They want to smash the windows of big government. Ok, well I guess they should start small and smash the windows of cop cars. See how that works out for them.

Yeah that was kind of nauseating. I didn’t immediately think of racial or gender implications. I thought this man is telling them its time for Kristallnacht USA. They really are putting themselves in a place where its impossible to live with other people. They can either grow up and realize they have been drunk on rhetoric or continue the binge and end up in violent confrontations.

And of course this is uniformly people who have no experience with serious organized violence. They’re pulling the same chickenhawk thing they did with Iraq, and imagining that it will turn out just as well.

What’s especially disturbing to me is that politicians like Pawlenty, a fairly moderate governor of a fairly liberal state, are engaging in this sort of rhetoric, all the while believing that they’re fooling the rubes. Pawlenty et al sit in their hotel suites afterward, having a cocktail and glad they got that out of the way so their cred is established among the mouth-breathers. Pawlenty probably thought the whole thing was just kind of fun: put together a few images and watch the crowd go wild, then when election time comes they’ll hold their noses and vote for him.

And he, and Romney, and Ron Paul, and any other non-batshit Republican, just don’t get it. The wind already done got sowed, and this is the whirlwind. These people are too stupid to actually accomplish a revolution, but they’re just dumb enough to try to start one. And it will wash over Pawlenty et al like a freak wave that kills a dozen experienced surfers.

Thank you for this synthesis, Amanda. I knew something really bothered me about those speeches, more than my just thinking “what a bunch of idiots.” You put it together for me.

Violence is always okay when you’re the one dishing it out, they think. And of course they’re always right, blah blah blah.

  You just cannot get a Republican to admit that there are things called ‘facts’ and that they have chosen to pick a side that stomps on those facts. What’s their response when confronted with unassailable facts? “That’s a lie! It’s a liberal lie!”

  These people scare the fuck out of me. They have no concept of reality and their feeling of victimization by the reality-based people who oppose them is huge—-and angry. All it would take is a spark.

And of course this is uniformly people who have no experience with serious organized violence

it kind of cracks me up when you see gun nuts who buy guns for the purpose of defending themselves from the federal government should the need ever arise. What is that they think is going to happen should somehow us troops ever be deployed to eliminate revolutionaries and enforce martial law in let’s say ohio? The idea of libertarians individually trying to defend themselves from a state that has an army at its disposal is patently ridiculous but you will always have a bunch of clowns having a circlejerk talking about it.

This, I think, points up a critical difference between wingnut Americans and their fascist forebears.

Traditional fascists would have heard the crap being spewed at CPAC and immediately launched an American Kristallnacht.  Instead, the teabaggers and country club types hearing that crap at CPAC laugh and then return to figuring out how to stop healthcare reform, stop the Stimulus, getting more tax cuts for the top 1%, bailing out more Wall Streeters and bankers, and generally screwing anyone who isn’t a rich WASP.  That’s just sad.

We know you have it in you, Reichwing!  You’re so close!  America is the Best Damn Country in the World™, so how can you let a bunch of cheese-and-bratwurst-eating EuroPeons show us up?

If you put your minds to it, I know you can be the best fascists evah!  If you rededicate yourselves to putting America firmly on the right track, there’s nothing that can stop you!...

David Neiwert should be on one of the many terrible morning shows rather than George Will or Colin Powell, explaining these dynamics. Or they should just put up his long essay on Rush, Newspeak, and Proto-Facism, scrolling slowly down.

As I watch ABC News’ roundtable, George Will just said something along the lines of this about CPAC: ‘look at the GOP, having just lost the Presidency, with no real new talent, so the entertainers stole the show’. This post sparked me onto exactly why a lot of people, including a bunch of super-serious types, have kept trying to keep people like Rush, Glenn Beck, or any of the supercrazy nutjobs who absolutely do not reflect back at all at the big names who share their stage are consistently called rodeo clowns rather than evil. Driftglass, a great longtime Chicago blogger just had a podcast with Bluegal from I believe C&L;, and while reading aloud a form letter from Michael Steele’s RNC (which they both mercilessly skewer), Drifty breaks down and says something that your post has everything to do with - there are 30-40 million Americans who aren’t fit to be adults, let alone rational citizens.

These ‘entertainers’ are clearly there to do what Neiwert has preached for years - rationalize/mainstream rightwing violence. Frankly, after reading the plane guy’s suicide letter, I was surprised more by how much real sense (the wealthy robbing the middle class blind bit) was in it than the mad scramble by the press to define it as not terrorism. Glenn Greenwald’s gone over that territory enough, but the urgent need to not only erase Timothy McVeigh from the public conscious but to also basically de-fucking-fine terrorism as ‘what Muslims do (and did I mention most are brown?)’ is just despicable and enabling these people. The sad irony that some guy who was tricked by the same tax dodge that got Wesley Snipes in the 80s was (I assume) driven to this by the same Randian policies that have ruined so many others is now mostly lost to this, far more important message that CPAC, Bircher types are actively advocating violence in dog whistle times triplicate language.

Through a million reasons you guys go over every day, there are so many people ruled by fear - now of a black planet, and I enjoyed the FDL booktalk with Rich Benjamin of Searching for Whitopia too - that they are all basically 7 year olds in rich, old, white, rural male bodies. Any other explanation, like what Doug Stanhope the comic says, how they just idealize their youth (50s), b/c youth is great, strike me as false b/c there’s just too much history with race and class, even after money whitewashing as much as they can.

However, what to do? Past killing the filibuster and, perhaps, passing legislation that could actually help these people enough to make them defend their (new) Medicare equivalent from gummint, how will these children react to the next, real deal, climate change? Short of jokes that I’ll be making at parties, like ‘literacy tests? how about tests on where your tax money goes, or how much you’ve gotten yours cut by Obama’, these people won’t go away. Or, maybe, more importantly now more than ever, their Freedomworks money won’t go away, nor the same shallow media entertainer types like David Gregory who won’t stop justifying their existence with constant, totally super-unbiased coverage.

It’s an impossible question to answer, I know, but I’m just searching for a way to end this reaction to a great post. If there was a just Disco Ball, Pawlenty wouldn’t have a prime spot on Meet the Press for using his faux moderate cred to help push utter dog(shit)-whistle politics - or if he did, it would be with his mike cut off and with just a laughtrack with the aforementioned Niewert piece onscreen.

I don’t know, DupinTM, I think you’re actually on to something.  I can see a lot of value in a literacy test that includes questions like, “Ms. Jennings earned $55,000 last year, and her taxes went up/down” or “Of the following Federal budget items, the largest is The American military presence in South Korea / Foreign aid money for all African nations / Support for elementary education”.

As John W. Campbell said in one of his famously controversial 1960s editorials in _Analog_, if literacy tests were administered blindly through IBM sheets marked with number 2 pencils (rather than by winking white racists), a too-hard literacy test would disenfranchise most black people all right, but also almost all white people who hadn’t passed the bar.

I don’t know how Pawlenty even has a job anymore, given his part in the ongoing road neglect which led to the I-35 bridge disaster.  Are Republicans just not ever responsible for failures in government that happened on thier watches?

At the risk of Godwinning… call it the Riefenstahl effect. Doesn’t matter how bad the message is as long as you have an effective way to hold their attention.

You know, it’s time that progressives organize a serious pushback to these tea party people.  Have our own marches and conventions to counteract the bullshit these people are spouting, in addition to pushing coherent, specific goals that we are for.  Because what I see going on right now is that these people are grabbing all the media attention (hey look, we’re a force to be reckoned with) and are having an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. 

What I really hate is that I work in the Fox News building in NYC and see some of these Fox people who push this tea party bullshit on their programs when I walk through the lobby of the building.  I’m giving serious to carrying anti-Fox News signs when I walk through the lobby just to rattle their cages a bit.  Since I work in the building, I am legally allowed to be there, and since I don’t work for Fox, they can’t fire me for it.

Given that the plane-crasher in Austin just smashed quite a few windows in an attempt to help bring down big government, Pawlenty’s speech is really, really reprehensible.

“Rachel Maddow found at least one publication that had cartoons equating Tiger Woods with Barack Obama for no other apparent reason than the fact that they’re both biracial.”

Hate to correct you, Amanda, but they are equating Tiger Woods and Barack Obama because they are both Black

Speaking as an African American who has a White father and a Black mother, I can tell you, in this country, no matter how much White blood flows in your veins or how light your skin is or how White your spoken voice sounds if you have significant Black ancestry you are Black

This is a fact that every African American knows - and ever biracial African American knows very well.

That’s why almost all biracial African Americans identify as Black - because before we even went to kindergarten, we learned the hard way that your race will never accept us - hell, we count ourselves as lucky if our White blood relatives accept us

So, let’s keep it real - Tiger Woods is a Black man who happens to have some White and Asian ancestry, and our President is a Black man who happens to have some White ancestry, because that’s how the American racial classification system works.

Trust me on this one - I’ve lived it for 41 years now (and I was born before Loving v Virginia)

TY, Dr. Psycho.

In the darker corners of my psyche - the Nixonian lizard brain, I wish that, like the stimulus funds+hypocrisy debate, that Obama really would just match their rhetoric with his powers. Deny all the stimulus money to the South and talk about it constantly. Real hardball rather than dumb Irish Catholic stereotype Matthews hardball. Or, as you say with the tests, ONLY give it to whites, and flaunt the fact that Asians, Latinos, Blacks, and Martians can vote w/o it.

I’m struggling with the questions. I think at the moment I want only 2:

1) What percentage of your hard earned tax dollars go to welfare?

2) What percentage of your blood, sweat, and tears go to foreign aid?

The answer to both is, and I’m sorry I’m too lazy to look it up exactly and it was on some popular blog a few days ago, miniscule. Like tenths of percentage points.

Hell, if we’d done stuff like this we might have had Medicare for all! Still not sure about real financial reform. Or, as MikeEss pointed out @7, maybe we could’ve gotten that proto-fascist (Neiwert) Krystallnacht they’ve been pining for (but hoping the rubes will do for them). Or maybe pharmakos is right @1, and optimistically speaking they’ll have that epiphany that Cartman from South Park has after the Dog Whisperer gets done with him, and that…

Other People Exist! And Are Human Like Me!

I’m not so hopeful, but hey, with all the guns they have they’ve still only convinced, in the middle of the massive cult that is anti-abortionland, only the biggest misanthropes to commit the evil.

It’s kind of funny. When I first heard of literacy tests I thought they were a fantastic idea. Note: I live in a place with a lot of stupid ass hyper religeous white people who I am sure would fail. Then I learned how these tests were historically used to discriminate against “undesirables” and that knowledge cured me of thinking literacy tests were a good idea. Why can’t other people see this too?

Comment #5 : I keep waiting for something to happen with these shitstains. Why haven’t they been called out on their bullshit more?

Apologies, Gregory.  I certainly wasn’t trying to obscure that they’re both black.  But to racist teabaggers, what they have in common is not just that they are both black, but that they both have a parent who isn’t black.  Miscegenation haunts the racist mind, and I think that it’s true that the teabagger obsessives would object both to the fact that Woods and Obama are prominent black men in roles that used to be considered whites-only, but that both of them are products of relationships that racists object to.

I certainly wasn’t trying to offend, and apologize.

Questions for a test:

i, The Glorious Revolution in England was in 1688, the American Revolution was in 1776, and the French Revolution was in 1789.  What is the world’s largest democracy?

ii, In OECD countries, the average taxation level is 40.7% of GDP, 56.1% in Denmark, 49.0% in the Euro area, and 35.7% in the USA (*).  What does “OECD” stand for?

iii, The median household salary is $42,000 and the median net worth for an American family is around $120,000. Only about 1% of Americans are millionaires.  The base salary for a member of Congress $174,000, and 237 members of Congress, about 44%, are millionaires. The richest member of Congress is worth slightly over $250 million.  What is 42,000 as a percentage of one million?

(*) 2003 figures, swiped from Wikipedia.  Should be updated.

So, let’s keep it real - Tiger Woods is a Black man who happens to have some White and Asian ancestry, and our President is a Black man who happens to have some White ancestry, because that’s how the American racial classification system works.

I think Amanda’s right, though—the fact that Woods and Obama are mixed-race, and proudly so, hits all kinds of buttons with these guys that wouldn’t be getting pressed if it was, say, Michael Vick and David Paterson, who both have two black parents.

Of course, drawing these distinctions when it comes to African-Americans is even more ridiculous than it sounds, because unless you’re a recent immigrant from, say, Ghana, you’re at least half-white to begin with even if both of your parents are classified as black.  I’ve been watching the Henry Louis Gates series, “Faces of America” on PBS and he says in the intro that one of the things that made him want to do the series was looking at his own genealogy and discovering that he has more Irish ancestry than African.

In a way, I think that’s what drives them nuts, though—they know perfectly well that a lot of “black” people have just as much white ancestry as they do, but that can’t possibly be so, because that would mean that any “natural” superiority they have doesn’t actually exist.  So they’re really desperate to erase any evidence that, yes, the United States is a mixed-race country to a much greater extent than anyone is willing to admit.  Hell, my mother’s side of the family has been here since Colonial times, so it seems incredibly unlikely that there’s no African and/or Native American ancestry hanging out in our family tree no matter how white we look.

Pawlenty claims he was joking.

As someone recently commented (can’t find it on Google) “It’s all shits and giggles, until a plane crashes into a building.”

Amanda - apology accepted, and I do appreciate it.

As you might imagine, I’m very conscious of just exactly how White folks feel about “race mixing” (hell, there’s still at least one justice of the peace in Louisiana who openly refuses to marry interracial couples)

With that said, I really don’t think being mixed or 100% Black really makes a difference to White racists I’m pretty sure they hate ALL OF US - even those of us with Caucasian blood!

No doubt about it, Gregory.

I think the implicit comparison is that both Tiger Woods and Barack Obama are black men getting too much sensual gratification.  One is fucking too many people, one is rewarding too many people.  One is violating the tenets of marriage, one is violating the tenets of the Constitution.  I guess Pawlenty wants his audience to feel like the nation is the collective wife Obama-Woods is stepping out on to indulge his uncontrollable appetite for spending-sex.  Put the call to violence in there, and Pawlenty’s rhetoric strikes me as a bit of Tulsa Race Riot.

Yeah, there is a whole lot of the KKK lynch mob in there - and, like the racists of old, it’s all about preventing Black men from being successful (either sexually with White women or in terms of public power and influence).

that they are all basically 7 year olds in rich, old, white, rural male bodies.

Old, white, and male, yes. Rich, not always.

That literacy tests were abused and used to discriminate doesn’t mean that we well written one wouldn’t help. However, I’m not sure that literacy tests for voters are a very efficient use of time and effort.  I think a better idea is to have people running for office take civics tests. These are the people that need to be held to higher, and very transparent standards.

I’m not sure how you can have a Kristallnacht without racial implications.

I pressed play before i read the post and I assumed he was making a bizzaro analogy because he’s not very good at analogies and he needed some kind of detour so it wouldn’t look like he was outright saying, go out and smash shit up now. The obama is tiger thing didn’t occur to me at all but it totally fits.

Gregory, I thought Woods identified as “Cablaisian” or something, not black? From the (very tiny) bit I’ve read about him it sounds like he wants to acknowledge that he’s mixed race and not just focus on one side. ‘Cause I get your point, totally, but I think it’s important to respect how the people in question identify themselves too.

Come to think of it, Pawlenty’s smash-the-glass, smash-the-system image is similar to the original Macintosh commercial.

I wonder if one of the reasons people have overreacted to the woods situation, at least in comparison to other philandering athletes is that the women involved were white.

Bagelsan,

Look, the cold hard reality of being African American is society doesn’t really give us that choice to make

Since slavery, anybody in this country with more than about 1/16th African ancestry is Black like it or not

Honestly, a lot more biracial African Americans than would care to admit it would prefer to identify with the non-Black side - after all, African Americans are a demonized persecuted minority, our men branded as criminals and fiends, our women lambasted as sluts and hoes, if you could opt out of being Black,you would.

But, we really don’t get to make that choice - unless you are really really really light, speak with a really White sounding voice and make a conscious effort to distance yourself from the race

Mariah Carey can pull that off, so can Derek Jeter, so can Jennifer Biels (you probably didn’t even know about Mariah,did you?0

But somebody as dark as Tiger?

No way!

That’s why that “Calablasian” bullshit was regarded by many African Americans - myself included - as delusional and insulting.

White America never brought it - they knew he was one of us, but they didn’t say anything as long as he was a “respectable Negro”.

But now?

He’s one of us again (just look at that pic on Vanity Fair a couple of months ago - where Annie Liebowitz made him look like a convict - a Black convict).

You see, as a non Black person, you have the luxury of being “color blind” and of choosing your identity.

We do not have that luxury and never have.

So, it’s not a question of “respecting his identity” because none of our identities gets respected - every thing we’ve ever gotten in this racist country was won because of racial unity, not individually resigning from Black America (as if this country would ever let us!)

Bottom line, Tiger Woods is an American Black man weather he likes it or not, just like the rest of us.

Trust me, if those of us who are lightskinned and/or talk like White people ever had a serious possibility of adopting a White (or at the very least non-Black) identity and having that identity taken seriously by White Americans you can bet we would all do that with a quickness.

But your race does not allow our race that luxury and never has - so let’s keep it real.

# 33 John Rove,

Ya think?

Forgive my sarcasm, but this is a country where they actually passed a federal law banning interracial sex [the Mann Act of 1910] because a Black athlete, Jack Johnson, dared to date White women (and they actually sent his White girlfriend to prison for the “crime” of having sex with him and - worse yet - getting engaged to him!)

So yeah, of course, White America is outraged that a Black man would “defile White womanhood” (although they aren’t as honest as they were in the Jack Johnson era, so they don’t have the guts to admit that that is the real reason they’re mad)

It is getting pretty obvious that the Woods thing has huge racial component and it is my bad that I didn’t get that until just now.  I just thought are puritans were going crazy.

With that said, I really don’t think being mixed or 100% Black really makes a difference to White racists I’m pretty sure they hate ALL OF US - even those of us with Caucasian blood!

Not to freak you out, but I actually think they hate mixed-race people more than they do “regular” black people because you’re basically a walking refutation of all of their notions about their personal superiority.  That’s why they work twice as hard to make sure you have to identify as “black” no matter what else is going on in your ancestry.

I remember reading a short story by Kate Chopin that has a woman in the South (pre-Civil War, I think) being thrown out by her husband because it’s just been discovered that she’s part black.  Of course, the dirty secret of the husband’s family is that he is, too, but no one will ever tell him.

One thing, though:  who the hell doesn’t know that Mariah Carey is mixed-race?  Was anyone under the impression that she wasn’t?  She’s always been pretty open about it.

# 37 Mnemosyne - I suppose if you’re a regular reader of the celebrity press, you’d know about Mariah Carey’s Black/Latino ancestry. But if you just had to go by her appearance and how she talks, she totally appears Caucasian (hell, I didn’t know til I read it somewhere - and I can almost always tell)

As for Whites hating us more than non mixed Blacks - I never really got that impression (even when I’ve been in incognegro situations - where I was in an all White space and they couldn’t tell I was Black ...usually, I get a pretty good read on just how racist the average White person is in those settings)

My impression was - and is - that they hate all of us more or less equally, and a lot of Whites really cannot read skin tones the way we can, so a lot of times they just can’t tell.

Obviously, they can tell that Mariah Carey is different than the rest of us cause she’s almost White and has Caucasian hair.

But most of them are skin-tone blind - they’d have a hard time telling Alicia Keys from Mary J. Blige, because they don’t see skin-tone like we do.

Trust me on this one, I’m really light, and I’ve had White folks tell me I look like Black guys who are really dark (imagine somebody telling Heavy D that he looks like the late Biggie Smalls)!

I used to work in an office with two Black receptionists - Jen, who was as light as Alicia Keys and had unusual facial features, cause she was half African half French and Kim, an American Black woman who was about Mary J. Blige’s color and had the same facial features that many American blacks have.

All the Blacks and Latinos in the office knew that Jen and Kim looked totally different.

And most of the Whites in the office thought they looked alike, almost like sisters!

So, I think most of the time, they really can’t tell which of us are mixed and which aren’t - especially because there are so many lightskinned Blacks who are 100% Black!

Basically, I think most of you hate all of us pretty much equally - and, unlike you, I’ve been on the receiving end of that hate for my whole life, so perhaps you should defer to my experience here, cause I know more about it than you do.

It is getting pretty obvious that the Woods thing has huge racial component

I think it has a huge racial component that’s different from, say, Pacman Jones or Michael Vick.  I think the issue with Woods is that he has managed to seem like, to borrow an old respectable-racist phrase, “one of the good ones.”  Until now.  It’s like the stereotypes he always avoided suddenly caught up to him.  Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant likewise endured a lot of damage to their good-guy public images, but this one does feel like an amped-up version of that particular kind of racialized humiliation.

FlipYrWhig:

He’s a golfer fercryingoutloud. Of course it’s different. When he started playing he wouldn’t have been allowed in the clubhouse in any number of the courses where he won tournaments. Other than, say, skiing or ice hockey, I can’t think of a sport that’s been more lily-white* than golf, whose very social existence is a testament to the power of racism and white flight. (Tennis used to be like that, but you don’t need nearly as many pristine acres for a tennis court.)

*With a few early not-really-exceptions involving people whose families have in fact been on continent longer than those arrivistes from the Mayflower

GregoryAButler, your comments make me so sad.

Because they’re true.

As a teen, I had no idea Jennifer Beals was black.  Of course, now that I live in Chicago, I can tell my white people apart.

Mariah Carey does not look Caucasian to me.  But she and Paula Abdul and other mixed race singers put out videos in black and white with the contrast blown out back in the early 90s.  They (or their handlers or their directors) went out of their way to make themselves look white, or at least confuse the issue.

And they did that because everything you say about how black people are treated in our society is true.

# 39 Flip Yr Whig

Well, neither Pacman Jones nor Michael Vick nor Michael Jordan nor Kobe Bryant had sex with White women

Tiger Woods did.

A LOT of White women.

Wifey + over 16 mistresses and sex workers (that we know of).

All of them White, most of them blond and one was even a 9/11 widow!

He did a latter day Jack Johnson on White America!

Hell, he out Jack Johnsoned Jack Johnson (Johnson only had sex with one White women at a time - Woods had 17+ of them - in some cases, two at a time!)

The golf thing was a part of it - he did take the ultimate White man sport, bust it wide open, and he even won the damned Masters Tournament in a segregated country club!

So, it was bad enough he got to put on the fabled green jacket and - in effect - make White America call him Master (and on an old slave plantation at that!)

Then he wifed the whitest White woman he could find - a blond haired Swede - and impregnated her with not one but two Black babies (and - little known fact - White America has a way of exiling White women who have kids with Black men out of their race ...ask any White woman who’s ever had a kid with a Black man or any biracial Black person with a White mom about that).

And then he ran roughshod over as many White bar hostesses and sex workers as he could get his hands on - with the sex workers, he was going tag-team - paying $ 60,000 bucks a weekend to have 2 busty blond prostitutes at his disposal for 24 hours straight!

And that was just too much for White America to stand!

# 41 - so you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Yeah, it is tragic that this country (and don’t get it twisted - I love America and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else) has this original sin of White supremacy laying as a blight across the land.

I hope I live to see the day that that racist demon is exorcised from the tormented soul of this great country.

Gregory, I grew up among a mix of old-money and nouveau riche white people, and while I’m not disputing your personal experience, mine is different enough that it bears exchanging.

It’s not hatred that is the driving emotion: it’s a combination of phobia and disgust. The basic principle is that blackness is a contamination and that it’s also contagious. Most white people have a deep-seated and surprisingly easily expressed fear that if they touch a black person, or if they come into continuous contact with black people, the contamination will spread to them and they will become the object of disgust and fear. Most affluent white folks don’t hate blacks: as long as blacks are living someplace else and the white people don’t have to share anything with them, they’re mostly just fine with it. But when a black kid gets in the swimming pool, the phobic disgust and the immediate rationalization happens right away. They really do think that having a black kid in the pool pollutes it—literally pollutes it.

They also hate mixed-race people much more than “pure” African-Americans, because mixed-race people are walking pollutants and the result of pollution. This is also why black African or Caribbean immigrants aren’t so much a problem, as long as they’re educated and articulate. My dad likes the Ghanaian couple who live down his street just fine, and will happily invite them over for barbecue, but I had to physically stop him from joining the marchers outside the African-American couple’s house when they moved in when I was about 17.

Ultimately, it’s about not so much tribal identification, but a deeper form of constructing an identity that separates the cultural from the biological. “That is not me,” is the basic idea. It’s the same primal mental impulse that created the concept of pigs or menstruating women being “unclean” in early Judaism. I highly recommend the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked, which is readily available in translation and quite readable; you can also try Jacques Derrida, who spent his life writing about the issue of racial identity and the impulses that drive it, but Derrida is one of the least readable writers known to humanity. I do not mean to belittle your experience by putting it in some kind of academic category, but rather think that you’ll find a lot of confirmation of the understandings you’ve appeared to have drawn from these experiences within.

@ GregoryAButler, I’m pretty sure Kobe Bryant had sex with a white woman.

# 44, Felagund,

Thanks anyway, but I’ll skip Derrida and Levi Strauss (I do not need some White guy from Europe to whitesplain racism to me)

Also, maybe that’s how rich White people feel about my race - but not all White folks are rich.

As a working class Black man, my only contact with that class of Caucasian has been when I build their offices and set up their trade show displays.

However, I’ve lived among and worked with working class and lower middle class White folks my whole life.

And, of course, I have working class White relatives (my dad’s entire side of the family).

So I really think you might want to take a break from whitesplaining racism to me, and perhaps you should actually listen to me about this, cause I know way more than you do about the topic!

Put it this way - I had a conversation last summer with a good friend of mine and she was telling me all about street harassment - how, ever since she was in middle school, she’s had to deal with men staring at her on the street and making perverted comments.

This is something that I’ve read about in books and on feminist websites like this one and feministing.

But my friend has lived this her whole life

So, in that conversation that I had, who do you think was the expert on street harassment?

Obviously, my friend was!

So I just listened and tried to learn what it feels like for an intelligent and sensitive young lady to be treated like a side of beef by random men on the street - a topic that she knows way more about than I do, because she has lived it

I didn’t try to mansplain to her about street harassment - I shut my mouth, opened my ears, listened and learned.

You should do the same when a Black person tries to tell you about his lived experience with racism - something you have NOT lived

So, no, I do not need Mr Jack Derrida from Europe to whitesplain racism to me - and the only Levi Strauss I have any use for is the dude who makes the pants.

Come to think of it, I don’t need you to whitesplain anti Black racism to me being as I’m Black, you are not, I’ve lived it and you have not

Thank you for not whitesplaining.

# 45,

No, Kobe did not “have sex” with a White woman

He raped her

Huge difference.

If he’d had consensual sex with her, it would have been a scandal.

But since he raped her, ironically enough, it was easy for White America to forgive him.

My theory?

Misogyny trumped White supremacy in that situation - the blame the victim rape apologia narrative took priority over the negrophobia narrative.

@ Gregory, point taken, although it’s kind of strange, given the historical combustibility of a rape allegation lodged by a white woman at a black man.  Do you think the Woods case draws more censure because it hinges on the idea that he already had one white woman, his wife, and yet still set out to find more?  Or does it matter that Bryant was married to a black woman?  (I’m still astonished that Bryant bounced back from that story as readily as he did.)

# 48, Flip Yr Wig,

Kobe Bryant’s wife, Vanessa Bryant, is actually Mexican American - she’s hella lightskinned, so she kind of looks White if you don’t know her maiden name. But nobody would mistake Vanessa Bryant for a Black woman - she’s too lightskinned and she has naturally straight unprocessed Caucasian hair!

Actually, at first, there were Whites in Aspen, Colorado (the resort town where Bryant raped the White woman - a concierge at a local hotel) who reacted with the lynch mob spirit (local deputy sheriffs even made a t shirt with a stick figure getting lynched! The shirts were white - the stick figure was, of course, black!)

But then the slutshaming kicked in - the hotel workers mental health issues were dragged out, the fact that she was in a sexual relationship with another hotel worker, a White male, (and they were intimate the same day - as he was consoling her after she was raped by Bryant) and, oddly, misogyny trumped racism.

Bryant exercised his right as a rich man to have sex with any woman he wanted, any way he wanted - a right traditionally exercised only by White men, but that Bryant had claimed as his own.

Also, the non-consent somehow made it more acceptable - again, I’m not sure why but that’s how it worked out.

Had he been dating her, I suspect it would have probably gone differently - very differently

I think the fact that these White women enthusiastically consented to have sex with Woods tipped the scales - and I do mean enthusiastically, the sex workers in particular were awestruck by Woods good looks, the size of his penis and at his ability to have sex with them for hours at a time and to make them orgasm, if the second hand accounts from their madam to the media can be believed.

In other words - Bryant brutalized a low status White woman - but Woods made love to many White women (they were low status too - but not as low status as the woman from Aspen) - and somehow, in the foul junction between American racism and American misogyny, that made all the difference in the world.

“I don’t think that anyone would have any problem getting 100%.”

Seriously?

Where do you live? If in the US, it must be a pretty rarefied community, not at all typical. Or you just don’t get out much.

Look at and listen to your fellow citizens the next time you’re in a mall or airport or something. We’re stunningly ignorant.

My read of the Kobe Bryant rape is the same as GregoryAButler’s.  These are some of the rules:
1.  If you’re a woman accusing a man of rape, you lose, unless the man ranks lower than you (and most men rank higher than most women).  KB outranked his victim.
2.  The media loves to publicize any claim that a prominent African-American man committed some kind of sexual assault.  A prominent white man?  Not so much.
3.  It’s important for a male celebrity to assert dominance in his sexual encounters outside of a relationship—make it clear that his partners are inferior to him.  Tiger Woods failed to do so decisively enough.

He raped her

Kobe Bryant was never convicted and the charges were dropped in 2004 for lack of evidence and because the alleged victim refused to testify.  It would be reckless to acuse Bryat of being guilty of something he was never convicted of in court.

# 52, Pranklaplegic,

Due to the gross institutional sexism of the legal system, and the generalized misogyny of our society most rapists get off scott free

Kobe Bryant is one of those RAPISTS

Be that as it may, every morning, when Kobe Bryant goes to the bathroom to shave a rapist looks back at him from the mirror - and that will always be the case, no matter what.

So, yes, Kobe Bryant is a RAPIST and I will continue to refer to him as such.

I’m sorry I misidentified Kobe Bryant’s wife.  I was going from memory, and I shouldn’t have.

# 54,

If your interested, this is Vanessa Bryant:

http://blogs.bet.com/news/playahater/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/vanessabryant.jpg

with Kobe:

http://redsarmy.typepad.com/.a/6a01156f2c3287970c0115703d30cf970b-pi

http://lakers.topbuzz.com/gallery/d/275761-2/Vanessa+Bryant+smiles+in+a+black+top+with+Kobe+Bryant.JPG

with their daughter:

http://stupidcelebrities.net/wp-content/5981.jpg

And her maiden name was Vanessa Cornejo Urbieta Laine

# 55, Gwangung,

And I respect the Hapa perspective on that choosing a race thing - that’s their experience and I totally respect it.

For mixed African Americans, we have a different history, what with blood quantum and anti miscegenation laws.

Basically, we were assigned the Black identity by White America.

From the time the first White slaveowner raped a slave and got her pregnant, we’ve always been White America’s forgotten stepchildren.

From the day that first raped slave gave birth to a brownskinned baby in the early 1600’s, we have always been welcomed into the African American community - while they may have envied us our light skin and slightly less curly hair, they have always treated us as family, while White America never once acknowledged us or took us in.

That’s why so many of us identify as African American - and even the ones that don’t by default are part of the race, like it or not.

# 58, Grangung,

Yes, basically we never got a choice - and, as a rule, our White ethnic group of origin always rejects us

In my case, I’m half Irish and, despite the fact that I work with many Irish and Irish American folks, am very familiar with the culture and support “Irish Republicanism” [the reunification of the Six Counties with the rest of Ireland], I have never been accepted by Irish Americans as one of their own!

I’ve known other half-Irish biracial African Americans and they’ve had the same experience.

And folks who are half-Italian.

Or half-Jewish.

Or half-German.

Or half-Armenian.

And I could go on…

But in all cases, we are rejected by our White ethnic group of origin and only accepted by our Black ethnic group.

If we are very lucky, our White relatives accept us, and that’s the best we can do.

So yeah, we have our ethnicity chosen for us.

Um, Gregory, take two steps back.  Breathe, think, and then reply.  You’re working in massively broad generalizations that people like Amanda shouldn’t have to apologize for.  Frankly your attitude is appalling because you can’t differentiate between society, individuals, and subcultures.  General American society demands at least a certain amount of civil equality even if not always enforced.  Sub-cultures of conservatism and nativism do not.  Individuals are racist or not.  Blindly attacking over an issue of semantics then ranting through three or four posts to prove how bad the world is and plans to kill you over skin color isn’t healthy nor realistic.

I’m sure you’ll be waiting to pounce on this and call me a blind idiot or possibly try to claim I too am a racist, but before you jump on this, think about what you’re saying and how you’re generalizing before you go off the handle attacking individuals, especially Amanda who has made it clear she isn’t racist in any such way and shouldn’t have to apologize to ANYBODY for ANYTHING SHE SAID IN THAT BLOG POST. 

Now, Unree, I don’t doubt there was a racial narrative to the Kobe Bryant rape case.  I’ll agree that a white athlete doing the same thing may not make as big news but without a duplicate case to study it’s hard to completely blame it on race when celebrity status and the fact that ESPN & sports sites carried it as well just expanded it further. 

On the CPAC itself, the conservatives are pushing to go violent because they have few angles left.  Violence, idle threats, and general anger will keep their party motivated in the face of continued losses.  Nothing will change this approach until the party finds moderates again or the tea party drives off the proverbial cliff and they’re left with no base.

@GregoryAButler #38: Now, that’s an interesting point, and one that is perfectly true; as a white guy, I immediately googled some of the names you mentioned, and indeed I couldn’t evaluate their skin tones as being noticeably different. This is probably related to the fact that people of any race will have trouble telling apart people of any other race provided they haven’t been around individuals of that race enough to develop a sense of how to tell them apart (I hate using the term race here, but I can’t figure any other that fits). For example, whites also have trouble telling different East Asian groups, such as Japanese or Chinese, apart, despite what are (to Japanese and Chinese) obvious differences in appearance between the groups. Now, since whites have historically been both the majority race in the US and been rather racist towards non-whites, going to the point of isolating non-whites from their society, it is not surprising that minority cultures in the US have been inculcated with a keen sense of the difference between different groups of white people while the reverse has not been true.

We’re talking about twisted-white-racist-logic here, not logic-logic. Miscegenation is a big monster in the right wing anxiety closet, and so is a threatened sense of white supremacy. These obsessions overlap, but they’re distinct. If we’re asking why white racists like to lump Tiger Woods and Barack Obama together, the answer is that they see them as both Black and biracial.

# 60 Xeranar - I already straightened that out with Amanda. I really don’t have to discuss it with you, especially if you’re going to be patronizing. Thank you, and have a nice day.

# 61, Truth is Life - not for nothing, but I really don’t like “Non Whites” - it defines us (and a bunch of other people) in reference to you and your race.

Try People of Color - much nicer.

On the question - you proved my point.

To me, Heavy D and Alicia Keys, as lightskinned Blacks, do not at all look like Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige, who are darkskinned Blacks.

It’s actually rather shocking to hear you say that

Example # 1

Alicia Keys http://www.hairfinder.com/celebrityhairstyles/alicia-keys2.jpg

Mary J. Blige http://miseducatednegro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/mary-j-blige-picture-3.jpg

To a Black person, they look totally different - it’s actually astonishing that a White person would not see a complexion difference that stark!

Example # 2

Heavy D http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_v3j81gQzUOc/R__oFF6ixPI/AAAAAAAAAiw/9PBv-aFMxXc/s400/HEAVY+D2.png

the late Biggie Smalls http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2008/03/17/notorious-biggie-smalls.jpg

Again, to a Black person, they look totally different - again, it’s actually flat out shocking that anybody would think they look similar, with the dramatic difference in complexion!

As for you guys - honestly, I have a hard time keying in on eye color and hair color, your main points of distinction.

And I had a White father with hazel eyes - and I myself had violet eyes the first year I was alive!

But, generally, we all have the same eye color (brown) and the same hair color (black - although Black women routinely dye their hair various colors - both within the regular hair color spectrum - blonde, red, brown - and the exotic - blue, pink,purple, burgundy ect)

You guys do have complexion differences - Italians and Jews tend to be darker than the rest of you guys - but your complexion changes radically due to outside stimuli - you get red when drunk or embarrassed or sunburned, light brown when suntanned.

Of course, we have skin color changes too - we get darker when exposed to sun, and we get sunburned too (although I doubt you’d notice - even on lightskinned folks - but we can tell) and we have this thing called “ashyness” that we get when drunk or if our skin gets dried out (we can see it a mile away - you probably wouldn’t notice).

And I’ve never had problems telling apart East Asians by country of origin - perhaps because I live in New York and grew up around them, and I take the time to notice variations in appearance that might be invisible to you.

Incidentally, it’s odd that some of you can’t tell apart the various East Asian ethnic groups, considering how many Whites are married to East Asians!

Individuals are racist or not.

Disagree. Or at least, disagree with a blanket statement like that. There’s conscious and subconscious racism, there’s supporting racist policies while not “being racist”...

I hesitate to give the racists more credit than is due, but the narratives for Tiger Woods and Barack Obama are similar, too.  Both are biracial black men, of course, but they are also biracial black men who rose to the top in a previously whites’ only club - golf and politics - with speed and skill, destroyed their more-experienced and better-known white rivals, and won near-universal acclaim for the achievement.

Of course, now that Woods has been felled by his own ego, the conservatives are desperate to believe that Obama will follow a similar path.  They desperately want America to see the “real Obama” like it has seen the “real Tiger” - which is to say, they want America to forget every achievement that Obama has earned and instead see him as the conservatives see him, as another uppity negro.

But in all cases, we are rejected by our White ethnic group of origin and only accepted by our Black ethnic group.

My great-grandmother had a daughter named Ruby before she met Great-grandfather Avenger, and Ruby’s father was African-America.

After my grandfather Avenger passed away, Ruby became known to the Avenger family, and was looked after by one of my uncles for the rest of her life, and was accepted by the rest of the family.

Of course, that’s because for some reason, there has been a resolutely non-racist POV held by that side of the family, they were more concerned that my mother was a Catholic than by the fact that she was also part-Chinese.

Grandmother Avenger was very open about the fact that her side of the family went so far back in Arkansas history, the likelyhood of African and/or Native American ancestry at some point in our geneology was 100%, which was a big revelation coming from someone born and raised in North Texas in the early part of the last century.

For mixed African Americans, we have a different history, what with blood quantum and anti miscegenation laws.

My parents ended up getting married in Carson City, NV, because the clerk in Reno, NV, wouldn’t marry them because of moms’ Chinese ancestry, and this was in 1956.  It was the union organizer Harry Bridges who got that point of law tossed out the window a few years later.

Also, it should be remembered that until 1965, even a wife of an American citizen who herself was an English subject would have to get a private bill passed in Congress in order to become a citizen, as in the case of my Grandmother Monk, we used to have ridiculous laws about Chinese immigration to this country.

As for recognition, my wife is from the Philippines, and she sometimes has trouble recognizing her fellow nationals because they look like other racial groups that live here in America, while my eye for such things is a little better for that sort of thing.

Because of her complexion and high cheek bones she’s been mistaken for Native American at times because she works for a tribal government around here.

For example, whites also have trouble telling different East Asian groups, such as Japanese or Chinese, apart, despite what are (to Japanese and Chinese) obvious differences in appearance between the groups.

My grandmother used to say that this is how you tell what nationality someone belongs to:

You look at them carefully, and if they aren’t Chinese or Japanese, they must be Korean.

Basically, I think most of you hate all of us pretty much equally - and, unlike you, I’ve been on the receiving end of that hate for my whole life, so perhaps you should defer to my experience here, cause I know more about it than you do.

You know more about being on the receiving end.  With all due respect, I don’t think you know more than I do about being on the transmission end, no matter how many all-white groups you’ve been in that you think had no idea you were mixed race.  I’m not trying to do any whitesplainin’ about how you’re supposed to view things—I’m explaining what it looks like from my end.  I don’t think these conversations are useful coming from a single direction.

Living in Hawai’i, where people care if folks are Chinese or Japanese, I got the hang of it.  Ethnicities are pretty straightforward; you just have to care.

# 60 Xeranar - I already straightened that out with Amanda. I really don’t have to discuss it with you, especially if you’re going to be patronizing. Thank you, and have a nice day.

Truthfully there was no condescension in my post, it was actually more of a direct attack upon you while trying to use less aggressive words to satisfy my annoyance at your general attitude.  Patronizing would be gently cooing your opinion back at you while secretly thinking you’re an imbecile.  Course, I don’t think you’re stupid, I think you’re just woefully overgeneralizing the white/black relationship and since you stand by the fact you’re black and have experienced nothing but horrid treatment by whites doesn’t validate your stance more than if I stand in a group of black men.  It’s anecdotal and I enjoy the company of my black colleagues and my mentor during my PhD was one of the top black historians in the sub-field.  I’m not trying to push some sort of “hey i’m not a racist” credential here, but I am pointing out that your broad sweeping attacks are essentially bigoted in and of themselves.

As to the person who talked about racist policies, I do concur, people support this on a subconscious level but a “society-level” racism that is de facto is hard to psychologically justify though I can name a number of laws and practices that created a de facto rule.  Still it doesn’t mean it is a guaranteed agreement, it is an enforced practice because of it’s status within society, which effectively makes it an individual choice.  Group-speak essentially covers this aspect rather well but most psychologists due concur that group-speak is still an assimilation of individuals into an amalgamated agreement.  It all comes back to personal agency on such issues. 

Course, I can’t sleep and I am writing this so I guess I am more than a little frustrated by such broad generalizations regardless of race.  Nobody should be demanding apologies for the use biracial over black.

This was one of the best threads I’ve read here.  Really fascinating and I am riveted by GregoryButler’s posts.  Why did it have to end iwth Xeranar pulling the “hey I’m not a racist here are my creds” card and then claiming he isn’t doing that while pissing and whining about how unfair someone is being to people who are white like Xeranar! and then with Knute making this laughable post about how Saturday night live is exactly like picking the possible next President of the United States!

Bummer.

But the rest was great, thanks!

From Para 2 (will finish the rest, promise), isn’t Tiger Woods multiracial, not biracial, as he is of at least 3 races?

I don’t remember any outrage then do you?

Yes, because there’s absolutely NO, I REPEAT, NO DIFFERENCE between a satirical television show and a ‘joke’ at a political conference whatsoever.

knute, you’ve been playing football without a helmet too long, don’t you need to see a brain injury specialist at some point in time?

Actually, there WAS outrage. I would link, but I don’t want Knutter to start trolling those sites, too.

Rinse and repeat for sexism against Sarah Palin. I could easily call up hundreds of progressive blogs (including this one) decrying obvious sexist bullcrap against Sarah Palin (Amanda even yanked an ad which she doesn’t like to do).

Knut thinks he’s provided a “gotcha!” moment for us, but really it just shows he’s a troll who doesn’t know shit about shit.

”...isn’t Tiger Woods multiracial, not biracial, as he is of at least 3 races?”

He is, but as GregoryAButler points out, to society at large he’s Black. 

I’ve heard it said that you “are” what you look like, and if you appear to be “Black”, then you’re treated as Black, likewise, if you can “Pass” (a very loaded term) for white, then you’re treated as white.

And while individuals may vary a lot in their ability to recognize ethnic nuance, if the most common reaction places you into one of a handful of racial categories, then that’s how you’ll be treated, for the most part.

Living in SoCal, with wider than average-in-America diversity, my half-Asian (Pakistan/India/Bangladesh/Sri Lankan) daughter appears to be white (or maybe Hispanic) among most Americans.  She will emphasis her Asian heritage in many circumstances, because she is proud of being more than just white.  But many people do not have the choice.

If being viewed as Black held no stigma, then there would be no major problem with being stuffed into one category or another.  But despite the election of Barack Hussein Obama, America still has a long way to go before that is the norm…

@Knuterockne

There was a some outrage.  But what’s the point?

#67: Mnemosyne - actually, you are whitesplaining - and you’re doing quite a good job of it.

Congratulations - hope that works out for you.

#69: Xeranar - see note above - it includes you too.

And I’m sure some of your best friends are Black too.

Have a nice day.

#71: AnglScarlett - I’m glad you enjoyed my posts - I don’t normally get to write about the politics of race (my other blogs are devoted to class struggle in the New York construction industry and film reviews) and it was good for me too.

As for the whitesplainers - they really need to get over themselves (especially the person who not only wanted to whitesplain racism to me - but who also wanted to use two dead European White men - Jaques Derrida and Levi Strauss - as his auxilliary whitesplainers!)

Message to the Whitesplainers I know more about White racism than you do, because I’ve been on it’s receiving end for 41 years - close mouth, open ears, listen and you might actually learn something!

#73: corwin -you actually have to ask!!!!!

That’s a serious question?

Do you not know any real life African Americans?

Do you not have a TV or a computer in your house - because you can see us on TV or the internet, and if you had, you wouldn’t ask that question?

Are you one of those folks who insists on calling Asian Americans “Orientals” too?

Well, yes, we are African Americans - it took us a long time to get here, and the US Bureau of the Census doesn’t even recognize that yet

They, like you, still call us Negro - or African Am - not “African American” but “African Am” - so we’re not fully “American” yet, but still 6 letters away!

I’m actually astonished that you would ask that question - White America is more racist than I thought?

So, no, I am not your fucking “Negro” - I am an African American!

Thank you for your cooperation.

#73: corwin - I’m not done with you yet.

We have not been “Negro” in my lifetime - we became “Black” in the wake of the urban rebellions of the late 1960’s so when I was born in 1968 we were already Black (and yes, you write it with a capital B cause it’s the name of a race! You wouldn’t write jewish with a small j or chinese with a small c, would you?) - and we’ve been “African American” since Jesse Jackson introduced the term after the LA uprising in 1992.

In other words, if you have read a newspaper in the past 42 years, you would not have asked that question.

Next time, try google and wikipedia.

You’re welcome.

#72: helen w. h. , actually, no, he’s not.

Historically, since the beginning of slavery, any person with measurable and/or visible Black ancestry is considered Black.

That’s the standard your race imposed on us over 400 years ago and it still prevails today.

No, we don’t get to “choose” - cause your race made that choice for us a long time ago and still enforces that standard to this day.

White Americans do not recognize the Whiteness in mixed African Americans who have a White parent -  and I know this because I have lived it.

With mixed Blacks with an Asian parent, from what I understand it pretty much works the same way.

Being Black really is a “mark of cain” in this country - once you have it, that’s all that matters.

So, yes, Tiger Woods is one of us, no matter how much White or Asian ancestry he has.

That’s just how race works in America.

Mnemosyne - actually, you are whitesplaining - and you’re doing quite a good job of it.

Really?  So maybe you can explain to me what it was like to have my childhood heroes be Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver and yet not have a single black family in our neighborhood until I was 16. 

I look forward to you explaining my experience for me since I’m clearly too stupid to understand it myself.

@GregoryAButler

Bro, chill a bit. Nothing you’re saying is a lie but the shrillness is unnecessary. The people here really are not the enemy and most of them really DO want to understand. I love seeing you keep the racial dialog open and real, but take it down just a notch. This from a biracial sista who is quite a bit older than 41 and knows a bit about our country’s racism too.

FWIW, I self-identify as a half-breed - proudly. However as Gregory has stated, my society identifies me as Black, period. Frankly I don’t care. I’m me. Like it or leave it.

Speaking as someone else who has really enjoyed Butler’s comments.

As a white person, I don’t think the white perspective on racism is unuseful, necessarily, but I do think that it’s partial and suspect.

I know that as a woman I am not always inclined to listen to men tell me how misogyny really works, even when they’re talking about their observations as men of other men… It can be interesting to know what they think, of course, but… eh, I’m thinking of every thread on nice guys ever, where someone or someones invariably comes in to say that sexism is a problem, and manipulative behavior toward women is a problem, but really, the nice guy actions don’t come from misogyny or objectification of women at all, but just low self-esteem or whatever. I mean, it’s nice to know that they think that, and probably it gives us information about how to usefully dismantle nice guy behaviors, but it doesn’t mean that misogyny and objectification aren’t part of the picture.

Sorry, guys, but my brother is mix racial who identifies mostly as black, but not always.  When he is not pressured to pick a side (and the black folks did this as much as the white folks when we were growning up), he is more likely to say he is mixed racial or biracial.  Forget trying to explain its actually triracial to most people.
The black folks will welcome you if you are biracial including black?  Right.  While shunning or harrassing your white/Asian/native American Indian relatives and friends.  While accusing you of acting white over any little thing.  Our experience was a different as our folks hang with white hippies and mixed race and international graduate student communities when we were really young.  The working class tug of war insistance to identify didn’t come until grade school.
GregoryAButler’s experience is clearly common, very common, but not universal.  He is presenting it as such.  Several of us have a problem with that.

GregoryAButler:
Keep repeating that and nothing will ever change.  I never said what my race was, did I? Mixed, but not with African American.  Do you even see your own assumptions?  Clearly not.

Nice to know you are so involved in your rage you can’t be productive or even grasp for a second that your experience in not universal.  Too bad.  No conversation can be had with you here, clearly.

Gregory, I am flabbergasted by your apparent belief that skin color is the important factor in how much one person “looks like” another.  I have never found it so.  For me, facial features, body shape, body language rank a lot higher than skin color.  Brothers and sisters can resemble each other strongly and yet have different skin colors.

In thinking about this, I wonder if the features people pick out as constituting resemblance affect how they feel about racial differences, or maybe it’s the other way around.

In thinking about this, I wonder if the features people pick out as constituting resemblance affect how they feel about racial differences, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Barack Obama is basically a dead ringer for his maternal grandfather—here they are together when his grandfather was about the same age that the president is now.  The shape of their faces is identical, their body type is very similar (tall and skinny) and the only real differences between them as adults are superficial things like hair and skin color.

I’m not sure about your theory, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, when I lived in the Midwest in virtually all-white surroundings, I would have been oblivious to those differences and only seen skin tone no matter how unprejudiced I would have thought myself to be.  I’ve lived in one of the most diverse cities in the country for 20 years now, so my eye is a little more practiced than it was when I went by hair and eye color because everyone’s skin tone was pretty much the same where I lived.  Now that I’m presented with a lot more difference on a daily basis to use as comparisons, it’s easier for me to use different visual cues.

I think that Fred over at Slactivist had a non-related post that actually has alot of bearing on GregoryAButler’s remarks and how he’s taking things and how others are taking things. All are responsible

It’s actually a response to anti-global warming ‘jokes’ on Fox news after the blizzards last week, but it does a great job at disecting responsibility and ethical behaviour and how those two things intersect for large problems that you didn’t cause but for which anyone (as a member of society) bears responsibility for.

“All are responsible.”
“Well I’m not guilty.”
“I’m talking about responsibility, not ...”
“You can’t blame me!”
“Blame isn’t the issue here, we’re ...”
“You’re just as guilty as I am!”
“But the point was ...”
“Al Gore is just as guilty as I am!”

Gregory, I wasn’t using Lévi-Strauss to explain “racism” to you: he doesn’t talk about racism. He writes at length about how certain taboos and strictures make up the foundation of how certain basic differentiation systems in the human brain create cultural structures. And Derrida was not a “white” man: he was an Algerian Jew, which in French culture is like having two strikes against you: his body of work addresses directly the questions of exclusion and Other-ness. I felt, perhaps wrongly, that you might find both scholars’ work interesting food for thought in light of your experiences.

Oh, and have a nice day.

“Man flys into a building in Texas and OMG it’s a right wing tax dodger.”

...well, yeah.  Did you actually bother to read his “suicide note”?  Whether he was rightwing or not, “Tax Dodger” certainly fits him well.  (Although I’m sure he would rather have been seen as a martyr for “exposing” the nefarious tax system whose laws he violated and was held responsible for…)

RE the professor who shot her coworkers, can you point us to a rambling screed she wrote that explains her actions in terms of supporting some political agenda?  Unless you can, how do you know her attack was anything more than “going postal” on her peers, as so many seem to have done before her? (not to diminish the evil of what she did…)

I never heard a peep about the SNL skit.  Nada, zip, nutting

I don’t remember SNL doing that skit to make a political point to an audience known for its casual racism. Or perhaps the “SNL” to which you’re referring is your favourite netcast, “Stormfront Nation Live.”

The point is some people get a pass and some don’t depends on their bias I guess.

Yes. Racists talking in dog-whistle code to a sympathetic audience generally don’t get a pass. Network TV comedians trying to appeal to the broadest audience possible with blunted humour generally do. I’m sure that’s troubling to you, but this isn’t action news: we call people on their BS.

Woman academic shoots three people in Alabama and the crickets chirp.

Here’s a visual representation of crickets chirping for ya. Yep, no-one’s talking about that.

Man flys into a building in Texas and leaves behind manifesto detailing right-wing views and grudge against tax authorities and OMG it’s a right wing tax dodger.

Fixed that for you. Make sense now? For extra credit, compare a motive apparently based in political ideology with one apparently based in a small-time academic tenure dispute, and discuss why a political blog might be more focused on the former rather than the latter.

It’s their bias I guess.  I wore a leather helmet in my day.

That would explain your comments. I hope that your mom equips you with a modern composite helmet these days when she allows you to wander outdoors.

#81: Mnemosyne - I just got off the phone with the NAACP - they will be inviting you to the annual Image Awards this year, to give you the award for “#1 friend of the Negroes”.

Honestly, do you really think you can impress me by telling me about the dead Black heroes you had as a child?

I’m sure that some White folks might be impressed by that - but as for us, you really have to do better.

And no, you’re not stupid - just blinded by your White skin privilege.

Your welcome

#82: originalhalf - I’m not your “bro” and no, I will not “chill” - perhaps servility and oversolicitousness for the feelings of Caucasians is how you manage to survive your encounters with the opposite race, but it never worked for me.

As Chuck D said [look him up on wikipedia if you don’t know who he is] “I got a right to be hostile - my people been persecuted”

#83: Mandolin - speaking as somebody who’s actually gotten into “mansplaning” mode when talking about sexism with women (it’s a flaw, and I’ve been trying to learn how to listen when discussing oppression with somebody who’s been on the receiving end of it) I know what you’re talking about here.

Thanks

#84 and # 85: helen w. h. - I am not the ambassador of Black America, I do not speak for all Black people. I do know about the lived experience of myself, my brother and many many many other biracial Black Americans. I know we were embraced by the Black community, and shunned by the White.

I know this because I personally lived it and saw it.

I don’t need you to whitesplain it to me.

As for the rage part - I make no apologies - discrimination against ANYBODY enrages me - but I get especially angry when me and people like me are the targets of it.

Your welcome.

#86: Older - what the hell are you even talking about?

Is this another version of the “colorblind” speech that you always hear from White liberals and leftists?

#89: felagund - again, you can keep your European White man Levi Strauss and your North African White man Derrida (I’ve actually met North African Jewish people before, dude - so please do not try and tell me he’s a man of color - he might not be White in France ...but we’re in America)

How about you read some Carter G. Woodson, Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, bell hooks, John Henrik Clarke and Yosef Ben-Jochannan - and then call me back?

And, please, no more whitesplaining

When a Black person tries to explain racism to you shut up, listen and learn

Your welcome.

#90: Linnaeus - I never felt it as a “double bind” - despite all the persecution and the shit we get from your race, I actually like being African American.

knute, go get your leather helmet replaced and look at comment #74 for your response.

#87: Mnemosyne

“Barack Obama is basically a dead ringer for his maternal grandfather—here they are together when his grandfather was about the same age that the president is now.  The shape of their faces is identical, their body type is very similar (tall and skinny) and the only real differences between them as adults are superficial things like hair and skin color.”

They don’t look alike at all to me - other than, as adults, both were tall slim males.

Hair is not “superficial” at all

Ask a Black woman about that - cause they spend an average of $ 40 bucks a week - $ 2,000 a year - to use powerful drain cleaner-like bleaches to straighten their hair so it looks like yours, because White bosses will often refuse to hire Black women with political hair - that is, with their hair at it’s natural texture

Hair is very political - if you have what America considers to be bad hair

And, here in America, the land of the lynch mob and the home of racial profiling, you’d have to be either blind or stupid to say that skin color is “superficial”!!!!!!!!

Please, tell that “colorblind” nonsense to your White friends - like you, they have color privilege in this country, and will never know what it is to be persecuted on the basis of race.

Do not tell that fairy tale to a Black person - cause we know it’s a lie.

Your welcome.

(I’ve actually met North African Jewish people before, dude - so please do not try and tell me he’s a man of color - he might not be White in France ...but we’re in America)

It’s actually rather shocking to hear you say that:

Levi Strauss

Derrida

It’s actually astonishing that a person (especially one living in post-9/11 America) would not see a complexion difference that stark!

Me, I take it as a good sign that American caucasians no longer have an obsession with brown-paper-bag tests and terminology like “octoroon.” Of course, that doesn’t even bring us close to the “post-racial America” the Pollyannas like to pretend arrived with the election of their new African-American BFF, but neither does rage-clouded alienation of people who are already on your side.

By the way, it’s understandable that Derrida’s shock of white hair might make his complexion seem lighter than it is. Photos are funny that way when it comes to hair (or lack thereof).

Honestly, do you really think you can impress me by telling me about the dead Black heroes you had as a child?

No, I’m talking about the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to have black heroes and never even notice that there are zero black people in your neighborhood.  But that doesn’t fit into your narrative about how all white people hate you, so I guess that point flew right over your head.

They don’t look alike at all to me - other than, as adults, both were tall slim males.

Seriously?

Stanley Dunham

Barack Obama

Identical ears, identical chins, very similar foreheads and mouths.  It’s impossible to put those two pictures side by side and not see the family resemblance.  Unless you’re determined not to see it, of course.

Hair is not “superficial” at all

Again, you misunderstand me, and at this point I’m going to have to assume that you’re doing it deliberately.  Hair is a superficial physical characteristic which is why it is a political issue.  If black people and white people had exactly the same kind of hair, then another physical characteristic would have taken its place as the determiner of “good” and “bad” because there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about hair or skin color.  They are physical characteristics that racists latch onto to try and draw a difference between themselves and the people they want to believe are inferior to themselves.

Please, tell that “colorblind” nonsense to your White friends - like you, they have color privilege in this country, and will never know what it is to be persecuted on the basis of race.

And I said I was “colorblind” where, exactly?  Of course I’m racist.  I grew up in the United States.  I had maybe a dozen black kids in my high school of 2,000.  I get fed this stuff via TV and radio and movies and magazines and newspapers every single day.  I do my best to tune it out and not let it affect me, but it does.

But in your eyes, acknowledging that I’m racist because I was raised white in a racist society is absolute proof that I, personally, hate all black people and anything else I say is a lie because of course all white people hate all black people.

Nice threadjack, Gregory. 

The OP uses a word that bugs you, “biracial”, to describe Tiger Woods.  You complained.  She apologized.  That could have been the end of it.  The substance of the post might have been the topic of the thread.

Instead, this whole thread is now all about you and your grievance.  It seems nobody has anything more to say about the reactionary CPAC’s increasing use of violent rhetoric.

That’s just not important anymore, because really it’s just all about you and how nobody understands you and how nobody’s experience matters as much as yours.

It’s impossible to put those two pictures side by side and not see the family resemblance.

Not if all one focuses on is skin colour and hair. Only one person in this thread is that explicitly obsessive (corwin and knuterockne wisely keep their own obsessions with those matters on the QT).

Gregory - thanks, I am going to check out your construction block.  Not only do I live in Ny but that subject is right up my alley.

Construction blog, not block! 

# 102 - thanks for your interest in my work!

my construction blog:

http://gangboxnews.blogspot.com

my film review blog

http://moviereviewed.wordpress.com

also, there is an archive of some of my online essays at:

http://clnews.org

[just go to the Gregory A. Butler archive]

and, of course, I wrote two books - “DISUNITED BROTHERHOODS ..race, racketeering and the fall of the New York construction unions” and LOST TOWERS ...inside the World Trade Center cleanup” both of which are available for sale at amazon.com

#97: Gracchus and #99: Mnemosyne - I see you are still whitesplaining - good luck with that.

Ha haha, I can’t believe this, because even on a blog with commentators as intelligent and progressive as this one’s, the reaction Gregory’s posts reminds me a lot of how the majority used to react to a man on this site I used to post on.  He posted as “black as coal”.  A lot of people hated him; I loved him.  He used to be Cynthia McKinney’s press secretary.  I know his real name, but I won’t mention it.  I fell out of touch with him, sadly.  Gosh I miss reading his posts.  Anyway, his writing has a similar tone.  Extremely passionate.  Or at least, that is how I always read it, but some read it as hostile, which it can be, but is it hostile to you personally?  And I just never took him that way.  He loved me too, so I guess if you take the time, you can have that conservation.

Gregory, why do you think that felagund’s original comment conflicts with yours? Seems like the two of you are offering mutually compatible descriptions of the same facts from two different perspectives. You’re saying that if you look a certain way, you’re Black in America, whether you like it or not, and that anti-black racists aren’t going to hate you any less if you’ve got one white parent.

Felagund agrees that the white racists he (she?) knows go by the Mark of Caine rule. They view blackness as a taint or a pollution. They’re not afraid of blackness in the abstract, but they’re terrified about it actually impinging on their lives. Therefore, you’d expect them to be at least as hostile to biracial Black people as they are to people with two Black parents. That fits with what you’ve experienced, right?

#106: AnglScarlett - sadly, I’m not surprised at all at the tone of racial hostility.

In my experience, White liberals and leftists can actually be more racist than the average White person, probably because they are so “ideological” about it.

Also, the messiah complex - and the fierce need to whitesplain racism to Black people.

And this brings me to #107: Lindsay Beyerstein.

My main problem with felagund is his/her fierce need to whitesplain racism to me, an American Black person - felagund is an embodyment of every patronizing White liberal/leftist I’ve encountered in my 26 years of political activism.

Folks like felagund need to stop talking and start listening - I have lived racism, you have not, so defer to my experience, sit down, be quiet, listen and learn.

Basically, it’s the incessant whitesplaning and the patronizing mentality that no doubt lies behind it.

Imagine if a man were to try and mansplain street harassment to you, instead of shutting up and listening to you and what you had to say about the topic, and trying to learn from your experience.

That’s what it feels like when felagund tries to whitesplain racism to me.

Not a good feeling at all.

I see you are still whitesplaining

Then what were you doing with your own photo-comparison game at #63? “Blacksplaining” seems like a clumsy and (in this particular forum) unnecessarily divisive neologism, when “making a point based on photos” and “stating the opinion that racism sucks and is the province of brain-dead losers” would suffice to describe both your skin-tone photo comparison and mine.

In addition to being a provocative writer, you’re an very good one—you really don’t need to over-rely on this “whitesplaining” pony.

Nor do you have to demand that everyone accept your own experience as universal. That only leads to embarrassing responses to challenges like this one from the Tiger Woods thread:

while you might be right and I might be wrong about the specific details of the extramarital sexual activity of upper class men, I would contend that the main theme of my original comment is correct

Slightly off topic, the sun is hotter than usual today where I am—no doubt because Apollo is driving his chariot steeds especially hard. And before you mock that statement, I would contend that its main theme is correct.

[to end on a positive note, when you sticks to those main themes, your comments are well worth reading—even when fueled by rage-ohol. And the NYC construction blog sounds very interesting]

# 109 Graccus,

You have to understand, it gets really tiresome and annoying to have folks who have never faced American negrophobia to try and “explain” it to me - and yes, it’s angry making.

And I’m not embarrassed to be incorrect on a question - hell, if you do as much polemical writing as I do (and I’ve been doing this kind of stuff online since 1998) you’re going to be wrong quite a few times - hell, you’ll even end up changing your mind on stuff (which I have).

But the Woods and upper class male infidelity thing was basically a “forest for the trees” type deal - Lindsay was looking down at the treetops, I was looking up at the branches, but we were still looking at the same forest.

Not so much here.

Oh, and for the record, there has been a hell of a lot of whitesplaining going on here.

Including from you, and that whole Derrida is “not White” because he has ruddy skin while Levi Strauss is pale (and, honestly, that was bullshit - and I hope between you and yourself you can admit that).

So this thread has definitely exceeded the FDA Recommended Daily Allowance of Whitesplaining (which is 3 paragraps or 78 words, whichever is longer) - by that standard, I’ve had about 368 days of whitesplaining in just 24 hours!

That’s what it feels like when felagund tries to whitesplain racism to me.

For goodness sake, he’s not explaining anything to you. He’s offering a complementary, though different, experience to your own. He’s not disputing anything you say, just expanding on it from his own experience and suggesting (to the forum at large) other scholars who’ve thought about racism and placed it in a broader sociological and anthropological context.

If you want to be the only voice on a given topic, making your view the universal one, you have your blogs and are welcome to turn off the comments. They keep them turned on here because they enjoy the give-and-take—even from the tame trolls like dana and corwin.

# 111, Gracchus - does my point of view on racism (and the life experience that backs it up) really bother you <b>that much?<b>

White racism is a vile reality in this country, and has been ever since Columbus first landed here.  And most whites tend to underestimate just how pervasive institutional racism still is, even those of us who want to believe ourselves to be totally “colorblind” or “non-racist”.  I think POC’s grievances against these injustices are entirely warranted.  And I think the initial inclination to distrust the perspective of white people - even those who claim to be well-intentioned - makes sense.

That said, none of us chose our skin color.  Nobody chooses to be white, black, yellow or red.  We’re born with the skin we have, not the skin we wished we had, and none of us had any say in the matter.  I am deeply ashamed of the evil that people who look like me have perpetrated against POC throughout history.  I am deeply ashamed of the patriarchal injustice that my fellow males have perpatrated against women.  I am deeply ashamed of the intolerance and hatred my fellow heterosexuals have perpetrated against the LGBT community.  But I am not personally ashamed of the fact that I am white, male, and straight.  I am not ashamed of those things because I had no say in whether or not I would be any of those things.  I was born how I was born - it wasn’t my call.  I didn’t secretly plot to be born into the most privileged group in the world when my parents conceived me, it just happened.  These are innate characteristics about myself that I feel neither pride nor shame over, because I had nothing to do with any of them being assigned to me.  I just am these things.  Where I have a choice and where others have a right to judge me is in how I react to being these things.  Do I acknowledge my privilege, and do I work to help undermine the societal constructs which give me greater privilege than those who are not like me, or do I take full advantage of that privilege and reinforce it by refusing to acknowledge it?  Or worse, do I actively and consciously try to perpetuate that privilege?  Well, if I’m being honest, in my life, I have done all of those things.  I have both abused my privilege, I have actively reinforced it, and I have also consciously worked to undermine it.  I try to do much more of the latter today, but of course I still fall short at times.  And when I fall short, others have every right to call me out.  That I have abused my privilege by acting in racist, or misogynist, or homophobic ways does not make me an irredeemably evil person, but rather a flawed person who has committed evil at times.  If I consistently behave in those ways, I can justifiably be considered evil, but I would like to believe that as human beings, we are capable of making mistakes and seeing that we have failed and amending our wrongdoings going forward.  What’s the limit?  Where is the line where someone goes from being a generally well-intentioned privileged white person who sometimes screws up to being a full-blown unapologetic and evil racist?  I don’t know.  But I know that if we are all to be judged for the rest of our lives based on the first time we err and commit a racist, misogynist, or homophobic act, and we shall forevermore be completely irredeemably evil racist, mysoginistic homophobes with no chance of redemption, than why would anyone bother trying to be a better person?

To automatically assume nefarious intentions by each and every member of any one particular race - knowing nothing of those individuals other than their skin color - is a position that will ultimately reinforce the racist status quo.  While it is undeniably impossible for an African-American to be racist, it is very possible for an African-American to be prejudiced.  While the overall adverse effect on society from African-American prejudice against whites pales in comparison to white racism - and is to some extent reasonable given the raw deal POC have always gotten in America (and the world) - both racism and race-based prejudice are rooted in ignorance and closed-mindedness.

(CONT’D.)

(CONT’D.)

Chuck D. is brilliant, and he’s right to a large extent.  African-Americans have been persecuted for 400 years and have a right to be hostile.  But if that hostility is going to be directed at each and every white person on earth with the assumption that even well-intentioned white people are and always will be the enemy and are just inherently evil people at their core, nothing will ever improve.  If you’ve already decided that every white person automatically hates you because you are black - and there is no hope for reconciliation - well then there’s no point in continuing the conversation, because you’ve already shut the door to the possibility of a peaceful coexistence.

Having your guard up and a certain amount of skepticism when dealing with white people is probably both rational and healthy.  But at some point, you have to allow people you may be normally inclined to distrust the opportunity to prove that they really are not your enemy and are not out to get you, and you have to be willing to accept that people are more than just their skin color, gender, or sexual orientation, and just because you do not share these innate characteristics with someone does not mean you cannot peacefully coexist with them.

Actually, you don’t have to do anything.  You can be pissed at a particular group that is different from you for your whole life if you want to be, and that’s your right.  That’s not a life I would particularly want to have, though.

You’re correct, Mr. Butler. You are not my actual “bro” as I’m an only child. Mayhap being female I should have not been so familiar with you. My bad.

I’m neither servile nor oversolicitousness to anyone, but you’re entitled to your perceptions. I respect your passion however I choose to express mine differently. I also choose to engage in the dialog about race without the shoulder chip.

Your experiences of racism in the US are yours. Mine are mine. Similarities I’m sure, but your opinions and reactions are yours alone. You own them. Just as I and anyone else of color in this country own ours alone. Please do not lump all of us into the same category. When you do, you are as guilty as the oppressors.

Back to CPAC.  Violence within the right is something that has scared the bejeesus out of me for awhile. It used to be buried pretty deep but now it’s rising to the surface far too often. The sh*t is going to hit the fan and the sensible Republicans are going to have a lot to answer to for not shutting this down when they had the chance.

Including from you, and that whole Derrida is “not White” because he has ruddy skin while Levi Strauss is pale (and, honestly, that was bullshit - and I hope between you and yourself you can admit that).

And yet you claim (correctly) that both Mary J Blige and Alicia Keys’ skin tones are discernably different, though they’re both identified as African-American. I’m claiming that a North African man’s skin tones are discernably different from a European caucasian’s, though they’re both identified as White Frenchmen. I’m also making the point that, in addition, there are factors like hair, facial features that can alter that perception.

One doesn’t have to be Black to verify your claim, nor does one have to be White to verify mine—one looks at the photos with one’s relatively standard human eyes, and verifies the claim with one’s brain (which, whatever the bearer’s skin melanin content, aren’t as standardised).

In short, if my self-evident and trite photo comparison was BS, so was yours.

# 111, Gracchus - does my point of view on racism (and the life experience that backs it up) really bother you <b>that much?<b>

Not in the least bit. As I said, I find your views provocative (that’s a positive in my book), well-written, and valid as far as main themes (and some supporting details) go.

I’d wager that Felagund, Lindsay, and the others engaged in this de-rail would agree with me. I haven’t seen one of those people deny your particular life experience, or disagree with your main theme. Which makes your claim that any of us are “bothered” by your POV even more absurd.

The problem seems less that people aren’t listening and responding to you, and more that you want to be the sole explainer (of any colour) when it comes to racism. Again, you have your blog for that.

That’s not to say, by the way, that your comments aren’t welcome. But as RobW noted above, it’s not all about you. As Amanda will tell you from previous experience (especially in her NiceGuy™ posts), people who forget that are usually the ones that get us into these massive de-rails.

Back to CPAC.  Violence within the right is something that has scared the bejeesus out of me for awhile. It used to be buried pretty deep but now it’s rising to the surface far too often. The sh*t is going to hit the fan and the sensible Republicans are going to have a lot to answer to for not shutting this down when they had the chance.

Which I’d date to about 1980, when the moneyCons and neoCons decided that pandering to the Know-Nothings and Xtian fantasists was the only way to win.

The sensible Republicans you’re talking about realise this, but they also know that they’re 30 years too late to prevent their own ride in the tumbrils should these RWA populists take power.

Back to CPAC.  Violence within the right is something that has scared the bejeesus out of me for awhile. It used to be buried pretty deep but now it’s rising to the surface far too often. The sh*t is going to hit the fan and the sensible Republicans are going to have a lot to answer to for not shutting this down when they had the chance.

Which I’d date to about 1980, when the moneyCons and neoCons decided that pandering to the Know-Nothings and Xtian fantasists was the only way to win.

Oh, it goes back much further than that… 1980 was just the start of the current wave.

Air Force One landed at Love Field in Dallas Texas on a fateful, tragic November day in 1963.  That morning, in the Dallas Morning News was a full page ad, paid for by the John Birch Society, which featured a picture of America’s young president and the words “WANTED” beneath him, and text which suggested that he was a communist sympathizer attempting to undermine the Constitution and that he needed to be stopped.

Less than an hour after that plane landed, America’s 35th President would be brutally assassinated as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

Interestingly enough, that same John Birch Society which helped to fuel the fire of violence which led to several high-profile executions of left-leaning leaders in America in the 1960s was a co-sponsor of the 2010 CPAC.

#113: DTG in STL - thank you for your voluminous obviously well thought out contribution!

Obviously you’ve thought about this, a LOT and you have a lot to say - and very eloquently and intelligently, and for that I thank you!

BTW don’t be ashamed of being a straight White man - my dad was a straight White man (and a US Marine) and he didn’t have a racist bone in his body. My best friend in the world (who is sitting just 5 feet away from me as I write this) is a straight White man, and, again, he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body either.

As long as you’re not racist, it’s all good.

Again, thanks for your at length contribution on this topic.

#115: originalhalf - I didn’t know you were female, so it wasn’t about that.

It was the patronizing demand that I “chill” and adopt your more submissive coping methods towards the other race.

I do hope that works for you though (although I would not want to be in your shoes).

# 123, Linnaeus,

Actually, America assigned us to the African American identity, because we have significant and/or visible Black ancestry.

We don’t get to “choose”.

Our other ethnic identity (in my case - Irish) gets erased, as a matter of course.

With that said, it’s actually a really great nationality to be a member of - I wouldn’t switch even if I could.

#97: Gracchus and #99: Mnemosyne - I see you are still whitesplaining - good luck with that.

Uh-huh.  I notice that the people you’ve been most dismissive of on this thread are women.  I’m sure it’s just a total coincidence that DTG and I have basically said the exact same things but you only take the discussion seriously when you’re having it with another man.

At least now I understand your point of view.  Oh, and for your comment about originalhalf being “submissive,” you can go fuck yourself, you misogynist asshole.

#125: Mnemosyne - I did not know your gender this entire time, because you use a screenname that isn’t gender identified.

I only know you’re a woman now because you just told me.

My criticizing you had nothing to do with your gender - it had to do with your whitesplaining.

My main problem with felagund is his/her fierce need to whitesplain racism to me, an American Black person - felagund is an embodyment of every patronizing White liberal/leftist I’ve encountered in my 26 years of political activism.

Folks like felagund need to stop talking and start listening - I have lived racism, you have not, so defer to my experience, sit down, be quiet, listen and learn.

Basically, it’s the incessant whitesplaning and the patronizing mentality that no doubt lies behind it.

Imagine if a man were to try and mansplain street harassment to you, instead of shutting up and listening to you and what you had to say about the topic, and trying to learn from your experience.

That’s what it feels like when felagund tries to whitesplain racism to me.

Not a good feeling at all.

When you open your mouth and share your thoughts next time try asking yourself “what do I want from this dialogue?”  Because as far as I can tell if anybody responds to you you just get more angry and bitter and explain vividly that somehow we’re imbeciles and deserve to be shot.  Frankly, yes, we do understand.  We haven’t experienced what you have, what we have are books, essays, and personal accounts from our point of view.  You haven’t experienced the civil war but can say “I have empathy for those that served.”  That would be in your slang Civilwarsplaining.  Which is verging on obnoxious.

You’re arrogant, angry, and embittered, you attacked a biracial woman, explained that darker black people have it harder, and generally attacked everybody who asked you why are you so angry or that tried to explain we’re allies in the cause.  You’re basically a leftist troll on the internet by most standards because you’re just attacking anything within arm’s reach for what advantage?  You’re not making anybody feel empathy for you, you’re creating a certain amount of personal anger towards you by being so pissy towards people.  I’m done trying to share my thoughts with you because frankly, for the black men I have met that are like you, nothing will satisfy them.  They’ve found a personal crutch with which to keep everybody away.  You can stay in your hate-filled bubble, i’ll be fighting for civil rights.

#128: Xeranar - yes, yes I know I’m the stereotypical “angry Black man” - and now you have to “defend biracial womanhood” from me.

Yes, I am one of “he black men I have met that are like you,”

You want us to be so grateful that you deign to be allies with us, to welcome you with open arms, perhaps to put Hawaiian-style leis around your necks and to never ever criticize your privilege, your arrogance and your know it allness”

Sorry but it doesn’t work like that anymore.

You apparently DID listen to me though, in a roundabout way:

“I’m done trying to share my thoughts with you”

THANK YOU!!!!!

I don’t want to hear your thoughts on racism because you don’t know what your talking about -  and your too busy whitesplaining to learn!!!!!

Plus, you apparently want us to throw a damned parade because you deigned to come to the ghetto and “fight for civil rights” on our behalf!

With allies like you the Black race does not need enemies

Honestly, I prefer the White guys I work with to White liberals and leftists like you.

Even the ones who are flat out racists - because they are honest racists who don’t front like they are “allies” of my race!

And, on the real, most of the non leftist non liberal regular working class Whites I know are far less racist than a lot of the so called “progressives” I have dialogued with on this list.

Xeranar, we as an oppressed people have a right to be angry and you will not silence that!

I can see why you meet so many Black people who have the same angry reaction to you that I do you are a patronizing liberal racist, and that’s why we don’t like you

Instead of raging at me, why not look in the mirror and deal with your own racism?

Comment 46: Whitesplaing! I love it.  I’ve been mansplained before. I hear you on the patronizing liberals. Some of the most sexist men I’ve seen are on liberal sites/id as liberals. UGH.

Try People of Color - much nicer.
But that’s just a more polite way of saying exactly the same thing, “non-white”. The term as used doesn’t make sense otherwise.

#131: Devonian - politeness is important!

And defining us by what we are (people with dark skin) as opposed to what we are not (caucasian) is very important as well.

I can see why you meet so many Black people who have the same angry reaction to you that I do you are a patronizing liberal racist, and that’s why we don’t like you.

And you’re a black bigoted asshole.  So technically we’re even.  Frankly your demand I be silent is just how telling it is.  Get over yourself.  You don’t have a magical lock on knowing racism, you’re just another person with an axe to grind who complains when an academic deals with the issue by not personally bowing down to you.  Does that sound harsh?  I hope so.  It’s true.  Trying to tell me how I shouldn’t dare say a word about racism is just stupid, plain and simple.  Intellectuals, historians, and generally knowledgeable people will talk about issues of the day and racism falls into that realm.  If you can’t handle it that white liberals want to stop racism and aren’t patronizing you, under that understanding define LBJ and the congress that voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Warren Supreme Court? 

Yes, I give that you have lived a life dealing with racism, as for your faux outrage at the fact I tried talking politely to you about how fighting with others who don’t want to oppress you is bad for the movement or whatever you want to call this blog and it’s commenters you lashed out.  But you’re just an angry bigot with a need to satisfy your pathetic ego by lashing out at every white guy or girl on the assumption that I am a vile racist by living out my life.  Go read Wise’s book “White like me” and then tell me is Tim Wise racist by breathing?  He points out the privilege I get and I acknowledge it, I pay my dues like everybody else and works toward a more egalitarian world.  You’re attempt to paint me as a racist for trying to have an intellectual conversation about racism that doesn’t somehow give you a crown and rose pedals at your feet for being black is laughable.

Then again arguing with you is just giving into your trolling ways.  Go troll somebody else.  I just really want that last word because you seem to no answers but more bigotry to my responses.

#133: Xeranar - nice rant.

And I get to have the last word.

Have a nice day.

And I get to have the last word.

Have a nice day.

Nope.  Good to know what you’re actually trying to accomplish, though.

I did not know your gender this entire time, because you use a screenname that isn’t gender identified.

Actually, Mnemosyne is a gendered name. It may not be immediately apparent to X random person who is not familiar with classical mythology, but it’s just as gendered as (say) Isis or Galadriel.

Also, while I agree with a lot of your points, GregoryAButler, I don’t know where you get off saying that because Derrida would be considered white in the United States, his experience as an Algerian Jew in France has no element of othering to it. He writes about othering because he has lived it. Enough with the goysplaining.

#136: Rebecca

I’m one of the tens of millions of X random people who is not familiar with classical mythology - so to me, I had no idea of the gender of the name.

As for Mr Derrida - I’m sure he knew a whole lot about antisemitism in France and Algeria, being as he lived it

But he didn’t know a damned thing about anti Black racism in the USA for the same reason

And yes, Mr Derrida, like the vast majority of European Jewish folks would be considered White in the USA - a fact that you cannot deny and the pic that was linked to this thread indisputably proves.

So he probably wasn’t considered a Frenchman, either in Algeria or France - but, had he moved here, he would sure as hell have been considered a White American!

I’ll see your goysplaining and raise you a whitesplain!

I dn’t know what point you’re trying to make with your “If Derrida had moved to the United States, he would have been considered a White American.” He didn’t. He wasn’t. In the place and time where he lived, he was a man of color. Obviously he did not have firsthand experience of anti-Black racism in the United States, because he lived in France. If he were Black, that would still be true, because he was French, not American.

Also, “person of color” =/= “Black”

#138: Rebecca,

Jews wern’t people of color in Europe - they were a persecuted White ethnic group, in a continent full of White ethnic groups that, from time to time, slaughtered each other (lacking a state to defend them, the Jews got the worst of it in the last big European slaughterfest - WW II - but you already knew that).

That does not make Derrida a “man of color” - that makes him a Jew in antisemetic Europe.

Not at all the same thing as being a Black man in America, so give it a rest.

And yes, had he come to the States, he would have gotten White man status the minute he arrived here, just like all the other White immigrants, so let’s keep it real.

Again, Rebecca, I see your goysplain and raise you a whitesplain.

And I hope you’re not going to claim that Jewish Americans have People of Color status - cause that’s pure nonsense and you know that as well as I do!

I’m asking you why you keep constructing this hypothetical where Derrida is American, and you’re completely ignoring me. Derrida’s Judaism may not have made him a man of color, but his being Algerian sure did. Do a bit of reading on Algeria and France before you try to say that Derrida was White in his home country.

Furthermore, do tell me what I’m trying to whitesplain to you. I’m trying to explain that people of color are treated as second-class citizens in places other than the United States, and you’re just not having it.

(Goysplain may not have been the best term, since that’s not really the main element of what we’re discussing, but I don’t know what might be a better term for what you’re doing here. Americansplain?)

Rebecca,

Here’s a novel idea.

How about, when discussing the literature about anti Black racism in America, recommending the works of an African American scholar - instead of plugging the work of some foreign White man?

I know we’ve only been legally allowed to read and write in this country since 1865, but, be that as it may, there actually have been several hundred American Black scholars who’ve written works on race theory in this country.

I think they might know just a little bit more about the subject than your boy Derrida, who, after all, was a White man from Algeria

And, for the record, the Jews of Algeria thought of themselves as part of Algeria’s White French settler community,

When Algeria won it’s independence on May 5, 1962, 900,000 of Algeria’s 1 million strong White French community immediately fled the country, as did almost all of Algeria’s 35,000 Jews.

So, while you may think of Algerian Jews as “people of color” Algerian Jews think of themselves as White because they fled Algeria with all the other White Algerians in 1962!

I see your goysplain and your Americansplain, and raise you a whitesplain.

The appropriateness of suggesting Derrida is not at issue here. You have moved beyond that. You’re acting as if the conversation went like this:

“Derrida might be some useful reading.”
“No, I don’t think Derrida is useful in this specific situation, as he wrote about other racism, not American anti-Black racism.”
“ZOMG YOU HATE DERRIDA”

when it went more like this:

“Derrida might be some useful reading.”
“IF DERRIDA WAS AMERICAN HE WOULD BE WHITE and also if bunnies could fly they would form aerial bombing squadrons”
“Er, he was still treated as a man of color in the country in which he actually lived in real life…”
*sticks fingers in ears” “I CAN’T HEAR YOU”

The appropriateness of suggesting Derrida is irrelevant. Appropriate or not, it does not give you an excuse to minimize other people’s experiences.

Also, what’s the deal with talking about how Algerians see themselves as white? Have you not spent this thread explaining why people’s self-identification does not matter? Or do you only care when they’re Black?

Rebecca,

I was referring to pre 1962 Algeria’s White settler community - the 1 million White ethnic French colonial settlers who lived in French colonial Algeria.

Derrida was one of those folks - so was Albert Camus - they were a large community, who returned to France in a great mass migration after Algeria won it’s war of independence against France on May 5, 1962.

There were 8 million Arabs and Berbers in Algeria in 1962, they were treated as second class citizens and racial inferiors by the French colonial authorities - and the 1 million White Algerian settlers from France - from France’s invasion of Algeria on May 5, 1830 until France was driven out on May 5, 1962

(put “The Battle of Algiers” on you Netflix cue if you want a brief popular history lesson - otherwise, consult wikipedia or be oldschool and go to your local library)

Obviously we’re talking about the pieds-noirs, this is Derrida. Your point?

Well, the Algerian Jews were assimilated into the White Algerian community.

Dramatic evidence of which is the fact that, like the other White Algerians, over 90% of them fled in the wake of Algerian independence in May 1962 - with the exception that, while almost all White Algerians fled to France, many Algerian Jews went to the zionist colonial settler state in Palestine [the “state of israel”]

OMG, they left a country they didn’t want to stay in! That totally makes them white! It’s not like they were threatened with death if they didn’t leave, or anything like that!

Now, could we get back on topic? I asked you where you get off saying that Derrida’s experience of racism is not important because he is not a Black American; you’ve yet to respond.

No, they left with all the other White settlers in Algeria

What part of that don’t you understand?

And, following from that, Algerian Jews were an integral part of the White colonial settler community in Algeria.

and that includes your boy Mr Derrida.

As in, Derrida was a White man

And yes, let’s get back to the original topic - why do you insist that I read a book by a White man from a foreign country to understand racial discrimination against Blacks in America when many many many Black Americans have written on the subject???

You have yet to respond to that.

And by the way, I like how you totally pulled the Arabs = Terrorists card by claiming that Algerian Jews were in danger of being murdered if they didn’t flee independent Algeria!

Actually, they faced the same “danger” that the rest of the White settler community in Algeria faced the danger of no longer being the oppressing ruling minority, and having to be equals with Algeria’s Arab and Berber communities

That was the only “danger” that Algerian Jews and the rest of the White Algerian community faced - so let’s keep it real.

Maybe you’re having a failure of frame of reference here? I’m talking about racism Derrida suffered in France. You see, when you talk about racism and whiteness, locations are important. People who were white in Algeria were not white in France.

I’m not insisting anything other than that you stop minimizing the experiences of people of color who are not black. I was not the person who suggested Derrida, and you may address yourself to them on that topic; I am the person who is asking you where you get off saying that Derrida’s experience of racism is not important because he is not a Black American.

And while were at it, do you know any other White settlers in colonial-era Africa besides Derrida who’s books you’d recommend?

Ian Smith, perhaps?

Or P.W. Botha?

Or maybe Jan Smuts?

Rebecca, perhaps you should read a few books by Frantz Fanon, and then we can talk.

In fact, read all of them, and then get back to me.

I’m still not interested in the literary contributions of White colonial settlers like Derrida - not interested at all.

Until then, we’re done.

Have you ever heard the phrase “la valise ou la cerceuil,” GregoryAButler? I’m not pulling that threat out of nowhere.

I would very much appreciate if you would do a bit of reading on the historical background before you argue about it. It’s common courtesy.

Yeah, I’ve read Fanon. Your point?

* le cercueil, naturally

“Have you ever heard the phrase “la valise ou la cerceuil,” GregoryAButler? “

No, I haven’t - the only foreign language I speak is Spanish.

Care to translate?

“The suitcase or the coffin”

Thanks for the translation - not everybody went to schools that taught French (I went to NYC public schools - Spanish was the only foreign language).

Beyond that, honestly, I’m sorry that the tone of this exchange has gone where it has.

But it is quite tiresome when White folks seem to feel the need to put their experiences and their thoughts and the ideas of people of their race at the center of the God Damned universe!

My beef with you and the other poster about Derrida is that why do you have to keep pushing books by White people on racism when there are plenty of African Americans who have written on the topic?

Does everything always have to be about you and your race all the time and every day?

It’s sickening, and yes, it enrages me.

And I make no apologies for that.

So, no thank you, I do not want to read anything by Derrida - the voice of a White man doesn’t always have to be the universal voice of authority all the God damned time (even when it comes to the Black experience)!!!

So, you can keep Jacques Derrida - I’m not interested, at all.

If I want to read about racism, I’ll read a book by a Black person.

Sorry for all the rancor, but I’ve really had quite enough of having the White experience always presented as the unversal one - and that includes Derrida’s experience of being a member of a White ethnic minority group in France - it’s still the White experience, and I get enough of that every day on TV, on the internet, over the radio and in books I read.

How about let’s universalize the Black experience just for once?

Alternately, there is this wonderful search Engine called Google…the phrase brings up a lot of French results, but not solely French results.

It’s interesting that you suggest Fanon, because Fanon wasn’t American either. If you want to talk about anti-Black racism in the United States, Fanon is not your reference. You can make a case for Derrida’s experience of racism being different because he is not Black, but you can’t make a case for his experience being different because he is not American and still cite Fanon. (And I’m not sure you’re trying to make a case for Derrida’s experience being different because he is not American, since you keep up this “WHAT IF HE WAS AMERICAN” thing, but as you keep mentioning anti-Black racism in the USA, that seems to be an element.)

In any case, no, this particular argument that you are having with me is not about the centering of White experience. It is about you trying to obscure someone’s oppression because their racial categorization in the society in which they live doesn’t line up with how you see them. Nowhere have I argued that Derrida is an expert on anti-Black racism in the US. I have argued repeatedly that you are making your own decisions about his experiences from across several decades and an ocean because his skin tone doesn’t match your perception of what a person of color is. This is about you. Own your words.

Rebecca,

You totally missed the point.

Totally.

And you’re still trying to tell me that Derrida isn’t a White man (despite the fact that he quite plainly is)!

Whitesplaining at it’s finest!

Is there a school where White liberals like you learn how to be so clueless and totally unable to shut the fuck up and actually listen to a Black person when they’re trying to explain racism to you???

Or did you just develop that level of cluelesness, arrogance, closed mindedness and inability to listen all by yourself????

If I’ve totally missed the point, perhaps you should try explaining it, instead of repeating “DERRIDA IS A WHITE AMERICAN DERRIDA IS A WHITE AMERICAN” as if it’s a) factual b) meaningful.

Like I said: we have obviously moved beyond talking about anti-Black racism in the United States, which is why I am not deferring to your experience. You are not the expert on anti-Algerian racism in France. Your experience does not cover that.

I’ve been hesitant to call what you’re doing whitesplaining, because you are not white, but I can’t really think of any other satisfactory name for it. You are trying to decide what is and is not allowed to be called racism for people other than yourself who have actually lived it. That is whitesplaining.

Rebecca,

I never said that Derrida was a White American - I said he was a White Algerian - basically because that’s exactly what he was.

Would you like to address the rest of the argument?

I kinda already did [see above posts]

No, you’ve absolutely failed to explain who gave you the authority to say that Derrida has not experienced racism.

Let me try this one more time

A WHITE MAN’S VOICE DOESN’T ALWAYS HAVE TO BE THE AUTHORITATIVE VOICE ON EVERY QUESTION

In other words, no, I don’t have to read your boy Derrida to understand racism - and no, he really doesn’t have anything relevant to say about American negrophobic racism, because he lived under European antisemitism, and the dynamics are totally different.

Now, maybe it’s hard for you to get this but not everything in the world revolves around Caucasians and Europe

I know your intoxicated with Eurocentricity and White skin privilege, and you think that everybody else in the world has to listen to you and your race, but that’s just not true.

So, I’ll compromise.

The next time I want to read about antisemitism in Europe, I’ll read one of your boy Derrida’s books.

But there’s not a God damned thing that Jacques the White Algerian man can tell me about anti Black racism in America.

I’ve said my piece, and I’m done - with you, and this thread.

As I’ve already said, and as I can repeat again after this if you still don’t understand: I am not asking you to read Derrida to understand racism. I am asking you to stop pretending that he has not experienced racism just because he is different from you and because his experience of racism does not fit into your Americoccentric view of the world. This is about what you are doing.

You’re not obliged to stay, of course, but I hope you realize you haven’t refuted any of the accusations of minimizing that I’ve made against you.

Reading comprehension FAIL

I said that Derrida had experienced European antisemitism

European antisemitism =/= American negrophobic racism

Get it?

That’s it - I’m done - if you can’t get it when I’ve spelled it out so simply, I give up.

Aaaand re-flounce!

Not once have you acknowledged that pieds-noirs faced prejudice in France. Not once. I repeat this to you and all you can say is “he’s white, he’s white, he’s just like every other white Frenchman.” Are you even trying?