For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Just about all of my black male friends know what this kind of racial attack is from personal experience. I am no exception.

Racism, like all forms of bigotry, is what it claims to oppose–victimology. The bigot is never to blame. Always is he besieged–by gays and their radical agenda, by women and their miniskirts, by fleet-footed blacks. It is an ideology of “not my fault.” It is not Ron Paul’s fault that people with an NAACP view of the world would twist his words. It is not Ron Paul’s fault that his newsletter trafficked in racism. It is not Ron Paul’s fault that he allowed people to author that racism in his name. It is anonymous political aids and writers, who now cowardly refuse to own their words. There’s always someone else to blame–as long as it isn’t Ron Paul, if only because it never was Ron Paul.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Ron Paul was quite the racist and still is since he hasn’t the integrity to apologize for it written in his name.  Only repentance brings redemption.

If I Were A Poor Black Kid – Forbes:

“President Obama was right in his speech last week.  The division between rich and poor is a national problem.  But the biggest challenge we face isn’t inequality.   It’s ignorance.  So many kids from West Philadelphia don’t even know these opportunities exist for them.  Many come from single-parent families whose mom or dad (or in many cases their grand mom) is working two jobs to survive and are just (understandably) too plain tired to do anything else in the few short hours they’re home.  Many have teachers who are overburdened and too stressed to find the time to help every kid that needs it.  Many of these kids don’t have the brains to figure this out themselves – like my kids.  Except that my kids are just lucky enough to have parents and a well-funded school system around to push them in the right direction.

Technology can help these kids.  But only if the kids want to be helped.  Yes, there is much inequality.  But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.”

(Via Forbes.)

Mr. Marks is exactly right the problem is ignorance.  His.  Its willfulness especially.  I don’t doubt his heart is somewhere near the right place, but seriously.  His entire argument boils down to this:  Poor black kids “don’t have the brains to figure this out for themselves” just like his presumably white middle class kids.  Further, they don’t have adults with the resources to help them.  So even when the odds are stacked against them, and like all children, are ill equipped to face these challenges alone, it’s still their fault they struggle.  You gotta love conservative ideology for it’s ability to engender doublethink.  Orwell would be impressed.

It’s very difficult for us to grasp the notion that cops are human beings, subject to the same racial biases and flaws of other human beings. This is not a plea for mercy on their behalf. It’s a plea for understanding that abuse will happen. A gun and a badge do not confer a “great soul.”

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic)

Amen.  If they didn’t try to squeeze over two million people on a road that can safely handle half that, we would have most of the real issues in the first place.

I Feel Like A Black Republican:

You know, normally something this stupid wouldn’t bother me, but this story really gets under my skin. If they can try to paint Common as a ‘dangerous black man,’ what black man is immune? If they think Common is vile, then I know they have no use for my black ass. Common is beyond the pale, Michelle Obama hates whitey, Eric Holder is protecting the New Black Panther Party, Shirley Sherrod is discriminating against white farmers, Barack Obama is giving reparations to black people? Conservatives, do you realize how stupid this sounds to black people?

…But shit like this is what prevents me from even getting to the point where I’d give their policies a fair hearing. And I know there are some Republicans and conservatives here, and I say that you have no chance of getting any kind of support from black voters as long as the leaders of your party are pulling these kinds of stunts.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

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]]> http://therobopinion.net/2011/05/12/faux-news-is-complete-bull/feed/ 0 http://therobopinion.net/2011/03/07/the-racism-of-frame/ http://therobopinion.net/2011/03/07/the-racism-of-frame/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 03:17:51 +0000 Robert Barrimond http://therobopinion.net/?p=3054 Continue reading →]]> Wow.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Racism of Frame:

On Friday I joked on twitter, the other day, that biggest problem with attempting to write smart is that you end up attracting people who really are smart. And sometimes they write in to tell you you’re wrong. And sometimes, In such cases, your forced to acknowledge their point.

Aside from the fact that Obama’s father was passed over by Kenyatta, you have the fact that the Mau Mau Rebellion was primarily a Kikuyu rebellion, the result of Kikuyu being kicked off their lands by white settlers. The war was primarily fought between Mau Mau Kikuyu and Kikuyu loyal to the colonial state. Fewer than 100 Europeans died in the rebellion…tens of thousands of Kikuyu died. The lazy assumption that Obama’s father, a Luo by birth, would have been a part of the Mau Mau Rebellion simply underscores the fact that Europeans and Americans have NEVER understood the Mau Mau Rebellion. To them it just meant ‘black people doing crazy things.’ Huxley called it ‘the yell from the swamp.’ It was uncivilized, savage, a revolt against civilization. The fact that it was connected to real grievances by the Kikuyu, that it was a product also of Kenya’s very divided ethnic heritage (as witnessed by Kenyatta’s favoritism towards Kikuyu during his long presidency, and the bloody and protracted battle between Luo and Kikuyu after the 2007 elections) is ignored, or better yet, never understood in the first place.

I disagree with the opening post in that I think this does have something to do with skin color. Because Kenya’s anti-colonialism was black, it is easier for idiotic people like Huckabee to claim that it is somehow bad if an African has a negative view of British colonialism. Imagine Huckabee trying to say the same thing about a white victim of colonization, be it the Irish, the Dutch settlers in South Africa up to the Boer War, or Canadians. There’s no way, no way at all, that Huckabee would employ the same language and the same dismissive contempt for an entire people’s aspirations for freedom and independence. This is absolutely about race, about Obama’s ‘otherness,’ an argument that is made so much easier by Obama’s ancestors and his mixed skin color. Moderate Flag.

In an editorial they wrote during the height of Mau Mau, the Times said: ‘We live in a tortured period of history when strange and primitive forces are coming into their own again. Our civilization often seems but a veneer covering a dark abyss. Now and then the surface is pierced and we see frightening things.’ That was part of their commentary on Mau Mau.

Time Magazine also ran a story on Mau Mau. Not only did Time report rumors that Mau Mau oathing ceremonies involved the harvesting and eating of human brains by Mau Mau, they also had this quote from a white settler living in Kenya: ‘Some bastards still think Kukes are human. They aren’t…Night after night, you lock the doors, see to the guns, and kiss your wife and kids goodnight, and wonder if you’ll ever see another alive in the morning. We have no protection, except ourselves. And don’t forget, most of us are on commando duty. Some of us can’t farm anymore.’ Around this same time, Robert Ruark, the American author, said of Mau Mau: ‘To understand [Mau Mau] you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we civilized people have encountered in two centuries.’

I find these quotes remarkable in part because the world had just gone through the Second World War, which saw the gassing of six million Jews, the slaughtering of some 50 million civilians, etc. Yet it took the Mau Mau rebellion for people to think that ‘civilization’ was endangered. Think about that, and then ask yourself, why were people so freaked out by Mau Mau? Again, fewer than 100 whites died in Kenya. A thousand Africans were hung by the British. Tens of thousands more died in the rebellion, or died in the British concentration camps. So what made Mau Mau so different? I know what I think the answer is, but it’s something to ponder.

Dave Weigel, back in September, when Newt Gingrich praised Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘brilliant’ book for its ‘interesting insight’:

What will be the impact of D’Souza’s book? If 1995 and 2007 repeat themselves, Gingrich will be the exception–people in the rest of the movement will realize just how tissue-thin this research is. If they realize that, they may then look askance at Glenn Beck’s search for similar evidence of Obama’s radical history. They may even question the wisdom of questioning Obama’s birthplace. Could the search for some skeleton key in Obama’s past be a distraction? It could be! If it were a book, it could be called the The End of Birtherism.

And Weigel on Huckabee:

Occam’s razor: Huckabee is just ill-informed….I’ll give Huckabee the benefit of the doubt and say he put a few different ideas in the blender. So he’s not a birther; he does reveal an odd ignorance of the biography of the man he occasionally out-polls in the 2012 presidential election. (That said, I’m not sure if Obama could pass a pop quiz on the early years of Mike Huckabee.)

I’m picking on Weigel here because he’s as competent and well-informed as any journalist covering the conservative movement, and so the problems with his coverage serve as a useful proxy for his colleagues. He predicted in the fall that D’Souza’s book was so explicitly batshit crazy that it would end up discrediting birtherism, a movement that thrives on innuendo and suggestion. Well, here we are six months later, and a man who ‘occasionally out-polls’ the president just offered it as fact. And Weigel now excuses this as being ‘ill-informed.’

He’s right about the ignorance, but he’s wrong to dismiss or excuse it. If Obama were to chalk Huckabee’s pro-life stance up to his Catholicism, Weigel would be among the first to pounce. And he’d be right to do so. If you’re going to rely on pop psychology to explain policy preferences, arguing that the political is merely the personal, then you’d better understand the person you’re talking about.

But it’s also worth pondering why Weigel got this wrong back in September, because I think it explains his continued failure to grasp the point today. It’s not about the facts. It’s about a basic, emotional, intuitive belief that Obama is foreign. And it’s about the new esotericism of the right. The fact that Obama is actually proudly American drives his critics nuts. They know he cannot mean it. And so, precisely because all of the readily available facts indicate that he is patriotic and moderate, they search everywhere for evidence that will reveal his underlying foreignness and radicalism. It’s not subject to factual rebuttal because the facts that might rebut it are, in their view, further evidence of his massive duplicity.

And I differ with our esteemed host. This is not merely skin-color prejudice; it’s not that simple. But that is, absolutely, where it starts.

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

“This is a good piece by Ted Conover pivoting off the arrest of the Oregon bomber, to talk about the convictions of supposed terrorists in Newburgh, New York:

These prosecutions fail the smell test, and lately the odor has washed over my own Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Last month, if you missed the news, four African-American ex-cons from Newburgh, N.Y., were convicted of plotting to bomb two synagogues here, one of them half a block from my house. The government released a photo of some of the men casing the joint that our local paper ran the day they were convicted.

One of the men in the photo is an FBI informant, Shahed Hussain. The case seems like a slam-dunk–until you learn more about him. Hussain, driving a flashy Mercedes and using the alias Maqsood, began to frequent the Masjid al-Ikhlas in down-at-the-heels Newburgh in 2008. Mosque leaders say he would meet congregants in the parking lot afterward, offering gifts and telling them they could make a lot of money–$25,000–if they helped him pursue jihad. The assistant imam said the suspicion Hussain was an informant was so great ‘it was almost like he had a neon sign on him.’ A congregant told a reporter that, in retrospect, everyone wished they’d called him out or turned him in. ‘Maybe the mistake we made was that we didn’t report him,’ the man said. ‘But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?’

Hussain bought meals for the group of four men he assembled because none of them had jobs or money. The owner of a Newburgh restaurant where they occasionally ate considered him ‘the boss,’ because he would pick up the tab. Among his other inducements were the offer of $250,000 and a BMW to the most volubly anti-Semitic plotter, the man the government says was the ringleader, James Cromitie. To drive that car, Cromitie would have needed a driver’s license–which he didn’t have.

Another supposed plotter, a Haitian, was a paranoid schizophrenic (according to his imam), which was the reason his deportation had been deferred (according to The Nation’s TomDispatch.com), and who kept bottles of urine in his squalid apartment (according to the New York Times). The last two, both surnamed Williams, have histories of drug busts and minimum-wage jobs in Newburgh. At trial the government asserted that the plot was driven by anti-American hatred. But in papers filed in court by defense lawyers before the trial began, Cromitie is quoted in government transcripts explaining to Hussain that the men ‘will do it for the money. … They’re not even thinking about the cause.’

Greenwald makes a similar critique of the Oregon case. What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat. Conover writes at the end:

This prong of our nation’s anti-terrorism strategy seems tantamount to sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people’s shoulders and whisper in their ears. One imagines that there is no shortage of Americans who, with enough money and other enticement, could be lured into crimes either ordinary or political: selling drugs or attacking gay people or racial minorities. But does dangling carrots that reward badness really make us safer? If it hadn’t been for the FBI, I don’t believe the Newburgh Four would have targeted my neighborhood, or anyone else’s.

Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically ‘prove’ the problem of violent white supremacists. And once such a war is launched, and such a unit is formed, what incentive would such a unit have to declare the war won, essentially justifying it’s own dismemberment? Indeed, there’s always a potential terrorist out there somewhere…

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

Wow.

‘Reparations’:

“I’ve looked at this clip a few times where King calls Barack Obama ‘very urban.’ I don’t think ‘very urban’ is a slur for black. I think the point is that urban politicians aren’t interested in rural Americans. In this case, Barack Obama is interested in ‘rural America’ because the farmers are black, and it gives Obama a chance to prosecute his nefarious plot to award slavery reparations:

‘We’ve got to stand up at some point and say, ‘We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,” he said. ‘That war’s been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there’s no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one’s filing that claim.’

(Via Ta-Nehisi Coates :: The Atlantic.)

Excellent as always.

“We’ve posted no shortage of pieces on political attacks that leave context on the cutting room floor to give the public a misleading impression. An opponent’s statements, cherry-picked and shorn of any language that could provide the intended meaning, can be shaped into a slashing ad. 
Or they can lose a woman her job. The latest victim of the missing context trick is U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. Her story shows the harm that can result from taking something out of context — or acting before all the facts are in.”

(Via FactCheck.org.)

Fox News and Andrew Breitbart (no I won’t link to them) should lose a good amount of credibility. This was malice aforethought.