Commentary
Robinswing, Black Kos Editor
I’ve been thinking. It happens. Most of us know here know what‘s going on. It’s gotten to the place where I don’t feel the energy of explaining. Or the need. Not that many people are listening. Only a few care. I’m talking to you.
The blackwoman has been thinking it might be time to seek out some solutions for eliminating racism. It was more difficult than I imagined.
I came to one conclusion. Amazing, my friend, has been saying this. I completely concur. Race is a problem for white people to solve. If black people or brown people could have made racism go away it would have long since disappeared back into the nothing-ness from which it came.
Nah, it’s on white folks to make the necessary moves to kill and bury, once and for all, the notion of race. I think in a generation or two this just might happen.
For one thing no small part of the fear rising in the hearts of some our finest race-baiting carbon units is the realization that within a generation they will be the minority. This idea causes folk like Pat Buchanan to go to sleep at night holding his gonads. He’s been ringing the white folks we’re about to be outnumbered bell for a really long time. With the election of America’s first black president, many of the dull-normals suddenly got it.
In the America they grew up in, such a thing was not possible. A black president was not a notion the mouth-breathers ever considered. It couldn’t happen. For one thing the expectation was white people would never go for it. I still remember the old southern white man who said during the election season last year "I’m voting for the nigger." Even so, he was in the minority.
The majority of white people in this country voted for dumb and dumber. They were willing to be led by two people who couldn’t find their butts with a flashlight and a map.
There is nothing I could ever say to such a person. I do not know these people. And if I got to know them they could really like me and retain their racism by telling themselves that I am ‘different’. This is what I heard in the sixties. "You’re different". This was what you heard back then when you defied the stereotypes taught and accepted as true.
"You’re different."
I didn’t fall for it. Clarence Thomas did. ‘Nuff said.
I’ve understood even back in the day it was easier to make me an exception rather than question what had been taught. To do so would be admitting Mom and Dad lied. Couldn’t have that. Easier to put an asterisk on me and retain the paragraph about the inferiority of my race.
Settling the question of race must fall on the shoulders of those who have most benefited by racial divisions. It’s called white privilege and if you are white you have enjoyed this privilege whether or not your parents are recent immigrants, held slaves, didn’t hold slaves , ancestors fought for the Union or the Rebels. If you are white in America your privilege exists as a function of your race. It is breathing and waking. It is part of the fabric of your life whether that fabric is silk or chambray. It belongs only to your race and only your race can call back the privilege by extending it through law, institution and practice to everyone. So far there has been no real effort in that direction. We got law. We understood you cannot legislate feelings. Only behavior.
We took what we could get.
There are of course those white people who do everything they can to educate themselves and others. It is obvious to me we need a great many more of the people who do not turn away when someone at a party or gathering makes a racist remark. Racist need to be called out. Many will deny being racist and tell you something along the lines of "one my best friends...". Do not believe them. Anyone who is white and has a black person as a best friend is sensitized by association and if the black person considers the white person a friend will school him or her when necessary.
White people have to come up with the solution to race. Some of these folk are family. Some are neighbors. Some are friends. Talk to them. Don’t let them get away with the stereotypes. Challenge them on privilege. Point out that as long as this privilege exists, racism has a home.
If all else fails, remind them that they are soon to be the minority and that karna is a bitch.
Now run and tell that.
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Paul Jennings was a slave in James Madison's White House, and became the first person to put his recollections of it into a memoir. Madison and the White House, Through the Memoir of a Slave.
In 1809, a young boy from a wealthy Virginia estate stepped into President James Madison’s White House and caught the first glimpse of his new home. The East Room was unfinished, he recalled years later in a memoir. Pennsylvania Avenue was unpaved and "always in an awful condition from either mud or dust," he recounted.
The city was a dreary place," he continued.
His name was Paul Jennings, and he was an unlikely chronicler of the Madison presidency. When he first walked into the Executive Mansion, he was a 10-year-old slave.
But over the course of his long life, Mr. Jennings witnessed, and perhaps participated in, the rescue of George Washington’s portrait from the White House during the War of 1812 and stood by the former president’s side at his deathbed. He bought his freedom, helped to organize a daring (and unsuccessful) slave escape and became the first person to put his White House recollections into a memoir.
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Sure, it's the 1960s—but the AMC hit gives the tough debates of the civil rights era the short end of the stick. This is so typical of Hollywood, especially TV, when dealing with this era. Why 'Mad Men' Doesn't Care About Black People.
In the opening scene of the first season of Mad Men, Don Draper, sitting in a swank restaurant, gets a light from a black busboy and then strikes up a conversation about his smoking and brand preferences. As this is 1960, an older, white, waiter comes over and asks if Draper is being bothered. Draper sends the intrusive waiter away, and keeps up the conversation with the busboy, remarking, "You must need to relax after working here all night."
"Yes," the man answers, and then quickly adds, "I don't know." Draper, the creative director of a Madison Avenue ad firm and the show’s central character, rolls into his sales pitch.
Although Draper has a gift for engaging and seeing through marginalized types—the unwed mother, the Jewish heiress, the closeted gay man—in the case of the black characters, the relationship never goes beyond shallow conversation. Mad Men takes on a number of cultural controversies, yet race is treated with politeness, distance, restraint, and a heavy dose of sentimentality. For a show that takes place in the early ’60s, as race riots are breaking out, this is a glaring omission.
OK you had to expect dopper0189 homerism on this story. Usain Bolt Covers 100 Meters Much More Quickly than Everyone Else.
Usain Bolt crossed the finish line, saw his record-setting time on the clock and spread his arms as if he were soaring like a bird.
About all this guy can't do is fly. And by saving his celebration until after the finish line this time, he showed how fast a man really can go on two feet.
The Jamaican shattered the world record again Sunday, running 100 meters in 9.58 seconds at the world championships to turn his much-anticipated race against Tyson Gay into a one-man show.
Also August 17th is the birthday of Marcus Garvey
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Hillary Clinton’s tiff with a Congolese student obscures the real American mission in Africa: economic development. Where’s the Beef in Africa?
On Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo—part of a seven-nation tour of sub-Saharan Africa—a flurry of attention focused on her sharp reply to a local student who seemed to question her role as chief diplomat of the United States. All the attention overshadowed the substance of the student’s question, which concerned mining contracts between China and Congo. It was another missed opportunity to discuss the one issue that could really make a difference in Congo and the other failing states of Africa: foreign direct investment and private-sector economic development.
Just weeks after President Barack Obama’s brief stop in Accra, Ghana, Clinton’s 10-day jaunt echoed similar themes but was by far the more hands-on experience. In South Africa and in Kenya, she emphasized the dynamic economies of each country, pushing for more and better growth. In Somalia, she met with President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, an embattled but critical ally in fighting terrorism in the Horn of Africa. In Nigeria and Liberia, she stressed good governance, the democratic process and the rule of law: "I think the people of Liberia should continue to speak out against corruption," she said at her meeting with Liberian head of state Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, adding: "The United States officially supports what this government is doing."
Yet for all of the bold statements and fluency with local issues that Clinton and her entourage brought to Africa, the trip looked a lot like jaunts previously taken by other U.S. diplomats. Visiting health clinics and housing projects as well as the national assemblies of her host nations, Clinton assumed the mantle of humanitarian-in-chief.
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Nigerian police have detained hundreds of people belonging to an Islamic community in the state of Niger.The arrests on Saturday came weeks after a radical sect killed almost 800 people in the north of the country. Nigerian Police Round Up Hundreds of Boko Haram.
About 1,500 police officers backed by reinforcements from the capital, Abuja, had surrounded the compound of the Darul Islam community on the edge of the town of Mokwa early on Saturday, said Mike Zuokumor, Niger state police chief. "We received a series of reports about the activities of the sect from neighbouring communities, the local government and the emirate [traditional leader]," Zuokumor said.
This is a symptom of why the CBC doesn't have the influence it's numbers and seniority would suggest. They are behind the curve in using and acessing traditional media as well as new media, especially on issues outside of the civil rights stockade Sunday talk wants them to be trapped in. Congressional Black Caucus needs a new media face-lift
Though the answer for those three organizations is an obvious yes, for the CBC, the answer is resounding. When the Caucus was originally founded nearly 40 years ago, the organization had 13 members. Today it has 42 members, all of whom are elected officials. All members have to be relevant to the taxpaying American voter in general, and to African-American voters in particular. The CBC has a constituency to whom it must answer on a regular basis. For this reason, and with a black president occupying the White House, the organization is more relevant than ever.
So if relevance isn't the issue, then what is? Quite simply, the issue is modernity. When you do a google search for Congressional Black Caucus your first hit is not the CBC but, instead, their foundation's website. This is confusing and clearly doesn't maximize the power of new media. This is further driven home by the CBC's website url, an extremely cryptic http://thecongressionalblackcaucus.l...
Furthermore, although the CBC has an assortment of YouTube clips, they aren't thematic. Nor is there an electronic newsletter that one can subscribe to.
Yeah to Color of Change, they are starting to get noticed outside of the Netroots with the Glen Beck boycott. Black activists hit FOX News where it hurts — its wallet.
The minority-run ColorOfChange.org is campaigning against the ultra conservative commentator Glenn Beck. They have persuaded more than 20 advertisers including CBS, Wal-Mart, LexisNexis-owned Lawyers.com, Procter & Gamble and Progressive Insurance to pull their ads.
The color of Netroots by Deoliver47
Black folks should take guns to the town halls by The Apathetic Militant
For The White Person Who Wants to Be My Friend (Healthcare Version) by ackeegirl
Racism, Right-Wing Rage and the Politics of White Nostalgia by tim wise