I would think that this would be the least problematic of the events, since a fair number of the people attending are competitors with a vested interest in not getting into trouble - perhaps that is why some clubs say they lose money?

No, no, no… I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

I mean, seriously… what were all those silly relay organizers thinking, scheduling their event the same weekend as “Jim Crow Era Heritage Fest”?

Barf.

This is what happened to Freaknik in Atlanta.  It used to be a really major event, then businesses started to close up and it faded away.  It brought about a quarter million people into Atlanta, mostly from traditional black colleges, and I guess that worried the city fathers.  The businesses that stayed open for Freaknik always did well too.  It was just racist panic I believe, same as Austin.

There is or used to be a black college weekend on Martha’s Vinyard.  I was there once when it was going on - masses of beach goers, all much better dressed than anyone else, spending good money on finer things.

Of course this is vastly more of a threat than the drug crimes the island has been contending with during the rest of the year.

Oh, and if I owned a store in that mall, I would be PISSED.

Eh, you’re mixing up state stuff with city stuff, Antigone.  The fallen Confederate soldier statue is on the Capitol grounds, which is controlled by our wingnut-dominated state legislator.  Stuff the city controls, like street names, indicates a different direction—-we have streets named after Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, and MLK.  Travis County (where Austin is located) was 65-35 in favor of Obama in the election.  I never said we were perfect, but nor is it fair to condemn the entire South as one unwashed, liberal-hating red area.

Oh, and if I owned a store in that mall, I would be PISSED.

If I owned a store in that mall, I think I’d sue.

Honoring the fallen Confederate soldiers is racist?  And prototypical racist, the point that “If that’s not racist, I don’t know what is.”  Please.

Look, I can understand the argument if it were a memorial for Jefferson Davis, but it’s for the poor grunts on the wrong side of a traitorous war.

Undoubtedly racism is part of the underlying reasons for the monument, but it’s not racist by itself: you have to look at a lot of the context to get that.  As it’s not facially apparent, it’s counterproductive to make the claim it is.

“Texas: the only state to secede twice in order to preserve slavery.”

Heh, there’s a Jefferson Davis statue on UT campus. And one of MLK. There’s no reason to cover up the fact that there’s a racist history in Texas, but there is also a progressive anti-racist history.  There’s both.

The specific problem here is a separate one, though.  This is San Francisco-style liberalism at its worst—-people are Democrats and environmentalists and pro-choice, but they are also classist and racist and don’t examine their worst prejudices.

But, but, we live in a postracial America. Don’t we?

I’d sure hate to be the bar or mall owner defending against the obvious suit that any place offering public accomodations might face in a situation like this. The big question for me (and not rhetorical because I don’t know the clientele well enough) is which places would find their regular business hurt by informations pickets and which would find it helped.

They did this in Florida too, I don’t remember what the event was called, but it was basically Black Spring Break.  The malls closed at 5pm due to spurious concerns over shoplifting, as did many local businesses.  I only heard about it one year, which means that whatever the event was, it was moved to another city.  (Both malls were owned by Simon Group, which is constantly getting up to fuckery.  They wonder why their malls are failing.)

>>Emo’s Austin, a live music venue in downtown’s Sixth Street district, will be closed, as will Flamingo Cantina, a premier Austin club for reggae music…<<

OH NOES! Can’t have teh blacks in our REGGAE club!

In the interests of cultural sensitivity, it is important to not that most African-Americans from non Caribbean backgrounds have no historical cultural connection to Reggae, and Reggae artists had little interaction, effect, or purchase with the African American public in the 1960s and 1970s and onward.  I could see how African Americans who have had little contact with Afro-Carrib culture might not be interested in a Reggae club.

That isn’t, however, how the club owner described her behavior and decisions.  I could understand somebody saying “well, there isn’t much interest in our offerings with this particular crowd and we lose money”.  I don’t understand the drivel that the owner was credited with.

This is true Ms. Kate and I didn’t wish to imply otherwise… I just couldn’t help but see an irony in the statement. Caribbean culture is indeed its own heritage.

This has been pissing me off for a while now.  And then one of my friends posted in her Facebook that because of Relay weekend, she has to be sure to stay away from Highland Mall and downtown… not that she’d go there anyway haha!  I’m trying to figure out how to call her on that without flying totally off the handle.

Did you know that our African-American population is falling, not just in terms of percentage, but in terms of actual numbers?  While the city as a whole continues to grow rapidly, the black folks are heading out to Pflugerville or leaving the area altogether, and there aren’t new ones coming in to replace them.  Because Austin is racist.  I heard a local activist on KUT yesterday say that if he could wave a magic wand, he’d move every single black person out of Austin.

When there were riots in LA related to the Rodney King situation, I was living in NYC at the time. There was a mass hysteria in NYC with shopkeepers boarding up their windows and doors. And I am ashamed to say that my girlfriend and I fled NYC to a friend’s house in the suburbs, thinking that we wouldn’t be “safe” if we stayed in the city. At the time, I had not the faintest awareness that the entire thing—including my own reaction—was racist bullshit.

Ms. Marcotte,

This happens all the time in New Orleans.  Whenever there is a tourist event in the city which attracts a large number of blacks, many downtown and French Quarter restaurants and shops whose mainstay is tourism will, surprisingly, shut down for the duration of the event. 

The usual rationale:  1. Too many people gathering in one place make it difficult to get to work; 2. “They” don’t visit the restaurants and shops in significant enough numbers to justify the hassle (although they seem to stay open during the “slow” season!); 3.  These large crowds have a tendency to attract violent behavior—even though these event attract a largely sedate middle-class and working-class blacks (for instance, The Bayou Classic and The Essence Festival).

The NOPD doesn’t help matters:  They treat the visitors to these events as though they were cattle needing to be wrangled.  They close streets they would never think of closing during such big-time events as The Sugar Bowl or The Super Bowl.

The local hotels don’t help either:  They more often than not supply their guests who are in town for these event with plastic i.d. bracelets.

Over the years I have worked at a few bars and at least several times I have been told to keep drinks a little weaker for both blacks and hispanics.  In my experience that is better advice for anyone in the service and Australians than it is for people with dark skin.

Amanda, I haven’t lived in Austin since ‘89 and haven’t been there since the mid-90s.  I was in and out of Highland Mall a fair bit and never really noticed that.  Is this “Highland Mall is the black mall” a new thing?  Or just a reputation unbacked by demographic reality?  Or was it truly so and I was just oblivious to it?  (As I’ve noted before, all you Americans look alike to me.)

Yeah, probably.  I don’t go there because I don’t go to malls, so I don’t know firsthand.  And the few times a decade I bother to go to a mall, it’s there.  It seems like the mall to me, but maybe I don’t have particularly strong expectations about the racial mix-up of mall shoppers.

In the interests of cultural sensitivity, it is important to not that most African-Americans from non Caribbean backgrounds have no historical cultural connection to Reggae, and Reggae artists had little interaction, effect, or purchase with the African American public in the 1960s and 1970s and onward.  I could see how African Americans who have had little contact with Afro-Carrib culture might not be interested in a Reggae club.

I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise, and if that came across, I’m sorry.  Far from it.  It’s obvious that a bunch of college kids of any color are probably not going to go to the reggae club first.  Unless the reggae club books something they want to see, which is something Flamingo Cantina does all the time. 

But the point is that Flamingo Cantina has a lot of black performers, which just makes this blatant racism all the more fucked up.

this sort of thinking comes from someone who owns a reggae bar, which leaves me with the unavoidable impression that Gillen thinks black people are fine if they’re <strike>performing</strike> stoned and mellow

Fixed that for ya!

white paranoia and fear comes from white guilt, which is earned guilt, because of the unchallenged racism, as Amanda points out about most Austin and San Francisco liberals, as in other places I’m sure.

Yuppies - can’t live with them, can’t stand them.

I don’t even have more to add to this, except that she’s wrong about Texas Relays being dangerous.

I’m sure someone in comments has already mentioned this, but “dangerous” is a euphemism for “there will be black people acting like human beings in public” in a lot of the South.

Reggae artists had little interaction, effect, or purchase with the African American public in the 1960s and 1970s and onward.

This is actually not entirely true.  There is apparently a high degree of continuity between social conventions around dancehall/ska/reggae and the way that hip-hop started in the US.  In fact I believe the first people to hold the block parties that spawned rap were Caribbean-Americans.

Weird.  Why is this year the tipping point for backlash against this event?  What changed?

I’m not sure that it is the tipping point.  I suspect this has been going on for a long time, but it just never came onto my radar.  Most people I know haven’t fully recovered from SXSW and don’t go downtown during Relays enough, so honestly, it hasn’t even come up.

and the way that hip-hop started in the US

Which was pretty much well after the death of Bob Marley, young person.

Which was pretty much well after the death of Bob Marley, young person.

DJ Kool Herc started it all in 1973.  Marley died in ‘81.  Old Person!

Though it’s true that the early breakbeat DJ’s were mostly playing funk, not reggae.  It was the concept that carried over from the Caribbean community, not the music itself.

I’m not an expert on hip-hop history, but I was around for the early stages, and whatever was happening in the Bronx in the early to mid 70s, it didn’t get to DC until around ‘79. At least it didn’t get to my mostly-black ghetto Alexandria, VA elementary school till the Sugar Hill Gang and “Rapper’s Delight”. I doubt there was anything like national audience, black or white, for hip-hop before 1980, and not much before MTV embraced the genre in ‘84. So perhaps it is substantially correct to say that rap is a post-Bob Marley thing.

Anyhoo, it’s funny that on certain issues, Austin is no more progressive than Myrtle Beach, which scandalously closes shop for Black Bike Week every spring, but is wide open for the “regular” (White) Bike Week.

College towns can be weird and wonderful, but also painfully *white* in a cultural sense (if not always in a demographic sense, e.g. Madison, WI has a large minority population). Austin’s the home of Whole Foods (does it get any whiter than Whole Foods?) and “Book People,” a book store long on faux-liberal condescension and rather short of actual books.

So perhaps it is substantially correct to say that rap is a post-Bob Marley thing.

But this is totally beside the point.  All I said originally was that there was a lot of cultural continuity between African American music culture and Caribbean music culture, going way back, part of which is directly responsible for hip-hop.  NOT anything to do with “who came first, Run DMC or Bob Marley?” (which is a dumb question, since The Wailers were putting out records in the early 60’s, and MTV-approved groups like Run DMC were simply not the beginnings of hip-hop, not by a long shot).

In reading more about the origins of hip-hop, mainly via that rap thread we had a week or so ago, the especially cool thing is that, not only do the origins of hip-hop lie in Caribbean culture, but the roots of reggae lie in African-American culture!

(it’s the biggest Mardi Gras in the country after N.O., or so I’m told.)

You were told wrong… St. Louis, Missouri has the nation’s second biggest Mardi Gras after NOLA.  Or at least we like to make that claim.  It is pretty huge, and outside of NOLA, it’s the most frequent Mardi Gras that I’ve heard people from other parts of the country talk about.  It may or may not be the “second biggest”, but we definitely like to claim that it is…

ST. LOUIS, MO - The nation’s second-biggest Mardi Gras celebration behind News Orleans draws big crowds, and leads to more than 100 arrests.

Or at least we like to make that claim.

There are at least three cities that claim to have “the biggest Mardi Gras outside New Orleans”.  Galveston, Mobile, and St. Louis.  There are probably more, too.  I don’t think it’s a claim that can really be substantiated, except for by attendance numbers.  Which are pretty meaningless, since I’d guess that there are more visitors to Disneyworld’s fake French Quarter every year than there are to the actual French Quarter in New Orleans.

The “liberal=OK with black people” connection is a dubious one, as statues, genre anxiety, and contending local forces indicate. There’s a big difference between “liberal/blue” cities like DC and Detroit, which have TONS of black people who largely support Democrats and a robust social safety net to compensate for utter civil abandon from higher levels, and “liberal cities” like San Francisco and Vegas, which are pro-union and pro-taxing-the-abundant-revenue so that everyone can enjoy it, but have different racial politics and at best a tenuous coalition between their constituencies. The idea of a spectral alliance between anti-racists, black people, and white liberals writ large is, I think, the right-wing’s menagerie of their enemies.

...and is the “Why is this year the tipping point?” a rhetorical question, or, um, what?

I would agree that in many ways Austin is a fairly liberal city in spirit, if not in action (see, e.g. systematic undercounting of the huge homeless population), for Texas at leasr, but when it comes to race, Austin is one of mosr, if not the most, racist big city in the country. This is evident in its extreme segragation, the institutionalized racism of the police (which the department doesn’t even attempt to hide —compare, for example, the police presence at SxSW vs that downtown during Texas Relays every year), or the near complete exclusion of black people (and hispanics to an only slightly lesser degree) from downtown. If you survey any random group of black people in Austin, 99% will almost certainly tell you they never go to 6th St and the surrounding area, because they don’t like it and don’t feel welcome there (they might also mention the police presence). Instead, Austin’s black club-goers tend to go to Plugerville, Round Rock, or even Kileen, or stick to the east side or clubs around 290w and I35, where they feel more welcome. And the great whiteness downtown (SxSW has to be the whitest gathering I’ve ever seen, by the way) is oblivious.

I sometimes wonder if Austin’s extreme racism is a product of the fact that for a “southern” city, it has a pretty small black population, which is fairly geographically isolated (on the east and north sides of town). That makes it easier to exclude them. And it’s been going on for so long, everyone just seems used to it. Plus, hey, we vote Democrat, and there are a bunch of gay clubs downtown (have you been to the new one), so we can’t be racists, right?

The racism is not a product of the geographical isolation; the geographical isolation is a product of the racism.  Moving the black and brown population to the eastside was a very deliberate thing; it was part of the urban planning process in the first part of the 20th century.  Move the social services over there, move the churches, restrict housing options, etc.  And hand over the central neighborhoods that had previously been majority-minority to the whites.

The “gentlemen’s agreement” keeps minority representation on the city council, but it’s not geographic representation, so for every Eric Mitchell who at least pays lip service to helping East Austin and addressing the city’s racist tendencies you have a Willie Lewis who’s more closely tied to the environmentalists than the African-American community (not that I have any problems with Lewis, just that there’s no guarantee of having anyone on the council who really fights for East Austin.)

I told my brother and sister-in-law that Austin is now majority-minority: whites make up less than 50% of the population, with the Hispanic population growing super-fast.  And they were shocked, they’d had no idea.  They live northwest, and she goes to UT, and it’s just a sea of whiteness all the time.

burgundy, I just meant to say that the geographic isolation perpetuates the racism, because Austin’s bevy of white “liberals” can go days without even seeing a black person.

What really bugs me about this is the sudden outrage at a few businesses suddenly displaying overt racism related to the Relays. I hear people seeming shocked, shocked I tell you, that something like this could happen in the great bastion of liberalism that is Austin, Texas. But anyone who’s paid attention to the relays knows that it’s met with widespread racism every year. And this isn’t the city’s only departure from liberalism. It’s inordinately large homeless population is, as anyone who’s worked with them knows, seriously underserved by both the city and private charities; schools on the east and southeast sides, where whites are the minority, are seriously underfunded and in some cases overcrowded; the mental health system sucks (which is why there are so many mentally ill homeless people); Planned Parenthood can’t build new clinics ‘cause contractors won’t work for them, etc., etc. I know these are just big city problems that you’ll find everywhere, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would call this a liberal city. A bunch of upper middle class white people who voted for Obama and a bunch of students who protested the war does not a liberal city make.

“Highland Mall near North Interstate 35 is a frequent destination for Texas Relays attendees. It will close at 2 p.m. Saturday “because the safety and security of our shoppers and retailers is our top priority,” General Manager Jeff Gionnette said in an e-mail to the Austin American-Statesman.”

Dear lord.  Quick, everybody, close the mall!  There’s customers a-comin’!