Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas- Sh*t-Shoveler
Commentary by Chitown Kev
You can shovel shit can't you? Aunty Entity- Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
The sheer amount of pig-**it that Fox News political commentator Juan Williams shovels into his February 21 Wall Street Journal paean to Clarence Thomas, America’s Most Influential Thinker on Race, surely qualifies the piece for WMD status. Seriously, it is something to behold.
A sample:
Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists.
Maybe the bulk of the readership of the
Wall Street Journal needs to be reminded that “racism stubbornly persists.” The sheer amount of racist dog-whistles and air-raid sirens emanating from large portions of America in the run-up to and subsequent election and reelection of the nation’s first black president alone is, sufficient evidence that racism stubbornly persists. I don't think that many Americans (even those that read the
WSJ Opinion pages) need to refer back to a 14-year old story in Time magazine.
And need I remind Mr. Williams that Clarence Thomas invoked the stubborn persistence of racism at his own confirmation hearings in a way that I, personally, found to be obscene.
"This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."
I had (and have) no hard opinion, one way or another, as to his guilt or innocence regarding Anita Hill's sexual harrassment allegations. However, I will say that Thomas's deployment of lynching as political rhetoric and metaphor was and is simply disgusting. Thomas, himself, explicitly insisted on being judged as a black American. The bulk of Mr. Williams argument rests on the the idea that Thomas "stands up for individual rights as a sure blanket of legal protection for everyone, including minorities." Yet when it came to saving his own reputation and to further his career, Thomas had no problem invoking the good ol' days of Jim Crow.
For that reason alone, I have always considered Thomas to be a hypocrite of the highest order.
And thanks to Juan Williams, that position has hardened.
Again, a sample:
In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case that preserved the affirmative-action policies of the University of Michigan Law School, he quoted an 1865 speech by Frederick Douglass : “‘What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice.’ . . . Like Douglass, I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.”
The Douglass quote is from an 1865 speech that Douglass gave at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society titled
What the Black Man Wants. What the black man wants, at least according to Douglass, is explicit:
But if we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the government, he knows enough to vote. If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote, on good American principles. [Laughter and applause.]
The right to vote.
The same enterprise that Justice Thomas sought to limit in his concurrence to Shelby v. Holder.
We know where Frederick Douglass stood on the question of overturning civil rights.
And we know where Clarence Thomas stands on the same questions.
In the final analysis, there may be more than a little bit of truth that Clarence Thomas is, as Williams describes, "the most influential thinker on racial issues in America today."
However, I submit that such "influence" is neither wanted nor needed by the majority of people of color in this country.
And it's not an "influence" that Frederick Douglass would smile upon.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Small towns find it hard to remember victims of racial violence. Economist: Marking murder.
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A LYNCH mob stopped a car carrying two black couples and their white employer on July 25th 1946. One of the black men, Roger Malcolm, had just been given bail after stabbing a white farmer. The mob tied up all four African-Americans and shot them 60 times. Their white boss, who was not harmed, said he could not identify any of the perpetrators.
The lynching that took place near Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, is still unsolved. A marker was erected 2.4 miles west of the spot in 1999. But few other such signs exist at similar sites in the South.
Between 1877 and 1950 almost 4,000 black southerners were lynched, according to a new report by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human-rights group. That is 700 more than previously reported. During the days of Jim Crow, a black man could be murdered for speaking “disrespectfully” or for knocking on the door of a white woman’s house. In 1904 a crowd in Mississippi sipped lemonade and nibbled devilled eggs as they watched a black couple being mutilated and burned. “Our willingness to romanticise this period necessitates that we deal too with the racial terrorism and violence at this time,” says Bryan Stevenson of the EJI.
Georgia saw more such murders (586) than any other state, followed by Mississippi. Tyrone Brooks, a member of Georgia’s House of Representatives, has spent years researching the lynching at Moore’s Ford Bridge with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), after past investigations went nowhere—despite the greater willingness of locals to share information about the murders in recent years. He has also organised annual re-enactments since 2005, and believes white anger over blacks trying to vote partly motivated the killings. On February 13th he sent a letter to Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking for an investigation and hearings into what happened. “We have no faith in law enforcement agencies any more, as they’ve already had since 1946 to look into this case,” says Mr Brooks.
A victim laid to rest
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Who Has More in Their 401K? Whites in Their 30s or Blacks in Their 50s? Washington Post: Middle-age blacks have less in their 401(k)s than young whites
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Our current retirement system heavily relies on tax-advantaged savings accounts such as 401(k)s. This system works reasonably well in the world of upper-middle-class and affluent people. Unfortunately, that same 401(k) system functions quite poorly for most people outside that top economic layer. African-American and Hispanic workers are particularly unlikely to derive financial advantage from these arrangements. Median financial wealth is quite low for both groups, especially when compared with non-Hispanic whites.
You might think this has a lot to do with access to 401(k)s, but it turns out when the savings accounts are offered to workers at the same company, whites still benefit a lot more than Hispanics and African-Americans. A new working paper by Stanford’s Kai Yuan Kuan, Mark R. Cullen and Sepideh Modrek examined 401(k) participation within a single firm from 2003 to 2010.
Kuan and colleagues find very large disparities in accumulated 401(k) savings. As you can see in this chart above, non-Hispanic white workers accumulated vastly more savings. Disparities would surely be even greater if their analysis included the stock market run-up through 2015.
What's striking in the paper is the many disparities arise among workers who are already actively contributing to their retirement plans. Kuan and colleagues provided data showing how much workers had accumulated in 2010.
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As the movie industry prepares for the Academy Awards, there's a topic that just won’t go away. The Root: Can Hollywood Fix Its Diversity Problem?
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At the 74th annual Academy Awards in 2002, Sidney Poitier—who became the first African American to win a best actor Oscar in 1964, for Lilies of the Field—received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. That same night, Halle Berry became the first African American to win best actress for Monster’s Ball, and Denzel Washington, following in Poitier’s footsteps, won best actor for Training Day.
All the hard work done by black trailblazers such as Hattie McDaniel, the first African American ever to win an Academy Award—for best supporting actress in 1940, for Gone With the Wind—seemed to have come to fruition.
It was “one magical, miraculous night of diversity,” said filmmaker Reggie Rock Bythewood.
The 87th annual Academy Awards, airing on Sunday, will be nothing like the 74th edition. This year’s ceremony was already labeled the whitest Oscars since 1998 after all 20 acting nominations went to white actors. And the snub of Selma director Ava DuVernay and actor David Oyelowo only served to reaffirm that Hollywood still has a diversity problem.
It really seemed as if Hollywood had turned a corner on this issue, especially after last year, when 12 Years a Slave won for best picture—the first time a feature film directed by a black man (British filmmaker Steve McQueen) had done so—and dark-skinned beauty Lupita Nyong’o—the winner for best supporting actress—was labeled the new Hollywood “it” girl. But this year’s nominations proves that there’s still work to be done.
One issue is how to deal with diversity within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose members vote for the Oscars. An in-depth Los Angeles Times study of AMPAS’ more than 6,000 members in 2013 showed that just 2 percent were black and almost 94 percent were white.
It’s an issue that Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who became the first African-American president of the academy in 2013, seems eager to address.
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Filmmaker Keith Carmack is looking to bring the story of baseball Hall of Famer Pete Hill into a more public space. The Root: A Filmmaker’s Quest to Tell Unknown Slugger Pete Hill’s Story.
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He’s a largely unsung hero in the baseball world, even as a Hall of Famer who played the majority of his career in the pre-Negro Leagues era for legendary teams such as the Pittsburgh Keystones, Cuban X Giants and Chicago American Giants; and yet most people have never heard of him.
According to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Hill, whose playing career dated from 1889 to the mid-1920s, was a fearsome center fielder with a powerful arm and “excellent glove.”
Babe Ruth. That name ring any bells? Funny, since Pete Hill may have been better than him.
It’s the story of disturbed graves at Burr Oak Cemetery, just south of Chicago, the legend of Pete Hill and a newspaper article titled something along the lines of “Is a Hall of Fame Baseball Player Buried Here?” that sent Canton, Ill., native Keith Carmack on a quest to make the slugger’s name known.
“They had dug up about 300 graves,” Carmack explains to The Root, “and resold the plots in the cemetery that was predominantly poor, African-American ... and it just so happened that around that time there were a lot of Negro League baseball players buried there because a lot of those guys died poor, and so they were in this kind of cemetery with the unmarked grave or one little marker.
“People thought that he would probably be there, so I read that and it was really just one of those things where you just get this sort of just fire ... inside of you,” adds the 29-year-old, who studied sound design at Columbia College Chicago. “I dropped what I was doing and just decided I needed to make a documentary. I kind of said I want to see this story play out ... so I just had to make it.”
Pete Hill
YOUTUBE/NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM
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Dinesh D'Souza's racism and the shame of immigrant self-hatred. The New Republic. How to Make It in Conservative America (If You Aren't White).
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I have two shameful family secrets. The first is that when I was growing up, almost all gatherings of my extended clan would include buckets and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a staple of our diet. The second and more serious source of self-mortification is that some of my kin—almost all of whom hail from rural India—sometimes vent anti-black racism.
These two focal points of embarrassment merged when I was 19 and went on a KFC run with a cousin I will call Amandeep. As our car glided into the parking lot, we saw a black family exiting the fast food joint. “Boy, black people sure love fried chicken,” Amandeep muttered. The comment angered as it baffled me: He clearly couldn’t see the irony of stereotyping black culture while heading for one of our regular KFC pick-ups. It was actually one of Amandeep’s more benign remarks. On other occasions he made Charles Murray-like forays into questions of black genetic inheritance and propensity toward crime.
I wish Amandeep’s racial theories were an anomaly, but he’s far from alone among South Asian immigrants. Anti-black racism, I’ve often thought, is one of the more unwholesome manifestations of assimilation. If blacks are near the bottom of the perceived racial hierarchy across North America, some enterprising immigrants find it useful to step on blacks as a way of climbing higher.
Racism among South Asians has some peculiar qualities; it’s not so much hatred of the other but the hatred of the almost-the-same, akin to a sibling rivalry. At the heart of this sort of immigrant racism is the desire to differentiate oneself from the group one could easily be identified with. As it happens, Amandeep is one of the most dark-hued members of my family. When he was small, his nickname in India was “kala” (Punjabi for black). I’ve sometimes thought that some discomfort at being labeled black contributed to his racial fixations.
Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing provocateur whose history of incendiary racial comments stretches to his undergraduate days in the early 1980s, provides an interesting case study for the intersection of immigrant upward mobility and racism. D’Souza grabbed attention this week for a tweet about President Obama taking a selfie: “YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment.”
Dinesh D'Souza ✔ @DineshDSouza
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YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment
10:48 AM - 18 Feb 2015
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
A Fox News Anchor, critiquing the Oscars, said she couldn't understand Lady Gaga because of, what she called, the "Jiggaboo" music. Immediately, social media was in an uproar. She defended herself by claiming she didn't know what the word meant and she was sorry if anyone was offended.
Of course, I figured it was because she just didn't care.
Sadly, the willful ignorance, the uncaring sentiments, have a profound effect on whole populations. It destroys hope. It destroys optimism. It wears out a weary Soul.
from Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “Cornel West makes the point...”
Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.
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You don't remember because you don't care. Sometimes my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care.
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Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you?
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I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.
-- Claudia Rankin
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