Racism isn't dead.

Finding a silver lining.q

2011-07-04T09:19:00.001-07:00

I just a new part time job teaching Spanish to adults in San Marcos. I'm pretty excited about it. I've had some really difficult times lately with a long-term relationship having ended (and possibly the friendship ending as well), the confusion of getting out of school, prepping for the GRE, health issues, and just trying to survive day to day while making "me" time to have fun a little.

In gaining this new job, I've been asked about my future with HEB. I've known for a long time that I would be leaving HEB. However, somebody approached me and told me that "It's time for you to get out and go do something that matters!" Of course, they really want to say that I need to get on to working with my future career as an educator in a class setting. While I admire their wanting to encourage me, I think the person would have done better to phrase it differently.

I do think I've done things at HEB that matter. No, I don't think any of it have to do with my work title. The most I've gotten from that is a diet of fruits and veggies sampled weekly, some physical exercise, and a long strain of patience from dealing with customers. But I must say that my time at my most recent HEB has been unique. I have worked with people at this store that, had I never met them, my life would never have been the same. I was and have been fortunate enough (and still am fortunate enough) to have worked with fellow students that not only could I identify with as peers in school, but that were the kinds of free thinking, discourse oriented people I had come to seek out in Texas State but seldom found. It was in this unexpected environment of a grocery store Produce department that I encountered and still know some of the brightest and forward thinking people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Book work...

2011-03-03T08:23:00.001-08:00

I've begun working on what looks like will be a relatively short book (around 80 pages or so). It's going to be concerned with issues of Whiteness and race stratification in the U.S., how this relates to power structures and dynamics, and why I believe fear is the primary driver behind why these dynamics continue as they do.

Encounters

2011-01-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

Recently in a discussion with a a new acquaintance, I found myself discussion my time spent in central Texas. I commented on how much I enjoyed the Austin Film Festival when I've had the chance to go as well as how much I enjoy the Pecan Street Festival, amongst other things like the Spaghetti Warehouse. When I started to share some other unique personal experiences, my time spent in a band arose, followed by my attendance in 2006 to an immigration reform rally in downtown Austin. I mentioned how much different I saw the tone, rhetoric, attitude, and political ends when compared to the (small) Tea Party gathering I hung around on for a bit one day.

The other person asked me, "That's strange. I wouldn't peg you for being someone to go to a Tea Party rally." The truth is that I typically wouldn't, but it was assembled in downtown San Marcos where I lived and couldn't help but indulge a bit, albeit sarcastically, as I walked by. Anyway, during the discussion on this, I mentioned how I found the tone of the event driven by very racist mechanisms of behavior and speech, although I seldom heard overtly racist language used (slurs, classical stereotypes about black people, etc.)

This prompted the person to engage me in how non-racist they not only felt the group is/was, how they identified with the group, but then a litanty of personal facts that they felt qualified them as "anything but racist". The list of details was pretty predictable.

"My black friend Patty wouldn't say that I'm...", "Read their platform! It doesn't say one thing about race as a protest reason...", "They don't think of themselves as racist, and many of the members are Jewish and a good number are Hispanic or Black."

All over the place there are the "I have a black friend!" excuses for their behavior and "The prescence of one non-white person per setting means it's not a racist driven movement or ideology." Best of all, the person or the others have never "thought of themselves" as racist, leading to the assumption that therefore they aren't or couldn't possibly be.

I laid out what I thought to the person in a pretty straightforward way:

1. Just because you have made a friend who is Black/Asian/Hispanic does not mean you do not harbor racist views or tendencies. Period. Invoking your friend as some kind of card to prove your worth does nothing about that. It is possible for white people to have friends of different ethnicities and still harbor racialized attitudes that can result in bigoted actions.

2. The inclusion of a person or persons of color in a group does not mean it doesn't have institutional white supremacist motives. Historically, in the setting of power, many people on the side of the oppressors have accepted the employment of oppressed exceptions who wish to separate themselves from what they see as a disdainful membership of the victimized. Just because the Republicans chose Michael Steele as the head of their party, for example, does not mean that Republicans as a group do not have racialized and bigoted mechanisms behind their behavior in regards to immigration, foreign policy, or domestic policy. Same goes for Democrats and having chosen Barack Obama to be their cantidate for President. Chris Matthews oozed Obama-worship for months when he wound up saying after an Obama speech, "He spoke so well and did a good job, I forgot he was black for an hour."

3. A person who has perpetrated a racist action does not get to choose the consequence of, and subsequently, the prescence of racist feelings or tendencies. This is not to demonize the humanity of someone who has done so, as more often than not people who say or do racist things do not even realize they have, as much racism has become coded, conditioned, or subversive into cultural norms and attitudes. This does not excuse the racism, but it should rather be an incentive for all of us to probe and deconstruct these things, even if it means a blow to the psychological investment many of us have in whiteness and a blow to our own pride through what we perceive as cultural normality.

2010

2010-12-29T15:45:00.000-08:00

The first decade of the new millenium we were all freaking out over not too long ago is now coming to a close. It was pretty unique in that many unpredictable events came to pass, but that's about where it ends. How we as a nation handled the unpredictability was, well, predictable. We handled it with the same laziness, narcissism, and excess of pride that we usually do. From 9/11 and the two wars started in its wake to the tragic handling to Katrina to the Wall Street financial disasters to electing the first black president, our country time and again showed its true colors in responding to such events.

My full thoughts have been put up on my facebook, and if you should ever want to view them, just shoot me an email or request it here and I can mail you the full document.

Personally, I'm glad to see it end. A lot of personal growth took place for me in this decade, but I think I'm looking forward to this next decade more to see what we as a country can do (if anything) to grow as well. I concluded my thoughts with saying that the word we should embrace instead of "Hope" from the left or some nostalgic nonsense from the right is the word "sense". We're lacking it in the worst way and need to get a hold of it badly.

I'm back

2010-12-29T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'll be back on here periodically, as my availability to use the internet has opened up more.

:)

Explanation

2010-08-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

I've been absent for a while. There's a fairly simple reason: I have no internet at my new place and I only get a few hours a week here at the library to read, catch up, etc.

I also have not been writing lately (bad news), but I have indeed been reading a LOT (good news). It's the only kind of escapism I can find that doesn't make me feel like I'm completely withdrawing from all things necessary to make this world a better place in some form or another. The last two books I've read haven't been about race (though I did read Frank Wu's "Yellow", which I recommend to all), but rather about the Crusades and the Middle East.

I've also been preparing for my last semester in college, so there's been a lot for me to get done.

I promise I'll be back.

Things to keep in mind...

2010-04-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts I had after hearing and reading discussions on race recently, particularly in regards to white/non-white perspectives in a white centric society...

1. Seriously, in a discussion about race (a topic which POC live and deal with daily in a White centric society), it would help most in the discussion if Whites were to put as much effort into understanding things from the POC viewpoint as they often end up using in rebutting and dismissing.

2. As I heard it said once, "Calling out an action of racism is not calling a person in question a racist as though it were some classification of the persons irredeemably evil nature." It's calling something out for what it is. Calling an action racist is more than just calling out an action, it's an affirmation of something that has effects for individuals and society. It's not a primary personal attack.

3. White people cannot consider themselves some final authority all the time on whether something is racist, especially when the action in name comes from a White person. I say this because simply questioning and holding something up to scrutiny isn't completely legit in the respect of racism. When one has been trained to see things from a White perspective, that is how that person is going to judge unless they step outside of their experience and into anothers. All people have experiences based off of their racial status that shape their views and perceptions, and Whites are no exception here. The road-block is that many Whites feel their view is "normal", a "generic" or "individual" view and not a "White" view. This is the effect of Whiteness. Anyway, It's not about seeing things differently from one another, it's about whether one side is making the effort to see things as another one might.

4. I am getting sick and tired of hearing White people dismiss minorities are "too sensitive" and "get over it" as though minorities are easily side-tracked from relevance in a discussion and look for insult and offense at every possible opportunity, that they find pleasure from experiencing it. Unlike the White observer in most cases, the racism in the topic tends to affect the POC more often than the White person, so it's important that the White participant have empathy and an understanding beyond their own White experiences. Their limits of perception of the White person(s) do not define the scope of analysis in the situation. The ease by which Whites disavow an experience which is not their own is one of the most troubling things I've noticed lately, and it tends to spring from this sort of monopolizing the scope of discussion to their own.

Just a few thoughts.

Race and Progressives

2010-04-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

Usually, my anger with respect to race can more often than not be found directed towards those on the right wing. It's usually them on opposing ends of race discussions. However, more and more, due to my experiences and the sharing of experiences from fellow anti-racists like Godheval, I'm noticing that many on the left are suffering from some different but related symptoms. Progressive whites are often times suffering from "Racism Displacement Syndrome".

RDS, as we shall abbreviate from here on out, is a common tendency amongst White Progressives to work towards progress on matters of inequalities, but choosing to remain oblivious to issues of race in the matters and how Whites experiences with race are crucial to understanding inequalities as well. This is often times a different manifestation of the "color-blind" approach to race, acting as if it doesn't exist as a solution to the problem of the social construct and it's effects in inequalities and privileges.

This is my basic message to White Progressives: wake the fuck up. Seriously. We live in a time of changing paradigms, technology spread out and information available in more ways than ever before, yet White people are found to be just as uneducated as ever on matters of race. White Progressives may know some about race here and there through education in other fields like Political Science or History, but the study of Racism is a topic that is tied into the social reality of the United States that needs to be studied, understood, and acted on as well. White Progressives, for all of their reading, blogging, and internet activism, have no excuse whatsoever to remain ignorant on matters of race. One cannot study the history of capitalism without realizing much of it's success is due in part to the subjugation by whites of non-whites. One cannot ignore the factor of race in the discussion on environmental degredation, as it is the pillaging, overuse, and plowing down of non-White lands that allows White companies to sell much of their products. One can not study inequalities in the economy without studying how race, one of Americas oldest and biggest legacies, is tied to it in ways that would be ridiculous to ignore.

My advice? To the White Progressive who knows something substantial about race relations: start speaking up more. You can't denounce your privilege by just 'denouncing' it, but you can give up the privilege to keep silent on matters of race. To the White Progressive who spends so much time on matters of Gay Marriage, Capitalism and Corporatism, Foreign Policy, etc.: your excuses are inadequate. It is time to start reading, educating yourself, and being just as active on those matters as well.

Matters of race permeate and intertwine in nearly every modern issue that faces people in a capitalist system. Ignoring it or running away from it will not make that change, but it will cement the reality that the fight against racism is largely a fight left for minorities when, quite frankly, whites are just as responsible for anti-racist action.

Break.

2010-04-05T22:38:00.001-07:00

I won't be blogging on very much for a while. School and some personal problems are taking their toll on my time to be creative. But sometimes it's better to deal with those head on. Maybe it will give me more fuel to create with later. In any case, see you on Facebook until then.

Jaime

Words

2010-04-02T20:44:00.000-07:00

Some words that describe Americans (not citizens, mind you, but what we know as the "model American")...add ones that you find appropriate.

Narrow-minded
Obtuse
Entitled
Myopic
Oblivious
Imperceptive
Unaware
Heedless

Any other ideas?

Founding Fathers.

2010-03-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

Seriously, what is the big deal with these guys? They are not deities. They are not untouchable beings. Their judgement is and was not flawless.

Why do people have a hard time viewing things in context? The Founding Fathers set up a system that we enjoy today, but it is hardly the same system we had then. We live and work in a Post-Industrial society, which is much different from the Agrarian one they framed their ideas in. We live in a time when black-letter law of slavery, segregation, and oppression of women is done with, but these things were the norm in the time of the philosophical framework of the system the Founders agreed on. We offer public education for those who do not have the funds or the desire to see their child schooled privately. This option, however, was not something that was part of the framework for our founders vision. However, our society has prospered with those things implemented, and we've been fine. Why can other issues that may conflict with "The founders" intentions not be viewed in the same context?

If you lost all of your money or assets and had no more private school, you'd be damned happy there is a public option for your child to be educated under, to guarantee at least a minimum of education and opportunity in this society. Why should this be any different for health-care, the matter of life and death for many Americans? We have a "right" to buy cheap, subsidized fast-food (which was built up by government socialist subsidies to begin with), but not to be able to walk into the hospital or doctor to get care? I think this is less a question of freedom and more one of priorities. Government management was and is responsible for interstate highways, public schools and colleges, pell grants, GI Bill (albeit having a racist implemenation), Social Security, public libraries, bridges, NASA, and public transit. So why exactly is the government managing a public option for some a bad thing? Oh yeah, that's right. We already do have and have had public options for some for decades (Medicare and Medicaid). Somehow, the country hasn't collapsed into a socialist dictatorship. Imagine that.

Oh yeah, I forgot another large government beaurocracy: the military.

Somehow I get the feeling we'd be "okay" in adding a public option. It's our priorities with respect to who gets kickbacks, tax cuts, and subsidies that needs to be examined.

Family

2010-03-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

You know, I get told a week before hand that my brother coming home, I don't have time to ask off for it, but I work a 9 hour day, drive home at 10PM, get there at 11PM, ready to spend what little time I can with him before he leaves the country again. Then, you make this comment to me over and over, in front of everyone, and try to bring yourself up at the expense of me and my life. If it were almost anyone else, it wouldn't bother me, but make me laugh heartily. But since I care about you, the comment stings badly. It stings, not because others heard it in and of itself, but because my life is hard enough than to have my own flesh and blood publicly displaying their resent about my good fortune in front of a family member I hardly ever get to see and often wonder if I will get to see again once he leaves the country.

I have done nothing but bust my fucking ass, save and scrimp every dollar I can, take care of my own affairs without begging for money to bail me out at every turn for fucking myself over, and when something good finally comes my way, you took several opportunities to slight me because of it, as if I had any say in the matter. Why can't you feel good that things finally took a turn for the positive? All this after my car died in December, I had to buy a used one and do lots of work getting it in decent shape, I had to move to a new place (which meant a big increase in rent and a nice sized deposit, take on debt for the first time (which I was openly unhappy over), and deal with even more things to pay off every month. And yet, I'm the one that's open for attacks, however 'jokingly' they are supposed to have been.

I'm hurt and offended.

La Pregunta

2010-03-16T21:09:00.000-07:00

"I'm not a nigger. I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, that means you need him, and you gotta ask yourself why."

- James Baldwin, interview, 1962.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDjaqhuSqQE

Interesting clip of an interview with James Baldwin. He is one of my heroes.

To those confused.

2010-03-11T17:03:00.001-08:00

I've received comments from people who are confused, concerned, or just flat out pissed towards me because of a misunderstanding they have about why I write the way I do about racism and what that means for my feelings on White people. This is especially pronounced in my case because in the eyes of most Americans, I am a White man.

Some feel I am guilty. I'm not guilty about anything. I didn't create the system of racial privilege and I did not choose my skin color or any other physical feature. I feel no guilt. I do, however, recognize the responsibility I have now that I have become informed. Once informed, I now feel outrage when I see things perpetrated in a systemic and institutionalized way, all the way to a personal way when it comes to racism. I feel particularly outraged due to a lack thereof on the part of other White people, though ultimately my outrage isn't landed at their feet. This leads me to my second point.

I, for the record, do not and never have hated White people as a group. I don't automatically dislike them upon meeting them. How could I? I am White, most of my family is White, and some good friends of mine are White. I love all of these people dearly. Some integral people in my upbringing were White (my Grandmother on my Dad's side being one). Many well educated and respectable people in history and society today are White.

Where my outrage is ultimately directed and where I feel the most resentment (with regards to White people specifically) is with two groups:

1. White people who refuse to learn about the society they are in and how it functions. Ignorance is one thing, but that can only be allowed for so long. Flat out willfull ignorance of the problems and manifestations of injustice in society in order to preserve some fairly tale life one wishes to remain subdued in is not an excuse. I do find that many White people fall into this category, and it is with them that I hold a lot of bitterness towards upon encountering.

2. White people who know damn well what the system is, don't care, and do things consciously or unconsciously to perpetuate it on a regular basis. I have zero tolerance for these kinds of White people.

These two groups are bunched into a group and divided by a very thin line (sometimes they overlap in small ways), but I find these two to the best most problematic, followed by the "Well-meaning, do-gooder White" who is oblivious to racial issues in any authentic manner (outside from interpersonal and overt racism).

This does not mean I hate White people. If I hated White people, why the fuck would I try to reach out to and write about them and their behaviors if I hated them? Wouldn't I let it go and allow their racism to continue if I hated them?

The truth is that I think White people are better than this shit. I know what most White people act like in all-White settings. The truth is, most intelligent and educated White people are capable of learning so much about things like religious intolerance, homophobia, global climate change, politics, etc., so I know they are capable of learning this. I just also know it is a much tougher lesson for them to learn, so I go into it with a thicker skin and an attitude that is ready for all types of responses.

I also know that I have to be on the lookout for my own racism, educate myself on these matters, listen to other POC and Whites who are informed, and continually sharpen my understanding of this issue.

I believe the fight against racism to be a worthy one, as well as the fights against other injustices. But, if I treat White people like it is not their job to work against it with minorities, then that would be the one way I could show my lack of humility and caring towards the White community.

For your viewing pleasure.

2010-03-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

Two movies you all must see:

Capitalism: A Love Story

and

Why We Fight

I highly recommend both.

Enjoy.

Great words.

2010-03-08T07:20:00.000-08:00

"We hungry but them belly full,
The structure is set, you never change it with a ballot pull.
In the ruins there's a network for the toxic rock
schoolyard to precint, suburb to project block,
Bosses broke south for new flesh and a factory floor,
the remains left chained for the powder war.

Can't waste the day when the night brings a hearse,
so make a move and plead the fifth cause you can't plead the first.

So now I'm rollin down Rodeo with a shotgun,
there people aint seen a brown skin man since their grandparents bought one."

"The rungs torn from the ladder, can't reach the tumor,
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer"

- "Down Rodeo", Rage Against the Machine

Listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KEKL8fcvzY

Music

2010-03-03T21:13:00.001-08:00

I don't credit it enough, but punk and (some) metal music really did aid in my arriving to my current state of understanding of the world. Not so much going to shows and participating in the pits (though I found that unforgettably exciting and meaningful), but the feeling of like-mindedness amongst all of the people there made me remember that there are important aspects of humanity that haven't been steamrolled over. This also helped me prepare for making comrades in my current fight on the progressive front.

If I have no name specific bands, there are really only two that I was ever truly fanatical about: Bad Religion and Rage Against the Machine. This is not to say that I only enjoyed these two bands in the punk/metal genre, but that they are the only two I gave a shit enough to follow and listen to on an album by album basis.

Both of these bands, though they are in two different genres of rock music (BR being punk, RATM being metal or funk-metal), helped bring me to a closer understanding of society and the world than any other groups or artists, though others like Mos Def helped me understand things about society I could never forget.

Bad Religions cutting cual guitars and fast-paced tempos are mesmerizing in themselves, not to mention the onslaught of lyrical genius displayed in many of their songs. Tracks like "Leaders and Followers", "The Handshake", "You", and "21st Century Digital Boy" became anthems I lived with week to week. I feel like this band was the first to make me feel empowered and make sense out of the confusion I felt in this complicated society. From "Leaders and Followers":

Recognition by proximity, and a brand new face
Just a smidgen of the success pie, and a pinch of social grace
You can play with the big boys, or you can tell them what to do
But sooner or later there's another one like you.

Rage Against the Machine was the band that helped direct me once I'd been taken out of the shadows by Bad Religion. They take you step by step, song by song, through a web of lies, deceit, and hidden messages in society and government. De La Rocha's verbal machine gun fire is undeniably legit, as you can feel the passion and anger flow from each syllable.

From "Guerilla Radio":

A spectacle monopolized
The cameras eyes on the choice disguised
Was it cast for the mass who burn and toil?
Or for the vultures who lust for blood and oil?
They hold the reins, stole your eyes
All the fistagons, the bullets and bombs
Who stuff the banks
Who staff the party ranks
More for Gore or the son of a drug lord
None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord.

Yes, music played an indispensable role in my arrival to my current realization of the world.

Renouncing Whiteness: Saying it and doing it.

2010-03-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

When I look at myself, I'm Jaime. I am a mix of recent English, Native American, Mexican, French, and German descendents. I enjoy playing guitar, basketball, reading, writing, and learning more about my car and how it works. However, to the people who matter, I'm White. I don't mean the government (well, partially I do). I mean the dominant culture - White culture. To them, no matter how much admixture I have, my phenotype tells them White. So, to them, White I will be. And this, whether I want it to or not, has an unmistakeable grip on my existence and shapes, at least in some ways, without my control the context in which I live and enjoy who I identify as personally. I am not a signatory of the contract of Whiteness, but I am, without my say-so, a beneficiary.

This is the dilemma in which a progressive minded, honest with oneself, anti-racist White person finds oneself. The vast majority of whites are likely not experiencing this dilemma because they haven't reached the realization of the world they actually live in. They haven't reached it because they don't yet have the ability to see it. They don't have the ability yet because they've been tricked; tricked by whiteness. Because they have not been taught how to think otherwise, they believe consciously or subconsciously, that the world they live in exists for a reason. To them, it may be that they benefit in ways that they may or may not acknowledge, but it's only because "everyone is an individual in this society" in their eyes, so that absolves them of any historical guilt or problems they may feel with respect to their current status. This narrative of the individualistic America, where everyone rose or fell on their own merits, where each man's predecessors worked hard to get their family to where they were is a dishonest portrayal of our society. The problem with this version is that it only includes Whites, and leaves out everyone else on whose shoulders White predecessors "worked their way up".

As another author has suggested, this is what the anti-racist White lives as the "White double consciousness". It is not the same as W.E.B. DuBois' "Black double consciousness", as Whites that are anti-racist do not necessarily need to view themselves in their image of subjugated groups to arrive at their place in this society (though listening to minority groups is a fundamental way to understand racial issues). The difference here is that the anti-racist White person also needs to see his/herself as they actually are in a historical sense. For instance, this realization does not mean saying that Whites do not work hard, or one persons White grandparents did not work hard, but only that the hard work was done with certain resources reserved for White competition at the detriment of racial minority inclusions. It is this double-consciousness that is necessary for anti-racist Whites to operate in, because they must know that this is true for them in a historical sense, but at the same time operate in a way that works against the large remnants still existing today.

It is not necessarily a conflict, self-loathing, or self-guilt trip, but actually sort of a tough love. It is finding out something about yourself that you may or may not have wanted to admit for so long, but once you do, you know it incontestably redefines you and your vision of yourself in the world. It also redefines how you see the people you know, the hobbies you have, the opinions you have, the people you identify with, and whether those things are conducive to the truth you've now uncovered about yourself and others around you.

The White double-consciousness means that Whites cannot simply renounce their Whiteness as a token measure, but they must act, think, and feel their renunciation. How does a White person do this? That is the journey that I'm on and have been on for some time. Maybe there is no set "way". However, one may argue that this blog in and of itself is a manifestation of my attempts to define that "way". Maybe only through serious self-reflection, cultural critique, and authentic relationships with like-minded individuals of both White and POC groups can a White person find his/her way. Wherever the path may lead, there is no turning back, so long as injustice and dishonesty cloud the social collective on race, as well as other forms of social divisions.

The Austin Pilot Attacker and Double Standards on Terrorism

2010-02-20T07:22:00.000-08:00

Before I begin, I want to make something clear. While I certainly do not condone what Stack did with his plane in Austin, I do think he made many valid points in his goodbye letter about our system of corruption and business/government intermarriage. I think what happened and the fact that lives were taken is a truly terrible thing.

I have two beefs with our media right now following this event.

One: Where is the discussion of Stack's motives? The letter has gone largely unmentioned and uninvestigated as a source for reason behind the attacks. When the 9-11 pilots did a similar attack, their motives were widely covered (albeit distorted) and used to begin two wars and a revamping of our security in the U.S. The media has largely ignored his letter and what drove him to do this. Again, the media drops the ball on serious investigation of the matter (like Iraq), yet we know how much his house was worth and what commentary there is over what Tiger Woods is going to say publicly tommorow. This is one example of the ridiculous media we live with in the U.S.

The truth is that the letter raises serious questions abour government and it's actions, and this is why it's not mentioned. The media, yet again, tucks tail and mentions nothing when it could implicate the massive complex of business and government.

Two: Where is the investigation of Stack's religious/ethnic background, as well as the resistance groups he mentions all over the letter?

After 9-11, all news outlets mentioned the ethnic/religious backgrouns of the attackers as "Muslim" ("radical" Muslims at that). This was heavily tied to their actions and motives for the attack. However, there has been no similar coverage of Stack as a representative member of some ethnic or religious group. There has been no coverage of how his being a member of these resistance groups he mentions during his suicide letter could have aided his actions and extremism, and there has certainly been no governmental move to eradicate them as some 'enemy force' in the same way it did with respect to Muslims and Arabs in similar 'problematic' groups.

Stack is instead viewed as an individual, much like McVeigh, Kazinsky, and other 'individual' terrorists who had beefs with the government (See Kaczinsky and the Leftist Manifesto, or McVeigh's Libertarian and anti-government beliefs). All of these men belonged to or worked for goals of anti-governmental organizations, yet no smear campaign comparable to that of the 9-11 attacks takes place. There is a racial component here as well that is undeniable. If you're a white male committing terrorism, you're a troubled person. If you're a Muslim (like the Ft. Hood shooter or 9-11 attackers), get ready to have your whole ethnic group put on the spot. Meanwhile, white males can rest assured their way won't be hampered with bothersome questions all over the media about their legitimacy in the country.

Our media is a failure, yet again, and this coverage of the terrorist in Austin proves it.

Sometimes...

2010-02-15T22:12:00.001-08:00

...I can be a real asshole and not even realize it. It's worse when it's the day after Valentines Day. I hope my girlfriend can forgive me for being careless with my words.

Sometimes I wonder why she puts up with me, as thoughtless as I can be inadvertently.

Test Video 2

2010-02-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

Very broad, no outline, just me talking about terror and America for a sound test.
Enjoy. All comments, criticisms are welcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijGtb46Stc

OKAY, here it is.

2010-02-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKHHfluJnYk

First video, about Whiteness in America. Kinda weak, did it on the spot. Will have better audio and picture soon.

Comments appreciated. Be gentle. :)

BTW, I had a discussion with my friend James Rodriguez the other day. We came to a nice little conclusion: "Illegals aren't crossing our border. Illegals created the border".

Excellent piece.

2010-02-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

http://godheval.net/an-open-letter-to-steven-sailer/

This is an excellent piece written by Godheval.

His premise: Okay fine, so let's accept for a moment the 'studies' that show inferiority amongst 'lesser' races under the 'superior' White man. So what? Where do these arguments go? Justified racism and discrimination?

If we're going to look at behavior and IQ that way, Godheval argues, let's look at more temporal and spacial behaviors by Whites (namely the propensity to rape, pillage, murder, and commit genocide, all the while exploiting the land and resources of non-Whites). Is it fair to label them sick, twisted thieves?

I sure hope Godheval doesn't mind, but I'll be remembering that argument for future engagements with others on racism.

Myth: America "lost" it's moral authority.

2010-02-09T23:41:00.000-08:00

It makes me snicker when I hear some conservative bray on about American exceptionalism in a world of backwards actions, immoral leaders, and corrupt governments. It makes me shake my head when I hear some liberal run his/her mouth about how America has "lost it's moral authority" in the world.

What moral authority did it ever have to begin with?

I think displaced Native Americans, past and present, might have a say on this.
I think Black slaves, then "freed" to be segregated, might have something to chime in with.
I think subjugated women might have an opinion.
I think Jews stopped at a Florida harbor and sent back to Germany by FDR might have something to say.
I think Mexican-American Tejanos in grossly underfunded schools for decades and decades might ask where this authority was,
I think the hoards of exploited European and Asian immigrants might want to see this morally sound benchmark.

Perhaps those in 1950's Iran who watched their elected leader be overthrown with the help of a CIA coup might have a say in this?
How about those who watched American interventionism in Latin America for decades?

Or can we cut these people out of the discussion on moral high ground and exceptionalism?

I've had it.

2010-02-09T21:55:00.001-08:00

You know, sometimes it dawns on me just how much I can only ever really know about what it is to be Black in America.

No, I didn't just watch the CNN special of the same name, and no, I didn't just take an African-American studies course. I'm actually finding out more of how it seems Black people must feel in regards to their place in American society the more I study white society.

Because some Black people are featured as rap artists, sing and rap about things considered lewd and base, any black youth that listens to it is not only considered the rule for all black youth, but that music alone is what is stapled to their identity (even if they also enjoy jazz, punk, metal, techno, rock, or country). Meanwhile, the suburban white youth who buy the same rap CD's are viewed as "also listening to rap" in addition to their other, 'normal' and at the same time 'appropriate' artists, like Hawthorn Heights or Alan Jackson.

Loud, obnoxious bands like Blink 182 are primarily the listening products of white youth, contain lyrics that can easily be shown as lewd and inappropriate on the same grounds, yet are not tipified with white youth as being a problematic culture. Instead, it's seen as a mere nuissance that kids "grow out of" or "can turn down when it's too loud". Even in extreme examples like Marilyn Manson, it's a "contaminating" culture that makes victims out of it's listeners. With rap and black youth, the black youth "embrace" it as their culture. No victim status is awarded for them. There is a clear cut racial double standard, yet it is never discussed or challenged.

White youth who attend frat partys, drift by through coursework with a sub-par GPA, and have a higher propensity to binge drink and abuse alcohol are "experiencing college", yet if by chance a Black person walks into the store to buy a 40 oz., a less than flattering stereotype is placed upon them. And people wonder why Black Americans are not as quick to go grab a flag to go wave around, ready to march into a country for war?

Watching Chris Matthews say on TV after the State of the Union that "he forgot Obama was Black for an hour" as an attempt to prove a post-racial society makes me both laugh and feel sorry for our country. Why the fuck does one have to forget that somebody is Black in order for them to make a good speech, come across as a uniting figure, or have serious and substanative ideas for our country? What would it mean if Matthews had all of a sudden decided to think of Obama as Black during the speech? What if Obama had said or done something stereotypically "Black", if even for just a few seconds? Would that have erased any certainty that he was capable of doing what he does?

Anyone with a degree of common sense already knows the answer to those questions, so there's no sense beating around the bush with this: America is far from post-racial. Yes, MLK was right when he said "We all came on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." He just forgot to mention that we still, though it is lamentable, sit in different seats.

Sr. Thomas...on video.

2010-02-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

Being American.

2010-01-14T16:16:00.000-08:00

My voice is heard, but not listened to. I'm seen, but don't matter. What matters are things that do not define me, and what defines me are things that do not matter to society at large. What matters to society is that I'm white, I'm male, I'm a valued customer, a compensated employee, a good college student, and a citizen with no criminal background. I have a social security number. I have decent credit. I pay my rent. I know the pledge of allegiance. These are some of the things that matter to my country that do not define me.

What defines me is that I want to work to erase what comes with being white by working towards justice, that I want to keep my non-religious head raised whenever Christians bow and pray in my company and not be considered rude or immoral. I want the troops out of the Middle East, knowing full well that it damages our interests abroad. Is it because I don't want America to have interests that aid it? No. I want America to have interests that do not subjugate and supercede the interests of those in the region. I want to see capitalism compromised for the good of the earth, it's people, and it's future.

I want to make sure I'm the most well-rounded, educated, and capable person that I can be before I have children. I want to do more for the people I love. I want to teach people and learn from people - everybody, not just people who look like me, talk like me, believe like me, or have lessons that are going to be convenient for me.

I want America to be redefined, rethought, and replenished. I know this means hard steps, hard times, and doing without. I'm ready for that, as difficult as it might be.

Sick and tired.

2010-01-09T20:10:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of this run-around, mealy-mouthed, PC crap.

Seriously, if the news shows me clearly that members of a certain ethnic group are insane and unstable in many ways, don't I have the right to say that generally there is a good chance they are all that way? I mean, when the two kids at Columbine, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kazinsky, or the man who shot abortion doctor George Tiller have all been covered in the news for vast killings and terrorist activity, don't I have reason to believe any white male might do the same to me?

When I read that majority of rapists are white males, don't I have reason to worry if I see my girlfriend working alongside one at her job? Is the fact that most drug users have been white enough for me to suspect them of such activity upon meeting them?

Can I question the mentality of white leaders when one of them (Bill Clinton) made such a grave error as to bomb and kill many people thought to be dangerous when in fact they were simply in a factory making aspirin? How about when one of them decided to invade a country, be responsible for the deaths of untold thousands, simply because of what turned out to be a weak hunch and doctored intelligence?

Can I assume most white males are alcoholics when it turns out the most common binge drinkers are of that ethnic group?

Not so long ago, it was revealed that white people used up most types of welfare more often and in higher per capita percentages than black people, the group who are typically stereotyped for such actions. Do I have the right to speak about whites as a lazy, unmotived, hand-out driven group?

Of course I wouldn't go and say all of that. However, it's so easy for us to speak in codified language, maintain stereotyped and racial myths, but I'm sure for many white people it's a little hard to swallow when the shoe's on the other foot.

Link of the week.

2010-01-07T08:38:00.001-08:00

http://www.theunapologeticmexican.org/glosario.html

Racial Code-Words, Part Deux

2010-01-02T07:48:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: I do not intend for this entry to be a bomb-throwing session towards President Bush. Instead, I want to focus on his words and why what he says is so embedded in our culture that the message is so much bigger than him and escapes our notice so easily.

Doing some research for a paper a month ago, I stumbled across this quote by President Bush. It wasn't until I read it a few times that I came across an interesting double message that was in his statement. Here's the quote:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily.. are a different color than white can self-govern."

Now, in this 2004 press conference, what President Bush was attempting to do here was show that he is confident in the ability of people from what we know as The Middle East to self-govern in a democratic fashion, and somehow imply that anyone who thinks to the contrary believes themselves to be superior to "other skinned people". This was the primary and most obvious surface message of what he said.

What I didn't realize until later, however, is that he was in the process of further cementing the idea of American and White being synonymous. That is, by using "people whose skin color is white" as the symbol for American in his sentence, he says it as if the most legit, generic Americans are those who are White. He furthermore uses darker-skinned people as the symbol for Muslim, and further states that Muslims can self-govern (true), but then using them as being some sort of autonomous group apart from Americans.

This is a large example of how code words in our society come to still racially divide us, even when we're not aware of the institutional way in which they're employed. By using White people are the paradigm for legitimacy in a conversation on being Americans, and Muslims as the opposite, foreign people who need to learn and embrace the "American" (read: white) way, we push forward more ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, even if the person is not overtly prejudiced or racist. These are conditioned, institutionalised behaviors.

President Bush is not the lone offender in this regard. It happens everyday, with different words or even attitudes. It's all over our mainstream media (CNN, FOX, ABC, etc.) It happens when we speak of "tragedies" in the suburbs when two (white) kids shoot up Columbine and seldom devote a fraction of that time to the weekly tragedies of the (predominantly non-white) inner cities.

How about this video? The guy even in his opening statements sort of places that "drug related, inner city" violence as "old news" and this "new, suburban attack" against a white kid as a special story.

Now, I'm not saying that I don't feel empathy, regret, and sorrow for this mentioned family. It's terrible that this should happen to any parent, and the kids who did that to this boy should be punished severely. However, my beef is also with the way the media handled the story. It's the way we paint and hand-pick stories that can be rose-tinted and tilted to keep a certain racially coded "norm" as a certain way in Americans' minds.

So, the next time you watch the news or read a speech, think a little about how words we take for granted have been institutionally crafted to hold double meanings for us about people in society.

Quick something I noticed.

2009-12-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

When the Democrats took power, I remember the conservatives wondering whether the Democrats would respect the minorities voice and not try and impose their "iron will" on everyone else.

Now, the Republicans are pointing to select polls as evidence that the majority doesn't want a public option.

I thought that the majority never took complete precedence over the minority? Why then should the GOP's argument over polling numbers be taken seriously? Or should their past comments about the Dem's majority power be forgotten, in which case they'll also have their way?

The GOP is full of morons.

"I wish I was ethnic..."

2009-12-21T20:37:00.000-08:00

(Influenced by a post on 'Stuff White People Do')

Seldom, but every so often, I hear a white person say to me or to a person of color, "I wish I was [ethnicity here]...", or some variation of it. It usually is something more to the tune of, "Man, it must be so cool to be Hispanic", or, "I wish I was Japanese so we would eat with chopsticks".

It seems fairly innocuous: they're just admiring the other person's identity, right? I don't think so, to be honest. I really do think there is a symptom of social ignorance here. It's not a malicious thing so much as a lack of perspective.

Anyone who is non-white knows, to some degree at least, that being non-white means a lot more than your skin color or your second language. It signifies a place or role in society as a member of a group, whereas being white tends to mean being seen as an individual, and having that ability to self-identify as such without the strictures of having to think of how you're seen as a member of a race.

This is where I get frustrated. When white people say things like that, it makes me think that they see ethnicity only as a surface value thing: food we eat, skin complexion, music, etc. They discount the one thing that forms ethnic identity in the long haul, the facet that shapes why and how all of the surface attributes form to begin with: experiences.

In ignoring the experiences of others and wishing to be ethnic to have some voyeuristic, cool attribute, they also do harm to their own identities. They not only ignore that they do have culture and ethnicity them selves, but they do have experiences that shaped those things too. In talking about ethnicity this way, it allows them to ignore both experiences that the person and themselves have experienced and focus only on the "cool, different, exotic" ethnic traits of the "other", and ignore the "boring, average, normal" (so to speak) traits of themselves. It is in this way that whiteness becomes less and less visible to everyday society.

Would the same white person making those wishes still be inclined to do so if they know what other ethnicities had to think about, act around, and keep in mind when performing activities that "average" white folks take for granted? I would say most likely not. This aspect of ethnicity and identity goes ignored in this regard.

The next time you feel inclined to say, "Gee, I wish I could be ethnic", think hard about what that really means, and decide instead to say "Man, I think that the music from Mexico is really cool", or "I really enjoy eating Japanese food". It's fine to identify and embrace other ethnicities, but we shouldn't ignore other aspects of what makes people who they are just by simply exoticizing the "cool" and ignoring the deeply relevant.

Kids DO pick up on things...everywhere.

2009-12-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

Check out this video. It's a study done on racial attitudes picked up from the media amongst children.

Here's the embedded video:

It's kind of hard to swallow, but it's reality.

Something else...

2009-12-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

I heard someone at work say something to a hispanic worker that I felt was notable for an entry.

"I don't see you as Hispanic, really. You're pretty white".

This was said due to the person in question being educated, well-spoken (English, that is), and bright. The white person saying this did not see anything wrong with their statement, and to the contrary felt it was some kind of compliment. The compliment being, "You're smart, therefore you're white". Does this mean that the norm is of white people smart and eloquent? What if a white person isn't? Are they less white somehow and a part of some other racial group? Oh yeah, that's right, we already have done that! When whites act like black people, we call them 'wiggers' to insult them.

So just to get the connotations right: white=good, non-white=bad.

Jeez. Everytime I hear something like that, these are some of that sentiments that I gather from it:

"You're better than those OTHER [read: bad] people that are [racial group here], in fact, you're kinda like ME [read: good]."

"Seeing as race isn't important to my life [HA!] and you're in it, I'm going to have to ignore that you're [racial group] so that I don't have to think about such unimportant things as race and racism, and correcting my preconceived notions about other racial groups. mkay?"

"Wow, you are an actual human being...therefore, it's simply not possible for you to be [racial group]!"

Please, utilize some tact the next time you run into a person of color whose personality has "gone above and beyond" some preconceived notion you have of their 'racial group'.

BTW, two entries down I've put "Stranger in the Village" by James Baldwin, as well as the link for the text, as a suggested reading. I think it would do any visitors of my site good to give it a read. :)

The way politicians use racist code words to fan racial anxieties...

2009-12-10T06:14:00.000-08:00

I'm going to compile a list of code words I've heard politicians utilize to speak about race issues without coming off as bigoted.

White

Average Joe

Joe six-pack

Moral voters

Independent voter

Evangelical voter

Hockey Mom

Soccer Mom

The southern vote

blue collar workers

Black

welfare recipient

Poor people

inner-city

affirmative action supporters

These are just a handful of examples of how our media and politicians (not to mention everyday people) use racialized language to refer to groups of Americans without sounding like they are mentioning anything overtly bigoted. They can use these words and say "the southern vote looks high for McCain" without saying that most southern whites will vote McCain. They can say "I don't support just handing out welfare to recipients while hard working Americans bust their asses" without saying "I think blacks are lazy and whites are industrious".

"We're past all that!"

I hear so much talk about how much better we are in terms of racism in our country. Yes, we've gotten rid of terms such as 'nigger', 'spic', 'gook' from our daily vocabulary, but have we done much in the way of conditioned messages? I don't think so, and many seem intent on keeping things this way by claiming "racism's over", "that stuff ended long ago", "get past it", et cetera.

It seems to run in common with a white tendency to not have to feel bad. I see it with mentions of Obama very frequently. "Hey, Obama's President! We have a black man in office, so now we're all equal!" It's almost like saying, "Look, we white people feel bad when race discussions come up, and we shouldn't have to feel bad (unlike everyone else who has had to endure the shit end of the stick for centuries on this continent), so here - we gave you a black president, now STFU and accept that racism is over."

It's funny how ready most liberal whites were to vote for Obama in the name of change and hope, and not to mention the fact that he's black and how this would "end racism" or some shit like that. However, a year later, when the country is back to debating issues and race becomes an inevitable facet of the discussion, we get ads like this:

which totally misrepresent quotations (the Jackson quote was referring to a specific senator, not every person who voted against healthcare), deny racism in the healthcare industry (well documented), and play on white racist anxieties by invoking the word 'racism' ad nauseum, using it as an ad hominem attack word rather than referring to the well-documented system of racial inequality that exists in our country.

And look, they even put some non-Whites in there! So it *must* be legit, since we know one black person solidifies their entire groups identity, regardless of whether there is a pattern in the group or not! (rolls eyes)

Days like today are days that make it hard to be positive about race discussions in our country.

Reading suggestion...

2009-12-09T19:28:00.001-08:00

In my previous entry, I alluded to Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin, an African-American novelist and essayist. It's an essay written in the early 1950's, before the Civil Rights legislation tearing down segregation. It's message, however, is just as strong today as it was then. It presents a truth about not only Black people, but White people as well.

The text can be found here.

I highly recommend setting aside some time to read this work and take in it's meaning. It is one of my all time favorite essays, as it is very personally written with viewpoints that most honest readers can identify with.

Here are three small excerpts, though it can do no service to the essay in it's entirety:

"For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in away that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York's Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory-but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive."

"For the history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation. It is out of this argument that the venom of the epithet:Nigger! is derived. It is an argument which Europe has never had, and hence Europe: quite sincerely fails to understand how or why the argument arose in the first place, why its effects are frequently disastrous and always so unpredictable, why it refuses until today to be entirely settled. Europe's black possessions remained-and do remain-in Europe's colonies, at which remove they represented no threat whatever to European identity. If they posed any problem at all for the European conscience, it was a problem which remained comfortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him. Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro, but the very nature of these abstractions reveals the tremendous effects the presence of the Negro has had on the American character."

"Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality with which they have insisted on this idea, but they did not invent it; and it has escaped the, world's notice that those very excesses of which Americans have been guilty imply a' certain, unprecedented uneasiness over the idea' s life and power, if not, indeed, the idea' s validity .The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply contributions" to our own) and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men. But not so to accept him was to deny his human reality, his human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological."

Strangers and Outsiders.

2009-12-08T22:39:00.000-08:00

My last trip in 2008, to Europe, opened my eyes to a reality I had never considered about my identity in the United States. I don’t suppose it’s impossible to arrive at this reality without leaving the states, but I do think doing so, especially for a trip to Europe, accentuates the understanding of it. It is a reality that very few Americans arrive at in their lives, and if they do realize it, keep themselves at a periphery of it, for this reality has very stark and real connotations for the identity they’ve been ascribed in their country.

Arriving in Europe, I thought of myself as an American in Europe. This, after all, is what my passport said and how many in Europe would likely see me upon first encounter. I spoke with an American-English accent, knew little to nothing about the area, and would have to dig back multiple generations to find a direct descendent from this part of the world. I was, indeed, and am a stranger to the continent.

I went through my first several days wrapped up in the excitement of being in England, taking with locals and sharing with them any information they wanted to know about me. It wasn’t until I arrived in France, walking amongst the sea of people in Paris, that I arrived at one of the biggest realities of my young adult life.

I stepped off of a bus to take my picture, like everyone else, in front of the Eiffel Tower. When I was heading back towards the bus, a couple of men approached me selling mini-Eiffel towers, 5 for a dollar (equivalent). It is useful for this essay to note that the men were of Sub-Saharan African origin, or black. That, however, is not the reality I arrived at. It was their general approach and attitude in dealing with me that caused the change. Of the three of us, it seemed as if I was the only one acting as if there were even a hint of tension. Let me note that I’ve never been into a fight with a black person, never been the victim of a crime by the hands of a black person, and have generally gotten along with black people in my life. By tension, also, let me clarify that I did not get tense physically, but sensed a tension from myself, as well as a distance, neither of which did I get from these two men. In their interactions with others, I noticed that the European onlookers that were approached seemed to wave them off as they would any white tourist or European stranger.

It was here that I realized what James Baldwin had written about in his essay ‘Stranger in the Village’: the white Americans identity is, in some ways or others, undeniably linked with the identity of the black Americans identity. Continental Europeans did not create the black man as a facet of European society for their purposes, no more than they created the concept of a European. White Americans created the Black American for specific purposes. But it was here that I noticed a bigger reality, Americans created the White people for an entirely different set of, but equally as important, reasons.

White Americans depended on the subjugation of the Black Americans for so long and in such a diverse number of ways that their very identity became intertwined as such. It is in understanding this that one understands the actions of white people in the overturning of those paradigms in the past and present. If Black Americans as the subjugated class were the creation of White Americans for the purposes to protect themselves from the darkness (no pun intended) and impossibility of salvation of the Black man, then White identity would therefore be shaken, disfigured, and redefined when Black people were freed, integrated, and granted equal opportunity. White people needed Black people to remain below them to feel like they had an identity. It is in understanding this that one sees the desperation in the faces, voices, and rhetoric of so many right-wing attacks on Barack Obama. Behind the vitriolic attacks of 2008 were not just anti-leftist words. These words paled in comparison to John Kerry, an equally as liberal candidate of 2004. Beyond the surface of these words lied the slipping away of white identity in the U.S.

Europeans did not rely on the African to identify themselves. And if they did, it was in a colonial sense that could be easily made abstract and replaced by their regional identification. As Baldwin remarks, gone were the days of the European in America setting eyes on the African as a stranger or familiar outsider. Europeans in America were replaced in identity as Whites, and the outsider African became the Black person they were dependent upon in identity.

It is this distinction, not some gap in genealogical history, which sets White Americans from Europeans in the context of identity. The White man needs the Black man as a subjugated person socially to find comfort with himself. Does this mean that Black people must perennially be at the lower end of the totem pole of White people, or that White identity must be removed in order to arrive at a more just social reality?

Anti-intellectualism in the United States

2009-12-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

Every election or so, I tend to hear some person, be it a pundit or a person in everyday life, remark that they think "X candidate" is too book smart, not enough like him/her, too smart for their own good, too boring, etc. The implied message is that we, as in most Americans, should want someone close to our intellectual level, not one of them 'book readin' types'.

Where do we go when we want a question answered about our health, our teeth, our investments, our appliances? People who have studied it a lot, people who are educated on the subject, no? Why is it, then, that when the science world releases something that is contrary to the idyllic world we've created in our own minds, we excuse away our critical thinking by saying "Well, they're just'a bunch of elist, book readin', fancy, college educated types who don't know anything about real life", or something to that effect? Don't we want our scientists to be book reading, researching, and somewhat removed from the biases of everyday life that might otherwise put them in a complacent funk? Isn't the point of everyday life to be the opposite from book reading, researching, gruelling scientific inquiry? Why then would we not listen to them when they are doing this?

I thought of this because as I decided to put my radio on conservative talk today, I heard about 10 minutes of a spiel on the "myth" of global warming. I'll first state that I do believe that human action does not cause increased global temperatures, but it seems blatantly obvious that they do facilitate and exacerbate the problem. Therefore, I'm open to hearing what scientists diagnose and prognose in that respect.

As I listened to the conservative pundit, however, I couldn't believe the asinine content spewing out of the radio...

"These 'scientists' want us to believe that an increase in Co2 is going to mean the end of times! I mean, come on now folks! CO2, that which we breathe out every second of the day, that which is necessary for plant life on this planet, is going to be what kills us? It's now a TOXIN? What's next? Too much oxygen is toxic too?"

I'm not a scientist. I'm not even a biology major (I major in both Anthropology and Spanish Literature). But, I have taken 3 classes in biology, am a former licensed nurse, and I do know that both CO2 and O2 above certain level can and will cause toxicity and eventual organ death. I'm sure the pundit might have changed his tune had he (wait for it...) consulted a BOOK on the matter before opening his mouth. He might have found that oxygen is eventually what does most damage to humans in the long run, that excess levels of oxygen cause collapse of alveoli in the lungs (which is why doctors prescribe and nurses keep oxygen tanks at set levels, not leaving it up the clients personal discretion, ya'know), and excess levels of carbon dioxide also do similar damage. There have been scientific studies that show that excess CO2 in controlled environments could actually hinder plant growth.

It's this same type of anti-intellectual populist rhetoric that fuels the anti-evolution movement, claiming it's "just a theory", setting aside the fact that had they cracked the first chapter of an introductory biology/chemistry/physics/geology/astronomy (i.e., science) book, they would note that a scientific theory (as opposed to a layman's theory) is not simply "a hunch" as they would have you believe it. It is quite another matter, one involving repeated observation and recording of repeatable and valid results. But, they won't be letting that get in the way of keeping life "normal" and "comfy" for themselves.

You see, I'm sure this 'Johnny hayseed' pundit doesn't mind book readin' intellectuals when they're doing his taxes, altering chemicals to produce the medicines saving lives, or any other non-controversial use of education. But when it comes to the environment and the possibility of having to alter his lifestyle and way of viewing the world, he becomes indignant due to the 'elitist' intellectualism in science.

Why are Americans this way, so much so that we even have to have large scale discussions on these 'debates' over whether something as widely agreed upon as evolution is taking place, or whether human actions have some effect on the environment? That is quite the question and one I'm keen on looking into.

To be 19...

2009-12-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

I'm going to take a break from politics, race, and controversy to discuss what I believe to be an interesting phenomenon that I used to take part in.

Some time ago, when I was around the ages of 18 and 19, I was went through a period of interest in metal music. I can't say it's completely gone, but it definitely is not my main musical interest in any way these days. There was something about it that made me feel very alive. It brought out a lot of the frustration and angst I felt in ways that everyday society couldn't allow me to do. When I would hear it, it seemed like a good way for me to express my feelings of rebellion against what I thought was a cruel, fucked up system at a time when I didn't quite have the knowledge and capabilities to take on issues like I do now.

To access this music, you went one of two ways: the conventional, everyday way, which was a CD, or shows. At shows one would witness a spectacular display, brimming as a mixture of brutality, harmony, brute expression, and solidarity. From an onlooker, it looks like a large mess, a convoluted jumbling of angry bodies thrown into each other by the hand of the music of some equally as angry people: a mosh pit. There was, and is, however, much more to it.

An onlooker only gains so much, whether they enjoy it or not. To be inside the pit while the band delivers a break-down that everybody in the pit anticipates and clings on for is to truly understand what it means to be chaotic and in harmony at once. Nothing one person really does directly creates a chain motion with another to form something to that of a chorus line, River-dance routine, or anything similar. It is rather in fragmented consciousnesses of the mosh-pitters that binds them together. How so? Mutual understanding and solidarity, despite the anger, brutality, and confusion.

When you get in for the first time, you will be leaving an owned man/woman. Seriously, someone is going to fuck up some part of your body, leaving you sore and ready to collapse. It is only with repeated exposure to the pit that you see where you fit. You come to establish a pit identity; "that guy" who "does that". This is not an assigned role, but an expectation that can often change but usually into something that is called for at the moment. In acting out the expectation, two pitters may see someone fallen and actively break ranks from their place and pick him/her up. One may see an intruder getting out of hand in the pit and join ranks with others to take him/her out of the scene.

The pushing, corralling, punching, grabbing, throwing, kicking, and slinging of the pit is where one determines their place. Where am I comfortable? What should I do? What can I do? Though it may appear to be a mess, a pit is actually a place where one can discover their level of fear, courage, and abilities - all the while breaking free from those limitations and expanding on them. This is not done without rhyme, rhythm, or reason. It was the flow of the music that determined your actions and force of them. I, personally, did a lot of pushing, throwing, and slinging my elbows. This was where I fit after much experimentation of what to do and when to do it.

During post-break down periods, one tends to stop short and catch ones breath, often times grabbing a quick drink of water and pouring the rest down ones face and hair, falling onto the back and chest in the case of a male, whose shirt has probably been ripped off, torn off, or taken off by the pitter himself.

Upon awakening the next day, one may find a series of bruises, scrapes, welts, or even cuts/busted lips. Broken teeth are not uncommon to find. These are battle scars, reminding the person that they, in their quest to get rid of their pain, agony, angst, and confusion, had to take a little brutality as a trade off. It was amongst these people that I found some semblance of balance in my daily, stressful, and confusing life from the years 2003 to 2004. I don't regret a second of any of it. Soreness and aesthetic imperfections be damned, at least it stopped me from becoming where I would have likely landed without it: blank inside.

Is it a guy thing? Primarily. I don't recall many women partaking in the ritual stress-relief seminar. Does this mean it is a macho display of brutality. I don't think so in all cases. I think it's a way for 21st century men to take out their frustrations of being raised by one paradigm of manliness, being taught another by society and the media, and bridging the two gaps while trying to figure themselves out. Are there some that use it as a tool to just be violent? Yes. But I wouldn't use that group to condemn the entire practice any more than I would a few bad eggs that ruin the good vibes and energy at a hip-hop club, which is an entirely different but good experience.

Well, that's that. Example? Watch at 0:37 to the inciting of the pit, one of the most exciting times in the event.

"You Lie!"

2009-12-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

Something I've not touched on for some time is some of the racist undertones used by some against President Obama, save for a recent blog I did on a Washington Times article over his trip to Japan. I have criticised Obama on many occasions regarding foreign policy, health-care, and green energy. However, there is a way to do it that doesn't cut down to racist pandering.

Here are a few examples of racism towards Obama:

This is what I call "stopping short". Read some on Joe Wilson, the guy who shouts "You Lie" at the 1:22 mark.

He is an unapologetic, racist 2.0. I'm surprised he didn't yell "You LIE, boy!"

The following is a compilation of McCain/Palin supporters in 2008. You tell ME if there isn't an atmosphere of

"White Pride" teaming up against that "damn Muslim, foreigner" who's going to "help the blacks"...

How about the two folks from 0:12 to 0:29? "A second stringer?"

And the woman at 0:55? "The whole, uh, Muslim thang"...

Yep. Big group of winners we have here.

Seriously, this is what a lot of middle America is like. I know, I live and deal with many of these people on a daily basis.

That's why when I hear "Obama is hurting with independent voters", I know a lot of those voters are people

like the ones represented in some of those videos.

Sigh...

Obama's Afghanistan Speech

2009-12-01T12:08:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to put up a transcript of Obama's speech, as it can be found by a simple google search for anyone interested.

First, the general Obama plan is as follows: go in with 30,000 troops for 18 months and try to clean house and watch the Pakistan border as much as possible. Around this same time we'll have pulled most of our Iraq troops out as well.

One thing I noticed during the speech was how much Obama mentioned Pakistan about as much as he did Afghanistan. This tells me that it is an integral part in how Obama made this decision. I feel that if it weren't for Pakistan, Obama may not have added more troops into the region. He has carried out drone attack around the border in hopes of disturbing Al Qaeda cells, so the connection makes sense.

However, I'm still not sold. Obama spoke inspirationally about the conflict and made me want to get behind him, but I'm not. Obama, like Bush and many others, has failed to convince me how our military presence in the region is going to somehow reduce the effectiveness of terrorist propaganda about us being an occupying enemy in the area. I also don't know how Obama is going to do the job in 18 months, unless he expects to return Afghanistan to what it was before we entered (corrupt guys running the joint with no terrorist influence), in which case I don't see it as much better.

In the end, my doubts don't lie specifically with Obama per se, but rather with the whole notion of the War on Terror and our reasons for being there to begin with. Of course we were attacked on 9/11 and those organizations are still out there. However, they were formed and carried out based on beliefs with our interventions in their lands and our support of occupying people in the region (Israel). Why are we not looking at the attacks in context? Why do we simply react without being pensive about the entire ordeal? I guess that's the essence of America's tradition: view ourselves and act as if we live in a world where our actions have no consequences but others actions towards us hold deep consequences.

I hope Obama proves me wrong. Really, I do. I'd like to think he's got a team running better logistics than that of the Bush Administration. That said, I don't think Obama's efforts are going to stand up for the long haul, nor do I believe that our conflicts in the region have anything to do with some sort of 'stabilisation effort' for peace and democracy. I can only watch, stay actively informed, and wait to see how I vote in the elections.

Thanksgiving: What does it mean? (Cliche alert)

2009-11-25T20:18:00.000-08:00

Yeah, go ahead, make fun. I'm trying hard not to reek of a 7th grade essay; but in economic times like these and with a social confusion the likes of which are unprecedented, I think it's a fair question to ask: What does Thanksgiving really mean, anyway?

Seriously, I won't accept what I was taught in kindergarten that I now know to be false: the nice English "settlers" (read: oppressors) had lunch with the Indians (read: the guys who taught the incompetent intruders how to live on the land they would later take by force, all in the name of liberty and freedom). Sorry, a bunch of white males denying rights to women and non-whites, socially stigmatizing non-Christians, and displacing indigenous people more and more as time went on, is not what passes for me as a national pastime. So, as an American, the day doesn't mean terribly much other than a reminder of who we (as an institutional nation) really are.

So, personally, what is it? I suppose answering for everyone is out of the question. But I think I can answer what it is as a functional definition: a way to keep the American worker satisfied with his/her lot in life by giving up a day of the month for family gatherings. For most people, whether you believe in the sanctity of Thanksgiving or see the marketing as an outdated way of just getting 21st century families to get together, it's a pretty solid deal. If you're a full-time worker, you get a paid day off in many cases. If you're a student, no school for a while. For me, as a student, it's a reminder that the semester is almost over.

In the end, I would say it's a day for me to just try and find the one person (or people) that is/are most accessibly important to me and try to enjoy time with them as well as I can. We're all strapped these days. Many of us question our place in our jobs, our future (as workers, students, etc.), and our lives in general. Where are we all headed in this quickly changing society? What validity will I have in it in 5-10 years? Will I fulfill my dreams and goals? Are they all meant to be achieved? If not, how do I know which ones to feel okay or bad about? Despite these questions, many of us know of at least one or more people we can turn to and cherish on this day. And for those who don't, maybe we can put ourselves to the side for a moment to think about them. In this 'me-centric' society, we tend to forget about what that type of message sends to those who don't have a lot of 'me' to feel good about. I think that one fact, more than any other, makes me feel the worst when I see how commercialized and fragmented our holidays, once sprinkled with some meaning perhaps, are becoming.

In the end, just value what you have. Who cares if you don't get everything you want this year? Who cares if you don't meet your goal you set 100% this year? We should be so lucky that we even have years to look forward to setting goals, achieving them, resketching them, or scrapping them, when some people only have goals of living to see the next day. Those people, more than any, only have their loved ones to value and get them through year in and out. Do you think we as a society keep that same level of focus on those we love the most?

Have a nice Thanksgiving.

The difference between living and learning.

2009-11-21T21:43:00.000-08:00

Today I heard a young woman (white) tell me that since she has a Mexican boyfriend she "knows what it's like" to be treated like one vicariously in a white society. This comment is utter bullshit, for one, and insulting on another front.

First, it's complete and utter nonsense. To demonstrate this, let me rephrase the question another way. I'm a male. If I hang out with nothing but women, will I ever know what it's like to experience life in this society as a woman? Will I ever know what it's like to be the victim of a sexist comment, mindset, or discriminatory act? No. If a black man hangs out with nothing but white people, is he going to begin to be judged as a white man? Negative. Just because one hangs out with people in mixed-race relationships does not mean they themselves know what it's like socially.

I wanted to tell this girl so badly that "No, you don't know how it feels to be judged as a Mexican in a white society - you're white and American. You may know how it feels to be viewed as a white female who dates a Mexican male, and that is a relevant discussion for another time; but it's far from being the same thing".

It's insulting in this way: it invalidates the unique reality a person of Mexican descent might feel in such a society. It sort of passively writes off being an oppressed situation by insinuating that watching and hearing something happen to another is the same or supreme to being the one that received the action. It's like seeing a punch thrown at somebody, seeing it connect, hearing the "pop", and saying "Man, I felt that just as bad as he/she did!"

This does not mean that white people have no valid stories or situations in society. An anti-racist white person (male or female) could very well say that non-whites do not understand how it is to be going against the institutional and social norm of white racism and experience the "traitorous" attitudes attributed to them. That is something that they can talk about and share (and it is an outlook and story that has a LOT of meaning, as white people are central allies in the fight against racism). However, nobody else can appropriate that feeling for themselves if they don't experience.

Therein lies the difference between living and learning. It's important to do both. By living, we affirm who we are in society: your ethnicity, your gender, your religion/lack-of-religion, your class, etc. All of these things contribute in very unique and special ways to who you are and how you experience life. Women go through things daily that men do not understand. Why? They do not live it. Men experience things that women will never experience, just on a different side of the coin.

By learning, we put aside our own viewpoint to empathise with that of another. We try to view things in their lenses, to understand that our reality is not the one objective reality upon which everything else is based. The male reality is not the generic, definitive one. The American reality is not the benchmark upon which everyone else in the world should be judged. People are a result of their biography and history, and those histories are shaped in their status and classification in society. These things are key to understanding who we are and where we're going.

If a person can't grasp that concept, I suspect it's going to rather hard for them to make sense out of much of what goes on in life without resorting to violence, resentment, and confusion that could be remedied and solved by simply putting their ego and vanity aside. Only when a person honestly realises that they don't know it all through their lenses do they really begin to learn about others and, in a way likely not expected, even more about themselves.

So in the end, the next time you're thinking about how your friend or family member of a different race/gender/religion sees the world, admit to yourself up front that this is a viewpoint that you've never lived and can only learn; but to truly understand how they live their experience, you have to put your aside momentarily. Otherwise, you're just swimming in a sea of your own shit.

Thoughts

2009-11-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

As I get ready to write my next article, I'm wondering:

Why is it that being Christian in this country, at least in title, is synonymous with being moral? Why can you say "I have Christian values" and be considered basically good, yet saying Jewish or Muslim values falls noticeably short? Or saying I'm an atheist? Is morality tied to the Christian God only, or to God at all? Can one be without religion and automatically without morality and values?

Conservative anxieties over "Third-World" and "paradise" men.

2009-11-19T16:37:00.000-08:00

I used to think only Pat Buchanan could say some of the most overtly and obviously racist and comments I've heard in our supposed "post-racial" society. Then I go and decide to read the news and I find this:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/17/pruden-obama-bows-the-nation-cringes/?feat=home_headlines

The above link is of an article in the Washington Times.

The author, a conservative, is upset because Obama recently went to China to discuss economics with their leader. Upon greeting the leader, he bowed as a sign of respect in diplomacy. Because of this, he is now ripe for accusations of being 'un-American' and 'subservient'. "What is Thomas Jefferson or John Adams had done this?" asks the author. Well, John Adams did spend many years in England learning to kneel in front of a foreign leader (much more so than a simple bow), so I guess there's that answer. But that's neither here nor there. What I'm interested in is the tangent the author goes off on towards the end.

He starts on somewhat of a personal rip of Obama and his upbringing. He says "Obama was raised in a paradise, far outside of the American mainstream", bringing up ideas of exotic living and 'non-American'-esque people (think 'non-White' for some idea of what he really means).

He then makes it abundantly clear what the end point of his gripe is: he refers to Obama's father explicitly as Kenyan (a predominantly Black nation, and said as if his father's country of origin has any effect on how Obama is going to act with others) and says "raised by a mother who had a thing for 3rd world men".

*GASP* - You mean...dark people?

There are white-racial anxieties written all over this article. What does Obama's mothers "preference for 3rd world men" have anything to do with this situation? And his Dad's nationality?

I would say it's indicative of how a majority, though obviously not all, of conservatives vent their racial frustrations. They keep themselves censored and shut-up for the most part, but every so often they have to let out their antipathy towards all things non-White, non-Christian, and non-hetero.

Fort Hood massacre spurs hate crimes. What a shocker.

2009-11-17T21:03:00.000-08:00

Why exactly do we fight the War on Terror? Well, I have my own theories. However, I'm going to entertain one of the more widely accepted (yet still asinine) reasons given by right-wing pundits and followers: that we are protecting our freedom and values here, the great western society of tolerance and justice we claim to esteem so much (as if being non-western are liberty loving are mutually exclusive).

So imagine my surprise when I read that just the other day a Marine reservist attacked a Greek Orthodox Christian Priest when confusing him for a crazy, "Arabic speaking Muslim". He beat him with a tire iron.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/10/alexios-marakis-assaulted_n_353022.html

Now, the priest claims that as he was pulled over, stopping people to ask for directions, the man started to attack him after 'freaking out' over his accent. Be honest, here. What sounds more likely to you?

First, let's get something straight. At the heart of all of this lies a simple truth. The man confused Greek for Arab, and Arab for Muslim. Why? He saw it as non-white. And deep down, that scares white people. Of course, I don't mean every individual white person. As a general rule for the population, of course it does.

That is why a Greek (European) man of Mediterranean origin can be attacked for confusion with a "Muslim" (which is a religion, not a race, by the way). That is why there is no movement amongst white people to be paranoid over Christians after the death of Dr. Tiller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Roeder) by an anti-abortion extremist. Why is this? The reservist and Scott Roeder are white. Therefore, according to the laws of white privilege, they're a couple of "troubled individuals", not a representative sample for white christians. Don't expect this same standard to be held for dark-skinned Muslims after a handful of domestic incidents.

It is this kind of conditioned exceptionalism that allows White-males to get by with no sweeping generalizations of themselves after the terrorist attacks by Ted Kazinsky, Timothy McVeigh, and Scott Roeder, yet the acts of a handful of Muslims lead to this type of nonsense:

The link above shows footage of Fox anchors seriously advocating the idea of interrogating Muslim-Americans serving in the military to "make sure" they're 100% on board. Imagine if the tables were turned, and all Christians were being interrogated for the actions of Scott Roeder. What kind of outrage would we see from the right-wing in this country? The thing is, the latter won't happen nearly as quickly as what we've seen happen with Muslims.

Now, let's see how fast the right-wingers move to decry the violence and abhor the actions this Marine took against an innocent man. I'm guessing little to no commentary over it in the news. However, had this been a Muslim man attacking a Christian man for "speaking the language of infidels", we would label it a terrorist attack. Interesting set of standards we hold here in the high and mighty, 'secular', and tolerant West.

Anti-racist white guy punks an anti-immigrant protest!

2009-11-16T20:56:00.001-08:00

This is a bad-ass video. A white anti-racist activist gives an interesting speech at an anti-immigrant rally. He puts a spin on the speech, turning the rhetoric around on European-immigrants (present and past) to give a little perspective on the asinine feel of the anti-immigrants arguments.

What is even more interesting is that the right-wing dickheads attacked the kid afterwards when he was riding his bike home. http://www.bluestemprairie.com/bluestemprairie/2009/11/ruthiehendrycksfail.html

Things like this are what worry white anti-racists. You see, there is one downside to being a white anti-racist: White people, in their lack of ability to claim your playing the race card, end up taking their irrationality out in violent outbursts, vocally or physically (the latter being less frequent). When they are in groups, it can get ugly, as we see here.

Good for him to stand up to those fucks, though.

Criticisms of a thinking man in a drastic situation.

2009-11-16T20:42:00.000-08:00

Obama, being pressed by top officials in the military for more troop presence in Afghanistan, has been pondering the decision for a few weeks. Because of this, he has been accused of being "indecisive", "lacking leadership skills", and a barrage of unfounded insults.

Let me get this straight: Obama, knowing that any surge in troops will take a year to complete, is supposed to rush this decision in order to look competent to those who oppose him? How do we know the situation will even be the same in a year? What if the troops were a waste in a year? Is it that urgent? What if they are not enough? Then it was a waste. I think Obama is unique in that he understands that an occupation of Afghanistan has been tried by two countries before us. Both have failed. Come to think of it, our occupation efforts have not often been incredibly successful.

After 9/11, Bush wasted no time hurling our troops into two countries to replace their leaders with ones we found "worthy". Look at the mess it has caused. Maybe Obama has learned a thing or two from this quagmire created by Bush.

Please, don't take this as another Obama apologist. I have my own criticisms of Obama (his way of dealing with Israel/Palestine, his way of handling Cap & Trade/Healthcare). I am simply educated and aware of how our past attempts to displace leaders to insert our own regimes has backfired every time in ways the "experts" somehow "never expected" (anybody now remembering Cheney telling us that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators, that it would be a quick and easy war?).

So, again, let Obama take his time. Get off his ass. If months have passed and no decision has been made or even discussed publicly, let the criticisms begin. Until then, conservatives, shut the hell up and let the guy think.

Uneducated people about Hispanic culture.

2009-10-08T06:04:00.001-07:00

I met a guy recently at my job who is a Spanish-immigrant worker in the U.S. His name is Felipe Arrabal. He usually comes in and speaks Spanish to me since his English is less than fluent and he plans on returning home in about 2 years. Usually, though, he's given funny looks when he speaks to me in Spanish. It's probably because he has light-brown hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. I'm usually asked questions such as, "I didn't know a White guy could speak Spanish so well!" or "He must have a Hispanic wife to know it so well". Such comments are not only ridiculous sounding, but ignorant as well.

Hispanic does not equal, "Dark skin, brown hair, brown eyes". Many mestizos and indigenous speakers share those characteristics, but it would take a pretty ignorant person to not know that the origin of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture is Spain, on the Iberian Penenisula of Europe (which, unless one doesn't know, is the origin of "white" people).

It tends to be predominantly (though not always) White people making these observations. What shocks them even more is when they learn that a light-skinned Hispanic is from Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, or Cuba. Aren't those where the dark-skinned people are from? I guess that's what happens with American education and a pop-culture-centric society.

For the record: hispanics can be of any skin color, hair color, or eye color. Please do not open your mouth and make yourself look a fool by thinking and saying something contrary and asinine.

Another good article.

2009-10-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.cwsworkshop.org/pdfs/WIWP2/4Underst_White_Priv.PDF

It has to do with 'Understanding White Privilege'.
Interesting read.

Essential reading #1: Barriers to Clarity.

2009-09-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

I've not felt like writing in a while. I study a lot for school, work quite a bit, and have other things going on. However, I will not leave this blog unattended. I will continue to read and educate myself on racism, sexism, classism, and other topics. In doing so, I will post up things I find interesting and important for myself and anyone else interested in educating themselves on the topics here.

My first one to show is a reading called "Barriers to Clarity" discussing the various ways in which Whites often try to assuage themselves, evade, or make unimportant the seriousness of institutional racism in this country.

http://www.cwsworkshop.org/pdfs/WIWP_Analysis/9Barriers_to_Clarity.pdf

Hard to know what you're feeling sometimes.

2009-09-20T21:48:00.000-07:00

As much as I educate myself on race/ethnicity related topics and do what I can to encourage and ferment an anti-racist mindset, it is really fucking tough sometimes in the society I live in. Some days I barely notice it, if at all. Others, however, it is really easy to see how one can go throughout most of (if not all) their entire life not having to give a shit, other than a token comment here or there, about the problems and concerns of others who are not White. And every time I remember that it really feels sort of discouraging for a moment.

Then I think to myself "Man, there's gotta be more people out there that give a shit on a real level about this stuff". So I run into some progressive minded people, but their lack of nuance on the topic and propensity to say things like "Oh yeah, I totally know about ethnic issues. My friend is black, so...yeah", as if having a black friend were the be all/end all of understanding race/ethnic relations in the country.

Now and then I run into people who are in tune on the topic, but seldom is it a White person. I can think of 4 or 5 people that I know semi-close to very close who are aware of racial/ethnic relations on a real level, and all are non-White.

It really sucks the most, actually, to meet someone who is very nuanced and well-read on other important issues like global warming, religious propaganda, class issues, or gender problems, but still remains largely ignorant on race related topics and doesn't seem to get why I "get on that topic" as opposed to some other one.

I expect most these days to be uninformed on the issue. But maybe I shouldn't let that make me more complacent. Maybe it's time for me to stop seeking out people who do know more about it and start looking for those who don't.

Vamos a ver.

2009-09-17T16:48:00.000-07:00

In the quad at school today there was a short Asian-American kid being eccentric, waving to people from a tree and shouting, "I love you!" in a cutesy voice. He ended up climbing down from the tree to interact with people up front. Most people just said it back or waved.

One girl, however, took it upon herself to live into the worst damned situation I see happen to people of Asian descent in the U.S. As he strolled by she asked what his name was, to which replied "Tim". Afterwards, almost immediatley, she asked "So where do you come from?"...

*Palm to face*

Now, waiiiiiit a sec! Isn't it possible she just meant what town in Texas he was from, or part of the U.S.? Aren't I being just a *little too PC*?

Nope. Since when the fuck do white people go around to other White people, or Black people, etc. asking "Where do you come from?"

Phrasing the question in the way that she did only perpetuates the idea of Asians as the "foreigner", "stranger", "outsider", somehow less authentically American than 'the rest'.

Can White identity exist without non-White identity?

2009-09-10T06:22:00.001-07:00

Ponder this:

White identity cannot, would not have, and will not exist without the existence of non-White identity. So what does that say about being White? That being white is less about being something, and more about not being something else. What is that something else?

What do we give those who are considered "non-White"? Well, ethnic identity, for one. We call them Hispanic-American, Asian-American, African-American, etc. We attribute different types of music to them. If a White man goes to an Asian restaurant, there is a consensus that he's eating "ethnic food", in contrast to "normal food" (of course, such as Hamburgers, hot dogs, sandwiches, etc.)

We give them "foreign language". Hispanics are tied to Spanish, Asians to a multitude of languages, etc.

We give them 'other-worldly' attributes, such as "natural dancers" (black people), "great at math and science, breed like rabbits" (Asians), etc.

It seems that everything that has to do with being non-White is about having ethnicity or culture. Being white is defined by it's neutrality. One is 'normal', a 'person', an 'individual'. One can judged as such, as evidenced by the 100 or so Supreme Court justices before Sotomayor whose personal experiences didn't call into question their impartiality. You can miss a basketball shot and not have it reflected on you that there's something not normal about you. You can show up late for class and not have being lazy ascribed to your tardiness, as well as your racial behavioral characteristics.

Being race-neutral, the "norm", the benchmark means that you are what everyone else is judged off of. Obama being called "race transcendent" did not mean he did what other Presidents did. It means he rose above being black. John McCain never transcended being white, nor will he ever be asked to. This is a privilege, to be considered the norm so as to never have to "overcome" a racial status.

In essence, being a white-American (and in many ways, a white-American male) means more in what you are not rather than what you are. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics - THEY have a race and a racial identity. Whites are just people. It means not having to conform to anything outside of a comfort zone. It means being given the benefit of the doubt, being judged as an individual.

Without Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, or any other group, White would not exist. There would be nothing for it to exist in contrast to. There would again be Irish, Dutch, Spanish, French, Swiss, Polish, Germans, or any other European ethnic group. Asians do not call themselves yellow or identify themselves with others of East Asian heritage unless they live in a White centric society, like America. This is just as Europeans did not identify as such until their arrival into the New World and the creation of it's power structure.

Knowing all of this, what does it say about those who choose to self identify, consciously or subconsciously, with the term "White-American"?

"I always feel like"...no, wait, someone is watching me.

2009-09-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

More and more these days I'm noticing stares. I don't tend to get these stares when I'm alone, so I've scratched out (for the most part) the notion that the stares I refer to come as a result of having not brushed my hair, worn a shirt that may attract attention, or some other reason. I notice I tend to get the stares when I'm with my girlfriend.

She at times notices it less than I do, and sometimes seems to notice it as much as I do, but nonetheless, I can't count on any specific number of hands how many stares my girlfriend and I both get when walking in public, particularly holding hands.

It's not a stare with any kind of rude look (well, 85% of the time, let's say). It's usually a blank stare, but with a hint of an invesitagtive look. It's almost as if the person is asking themselves, "I wonder what that's all about?" I only assume this internal possibility because of certain questions I've been asked in the past (and to which I've referred in a recent post). I'll get questions, questions that the asker feels are innocuous but to me reveal an ignorant mindset. I've been asked whether I'm "into Mexican girls", "just not that attracted to white girls", etc. These kinds of questions tell me that we're not seen as "normal" in the person's eyes.

Before I go on, let me make clear: I am not saying that everybody that I make eye contact with while in public with my girl is giving me the afforementioned stare. I am only referring to instances in which I am certain an obvious prolonged glare has taken place.

Now, here's where apologists rush in. "Come on. Interracial couples are not the norm, so why would they view you as one?" If the asker were truly inquisitive about our social status as a rarity situation, wouldn't the questions be less directed at my motives (or hers) and more about our situation? For instance, I'm seldom asked whether we are subjects of racist comments, stares, or actions, or whether we face or have faced pressure from society, family, or friends to date "within our race". Those would be questions pertaining to our social situation.

The subject matter of questions asked pertaining to my relationship and the frequency and nature of the stares given tell me that there is a good likelihood that they are less an expression of social curiosity and more one of preconceived ideas about who we are and why we date.

To review shortly, a couple of tips on speaking to people in interracial relationships:

1. If it is a non-verbal environment, don't stare unless they are giving you a reason to stare (like, anything your "average" couple would do: making out in public, for instance).

2. Instead of revealing yourself to be someone of limited social couth, please don't ask ridiculous questions or make stupid comments like "So you don't think Mexican guys are cute?", "Got jungle fever, eh?", or "Have you always liked (insert racial group here)?" It presumes that the person dating chose that person on the foundation of a skin color grouping and not based off of personal traits. It's insulting. And no, I don't give a shit if you have some interracial couple friends that "don't mind" having been asked that. Having self-respect isn't a pre-requisite for living in our society, sadly.

Now, go out there and don't fuck this one up. :)

That's just how it was, right?

2009-09-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

While sitting in a lecture, my professor is discussing the history of the theory of Evolution. Once she gets around to discussing Darwin and his contemporaries, she mentions that Darwin (like many Anglo men of that time) was "a bit racist, sexist, etc." but that we can't judge him based off of that criteria due to his being a product of his time. This was said by someone with a Masters degree.

This is quite a common tendency in race based discussions on the side of apologists, isn't it though? To take up the side of historic figures and excuse their philosophical short-comings (that we would normally chastise others for) in the name of them being a "product of their times". Funny, Darwin is considered "revolutionary" with Evolution, yet "a product of his time" in terms of racism, sexism, etc. Funny how we cherry pick how and what he was a product of when it suits certain agendas.

I've always found this line of thinking pretty ridiculous. The truth is that it isn't that he was a "product of his time", as though all men in notable positions thought as such. Thomas Paine, one of the biggest names of the American Revolution, wanted to do away with slavery altogether, yet many of his contemporaries were quite the opposite.

Bartolome de Las Casas witnessed the brutality enacted against the indigenous Arawak people of what is now Puerto Rico and wrote an extensive essay to the Spanish royalty asking for this behavior to be condemned and punished. Again, contrary to Spanish feelings of superiority and Catholic dominance, he was unlike other contemporaries. What product was he of, exactly?

The next time someone attempts to justify a publicly well-renowned figures actions that might tarnish an otherwise impeccable reputation, remind them that they might just be products of their own experiences, not their "time".

Yet again!

2009-08-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

As I work steadily in my department at work, I notice a conversation begin. A dark skinned Hispanic-American worker (named Will) begins talking with a light skinned, European looking hispanic named Juan. They speak to each other in Spanish for the entire conversation about the upcoming semester of school.

In the middle of the conversation, unnoticed by me and the two gentlemen talking, a white Anglo woman was listening in on the conversation. She approaches the two of them and says "That's so good that you're giving him lessons!" (She was speaking to Will about Juan). When Juan said "No, ma'am. These aren't lessons. We're just speaking.", she replied, "Oh, so he's practicing then". At this point, Will said "No, ma'am. I'm just speaking it with him".

The details after this point are pretty irrelevant to the point of the story.

The woman saw the two speaking Spanish. She makes the assumption, for whatever reason, that the light skinned guy must be getting taught by the darker skinned one. In her mind, light skinned equals one thing, dark skinned another.

Now, I know what the responses to this might be. "Maybe she listened to how the light skinned guy spoke and assumed his was less fluent, therefore being a student of the language". To this I say nay, that as being fluent speaker myself, I can vouch that this young man is as fluent as one gets.

"Most Hispanics in Texas are darker looking, so isn't it just natural to assume he would be teaching him?" Again, this is wrong. It might very well be true that most are "darker looking", but why would that assume that the other person was a student of the language? Doesn't that comment imply ignorance as to the origins of the language to begin with? Is Spanish not of European origin? Do we know where Spain is?

It is ridiculous colour coded assumptions like these that create issues in society. Issues that are never spoken about. To the onlooker, the person not involved, or the person making the assumption, it may seem pedantic or "too PC" to get bothered by something like this. But isn't that what puts the monogot majority in the U.S. in the privileged position?

Just sayin'...

I smile.

2009-08-12T22:54:00.001-07:00

As I sit in a cafe, I'm reading a book on institutional racism. It's less of a formal non-fiction book and more a collection of racism-related essays. Point being: I'm not reading what your typical person is sitting around reading. Most are looking at the newspaper, some gossip magazine, a novel of some sort, or something else. These are all fine things in some fashion, but not for me today. I'm reading about that damned four letter word and how it fits into our society everyday: race.

It's not always race that I read about. I also often tend to read about sexism or classicism. But today the topic is racism.

As I read, I begin to notice behavioural patterns from many passer-bys. Most of them passing by are white, and most of them smile when making eye contact. Most of them smiling look at me, look at me reading a book, and then look back to offer the smile. I'm obviously no mind reader, so I can't possibly claim to know what they're thinking. But I can tell you what they're definitley not thinking.

They're not thinking: "Oh, look at that nice young man reading. I'll bet he's reading on some sort of pressing social topic that would make me, should I ever step outside my comfort zone to take a look, think twice or even critically about the society I live in. I'll bet he's educating himself - voluntarily - on the existence and persistence of racism, sexism, classicism, religious intolerance, or xenophobia."

Instead, I'll bet it's something else (if anything at all). It's more like "Look at that nice young man. He seems non-threatening, likely educated (I mean, he's reading, right?), and probably has a good future ahead of him. He's going to make America proud some day. God Bless the U.S.A." Consciously I'm sure many don't take the time to think these things, but deep down we'd all be kidding ourselves if it weren't programmed into our social wiring. Every word? No. The general idea? You bet your ass.

I don't mean to say that I don't want to make America proud. The thing is that what I feel would make America a better place, a country to be proud of, that is, is effectively erasing many of our cultural "norms" present and embedded in our social fabric. Does it mean disturbing the silence, rocking the boat, making some uncomfortable, or even getting apprehensive responses? Sure. But when did any change or critical self-reflection come about without any of that?

Yet I smile, because I know that they likely have no clue how wrong the mindset is that I described (if they're even conscious of it to begin with). I smile because I've got this information and I'm not going to use it the way that "Uncle Sam" would want me to.

The same Uncle Sam who kept Jews in quotas from entering college to protect the WASP status quo. The same Uncle Sam who steamrolled over indigenous populations to amass land and power. The same Uncle Sam who denied human rights to blacks until just a few decades ago. The same Uncle Sam who told women they didn't really matter until a few decades before that even. The same Uncle Sam who felt it acceptable to steamroll over Iraq for it's own jingoistic interests.

No, I don't think I'll be doing anything to help that Uncle Sam. I'd like to work to create a better America, even if it's down here in the grass with everybody else. This is where things actually happen. I'm not saying that America is terrible and that I'm here to tear it down and erect some radical, unliveable place for most people living here. However, there's plenty of room for America to be not only criticised, but chastised. I love the freedom I have. Especially the freedom to gather information to initiate change that rights wrongs and calls out injustice when I see it.

But until I am able to effectively initiate that change more strongly, I'll just smile as each person walks by.

Free Speech for all, as long as you're nice to whites.

2009-08-02T06:47:00.000-07:00

Often times a question is posed to Americans as to whether or not a Nazi flag should be allowed to be displayed. Most will say "Yes, it's the first amendment right. They have the right to be an asshole".

Now let's not make any bones about it here: the Nazi flag is a flag used today by Europeans (or European-Americans) to signify national socialism for a White supremacy ideology. To put it more succint: it represents white racism against non-whites. This said, it is considered "okay" to be displayed.

Now, I wondered if this reflects some type of tradition for a respect for freedom of expression, regardless of the political or social end.

Apparently not: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=57375

When it represents Black Libertation ideology, even if taking place in a foreign country not subject to U.S. laws and regulations, U.S. officials are legally and generally socially justified in stripping the two men of their olympic medals. Media outlets call it "nasty", "un-American", and other sorts of labels.

Any support of White supremacist hate seems to be acquiesed to by society and media at large (look at most of U.S. history for proof of this - slaver, segregation, etc.) yet historical movements against the white structure have always been suspect (Civil Rights movements and the hosing of protesters, Rosa Parks criticism, even the recent Gates situation with the police). When whites attack non-whites, it is glossed over or justified (lynchings allowed for decades on end, burning crosses in yards, churches burnt down, the plethora of youtube videos showing McCain supporters and their racist comments, or the Philadelphia private pool discrimination, "it's their private business right to discriminate").

You see, when Blacks emphasize some sort of resistance against an oppressive system, it's terms for punishment. When Whites do it, "their rights are protected".

Gotcha.

Interesting.

2009-07-28T21:29:00.000-07:00

In our Census here in the United States, we have the categories "Hispanic-American", "Latino-American", and "White-Hispanic/Non-White Hispanic".

You see, I find it very telling about how racialized our government still behaves.

A brown skinned Latino man is going to be labeled, in the end, "Latino" or "Hispanic-American". This implies a non-White racial category. A light skinned Hispanic with European features is going to be considered "White-Hispanic".

I find this curious. It's almost as if they include "White" before "Hispanic" to remind the census that "Hey, the whites are still over here in this corner too!" Nevermind that there are "Black-Hispanics". This is of less importance. As long as we know they're non-White, we can calculate them in proportion to the White ones.

To me this is a small proof, though not the only one, of the remnants of White Supremacy in our institutions.

So...

2009-07-21T12:44:00.001-07:00

Pundits and politicians can pronounce Sonia Sotomayor's name as "So-duh-mire" all day long without fear of claims of sounding unintelligent, yet if someone were to say "George WashingtAN" or "Abraham Lencon", snickers and smirks of affirmation of a lack of intelligence would run amuck.

So, just to clarify - Anglos mispronouncing names left and right, perfectly O.K.

Non-Anglos mispronouncing things, "Learn English right!"

Gotcha.

Pues, entonces...

2009-07-19T22:29:00.000-07:00

Joder!

Me parece que con cada dìa que pasa, con cada libro que leo, y con cada frase de las noticias y los comentarios polìticos que oigo, me siento menos cierto de què justa es la sociedad en que vivo. Seguro - oigo bastante de comentarios que insinúan el sexismo, la intolerancia religiosa, y el etnocentrismo que componen el sistema central de nuestro paìs. Sin embargo, lo que me molesta màs es la situaciòn del racismo y su estado actual en nuestra cultura.

Nos mentimos (como paìs) diariamente, dicièndonos que ya se ha muerto el racismo (es decir, en todas las formas grandes), pero es esto la verdad? Creo que no es asì. Creo que nos seguìmos diciendo estas mentiras con la ilusiòn y la esperanza que todos los problemas, todos los puntos de vista de los ciudadanos que no son "blancos", se van a ir asì como asì. Por esto yo escribo del racismo. Voy a seguir asì hasta que nos dejemos de mentir y hasta que podamos decir verdaderamente que este es un paìs justo para todos con respeto a "las razas". Hasta que suceda eso, no voy a dejar de comentar en estas abominaciònes.

Bueno. Pues, ya lo dejo.

Identity Politics and Sotomayor

2009-07-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent article from the Washington Post called "Whose Identity Politics"?

It calls out Whites for the "code language" that is used to cover up their "inherent objectivity".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/13/AR2009071302605.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

An excerpt:

Being white and male is seen instead as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any "identity" -- black, brown, female, gay, whatever -- has to be judged against this supposedly "objective" standard.

Thus it is irrelevant if Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. talks about the impact of his background as the son of Italian immigrants on his rulings -- as he did at his confirmation hearings -- but unforgivable for Sotomayor to mention that her Puerto Rican family history might be relevant to her work. Thus it is possible for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to say with a straight face that heritage and experience can have no bearing on a judge's work, as he posited in his opening remarks yesterday, apparently believing that the white male justices he has voted to confirm were somehow devoid of heritage and bereft of experience.

Pool Restrictions in the 21st Century.

2009-07-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

So...segregation ended, right? We're all equal now. Everybody gets a fair shake. Nobody has any reason to cry racism except those victim mongering racists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Not whites. No, no, no, Whites are 'above' that type of behavior now. The U.S. is "post-racial" now. I mean, come on! Our President is multiracial, half-black, half-white! How can we have systematic racism? Get over it!

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Pool-Boots-Kids-Who-Might-Change-the-Complexion.html

Right. Sure. Well, I guess somebody had better let those kids know that. Let them know that whenever they get into the pool and the white kids get out, that's all part of our "post-racial" America they're raised in.

I guess somebody had better tell the kids with the troublesome complexion that they're the problem, that their dark skin brings bad vibes with it, as opposed to the inherently "good vibes" of the children with a lighter complexion (in the article, a fear is expressed that the black kids complexion would be a reason that the atmosphere of the pool area would change).

I guess fending the parents off with "refund money" is just fine. Nevermind the message that this sends to young children who are Black. "Hey, you're not allowed in. Here, just take your money back that you paid and go find some other pool. Your complexion is bad for the pool atmosphere and vibe."

Is this all part of our "post-racial" society?

Verdict on Iran

2009-06-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

So, Iran is experiencing some social division over their recent election. The news hails this as a sign of good for the future of Iran and it's government. Part of me is in agreement, but another part of me is sceptical. This is certainly not the first time that the U.S. has had some vested interest in the outcome of an election, war, or conflict in the Middle East. Usually, our hope for the outcome is that which supports our hope for continued hegemony in the area and the protection of our petroleum based interests. So, forgive me if I'm not all excited and pumped for the internal conflict going on.

I'm not saying that I support the current regime. It is plenty reprehensible for injustices it has committed. But in looking at the current regime and their attitudes towards the U.S., isn't it only fair to judge their attitudes and actions in context to their history with us?

After 9/11, there were a slew of conservatives digging into the Koran for proof that Islam was a violent, hateful religion, and that "these people" were just "that way". Liberals kept wanting to learn more about Muslims and their culture to understand the radical actions. What troubled me was not the focus on Islam for good or bad reasons, but the lack of focus on our actions that may have contributed to a mindset. There was no slew of academics or cultural movement to study our past in the Middle East, our support of regimes, and our moves to maintain hegemony in the region.

The U.S., from the backing of the installing of the Shah, to the propping up and taking down of Saddam, to almost unconditional backing of Zionist Israel, has had it's hands in the Middle East for decades. Has the U.S. been so mentally vacant as to assume that there is something 'wrong in THEIR culture' and not ours? Do we share none of the blame and therefore none of the responsibility to change?

In calling three countries an Axis of Evil that must be stopped, invading one, and then acting hostile to the others, are we to be suddenly shocked and indignant over the latter two's actions of self-defense in their arms industry? Again, I am not condoning nuclear proliferation, but rather attempting to open up honest discourse on our actions and our policy in regards to other countries. If we can't look at ourselves honestly, how can we honestly and fairly judge the actions of others? Not doing so is a recipe for problems, as far as I'm concerned.

The U.S. should take up more personal responsibility for it's own actions and policies that may have lead to current conditions. Im glad Americans, not to mention our President, want to stay out of Iran's conflict. However, because I'm aware of our lack of self-reflection, I'm suspicious as to what our inaction and support really signifies.

Misconceptions

2009-06-21T22:56:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest misconceptions I think Whites have about 'White Privilege' is the whole idea of what is meant by 'privilege'. I gather this in that one of the most common responses I have to the idea is "But, we didn't have a lot of money!" or something to that tune. This is a response to a charge of class privilege that has been thrown into a different discussion as a red herring, whether intentional or not.

Of course not all whites are wealthy. Such a statement is indeed ludicrous. So then, if not all Whites are wealthy, and there are of course wealthy minorities, how can one say Whites have racial privilege over minorities in America?

Simple: People tend to compete in society amongst those in their own wealth class.

If there is a poor white man and a rich black man, chances are the latter of the two is looking for a job in a different part of the city (or state/country) than the former. So here, class differences do not matter. It's a question of whether or not a rich white man coming into play with the rich black man has any bearing on the outcome of competition.

Another misconception is that after confronting an owning up to Whiteness/White Privilege, whites seek to absolve themselves of their bad feelings by saying "I renounce my privilege!"

You see, just because one isn't a signatory doesn't mean one isn't a beneficiary. Whites can't wish away their privileges by acting nice, "going ethnic" (whatever that means), or some other seemingly altruistic act of multiculturalist goodness.

Scratch that. There is ONE privilege Whites can give up, but seldom do: the privilege to remain silent about racism and let minorities handle it.

Whites have the ability to ignore racism and those who fight it. This is a rather large privilege that they can throw off. Simply? No. Gradually? Of course.

Stereotypes: The fault of those being stereotyped. Right.

2009-06-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

So I’m standing in my department at work with a fellow employee. He is of Mexican-American descent. A white female customer approaches him with some questions about a product we carry and he gladly answers, then proceeding to hold a few minutes long conversation with her.

Towards the end of the conversation, my employee friend is asked by this woman whether he can translate some Spanish that is written on a product for her. He says “No”, since he does not speak Spanish.

Blown away at the fact that this brown-skinned, Mexican-American descended young man , she replies in a more than surprised tone, “You DON’T?! Are you serious? Why not?” This is asked due to the interruption of her preconceived notion that all brown folks with Hispanic heritage ought to be able to spout off Spanish to meet her requests.

She then goes on to brag about how she is learning Spanish and how he “really ought to start”, appropriating his cultural priorities for him because she deems it necessary for all brown skinned Hispanics to know Spanish, since that's the preconception she has formed in her mind. I then step forward, translate the product phrase for her (as I am a fluent speaker myself, perhaps the person she was seeking instead) and watch her wish us "Good day" with a somewhat smug smile of self-satisfaction on her face.

This is White Privilege. She makes a sweeping generalization, a stereotype, and when it is proven wrong, it is the fault of the generalized person and it is on them to change. Non-whites must be given critiques to fit into the mold of how Whites see society and the world at large. This is a situation that even wealthy, well-to-do dark-skinned Hispanics do not often escape.

Thoughts on the Confederate Flag Apologists

2009-05-27T16:46:00.001-07:00

The "Good old Days" and Selective outrage.

Whites love to revel in the past. Whites love to sit and talk about their brave forefathers, how hard they sacrificed, the brave wars they fought in, etc. But there’s a catch: Whites only like to do this when they can revel in positive things about themselves, not so much when it comes to their history of racial oppression on it’s modern day effects.

In Southern Florida, it appears that some White NASCAR fans would like to wave their confederate flag during the races. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,522203,00.html
Start to talk to a white person about slavery and eventually you’ll hear “It’s in the past, nobody owns slaves today, why not just let it go?”, or something similar. Start to talk to them about why they wave the Confederate flag and you’ll hear a litany of reasons, but they’ll never think to say “It’s in the past, we lost, we were defending something (slavery) that was an abomination to humanity, let’s move on”.

White Denial and Rose-Tinted History

You see, Whites who wave that flag (particularly Southern whites) love to go on about the brave Robert E. Lee, go on about the brave men who fought for “states rights” (read that: the right for states to maintain and extend slavery). Whites like to bullshit themselves and sugar coat the past to rationalize their preoccupation with the loss and the fact that they were on the wrong side of the argument of whether humans should be enslaved based off of skin color. The ex-Vice President of the Confederate States himself claimed that White Supremacy was the cornerstone of their culture.

But today Whites rationalize the display of that flag with a number of terrible excuses. The first one being, “It’s a part of Southern Culture and heritage!”

Imagine if a German kid waved the swastika around America or his homeland, claiming it represented his heritage. Why wouldn’t he just wave the German flag? Why does he choose to identify with a flag that took on a completely different meaning from the one of his homelands culture? Similarly, why do Southern Whites not wave the American flag, or even their state flag, to display their heritage and culture? Why wave a flag that represents rebellion against the U.S. and against human rights?

WHOSE Southern heritage, exactly?

One might also notice that it is never Blacks who have generations of family in the south who are making this argument of the flag representing “Southern heritage”. I’ll bet they don’t feel a “cultural tie” to this flag anymore than German Jews feel a cultural tie to the swastika. The truth is that just as the swastika represented a false idea of “Aryan supremacy”, the Southern Flag represents the false idea of “White Supremacy” at any cost, even the rebellion against and separation from the U.S. to maintain it. The confederate flag represents a historical period of White Supremacist rebellion, not "Southern heritage".

So don’t let white people fool you. When they tell you that the Confederate flag represents their heritage, what they’re often saying is either A.) We lost; I’m stuck in the past. Or B. I’m a White Supremacist. Or both.

Just wanted to get that out there.

Tim Wise Article: good read.

2009-05-15T22:52:00.001-07:00

http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/hey-dude-wheres-my-privilege-race-and-lawbreaking-black-and-white

Tim Wise writes about 420 festivals across the U.S. and their predominantly White attendants. He also discusses what the drug culture means for different ethnic groups in the U.S.

Excerpt:

Though I tend to agree with those who claim pot has very little negative
health effect upon its users, it does appear to have rather serious consequences
for cognitive function, which would normally be, ya know, a problem at a
college. Indeed, at the big Boulder smoke-out in 2008, white
users demonstrated a drug-induced vapidity that would be viewed as culturally
pathological were it exhibited by students of color. So, for instance, despite
CU Boulder being a highly selective university, they managed to admit the likes
of Emily Benson, who told a reporter she actually came to the school "for the
weed atmosphere," and to be part of the pot legalization movement. Not for an
education, mind you, but to get high. And for this, she took a spot that could
have been given to a hard-working black or brown kid instead, or a working class
white kid for that matter with more serious daily concerns than the munchies.
Call it, stoner affirmative action: a form of preferential treatment extended to
many of the whites at Boulder apparently, including one young woman who
expressed her disappointment upon learning that the cookies and muffins being
handed out by one of her classmates at the 4/20 fest weren't "magical," as in,
filled with even more of the drugs she had already ingested. Bummer: now she'll
have to make do with that one blunt and some Adderall. How will she survive such
an indignity as this?

Meanwhile, as the aforementioned Ms. Benson (from the Kansas City area, and
whose parents must be so proud of her) indulges her habit, and as
thousands of her white classmates do too--many of them styling each other's hair in
dreadlocks, because nothing goes better with white privilege than cultural
appropriation--it is students of color who continue to be
told they are the unqualified ones, that they are the ones
who are unjustly taking up space at elite schools,
that their acceptance into such places is "lowering standards" and
cheapening the value of a college degree.

The irony of it all couldn't be more perfect: a bunch of white college
students clamoring for the legalization of pot, not realizing that
for them it already is, in effect, legal. If they really wanted to see
the laws change, they would be out demanding an end to the racist and classist
war on drugs.

They would be engaged in advocacy, not bong hits, the latter of which make
the former exceedingly difficult. In fact, the only way the nation's drug laws
are likely to change--for everyone--would be if the jails and prisons came to be
flooded with bodies that looked a lot like the ones in the meadow at UC Santa
Cruz and on the quad at CU Boulder. Only if whites start getting locked up will
sufficient pressure be brought to bear to liberalize drug laws. As long as the
ones being locked up are black and brown, the very same whites whose kids are
blazing up (with taxpayer support, via student loans no less), will say nothing.
Perhaps if their little bundles of THC started getting sent to the joint (as in,
the penitentiary, not the other kind), things would change. But don't expect any
of the weed warriors at the 420 events to volunteer for that kind of thing.
Their commitment isn't to social change, after all. It's to getting high, to
self-indulgence, to their own narcissism.

This is perhaps the most blatant example of white privilege imaginable:
the ability to do what you want, when you want, without fear of consequence, and
then to have that behavior deemed largely harmless, even when, for others, it
would be viewed as dysfunctional, destructive, and evidence of a profound
cultural flaw.

Mommy! It's the new color-coded Barbies!

2009-05-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

http://godheval.net/nabisco-barbies/#respond

On Godheval.net, an example of racism plain-as-day in our society can be shown: OREO BARBIE. This is 1997, not 1964, yet we are told repeatedly by White society that "racism is over, get past it, work hard and achieve". Yet racial stereotypes like "Oreo" for Blacks and "Ritz Cracker" for Whites are perpetuated in our dolls. Nope, no last effect on children whatsoever, right? This being likely said by the same who were yelling the smear of Obama's idea of early childhood education on Sex being detrimental for youth based on -- *gasp* -- age susceptibility.

Nope. No social racism in society these days. Minorities should just "get over it" and "work harder". Racism is only found in "extreme nutjobs" and "KKK members". White people are well to do and don't perpetuate racism (especially when they never bring it up). Right.

Pass it on.

White People, Attention: You have been and are being fooled! PART TWO

2009-05-12T21:07:00.001-07:00

(This is part two of the previous post.)

Where were we, now? Oh yeah.

When we left off last time, we were unraveling the beginnings of Whiteness. Whiteness was created only as a contrast to Blackness, Native-Americanness, and in contrast to anything else different. The creation of the White Race did not end with Naturalization for the first American citizens. Whiteness, unlike any other racial classification in the history of this continent, did something that no other classification was able or has been able to do: expand its boundaries and inclusion of “Whiteness”. It is in exposing this that I intend to show that being White in American institutions is at its root one of the primary tools for the retention of a social power structure and is an arbitrary label to maintain class divisions for the elite.

No, Jews and Italians were not always "white". The Irish either.

The arrival of numerous new groups of Europeans in the mid to late 19th century brought with it a crisis for the White identity. Not only did Whites have to contend with the Slave issue and Blacks now attaining citizenship, but now the arrival of new Europeans who had never lived in mass amounts on the mainland. On top of this, Asians made large migrations to America. The European arrivals were comprised heavily of Irish, Slav, Jewish, Italian, and Polish backgrounds. Many of these immigrants had darker features and brought with them different religions such as Judaism and the branch of Christianity known as Catholicism. None of these groups, upon arrival, were considered “white”. In fact, the Irish were considered as “low” as Blacks. The Jews were considered a different race. Bigotry was rampant in literature, such as “The Passing of the Great Race”, dividing Europeans based off of arbitrary lines and pseudo-science.

But wait, you might think, aren’t the Irish, Polish, Slavs, etc. all considered “white” today? Yes. Is this due to some sort of coincidence or all of a sudden White acceptance of different cultures and ethnicities? Not quite. These immigrant groups aligned themselves with White labor and social movements, such as the Irish (http://academic.udayton.edu/Race/01race/white13.htm). European ethnics, previously “conditional whites”, were now melding themselves in with the White majority. Just as in the past as European lower classes were accepted to keep Black power at a minimum threat from the status quo, European ethnics were accepted so long as they conformed to the “melting pot” lifestyle, leaving their lifestyles of their ethnic homelands to Anglicize and form a skin-privileged White culture. Light skinned Europeans could leave their ethnic ties behind and become White. Blacks, Asians, Mexican-Americans all did not have this luxury.

Not just the ability to have a pretty "White" name.

These were not simply social luxuries. There were plenty of structural luxuries. An example of institutionalized White privilege and minority suppression is in the Social Security act, passed in 1935. The act denied benefits to workers of agricultural jobs and domestic employees. The majority of these workers were a good chunk of the Hispanic and Black population of the country. This created opportunities of wealth inheritance that non-Whites would not be privy to. At the same time, many school districts in the Southwest and Texas segregated Mexican-American and Anglo children into separate facilities. The Mexican schools were grossly underfunded and often offered only a grade school education. It was not until the 1960’s that Mexican-American advocacy groups were able to bring an end to discriminatory practices in education to predominantly Hispanic areas and introduce bilingual education to students.

This is not even mentioning the Jim Crow South, sundown towns, lynching, segregation, and social degradation of Blacks. By racializing Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other groups, Whites became the “norm”, “non-racial”, and most importantly: “Americans”. By the end of World War II, the G.I. Bill pumped money to majority White families and injected even more opportunities for inherited wealth and social status. Whites, who were by and large leaving European, urban enclaves, were now migrating to newly constructed Suburbs. Being Jewish, Italian, German, these things were now less important to the homogenous White identity now formed. On their own, families had French and Italian backgrounds, perhaps. In contrast to “non-Whites”, however, these ethnic pasts were now second to being White.

Worth it in the end?

Thus, the existence of the White race was formed and is today maintained as a contrast to that which is “non-White”. Being “White” is relatively arbitrary. It is not defined by what it is, so much as what it isn’t (Black, Asian, basically anyone deemed racial). Is the White Race something that should have been formed? Is this arbitrary social group, as well the perpetuated classes of “Blacks”, “Asians”, etc. worth retaining?

White People, Attention: You have been and are being fooled!

2009-04-23T22:31:00.000-07:00

A difficult fact, yet impossible to escape.

Every instance in which I discuss race as it exists in America, I have to always remind myself of one small, yet undeniable and important fact that is key to understanding the history of institutional racism in America: the “White race” was created first as the centerpiece of racial classifications and was used to be the privileged, benefitted norm upon which all else not under said heading were persecuted for generations. If one does not understand this fact and the context around it, one is missing out on a great deal of racial reality in past and contemporary society.

Whiteness was created as a classification to keep from being included as Black, Indian, “Oriental”, or any other non-White grouping. What is more interesting than this by itself is the history of how this reality came to be and how Whiteness seems to be the one racial category that has been allowed to adapt and shift definitions over generations.

From ethnic identity to a skin color.

When Europeans arrived on the scene in North America, there was no such identity or solidarity as “White people”. The European arrivals were Dutch, French, Spanish, English, Welsh, Scottish, German, the list goes on. Just as current day Vietnamese do no see themselves as “Yellow” with their neighboring Asians countries (despite Americans classifying them as such), Europeans did not see themselves as having some sort of bond due to having light skin and lighter features. In fact, many European indentured servants worked alongside African slaves in the early colonial days. Being White and Black was no distinction at this time – class and ethnicity were the point of focus to the elites, and indentured servant Europeans simply didn’t cut it for them.

When numerous rebellions took place on the east coast in the early to mid 17th century, institutional manners of grouping people began to change. African slaves and European servants were grouping together to rise up against the wealthy elites in the new land. In 17th century Virginia was where the first laws separating “Blacks” from “Whites” in terms of marriage laws and civil privileges were seen. The European servants, now classified as “Whites”, were given property rights; court testifying rights, and other privileges the African slaves were not given. In case this is getting too difficult to follow (or too hard to swallow, whichever the case may be): the term White was created to protect the collapse of an elite, Anglo power structure. That’s it – Whiteness was a trick played on poor European servants to give up their class interests and ethnically identify with a new skin based power structure.

But one cannot simply close the book there on the book of Whiteness. The definition of who was White and who was not would not be resolved in the 17th century. The power structure and society at large had differing ideas over time of who was to be White and who was not.
(To be continued)…

Nope, no Affirmative Action needed. Discrimination's over!

2009-04-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2008/12/08/focus4.html (2007 saw the highest rate of work-place, race related discrimination complaints since 1994).

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=41828&dcn=todaysnews (Asian-Americans underreport discrimination).

http://economics.uchicago.edu/download/_DISCRIMINATION.pdf (Applicants with "black sounding" names like Jamal or Lakeisha get about half the call-backs for jobs than applicants with typically "white" names like Greg or Emily).

http://www.cmich.edu/Affirmative_Action_Office/Truths_and_Myths_Regarding_Affirmative_Action.htm (Myths about Affirmative Action. You'd be shocked how many you hear repeated daily in society and on television).

Yeah. "Post-racial society of Obama" my ass.

Asian-Americans: not Americans.

2009-04-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6365320.html

Betty Page, a white Texas Congressional Representative, has asked that Asian-Americans change or simplify their names according to standards that make it "easier to deal with". If this isn't an example of white supremacist culture and white privilege, I don't know what is.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ramey Ko, a member of an organization for Chinese-Americans: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Not Anglo...er, American enough.

First off, Chinese-Americans who are voting suddenly aren't "Americans". This is key to the topic. Americans are the ones with "simple", more Anglo names. Ethnocentrism at it's best.

Then think about the privilege Page has in the discussion.Chinese is "rather difficult", but English isn't difficult? Do you wonder has she ever tried to learn another language when she utters those words? What would her reaction be if she had to change her name in Vietnam or China to Huang or Wang? It is this type of privilege, an ability to not empathize or pay attention to the situations or realities of non-whites, that exemplifies white privilege. She can say this type of thing and get away with it: Asians, your names are not simple enough for US (Anglos) to pronounce. Please, change YOUR ways for US. Nope, forget that Asians may be just as proud of their names and heritage as any European-American. This is Eurocentric America. Get on board, already! Sheesh.

And also note the Euro-supremacist overtones: You and YOUR citizens. Are Asian-Americans not citizens she represents? I guess Ramey Ko, the Chinese-American that confronted her, represents them separately. And this is said by someone in power.

Victimization without being victims.

The final blow dealt here is towards the end of the article where a spokesperon for Republicans claims Democrats and Ko are "using race". Here, they are alluding to the all-powerful "race card". If the race card were such a strong card, it wouldn't be so easy for whites to knock down and end the discussion with. Instead, it is my theory that whites use the "race card" argument whenever they want to divert the topic and project back to the other end in an attempt to discredit the argument without addressing the topic.

Whites never seem to ever pull the race card it seems, even when they claim names are too hard for "them" to deal with and they should adopt "simpler" names for Ko and HIS citizens (yeah, no grouping of people and separating them from Americans there, eh?). Whites can complain and get their way out of the discussion because it's "too hard for them to pronounce and deal with them weird names from Asia".

And supposedly it's minorities, not whites, who play the victims in society today. Funny.

We're living in a "colorblind" society.
Segregation and slavery are over!
Everyone has equal treatment!
Discrimination from the dominant power is only imagined by minorities! They should try harder!

Right.

Why White People are Afraid

2009-02-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.alternet.org/story/36892/

I found this article by Robert Jensen of the University of Texas. He's pretty much nailed on the head why many white people who perhaps do have some idea of white privilege or racial injustice do nothing - fear, on multiple grounds. White people now have to deal with being the problem in the race discussion. This spurs all kinds of axieities of them.

A couple of things that he mentions are that whites in some degree fear what seems now inevitible: becoming the minority in the country. Whites likely will not be the majority demographic in the U.S. They may hold unequal amounts of wealth, but this loss in numbers can mean social and economic changes in the balance of power. This makes whites wonder if they will be treated the same way that non-whites were treated in the past and are currently treated today. Will whites no longer be the equivalent of "American", "normal", "standard"? This causes fear.

He also mentions that with greater economic justice and less privilege, resources would be more evenly distributed. This means whites lose some of the comfortable, higher lifestyle they've come to live in and become accustomed to. This also incites fearful reactions to such ideas of changing white privilege.

Along with the final fear in the article, which is the most obvious, that whites do not want to admit a degree of having been given an unearned head start due to their skin color, I must say that this article is dead on. Jensen points out what I believe is the biggest fear holding Whites back from helping to achieve racial and social justice - the above mentioned fear of "what will happen when we're the minority? How will we be treated?" And oddly enough, it is this fear that will likely lead to the worst result if it is used as an excuse to do nothing.

The more white people live oblivious to social injustice, not speaking out and recognizing the supremacist system set up in our country, and use their guilt and fear as a reason to do nothing, the less sympathy other ethnic groups will likely feel in the U.S. when a time may come when whites no longer hold all of the power demographically. If steps are taken now to correct inequalities based off of hundreds of years of past discrimination, and whites stop using cop-out excuses like "colorblindness", "I never owned a slave!", "my ancestors weren't even here!", "Affirmative Action discriminates against whites!", then maybe history may be kinder in such a hypothetical situation.

One thing is for certain: doing nothing does whites no good.

Colorblind only to themselves.

2009-01-27T19:47:00.000-08:00

It seems that white America feels it has reached a social fork in the road so far as it pertains to racial discourse and identity. To the average “white” American, there are basically only two types of “white” person you can identify as in our society. The first is the less frequent, yet still existing, white supremacist/racist. This is the white person who feels pride about their European heritage and finds it superior (and by definition, others inferior) to all other groups based on skin color. The second is the more frequently seen and heard “color-blind” white person. This person sees that race shouldn’t make a difference in how we view each other (not a bad outlook in and of itself), but since that is true one then assumes we should treat social situations as though race is not a factor and does not exist, hence, being colorblind. This second mindset allows the colorblind person to not see being white as having any real effect on their lives.

Most white people are taught to be one or the other, with mainstream America favoring the colorblind ideology. Our conventional wisdom teaches us that being racist is bad and being colorblind is good. Choosing one or the other certainly seems to make a lot of sense; given these were the only two real options. The problem lies in the fact that this is a false dichotomy whites are presented and one they continue to acquiesce to day in and day out. The fact is that there are not only two choices and that there exist other philosophies on the matter. Furthermore, being a “colorblind” white person not only allows a person to not see the effects of whiteness in society, but also keeps a person from seeing discrimination based on color when it occurs, thereby perpetuating discrimination.

But, at least I'm not a "racist"!

In our post-Civil Rights social era, being “colorblind” has become the mainstream way to handle race discussions for many white Americans. Polls on racial topics consistently find white Americans supporting the principles of integration, racial intermarriage, and minorities living in or near their neighborhoods. On top of this, polls also show that white Americans believe racism to largely be a thing of the past. Others show whites supporting overwhelmingly the idea that racism is the fault of behavior and culture on the part of minorities. That said, whites in similar polls also reject the notion of legislation to overturn many years effects of institutionalized racism in America, namely that of Affirmative Action. Thus, we have what may be labeled a possible society of “Racism without racists”. That is, the deep divide in polls on whites opinions with respect to race and society reflect a want or need to maintain the racial order in the U.S. in a non-racial way. One can now vocally adopt non-racist platitudes and stands without completely combating racism or racist structures.

I just want everyone to be equal, so long as I'm still ahead.

An example of this mindset can be seen in the conservative, though not contained in this ideology, movement to end affirmative action in hiring policies on the grounds of it being “reverse discrimination” against white Americans. Affirmative Action as it is constructed today was started decades ago to combat what whites claim they are against now – affirmative action itself, only targeted towards a different group of people (you guessed it – whites). Indeed, white Americans themselves benefitted from various forms of affirmative action for the larger part of this country’s history and colonial times. Slavery, Jim Crow, restrictive Euro-centric Nationalization and Immigration laws, anti intermarriage-laws, and various government acts (such as the Homestead Act) all worked to maintain a white status quo, give European-Americans a leg up, and maintain dominance in American society. White Americans calling for the end of affirmative action policies today now claim a want for equal footing and grounding in employment and other areas when it was denied to so many for nearly 200 years. This all being said as numerous studies show existing inequalities, in various sectors of American life between minorities and whites. Nearly all studies show how affirmative action legislation has moved to reverse inequalities in the workplace, yet by removing this on the grounds of “reverse discrimination”, it would at best halt and stagnate any progress made on these grounds and at worst allow the work environment to return to a place of ethnic and racial discrimination.

Thus, being colorblind allows a person to make decisions based on their skin color without consciously, or perhaps only verbally, ignoring the effects their skin color has on them or their decision making. Even to those who acknowledge the existence of other races and their inequalities, it allows whites to ignore the privilege they’ve inherited in this country with respect to income, education, and power. To be more succinct, this ideology allows whites to be colorblind to whiteness. For example, a 2006 study by the University of Minnesota showed that while a majority of white respondents agreed that past discrimination put minorities at a disadvantage, a much lesser amount agreed that it had given whites an advantage. Thus, whites are allowed to see minorities as “underprivileged” without seeing themselves as “privileged”. Whites can see race as African-American disadvantage, but not one of white privilege.

In a Pew poll, 54% of whites said programs to increase the number of minorities in college are a good thing, compared with 87% of blacks. If based on similar polls, we can conclude that more often than not whites will admit to African-American disadvantage but will not support policies aimed at giving them advantages. That is to say, whites will admit aversively to being higher in society but only do so verbally in a way that justifies not feeling an inclination towards doing anything about it.

Where to go from here. A possible starting point.

So if one accepts that colorblindness is a dead-end in achieving racial justice in America, where can one turn? If the only other true choice would be that of racism, it would seem that we’ve come to a point of no resolution. The good news is that there is another choice: white racial awareness. That is, accepting ones heritage as European-white and even having pride about that, but acknowledging the inherited privilege one is given with that distinction in society and working to end the White-centric mold of American society. Racially savvy whites who work to overturn economic and social disadvantage by acknowledging their own advantages do more justice towards minorities than simply calling oneself colorblind and ignoring the world around them.

Happy New Year

2008-12-31T21:46:00.000-08:00

I hope anyone reading has a happy new year. May all of your hopes be realized in 2009. I'll be back with a new entry within a week or so. Have fun. :-)

The Problem of the White Inferiority Complex

2008-12-26T19:23:00.000-08:00

There is, every year, someone who snidely comments on Black History Month in schools. I heard one of them today on the radio. Some jackass stated that “it’s divisive” and “unnecessary” in American history, as “all it does it divide us further in putting people in groups”. The man also made a crack about how black people merely “survived” American history without making any real contributions to our society. Putting aside the absurdity of the latter claim on achievements by black-Americans, I think the superior attitude that allowed this man to comment as such is what should be addressed, for it is what is behind his words that to me outlines the main problem with white America today.

But, I voted for Barack! The aversive nature of today's racism.

First, there are many that no doubt outright challenge my notions of white supremacist forces in the U.S. today. I am often told that Barack Obama's success is proof of that. How could a man of his skin pigmentation get elected to the highest office in the land if there were such barriers? To them I point to the media's obsession with his race and his "transcending" of it making him more appealing to many voters. You see, even in the praising of his "being different from most blacks" and "post-racial", there is an implicit message being sent: most blacks have something 'wrong' with them. Even in the minds of many supposed enlightened, liberals praising his race and transcending of it, there are still supremacist feelings slipping out. I suppose it is only natural given our long history of such thoughts being institutionalized and conditioned. Thus, although aversive in nature, racist tendencies that have been conditioned are very real within a great many people. For most that hold these tendencies, it either comes out in those that are up front about it and not ashamed, or comes out from it's latent place in our psyche due to conditioning of someone elses doing.

On to the supremacists and the dilemma they face - You know what I notice of proponents of racial superiority? It’s always people that have never achieved anything that are making the claims. It’s always life’s losers that are calling others lesser and weaker. Indeed, proponents of their own racial superiority are more often telling you more about themselves than they are about those they seek to denigrate. Not only do you find out their insecurities about themselves, but possibly in the history of such movements do we see a sense of inferiority being projected onto others. How so?

Real superiority never needs cheerleaders. The work done by someone superior (a playwright, an inventor, a scientist, etc.) speaks volumes in and of itself. They are seldom, if ever, calling themselves superior to others. It is the supremacist, indeed, the white supremacist in this case, who is making such a claim. But how do these people secretly feel a sense of inferiority, you might ask? It’s all in historical context and present day reflection.

It was large numbers of black slaves, not white plantation owners that built levees, plow fields, or harvest crops. It was large numbers of Chinese Immigrants that made up the majority of Central Pacific railroad workers, all the while getting paid much less than other workers. The American Revolution itself was in large part funded by companies that profited from slave labor. Much of European “advancement”, let alone American advancement, would not have even had the foundation or framework possible for achievement had it not been for the need of whites to prop themselves up on the work of others by force. Perhaps it is a guilt drenched inferiority complex that allows blatant White-racists to believe such absurd notions about other groups 'inferiority", but it is there for any observer to witness.

The end of the White monopoly.

White supremacists now see that the privileged society they created for themselves is now on the downslide. Because of past notions of 'superiority', they kept non-White Americans in lesser places in society. Once freed, the claims of “not being able to survive” became rampant. Now that they have, survival has been downgraded to mere “passivity”, particularly in the comments mentioned earlier. Surviving attempts at cultural and racial genocide through public policy is no “achievement” in the aforementioned man’s eyes, as he has never had to deal with that.

This man, speaking words that are not strange to anyone in our society at this point, now sees groups that were once subjugated getting opportunities that their grandparents would have never had, and those groups are doing well and are increasingly represented in society. The Black middle class has risen. Asian Americans are doing well. This man, a microcosm of the white superiority class, simply can’t stand it. He has to deal with the fact that he is not “superior” based off of some “special” characteristic like a lesser amount of melanin. He has to deal with the fact that he is equal to anyone else in ability and achievement skills. This is the current dilemma of many in White America’s “superiority” class (and psst, here's a tip: most of said Whites are not affiliated with any extremist groups like Nazis or the KKK).

To the white racist faced with a changing society, a healthy solution and what he often chooses are two different things. Those conditioned white supremacists who are seeing the decline of the white supremacist system should not cry out in anger and insecurity over the changing dynamics in society, but rather applaud the representation of those people who were once kept down. They should view their own privilege from it's historical context, accept it, and work to end the injustice and to promote equal opportunities and representation for all people. Neither anger and denial, nor ignoring it by putting up a wall of "color-blind society" mantra are going to end the injustices.

To be clear. And a possible solution.

Let me make something clear in closing: I am not saying that all white people in America are suffering from this discussed inferiority complex. There are many that can and do overcome such feelings if they exist for any period of time. However, there are many more who don't. They don't even see that it exists. Our Eurocentric narrative in the country has allowed them to think otherwise for so long that it is near impossible to turn them away from such beliefs.

I guess it's up to each one of us to challenge these notions as we see them, so as to make sure they are not perpetuated any longer. This, to me, is the real test for progressive Whites in the realm of racism. Voting for Obama is not equal to fighting a privilege-laced system and thought process. It's time to start looking at our place in society through historical context and evaluating beliefs and statements as we hear them from that perspective.

Salam!

2008-12-23T21:06:00.000-08:00

In the 2008 Presidential Campaign, and even before that back into the Democratic Primaries, there was a stinging accusation and subsequent myth surrounding Barack Obama: many claimed that he was a Muslim.

Now, to understand my confusion in why this became as big a deal as it did, one must first understand what a Muslim is. A Muslim is a believer in the religion of Islam, an Abrahamic religion not far separated from Christianity and Judaism. However, in our post-9/11 society, we as most Americans have been taught to group this term with that of “terrorist”. Thus, accusing Obama of “being a Muslim” was a blanket way to tie him to Anti-American ideology and tactics and in the end serve to make a loss for him more viable.

I am not here to defend Obama’s status as a Christian and debunk the myth of him being Muslim. I am here to ask one simple question: Why is being a Muslim a bad thing? When one reads into the religion, it is a religion that preaches just as much peace (and just as much violence, I might add) as Christianity does. Either religion has quotes that can be mined and taken out of context to serve some peaceful or violent end. So, again, why is it being used as a bad-word? If we go by the logic of some, that being Muslim carries with it some disposition to be violent against non-Muslims of the same fundamentalist persuasion, then we must also apply that same logic to most others in religious communities as well.

All in God's name.

Let’s take for example the loudest group that seemed to blow this horn - conservative Christians. Christianity has a long history of intolerance to non-believers where Muslims were generally more tolerant. It was Christianity that expelled Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492. It was Christianity that fed the notion of “Manifest Destiny” and the killing and exhausting of resources of indigenous American peoples. It was Christianity that fueled the movement of the Ku Klux Klan. It was Christianity that fueled The Army of God, a fundamentalist group responsible for numerous bombings of abortion clinics, gay nightclubs, and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. However, we don’t see rabid conservatives ready to vilify Christians for the history of violence, hate, and intolerance tied to them.

While everybody was calling Obama a Muslim as though it were a bad thing (though his father was the only one raised a Muslim and who never actually raised Obama himself) nobody was saying that Timothy McVeigh’s devout Roman Catholic upbringing had anything to do with his actions in blowing up the Oklahoma City building. Nobody tied Christianity to violence when in July of 2008 Jim D. Adkinson shot several church members due to “liberal” viewpoints and teachings. Nobody called Christians are group of hate when in Indonesia, circa Sept 2006, 2 Muslim fishermen were murdered and beheaded by 3 Christian farmers.

Our anti-Muslim sentiment was so strong just a mere few years ago that of some respondents polled, nearly half believed that Muslim-Americans should have some rights suspended.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6729916/

Of course, those who believed this were more likely to be of this mindset after watching much of the American news media. Of course, there was no clamoring for Christians to have their rights suspended after their ties to violence acts in history, particularly the United States.

Naturally accentuating the Negative.

Conservative Christians are so quick to venerate people for being “good Christians”, yet so comforted in ignoring achievements by Muslim-Americans in our society. Of course conservatives fail to mention that a Muslim-American, Fazlur Khan, designed the Sears Tower and John Hancock Center, some of our mainstays in American tourist attractions. Nor do we hold up Ahmed Zewail, winner of the 1999 Chemistry Nobel prize. We are so quick to glorify Muhammad Ali, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar as sports icons and household names, yet ignore their Muslim backgrounds in the process.

Part of me suspects that race had a small hand in this as well. Late in campaign, a McCain supporter was on camera accusing Obama of being an "Arab", when none of his family is from the Arab Peninsula, but rather Africa and Kansas. Again, here they are attempting to tie "Arab" with "Muslim", thus perpetuating more obfuscation. If Arab identity really were an issue to these people, why then is Ralph Nader (a MUCH more left-wing candiate that Obama) ignored on grounds of ethnic suspicion, who has heavy Lebanese ethnic background? Could it have anything to do with his skin color? Just a thought, nomás.

America, in many respects, needs to grow up and get real. No, Obama was not and is not a Muslim. But so what if he were? Given the history of our Christian reared citizens propensity towards violent movements, I'd ask something to the contrary: "Why NOT a Muslim President?"

White Ignorance

2008-12-19T19:31:00.001-08:00

I think being a European-American, or "white" as we call it in the U.S., is something one can be proud of. There is a long history of great art, music, language, and culture that comes with that area of the world. There many great innovations that are due to Europeans and their American diaspora. Having said that, I wonder how most White Americans aren't sort of embarrassed to be in that category after what I hear some of most ardently spoken White Americans say.

There is nothing wrong with being a white person. Let me state that again, as often times my reflections in this philosophical arena tend to cause others to think the inverse of this: there is nothing wrong with being a white person. Nothing wrong with it anymore than there is being a black person in America or being of Asian descent in America. However, there is something wrong with being ignorant and indifferent to a society that is clearly Eurocentric and based on Euro-superiority. This is what I am talking about when I mention the embarrassment factor, as white people are the ones that are benefitting from the society itself.

The privilege to be oblivious.

I don't know how some white people don't get laughed out of entire rooms sometimes. Who else but a white person can make such absurd statements as "How come it's wrong for me to call someone the 'n' word, but they can call me a honky or a cracker?", as if the two words are even worth comparing historically and socially? The word "honky" does not carry with it a history of oppression, dehumanizing behavior, and even downright terrorism towards a group of people. it doesn't ressurect a painful past. Terms like "cracker" don't have any real effect on white people other than a momentary nuisance.

And besides, I usually ask the person asking me the question (who is almost invariably a white person), "Why do you care so much about using that word to begin with?" Is it something people want to be connected with, a word that to many educated people represents ignorance in the most raw form and an attitude of disrespect towards a group of people?

I'm also tired of hearing "Why don't we get to have 'White Pride Parades' or 'White History Month'?" This might frustrate me just a little more, as it is rooted in an ignorance of the privileged system that European-Americans are living in daily. In case the "White" population hasn't noticed, every month of the year is White-History month. History curriculums in all schools are Eurocentric to boot. We learn European history and American history as the concentration. We learn about European composers and European inventors (save for a token mention of George Washington Carver to assuage ourselves). We even revolve the fundamental statements of this continent and country around absurd, Eurocentric notions. One off the top of my head would be the most famous: Columbus discovered America (well, except for all of those indigenous people that were already here, right?). The state of Eurocentrism and Euro-superiority is evident in our national fixation on whether Obama was a Muslim or not, as though being of a Middle Eastern ethnic persuasion is something to be "investigated" or ashamed of.

Media and society are plastered with European ideas of beauty and prestige. Even acceptable behavior is based on Eurocentric attributes. Don't believe that? Notice the reaction someone has when you tell them that they're "acting like a black person". Many white people will become offended in at least a minor way, as that is "undesirable", as though there were something wrong with being of that racial designation. It is also an attempt to tie undesirable behavior with a person of dark skin color.

So why do white people ask these ridiculous questions? Are white people really so blind as to see that Whiteness has become so embedded in American society that it is now "the norm"? Our society does not need a "White Pride Day", as our society is white pride. Our society sends that message socially and institutionally every day.

Transcending Whiteness and Acknowledging White Privilege

Even when we give people of other racial groups recognition, it is accompanied with an asterisk. Race is nearly always noted up front in the achievements of non-White Americans. Asian-Americans, for example, have been called "Model Minorities" in recognizing their success in many respects. However, though it may be a noble attempt to credit them, it devalues individual effort in calling it "a good Asian's achievement", whereas nobody would credit a white, European kids achievement as "a credit to his race". In fact, race is barely mention in regards to "white people". Whiteness is mebedded as a norm, and race seems to always belong to "others".

Take a recent example to accentuate this point: President-elect Barack Obama. During primaries, in many articles and pundit broadcasts Obama was praised for "transcending race". Do journalists and Americans as a whole think that being black is something one must rise away from? When was the last time a white candidate was asked to transcend race? You will not hear that anytime soon, as ethnicity and race are things that "other" groups have that somehow does not apply to European-Americans. That, my friends, is institutional and social white privilege at it's most salient.

It is privilege that allows White Americans to not ever have to think about themselves as a race, or if not that then to be able to hold others accountable in a race-based manner of thought. It is privilege that allows White Americans to think of racism in extremities such as the KKK and racial slurs and to deny or be oblivious to the institutions or social constructions it is supported by. It is this on display when studies show that when most white people are asked about the image they get of a drug dealer or a violent criminal, they often respond with the image of some other ethnic minority. This is ridiculous when most violent crimes are perpetrated from whites to other whites and an equal amount of white people do drugs as black people. It is privilege that allows this mindset to continue unchallenged and unfettered in The United States.

I'll restate this once more, so as to keep misconceptions of my message at bay: I'm not "anti-White". In fact, I'm typing this because I don't want to see White America become drowned in this problem to the point that it destroys them. I want this problem to be solved by beginning an honest discussion on the matter. This marginalization of other groups through a white-centric system is damaging to everybody involved, even the people who benefit from it directly. The first step towards correcting it is getting our society conscious about it.

So sparing me the "colorblind society" mantra, let me know what you really think. I welcome all critiques, praise, or questions.

Confetti, Fanfare, Music.

2008-12-07T20:32:00.000-08:00

I think America, or any society in general, can reach a point where we get so complacent and self-satisfied, so balkanized and fragmented from each other, and so divided and unwilling to communicate, that we reach a point where we abandon our goals of fixing society's ills as we go and pass it off on someone else.

We reach a point where we "it's cool", "don't rock the boat", "chill out" ourselves to a certain social death. We reach a state of what could be perennial apathy and aquiescence to the status quo of modern society, where we are ready to just accept our state as it is in the name of "chilling out, man".

For the interested reader, I'm here to start honest discussion on topics and give one the tools to go out and start the discussion on ones own.

I talk about a lot of things - race, religion, social privilege, intellectualism in society, poverty, politics, and power.

So let the boat rocking begin.