits…

‘He’s a cop killer’: Twitter reams Texas paper for smiling photo of white perp but mugshots for black suspects

Which one is the Cop Killer? The guy on the left is a Cop Killer. The guy on the left is a former NFL player arrested on drug possession charges

Hollis Daniels (left) and former NFL player Johnny Jolly (right) (screen grabs from The Houston Chronicle)

‘He’s a cop killer’: Twitter reams Texas paper for smiling photo of white perp but mugshots for black suspects

A Texas newspaper came under fire this week after it published a favorable photo of suspected police shooter Hollis Daniels, who is white.

In its Tuesday story about Daniels’ alleged shooting of a police officer, the Houston Chronicle used a photo from social media that showed the suspect smiling and hugging a woman.

“I appreciate how you raised me, and all the extra love that you gave me,” a caption included with the photo said.

“Everybody needs to [know] he was a great person and amazing friend,” one person in the Chronicle‘s story was quoted as saying. “I would have never thought he would do something like that, ever.”

The paper also shared the photo on Twitter, where it did not go over well with users who pointed out that mugshots were often used for black suspects.

 

Uber Driver Boots Racist Trumpazoids

Another calm brother ends a bad situation of racists acting badly

 

WATCH: Uber driver calmly boots ‘white privilege’ boasting bro for calling him a ‘b*tch-ass n**ger’

In a video uploaded to YouTube, a black Uber driver boots a group of young white people out of his car after they begin boosting about “white privilege.” The ride ends with one man calling the driver a “b*tch ass n**ger.”

In the video, flagged by The Root, the driver can be seen patiently waiting while the group climbs in and scrambles for seats. One man bizarrely states ”white privilege” as a woman carrying a beer bottle is relegated to the back seat and knocks open a video screen on the car’s ceiling.

After some back and forth with one rider who took the front passenger seat, the driver asks if he’s okay, because “you’re sweating like crazy.”

The driver then insists his passenger put his seat belt on as he begins to drive, before asking the same passenger to not touch his belongings that are in the front, which gets some unintelligible push-back.

“I need you to get out,” he states as he pulls over.

“Me?” the front seat passengers asks, to which the driver politely states, “Yes. Please I need you all to get out.”

“You’re a f*cking joke,” the passengers replies.

“No, I’m not. White privilege, leave” the driver shoots back.

“Get the f*ck out, bro,” the man replies. “You’re a f*cking — f*cking b*tch ass n**ger.”

That is when the driver leaves the car and the passengers exit, where a contentious argument can be barely be heard with the driver accusing them of being racists.

 

Black White Wealth Gap in DC…Likely to Get Worse Under the Chumph

Black workers are more likely to be employed in the public sector than are either their white or Hispanic counterparts. In 2011, nearly 20 percent of employed Blacks worked for state, local, or federal government compared to 14.2 percent of Whites and 10.4 percent of Hispanics.

Blacks are 30 percent more likely than nonblacks to work in the public sector, according to the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. And roughly 21 percent of black workers are public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblacks.

So when Putin’s bitch says he is going to “reduce government” who exactly gets hurt here?

George W. Bush (AKA the Bushit) “privatized” significant swaths of the Federal Government by outsourcing jobs to the private sector resulting in “whitening” Government.

More than a third (36.2%) of the Military are Minorities. Depending how you count (multiracial, other, etc) something between 17 and 20% of the US Military is black.

Partially as a result, the “wealth gap” between black and white is very bad in Washington, DC.

In D.C., White Families Are on Average 81 Times Richer Than Black Ones

Other major cities aren’t much better

The wealth discrepancy between blacks and whites is one of the most stark examples of inequality in America. White American families have, on average, around $142,000 in savings and assets, minus debt. Black families’, meanwhile, amounted to only $11,000, according to a 2014 Pew Research study. The gulf between black and white wealth is the worst it has been since the 1980s. Put differently, an average white family has 13 times the wealth of an average black family.

But as though the median numbers for the country as a whole weren’t bad enough, things look much worse in America’s cities, according to a new paperfrom the Urban institute—even cities such as D.C. where the prevalence of public-sector jobs, a large black population, and a high share of black business owners might make it seem like a place that black families could thrive. But in Washington D.C., the median white family has a staggering 81 times as much wealth as the median black family.

D.C. is not an outlier: In general, urban areas have much more severe racial inequalities, in part because of the concentration of white wealthy people, and the fact that their wealth has not “trickled down” to poor and middle-class black families. According to a 2015  National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Colors, D.C.’s racial wealth gap falls just behind Los Angeles’s, where median wealth for whites was closer to 89 times as much as blacks’. In Miami it was 30 times as high; in Tulsa, 18 times.

Darrick Hamilton, a professor at the New School and one of the authors of the Urban Institute’s study—along with fellow economists Kilolo Kijakazi, Rachel Marie Brooks Atkins, Mark Paul, Anne Price, and William A. Darity Jr.—says that while many ethnic groups might do poorly in one city and thrive in another, that’s not the case for black Americans. “No matter what the geographical context is, black Americans are a low-wealth group,” he told me. “I think the disparities are going to be dramatic wherever we look.”

Hamilton says that while the statistics about magnitude are useful for distilling the gap in balance sheets, they do little to capture what the wealth gap means for black families. In practice, less wealth means diminished access to the education and opportunities that help many Americans reach the middle class. Less wealth decreases opportunities for savings, homeownership, and economic security. And limited wealth accumulation also means that parents and grandparents have little to pass along to the next generation—from paying for school to helping with down payments—which dampens opportunities for intergenerational mobility.

D.C.’s wealth inequality stems from a combination of factors. According to the study, homeownership plays a significant role: Whites living in the District are much more likely than blacks to own homes—something that’s true around the country. In the District, whites with less than a high school education were more likely to own their homes than blacks at any education level, even those with college degrees. And for those who do own their own place, home values for black owners were around $250,000, about 30 percent less than the average value for white owners. Blacks in the District have a much higher unemployment rate, lower education rates, and are much more likely to have received a subprime mortgage.

The District’s racial wealth divide has old and deep origins in centuries of racist policies. The authors highlight a few in particular: the “black codes” of the 1840s, which prevented black people from owning successful stores or working in certain professions; the return of land in the District to the South in the 1870s, which decreased opportunities for ownership among newly freed blacks;  the demolition of Barry Farms—a black enclave founded by freed blacks—in the 1940s to make way for public housing and highway projects; the wave of “urban renewal” projects that swept out black businesses and residents in the 1960s and 70s. The effects of these policies have never been adequately dealt with. “Black people in D.C. have faced more than two centuries of deliberately constructed barriers to wealth building, and some of the highest barriers were embedded by design in law,” the study says….More…

 

Race in the Classroom

OK…This guy was a rookie. What he should have said was all white people in America benefit from racism.

Discussing race in the classroom: ‘Are all white people racist’?

A high school teacher in Norman, Okla. is under fire for this assertion. But how should the conversation about race relations be framed? 

One high school teacher’s bold premise – that “all white people are racist, period” – is reigniting discussion about how difficult it is to talk about race in school classrooms.

One offended student in the philosophy elective at Norman North High School in Oklahoma recorded the remark, part of a lecture about how to heal racial divides, on her cellphone last week. The student, who wished to remain anonymous, told the local NBC-affiliate KFOR that she felt the teacher was encouraging the class “to pick on people for being white.”

The controversy comes as the country is confronted with questions of institutional racism in its educational systems and police departments, police misconduct against young black men, and racial inequality. The teacher, James Coursey, appeared to try to draw his classroom into this national conversation. Some education experts applaud Mr. Coursey and others’ efforts to engage students in what can be a challenging dialogue. But they also say he could have just worded his argument differently.

“I think it was a rookie error in teaching about race,” Paul Ketchum, a professor of liberal studies at the nearby University of Oklahoma, told The Norman Transcript. “You go for the big term when the a less loaded term would be better to make it a teachable moment.”

In a statement, Joe Siano, the superintendent of the school district, agreed that the discussion could have been handled better but emphasized the subject should still be a conversation in classrooms.

“Racism is an important topic that we discuss in our schools,” said Dr. Siano. “While discussing a variety of philosophical perspectives on culture, race and ethics, a teacher was attempting to convey to students in an elective philosophy course a perspective that had been shared at a university lecture he had attended.”

In the video the student first posted to social media, Coursey starts the lecture by showing a YouTube clip about imperialism. In the video, a man uses white-out on a globe to illustrate how European influence spread across the world, as The Washington Post reported.

Coursey is heard in the recording rhetorically ask: “Am I racist? And I say yeah. I don’t want to be. It’s not like I choose to be racist, but do I do things because of the way I was raised.”

“To be white is to be racist, period,” he says.

The offended student, who said half of her family is white and half Hispanic, told KFOR along with her father they felt the teacher encouraged the “demonization” of one race over others.

More than 100 student demonstrators stood behind Coursey, organizing a walkout Tuesday. One student said the remark was taken out of context.

“We believe it is important to have serious and thoughtful discussion about institutional racism in order to change the history and promote inclusivity,” he said, according to The Norman Times.

Other educators across the country, from preschool teachers to professors, have stumbled or faced criticism about how they have tried to discuss racism. A professor at the University of Kansas was suspended last year for using the N-word in a discussion she led about instances of racism on college campuses. Some of the nine graduate students in the class filed discrimination complaints with the university against the professor, Andrea Quenette. The university dismissed the complaints, but chose not to renewMs. Quenette’s employment following the conclusion of the spring 2017 semester, according the Lawrence Journal-World.

The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., drew national media attention in 2014 by offering a “White Privilege Seminar.” Iris Outlaw, the professor of the seminar, said at the time that its purpose is to explore white privilege and other systems of oppression to help students grow. But some conservatives said it was a liberal perspective gone too far.

“This isn’t education, it’s indoctrination,” Notre Dame student and conservative campus activist Mark Gianfalla told the Daily Caller. “The problem I see with this course is that it is teaching a flawed and inherently racist sociological theory as fact.”… Not surprising, from a conservative racist. Read the rest here…

 

Racism and Rock and Roll

There is no question that Rock and Roll owes it’s roots to black music. And in the 50’s and even early 60’s songs written by black musicians were stolen and made hugely popular with white audiences by segregated radio. It took decades for those black artists to receive compensation for their work. The first Rock Superstar was Elvis Presley, although there were a number of others, including Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis who aspired to the throne. Several of Elvis’ big hits were covers of black musicians music. Bu he also “borrowed” from white musicians. In particular Blue Suede Shoes was a cover of Carl Perkins.

Elvis learned his chops playing with, and befriending black musicians. Because of his “Rockabilly” style, upbringing, and birthplace, a lot of black folks assumed Elvis was a bigot. There is no evidence to support that, although in a racist South, he, like all of the 50’s rock musicians performed with all white bands. The people who actually performed in the Studio recordings however – were a different story.

The Truth About Elvis and the History of Racism in Rock

Elvis has long been vilified as the face of racism and cultural appropriation in rock music—but it’s the legacy of the genre (and the truth about Elvis) that merits closer scrutiny.

Rock music’s legacy is conflicted.

It’s a genre that transformed American culture in a way that re-shaped racial dynamics, but it also came to embody them. Music that at one point in the 1950s seemed to herald the deterioration of racial boundaries, gender norms and cultural segregation had, by the 1970s, become re-defined as a white-dominated, male-dominated multi-million dollarindustry. In the years between, rock ‘n’ roll matured into “rock” and the counterculture embraced anti-establishment ideas like integration and women’s rights—without ever really investing in tearing down white supremacy in any real, measurable way. In that, rock’s history with race is sometimes naïve, sometimes willfully ignorant, and sometimes undeniably hypocritical.

“Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me. See straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain…”

It’s one of the most well-known and significant lines in hip-hop history. Public Enemy’s high-profile smackdown of white America’s “King of Rock ‘N’ Roll” resonated and reverberated throughout hip-hop nation in a way that even overshadowed the Flavor Flavlyrical gut-punch of John Wayne that completed the infamous couplet. On a certain level, the line was symbolic of hip-hop’s intentional dismantling of America’s white iconography; this was a new generation that wasn’t going to be beholden to your heroes or your standards. We’ve got our own voice, it announced. You will be forced to reckon with that voice.

That line also hit so hard because Elvis Presley’s racism has long been a part of his image and reputation in the black community. His notorious quote (“The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes”), solidified his villainy amongst black people. His is the legacy of cultural appropriation and white privilege—made doubly offensive by the fact that he was so dismissive and contemptuous of the black people from whom he’d stolen rock ‘n’ roll.

But—what if none of that was actually true?

The “shine my shoes” quote came from a 1957 article called “How Negroes Feel About Elvis,” published in a periodical called Sepia. The Ft. Worth-based magazine had been founded by Horace Blackwell, a clothing merchant; but by the mid-’50s had been bought by Jewish-American merchant George Levitan. It was by now white-owned but had a black staff and was still marketed to black readers, a publication superficially in the vein of EBONY but often with a more sensationalist slant.

“Some Negroes are unable to forget that Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, hometown of the foremost Dixie race baiter, former Congressman Jon Rankin,” read the article. “Others believe a rumored crack by Elvis during a Boston appearance in which he is alleged to have said: ‘The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records.’”

At the time of the article’s publication, Elvis Presley had never been to Boston. It was also alleged that he’d said it on Edward R. Murrow‘s Person to Person TV show—but he hadn’t appeared there either. Louie Robinson, Jet magazine’s associate editor, tried tracing the actual origins of the quote and came up empty. So he tracked down Elvis himself, interviewing the singer in his Jailhouse Rock dressing room in the summer of 1967.

“I never said anything like that,” Elvis said at the time. “And people who know me know I wouldn’t have said it.”

“A lot of people seem to think I started this business,” Elvis continued, regarding his “King of Rock ‘N’ Roll” status and reputation. “But rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it; I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music.”

“I always wanted to sing like Billy Kenny of the Ink Spots,” Elvis was further quoted as saying in the Jet interview. “I like that high, smooth style.” But Presley acknowledged that his own voice was more in line with the originator of the song that he would cover for his first single. “I never sang like this in my life until I made that first record—‘That’s Alright, Mama.’ I remembered that song because I heard Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup sing it and I thought I would like to try it.”

Presley had grown up on the “black side” of Tupelo, he’d run with the likes of Ike Turner in his early days as a musician and became close friends with B.B. King and eventually James Brown, Cissy Houston and Muhammad Ali. The racism that he’s been branded with because of a phantom quote seems to be a fabrication. But rock’s legacy as a genre pioneered by black people before white artists discovered it, white media re-branded it and white audiences embraced it means that despite Elvis not spouting racist ideas, his legacy is still rooted in racism—even if that racism isn’t directly born of the man himself. He attained his stature because he was not black and in doing so, he opened the doors for a generation of his disciples to reap those same benefits. And when examining the histories of so many of those notables, there is a legacy that is as conflicted as it is confounding.

Not unlike the history of rock itself.

To a generation of long-haired hippies, Elvis came to symbolize the antiquated era of malt shops and sock hops or a rock ‘n’ roller who’d grown up to be a stale old fart, churning out shlock. He may have aided in the white embrace of black music, but he hadn’t sang at the March on Washington like Bob Dylan, nor had he championed Bobby Seale like John Lennon. In the era of pop stars as quasi-revolutionaries, Elvis had become the establishment. The ’60s generation was about change. …Read the Rest Here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uke1B0FpIZ8

 

Letter From a White Guy

Amusing…Basically clarifying the situation of the “Desperation of Demographics”

A letter to my fellow white people

Chris Rock famously riffed on the proposition “I love black people, but I hate n–gas.” Chris Rock is one of the few people who can get away with saying this, since he is a.) black and b.) one of the funniest people alive. I am not 1/48th as funny as Chris Rock, but allow me to say that although I like white people, I’ve about had it with White People.

Don’t get me wrong — some of my best friends are white. In fact all of them are. I myself am a white person, and proud of my white person heritage. (Am I allowed to say that without sounding like a skinhead or klansman?) We are a vibrant people, with a rich cultural heritage in which there is much to celebrate. If you were paying attention during White History Month (March through January) you probably already know about many of our contributions — democracy, the Renaissance, the industrial revolution — and some of our people’s important heroes and role models: Socrates, Newton, Beethoven. I wear the traditional garb of my people, speak our distinctive dialect, and enjoy doing our customary dance, performed only at weddings — a flaccid, spasmodic flailing reminiscent of the inflatable tube-men erected to advertise used car lots.

But for all my pride in our many achievements, I do get sick of White People — a.k.a. Whitey.

You know the White People I’m talking about. They’re the ones who, every time an unarmed black person is gunned down by the cops, come forward to explain yet again that this regrettable incident would not have occurred if the victim had not broken the law, or if they’d simply complied with orders and been polite. These are the White People who, when they denounce “the violence in Baltimore,” are referring not to the breaking of a man’s back but the trashing of a 7-Eleven. The White People who warn that this latest wave of immigrants, is, at last, the one that will take everything from us, rape our women, kill us all, and destroy our civilization. I suspect this must be some sort of case of racial mass projection, since the only wave of immigrants in American history who have ever actually done this was the first one — the White People.

These are the White People who lack all capacity for imagination or empathy, who assume that what life is like for them is what it’s like for everyone else, or would be if they would just behave. They have a Sunday-school faith in an American Dream where everybody has an equal chance if they’re just willing to play by the rules and aren’t afraid of a little hard work. The police are there to protect them; society’s institutions exist to serve them. They see this country as a home and fortress, instead of as a prison, a place where they can only ever be on probation. They believe in law and order, in a level playing field. But “law and order” always serves the status quo, however unjust or cruel it is, and the playing field only looks level to those on the high ground.

“White privilege” is the p.c. slogan for these unacknowledged advantages and entitlement — the freedom to drive around without being pulled out of the car and beaten up, to walk to the store unmurdered, and, mostly, to never have to think about being white. It’s a little unreasonable to condemn White People for what’s basically human nature; pretty much everyone takes for granted whatever advantages they happen to have (being white, male, rich, thin, attractive, American, healthy, alive) and complains about their problems instead. It only starts to seem a little obnoxious when you point this out to White People and they get defensive and angry and adamantly deny having any such thing, insisting that they’ve got it just as hard as anyone else and some people are just whiners.

Let me be clear: I am not opposed to white privilege. In fact, I believe it should be extended to everyone, regardless of their color, ethnicity, or creed. Indeed, White People have been gradually, grudgingly expanding the definition of White People over the centuries: The Irish didn’t used to be white; neither did Italians, or Eastern Europeans, let alone the Jews. Perhaps it is time, at long last, to make everybody honorary White People. (Think how mad ISIS would be if we unilaterally declared them white.) Why shouldn’t we all be equally free to walk the streets without being harassed, beaten up, and jailed for makework offenses by the people we ostensibly pay to protect us? Everyone should experience the heady, illicit thrill of carrying small amounts of drugs around in their pockets, drinking a beer on their own front steps, and occasionally punching it up to 67 miles per hour. White privilege for all!

I try to be patient with White People. But by now, even the very slow ones have done the back-of-the-napkin calculations on the demographics, and they’ve realized that the numbers are not looking good for them. The White Man is taking this very hard. At least some of the paranoid delusions fixated on President Obama — that he is a closet Marxist, Islamic Manchurian Candidate, or late-blooming Antichrist — are symptomatic of a mass hysteria at seeing the darkening face of America embodied in our chief executive. The same syndrome is no small part of the support for would-be autocrat Donald Trump and his Speerian fantasy of a gargantuan bulwark against the invading brown horde.

This situation is, admittedly, not without its little pleasures — it is a delight to see the Republican Party, which has banked on pandering to the angry-bigoted-old-white-man vote for the last half century, now handcuffed to the dead weight of that aging, increasingly demented, and chronically apoplectic bloc. But let’s not get complacent; White People have, historically, proven dangerous, and you never know what they might do now that their numbers are dwindling and their long, cushy position on top is endangered.

White People, please: You embarrass us all. All these histrionics and tantrums, this aggrieved whining about reverse-discrimination, this shameless appropriation of the language of the oppressed — it’s undignified. It ill-becomes the people who calculated the circumference of the Earth, invented the printing press, and successfully exterminated or enslaved half the human race. Let’s let it go gracefully. We had our chance….Read the Rest Here…

 

Steven Colbert and Deray McKesson Interview on White Privilege

Great interview!

 

Sasheer Zamata From SNL Video on White Privilege and Women’s Rights

 

Some Lives Just Matter More

This guy was the former Attorney General under “Governor Gifty”, our former Governor who is now spending time in jail for corruption. The “Chuch” as he is nicknamed also ran for Governor… He lost.

Ken Cuccinelli Says ‘Black Lives Matter’ Insults White People

A panel discussion on CNN got heated Sunday when former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) argued that “Black Lives Matter” is a poor message because it makes white people feel less valued.

After former South Carolina Rep. Bakari Sellers (D) explained that as a black man, he was “the only person at this table whose next interaction [with law enforcement] may cause them to be a hashtag,” Cuccinelli suggested that the “Black Lives Matter” slogan and hashtag should be amended, according to CNN footage shared by Raw Story.

“Adding t-o-o at the end puts it in a context that makes sense,” he argued. Sellers answered that message is already implicit in the slogan.

“Well, you may say that,” Cuccinelli told Sellers. “And there’s plenty of reason to understand that. But I don’t think every American hears it that way. They hear, ‘Here we are. Yes, we have this political motivation that we’re separating out this one category of Americans and saying they matter more than everybody else.'”

Sellers tried to reframe the message for the former attorney general.

“We’re saying stop killing us,” he said.

“I understand that,” Cuccinelli replied, “but that’s why you have the retort, ‘No, all lives matter.’ We’re not leaving these out.”

The push to adopt the “All Lives Matter” message has been widely criticized as ignoring data that shows black Americans face the greatest risks when confronted by law enforcement. Young black people are 4.5 times more likely to be killed by police than any other age or racial group, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, and while black Americans comprise just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 26 percent of those shot by police.

 

Black America…And White America’s Rules

Utterly ignorant, or intentionally unaware of the history of America, a common conservative line is that black folks just need to “get in line” with that hard work and education to “fit in”…

Well…What exactly happened in the “Black Wall Street” of Tulsa Oklahoma in 1920?

The black soldiers who came home from WWI and WWII?

Tulsa “race riot” of 1921

Rick C. Wade makes an interesting point here..

Black America has been playing by white America’s rules. If we want reconciliation, it’s time white America shared the burden.

Ever since the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, I and a good many other African Americans have been searching deep within the well of our faith and struggling hard to do what the relatives of the nine slain churchgoers did so painfully, charitably and meaningfully—forgive accused killer Dylann Roof.

Roof’s racist manifesto, asserting, “I have no choice,” because of what he believed black people were doing to white people, is irrational, angers me to no end and tests the limits of my ability to find that forgiveness. But while some say this tragedy is “beyond forgiving,” I believe that I — and we —ultimately must.

I’m not there yet, though. To get there, I — and we — will have to remove what poet Paul Laurence Dunbar once described as our collective mask:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes —

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

For black Americans, our mask is our unspoken anger, disguising our deep disappointment, and reining in our resentment over a still-evolving history of racial insult and injury — all in the name of coping and getting along with the larger white community. We’ve bottled up our anger and turned our pain inward in the form of self-hate and defeatism. In some cases, we’ve turned our anger on each other.

For too many white Americans, their mask is the willingness to overlook the racial disparities that still persist in our society, and the unwillingness to grapple with the obstacles facing black Americans: recoiling at the sight of #BlackLivesMatter protests, disregarding legislative attempts to curtail our vote and denying the structural racism and economic disenfranchisement that holds many African Americans back.

Mostly, it’s the failure to ask why, in 2015, there are still people like Roof among us who’ve been taught to believe that black people have done some sort of harm to white people — and the failure to acknowledge that while few white Americans think of themselves as complicit in an unequal system, there’s no satisfactory answer to President Obama’s charge, in his Charlestoneulogy, that “racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal.” Those are questions for white Americans to ponder, and search their souls for answers.

I’ve worn the mask my whole life and played by white America’s rules, hoping beyond hope that by doing so, black America could eventually whittle away the seeming indifference to the inequities we face. Today’s generation calls this my generation’s “respectability politics.” And what I’m coming to terms with now is that this approach hasn’t always worked when it comes to breaking down the racial obstacles we face. Despite the racial barriers I’ve had to overcome during my lifetime, I’ve kept my faith, attained a top-flight education, worked hard and succeeded. I’m a Harvard graduate, former government official and now a global businessman. I have a solid upper-middle class life.

As a former seminarian and member of the AME Zion church, the shootings at Mother Emanuel opened old emotional wounds I thought had healed. Beneath my mask there’s pain and anger deeply rooted in my childhood; growing up poor in rural South Carolina in the late ‘60s, first attending a segregated elementary school, then later going to an integrated middle school and longing for the same social and physical comforts of my white peers.

In middle school, I recall staying after class to work on a service project, and when my white teacher drove me home I had her drop me off in front of a white family’s house a mile away from mine, so she wouldn’t see my small house and poor neighborhood.

Even a simple visit to the doctor was traumatic. A “Coloreds” sign hung at the entrance to the black section of the office; the room was filthy and the chairs were worn. When I ventured to the nice, clean white section to play with another young boy, I was chastised by the receptionist and disciplined by my mother. The dentist’s office was worse — I never sat in the dental chair for care, because I was treated in the “Coloreds” waiting room.

When I ran for my high school’s student council in 1978, I had to run as “Vice President Black” while a white student ran for “Vice President White.”

I watched my father, a forklift operator who never finished school, struggle to maintain his dignity while suffering the daily humiliations of being black in the Deep South. Like many black men of his time, he drank to mask his pain.

These and other experiences make up my racial DNA, and while I and many others with similar experiences have achieved a measure of mainstream success, despite the price of wearing the mask, more of us were stymied. And even as the mask did damage to our very humanity, and we implicitly knew this, we’ve never allowed ourselves to take it off; and we’ve not held the kind of uncontained hate that we see with Roof.

In addition to forgiveness, then, the challenge is turning our faith into action around racial reconciliation. But reconciliation, as all Americans must now surely understand in the wake of the shootings, is a two-way street. White Americans can no longer enjoy the luxury of being unburdened by history while black Americans carry all its weight. Our history is shared; and so must be the burden…More…

 

Who You Gonna Call? The White Squad!

This satire hits the nail on the head relative to white privilege in America. It is something along the lines of the Rent a Black Person satire a few years ago.

Can’t get ahead? Can’t even hail a cab? The New Jim Crow holding you back? Call the white squad!

 

The New Jim Crow – Racial Politics In La Town

Some things haven’t changed in the South. Sometimes that “politic” to keep white power in place in the South can take an even uglier turn…

Did a White Sheriff and District Attorney Orchestrate a Race-Based Coup in a Northern Louisiana Town?

In Waterproof, a small northern Louisiana town near Natchez, Mississippi, the African American mayor and police chief assert that they have been forced from office and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by an alliance of white politicians and their followers. In a lawsuit filed last week, Police Chief Miles Jenkins asserts a wide-ranging conspiracy involving the area’s district attorney and parish sheriff, along with several other members of the region’s entrenched political power structure. These events come at a time of widespread and high-profile racist attacks against the US President and Black members of Congress nationwide, and in a state where white political corruption and violence have been and continue to be used as tools to suppress Black political representation.

Chief Miles Jenkins
About 800 people live in Waterproof, a rural community in Tensas Parish. Tensas has just over 6,000 residents, making it both the smallest parish in the state, and the parish with the state’s fastest declining population. The regional schools remain mostly segregated, with nearly all the Black students attending public schools, and nearly all the white students attending private schools. With a median household income of $10,250, Waterproof is also one of the poorest communities in the US. The only jobs for Black people in town involve working for white farmers, according to Chief Jenkins. “Unless you go out of town to work,” he says, “You’re going to ride the white man’s tractor. That’s it.”

 

White Privilege Boot Camp – Patriotism

Questioning patriotism has become a right wing game in America, claiming somehow – sans any empirical evidence – simply being on the right grants them a lofty position from which to judge and parse the patriotism of others.

Plastic patriotism is also a white privilege. When white conservative opine about “this country”, it is a country and perception curiously devoid of people of color. White privilege expressed in terms of conservatives is the capability to oppose Health Care Reform on the basis of “socialism” and abortion is wrong, even though the current system results in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Minority babies, children, and adults each year…

Hat Tip to NewsOne for this one as well as BlackVoices.

White Privilege is not understanding the visceral reaction from black folks when Faux News and the right wing attacked Michelle Obama’s patriotism. This young lady gets unloaded on by the guy with the microphone – which I agree is over the top …

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Dr. Boyce Watkins view:

VIDEO: Woman Cries In White Privilege Boot Camp

I am not sure if the “White Privilege Boot Camp” is real or not, but I am also not sure if I mind the idea. This is not to say that it should be as harsh as the boot camp the brother puts the white woman through in the below video, but the truth is that many of us in America are ignorant about racial history, primarily because our country wants to forget it. We don’t mention many of the horrors and evils of slavery, because we would rather presume that a holocaust can only occur in another country.I watched the video below with as much shock as the woman who was being lectured by the brother with the microphone. The brother is loud, and he dominates the woman, leading most of us to feel some degree of empathy toward her. She even cries toward the end, so the tendency is to argue that perhaps he was too harsh. Yes, he was too harsh, and I would not have approached the issue in the same way. But……..

When it comes to how we process our racial history in America, there is the question of truth vs. lies. Was the woman crying because she was confronted with the truth about white privilege? Are most white Americans even aware of the benefits of being white? If that is or is not the case, then who should be held accountable for the clear and lasting damage of slavery? While some expect us to presume that history remains disconnected from the present, the truth is that they are inextricably linked. You can’t have the present without the past, since actions of the past create the world that lies all around us. Here are some quick examples:

Elena Kagan, the most recent Supreme Court nominee, can hire 29 people, with none of them being black, and no one blinks an eye. Why? Because there is a privilege to whiteness, which implies that black people should be happy with whatever we can get. She’d never consider allowing white men or women to be excluded in an equally egregious way.

The Supreme Court has had over 111 justices, and not a single black woman has had a chance to serve on the court. That’s not the result of black women being inferior to anyone else. It’s the result of white privilege, sexism and the racially divisive constructs on which our nation has been built.

The average black family wealth level is roughly 1/10 that of white Americans. That didn’t happen because black people decided that we don’t like money. It happened because for hundreds of years, slavery and Jim Crow eliminated our ability to pass wealth on to our children. This wealth imbalance wasn’t created overnight.

Those are the facts, folks, whether we like them or not. Some respond to these realities with anger. Some people forgive and forget. Some people live in denial. My personal opinion, though, is that we are going to have to deal with white privilege and the impact of slavery if our country is going to ever move forward. At the very least, we should honestly educate one another on the past… Again, I can’t condone the aggressive approach, but it is certainly thought-provoking.

more about “Woman Cries In White Pivilege Boot Ca…“, posted with vodpod