A Dream Deferred: Or Plausible Answer to A Rhetorical Question?

(+) A Dream Deferred: Or Plausible Answer to A Rhetorical Question?

May 05, 2006 at 08:24:12 America/Los_Angeles

(Mazola Files Editorial Note this post doesn't make much sense without the pictures: they were pictures of African Americans wrapped in flags during the Katrina disaster)



What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
--Langston Hughes

The question’s been on the table for a number of days now. I don’t think the person who originally posed it considered it a rhetorical one—and yet, it would indeed be foolish for anyone with a reasonably reality-based grip on the fabric of American society today to expect that an answer to the question be forthcoming. Not now. Not ever.

What the hell? Windmills are my friends, so I’ll post it again. For rhetoric’s sake:

Why should securing rights for illegal immigrants be a higher priority for any of us than addressing the ongoing issues for African-American low skilled workers, particularly male, that are merely made worse by illegal immigration?


myleftasscheek :: A Dream Deferred: Or Plausible Answer to A Rhetorical Question?
And as a platform to draw readers’ attention to a partial answer that I found in an LA Times OpEd by Erin Aubry Kaplan the other day.

The author doesn’t offer us any direct answers to the question (to do so would be ‘impolite’, I suppose, and a guarantee for non-publication of his views or being run out of town on a rail), but he does direct attention to something I’ve been thinking a lot about these days: the flags, and the role they play in liberal America’s most recent staging and performance of its “Hoorah for the Underdog!”-complex—the less-than-conscious cathartic release that inevitably follows on the heels of any great national tragedy that serves to remind us how far we have not come in terms of racial and economic justice—like Katrina.

Kaplan writes:

Although plenty of marchers waved the red, white and green, along with the colors of other Latin American countries, the preponderance of U.S. flags was striking. Far from subverting the Stars and Stripes or fashioning it into a symbol of resistance, as in the 1960s, Latino demonstrators treated the flag with matter-of-fact reverence. They simply held the flag aloft or alongside the flags of their nations. Those who wrapped themselves in Old Glory did so sincerely; they were literally wrapping themselves in the fabric of an American dream that they felt they had a hand in making. To desecrate the flag would have been to desecrate the can-do ideals of American opportunity many Latinos hold dear, low wages and poor working conditions notwithstanding.

No Hendrix-hijinks here. Nosirreee. Unending gratitude, deference to the ideal of the American Dream that has been a nightmare to so many.

“What's more American, or mythologized as more American, than hard work?,” Kaplan asks, and you can almost hear the cogwheels of ego-stroking, the machinery of feel-good Americanism engaging in his readers. See? Some of them still love us. Some of them still think this is the greatest country on earth—despite its flaws. Still. To this day, they flock to our shores. The huddled masses. The tired, the poor. Still, they are knocking on our door. We must be something real special!

And Kaplan concedes, as anyone with half a brain must do: “By that measure, Latinos have more than earned their membership in the club.”

And yet, delicately stepping around the fragile edges of the American collective psyche, Kaplan does manage to unearth a handful of “truth dust”:


But there's the rub: "earning" the right to be a U.S. citizen and, more profoundly, an American. Paying your dues, logging your hours. It's a curious, wholly capitalistic approach to citizenship, and it's gaining currency among Latinos and their supporters. Some of the signs I saw Monday made the argument in shorthand. "Immigrants Built This Country — That's It," read one. "Pilgrims Were Immigrants!" declared another.

Ah yes, the Pilgrims, the folks who gave the United States its fabled Puritan work ethic. A work ethic so revered, so uniquely American, that immigrants need only subscribe to it to become an American. The only problem with this notion, of course, is that it didn't apply to Native Americans and blacks. Indians were unwilling and dying off, so African blacks were imported for slave labor that built the American economy in its crucial first 200 years or so. Can't get much more industrious than that.

Although slavery has long since ended, racism remains — and black employment has never been as noble or as resonant a cause as that of the immigrant worker. It is an orphaned cause still looking for something or someone to take it up. Blacks who've more than earned their "Americanness" are still trying to make that point today.

But it is here that Kaplan provides what seems to me the most plausible answer to the question posed here, now in rhetorical terms—

I realized Monday that there is no place to make it in this movement. A few frustrated blacks have tried, taking up the flag to assert the validity of their Americanness over that of their Latino neighbors — a move that could not help but look reactionary rather than visionary. It doesn't much matter, because blacks are not needed. Latino immigrants are diverse, numerous and politically astute. Blacks are even losing their historic and symbolic role as a mirror of the nation's conscience; another group now holds a mirror that is less damning and easier for the nation to gaze into.

By the end of the morning protest, I was deeply impressed. I also felt deeply invisible. I drove home along a South L.A. main street that, with Latino businesses shuttered and blacks milling about in a kind of vacuum, was quieter and emptier than I'd ever seen it.

There’s the answer, staring up at us from the page:

another group now holds a mirror that is less damning and easier for the nation to gaze into

And the answer’s been there all along really. I mean which American flag would you rather try to wrap your head around?
This one?

Or this one?

How about this one?

Yeah. Those were rhetorical questions. We all know the answer. These other images are prettier, and therefore preferable. It doesn't hurt as much to look at them. They don't scream at us with ugly truths. The American Nightmare. Dreams deferred, bursting in flight. The rocket's red glare. But the flag is still there.

Wake me up when it's over, for now, I'll focus on the American Dream:

As always, a picture is worth 1,000 words. Apparently, unless it's a pretty one, that's all it's worth.
And talk is cheap, even at half the price.

Let's at least be honest about it: neither the question nor the dream has been "deferred." Both have been dismissed. As done for. For some of us, it is clear: the nightmare is never going to end, and it's really not the rocket's red glare our fellow Americans choose to either fear or revere. No. It's the blank stare of "blackness" writ large on a slate that is anything but clean.

Black Presence, White Absence: What A Month it Would Be

OK, folks, I'm gonna pull an AG on ya. This post began as a response to this comment by Bluebird in this  thread

Blue bird writes:

What I take away from this diary is that segregation isn't just something Black people created to get away from us - it's something we do to ourselves by not caring and not being involved, and not listening, and not reaching out, and not having the guts to reach out. Most people visiting another country will prepare themselves before travelling by learning about that country's culture.

fascinating diary (9.00 / 1)
and great question, too - does the tree make a sound if no one is around to hear it? Because functionally that is what U.S. culture is like - see no Black people, hear no Black people - What Black people? Where? Is the door locked? (to me it's pretty fucked up that it's possible for a white person to go YEARS without ever SEEING a black person except in various pop culture media and news - yet this is how white opinions about black people are formed.)
Since, as the drive-by rating game is evidence, there are still some folks out here who are not getting the point of this piece, I'm going to offer a bit more backstory here. You, Blue, have obviously understood the intent. 

I repeat: this piece has been accepted for publication three times, by three separate editors-two of whom happen to be "heavy hitters" in the field of "race studies," one of whom, Gloria Anzaldua, unfortunately died before she had the chance to complete the project, so you're obviously not alone in "getting it." And I am not alone in contending that it contains an important message--one that extends far beyond the issue of the specific traditions discussed in the essay.

As I said, I've been taking the heat on this essay for a decade now. And hey, way I see it, when you write something that meets with that much resistance, it's a good sign that you are "on to something."

As I also said, my first encounters with West African drumming occurred in Europe, in an environment where race was not an issue (mostly because almost everyone doing it was white anyway; the few "Black folk" who were involved were native Africans, many of them from the "source culture," a culture  in which there's really no such thing as a "nigger.") What mattered was knowledge of the tradition. Skill level. Thanks to a large degree to the efforts of my first teachers-two white teachers from Berlin-there was a pretty well-informed audience to work with: people could tell the difference between a "trained drummer" and someone who was just "banging a drum." People knew that there was no such thing as "African drumming"-there was Malinke drumming, there was Ewe drumming, there were Sabar drums from the Wolof tradition, there was a completely distinct Bata tradition, and other Latin traditions, etc. -all of which had their own "rules" and "guidelines." So there was little room for charlatanism and "faking it": either you knew the shit or you didn't. And if you were "faking it," no matter what color you were, you fell off the map and off the radar in pretty short order.

So I came over here, the day of the LA riots,  in fact, with 300 lbs of authentic, hand-made-in-Africa-by-Africans African drums in toe, and a whole stockpile of accurate, from-the-source information in my head and my hands.

I returned to America, with the experience of Africa and of Europe in my rearview mirror. To my surprise, I could no longer see the African Americans with whom I'd more or less grown up in the same light. Suddenly, America looked to me like "little Africa," and the people who had previously been African AMERICANS in my mind were now AFRICAN Americans. I had quite a bit to learn on that subject-believe me-and I'm still trying to wrap my head around a lot of it.

(The fact that 3 of my Black adult students and one Black child seeking to attend a workshop by a master drummer from the source culture in Africa that was staged in a filthy rich white suburb-a place where the only "coloreds" who dare to tread are folks like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan-were turned away at the door, and when they refused to leave "peacefully" the cops were called...yo-that's a little detail I'm still tryin' real fuckin' hard to wrap my heart around! Imagine: you're a kid, and you witness the way your father is "criminalized" in a filthy rich white suburb for attempting to attend a workshop in African drumming: his crime, he didn't pre-register. The master drummer from Africa could have intervened. He didn't. One ringy-dingy! Anyone still wondering about concerns expressed by the African American community with regard to the way non-native born Blacks might be "instrumentalized" to function as token minorities to once again screw the fuck out of native American Blacks?!?) :(

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the first thing someone in my position might do would be to seek out collaborators (and students) in the African American community. But the response was not unlike the response Paul Simon got when he did the Graceland album: how dare you white motherfucker come along and "appropriate" Black music in this way? Now, of course, without Paul Simon's efforts, the concert with Ladysmith Black Mombazo and Sweet Honey in the Rock I saw this summer would not have been possible; without Paul Simon, the predominately African American audience in attendance at that concert would not have had that experience. Paul Simon, of course, was nowhere in sight-nor do I think he'd had any vested interest in standing on that stage. He knew what the hell he was doing when he began collaborating with these musicians, and he was willing to take the heat for doing what he had to do-in the spirit of serving the greater good. Yeah, Paul Simon is my HERO. He represents the polar opposite of what's going on in this other "scene."

So, while I'm busy running around, just trying to "get back to the Hood," more or less with an attitude of "hey, come on, guys, I went down to Africa and `got the goods'. Really,  believe me, I got the goods!", two separate phenomena were underway that served as huge obstacles:

A) a number of charlatans from Africa who were NOT from the source culture of this tradition were running around selling themselves as "experts" on something they knew nothing about. Because of the racist tradition in this country, these charlatans who were exploiting the African American community's deepest desires to "connect" with their "roots" were of course taken at their word. A Brother wouldn't lie to us now, would he? One of these men in particular spread-throughout the entire country-the myth that women in Africa were forbidden from playing these drums-I recently told the story of the ramifications of this on children (girls) in the inner city.

The truth of the matter is that the Djembe drum was in fact created by a woman, and legend would have it that the rhythms also originated from the women, who taught them to the men, so that the men could play these rhythms while the women danced. There never was an outright ban on women playing these drums. There are, in fact, some traditions in Africa, in which MEN are forbidden from participating-but this particular tradition never had any gender restrictions placed upon it. These charlatans were teaching rhythms that did not even exist  in the source  culture. Or, they were teaching "mish-mash" rhythms, attaching names to them that were incorrect. Disinformation and mis-education was the name of the game. It was  a fucking MESS.

B)  At the same time, there were these things called "drum circles" cropping up all over-as described in this essay. These drum circles were facilitated by and catered to a predominately white audience-and it cost a lot of money to participate. At the drum circle that inspired this essay, there were at least 100 people in attendance. One of them was Black.

Here, too, from a strictly formalistic musical perspective, the scene could be described as nothing but a mess. WHITE NOISE in the truest sense of the word, and it was burgeoning into a major profit industry. It was a sham: as I said, the primary motivation was sales, sales, sales. It exploited the spiritual impoverishment of WHITE communities. At the time, the facilitators and manufacturers were still billing it as "African drumming." This essay contributed substantially to putting an end to that, along the lines Bluebird suggests in  another comment on the originall thread (I paraphrase): "If you are going to do this, then at least  call it what it is: "African-inspired" or derivative or whatever, but this is NOT any form of authentic African tradition.

So here I am, here I come-I've got the "goods"-the real ones. Culturally, I am "native to the Hood"-ethnically, I am not quite white (indeed, returning to this country was for me, as a person of Native American descent, something akin to a Black person returning to Africa in search of his "roots"),  but I have white skin privilege and therefore look like I'm white. The expectation-on the part of African Americans and others alike-was that I put myself in my proper place in this whole big mess: with the white folk, of course. Just go along to get along. Take your drums out to the suburbs, let the white folk pay you and pay you well for the "goods." I could have made a killing in this country with the knowledge and materials I brought to this country in 93-had I simply been willing to play along with this segregationist game.

Nopity. It was not an option. And believe me, I had the door slammed in my face many a time. I paid, dearly, and am still paying the price for that. As I said, it pretty much cost me my career-and then some. Still to this day, there is often great skepticism directed at me in the Black community. And I know as well as anyone that there are some African Americans who will never accept what I do and will never accept me. But I don't need everyone on board. I have since managed to attain the "critical mass" needed to do what I gotta do. And the white boys? Well, they're still busy hating the fuck outta me. Most of them anyway. I'm  an "ethno-fascist bullshitter." As my African American elder said: If you're not willing to make any enemies, you may miss the opportunity to make a few friends. So be it. Look at the pictures. Those are the friends I've made. I do believe I got the better end of the deal in the end. I'm not making any money at it, but I've picked up a helluva lot of friends along the way.

Now, I wonder sometimes. Were it not for the history of racism in this country, which is precisely what allowed for these developments to occur, if it might have been easier to be taken seriously by African Americans. Would the knee-jerk negative reactions to Paul Simon's extremely important work with South African (later with Brazilian) artists have been as vehement? Would I have had my ass kicked around the block to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of heartbreak were it not for the perception created by these "appropriators"? Would I have had to sacrifice my career to this shit? I don't think so.

And that is the travesty involved here: white people who just tromp in like this with absolutely no regard for the culture and community they are trampling over to get to the "goods" and/or to "paint their own wagon" make it very difficult for anyone with white skin color to be taken seriously: and this dynamic is operative not only in this particularly touchy and sensitive field (i.e., music, particularly authentic "back to the roots" African drum traditions!), it is operative in every area of endeavor in this society. As long as these appropriators are out there doing their thing, those of us who are doing a completely different thing will be viewed with suspicion, derision and deep, deep resentment. Understandably so. Any teacher who has sought to go into predominately African American schools-as just one example-knows exactly what I am talking about.

As long as the liberal lip-service-to-diversity brigade is allowed to spew its half-assed, inarticulate (!) blah-blah-blah-bullshit, the rest of us who are seriously interested in really `getting along' will be faced with additional hurdles. Obstacles that make an already difficult task nearly insurmountable. Nearly, but not quite. Yeah, unbeatable odds that we must render beatable. And that is not an easy job.

There was one more thing going on  in this country that I was completely unaware of-call it the "African American drum circle". Perhaps one of my biggest mistakes was not to acknowledge the validity of this tradition-a tradition which is distinct from the traditions I brought with me from Africa and Europe-but one which is equally as powerful, equally legitimate, and very much serves the same "spiritual" purpose as these other traditions. The images I have now added to this essay for the first time are from such an event. Again, the existence of these "white drum circles"-a very recent phenomenon-stood in the way of understanding history. Black history. In America. The event from which these images are taken has been in existence at the same spot on Chicago's south side since sometime in the 1930s (according to local lore). It is not the same thing as the drum circles I posted in the comment "what's wrong with these pictures?", but it took me a while to figure that out and make the distinction. It is an event that exists in the spirit of the New Orleans "Conga Square" tradition which-as I now know, but did not then-is a valid, long-standing tradition in its own right.

I don't know whether my job would have been easier if I'd seen this from the get-go. No clue.

It's interesting, though, to see what happens to this piece with the pictures added. Really interesting.

What we need is a BLACK PRESENCE MONTH, not a "Black History Month." All of us would be better served, imo, by a "White History Month". How about a "White Absence Month"-one month in which white people, across the board, just shut the fuck up and LISTEN? Yeah, everyone-myself included-who is in possession of White Skin Privilege just shut up. Shut UP. Let the other people talk. Listen. I wonder what we'd hear?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? 

BUSTED! Stephen Colbert Violates the Suburban Strip Mall Diversity Code

(+) BUSTED! Stephen Colbert Violates the Suburban Strip-Mall Diversity Code
May 12, 2006 at 11:07:22 America/Los_Angeles


(This isn’t exactly a metadiary, but was inspired in part by the recent rash of them both here and at the frat house. It’s not really about Stephen Colbert, either.;-) However, it does address an issue I see playing a significant role in almost every flame war, every banning controversy and every trifling or not so trifling dispute that erupts in our beloved (community) blogosphere. Furthermore, the diary has gotten totally out of control lengthwise. Sorry. As always, food for thought. Hats off to those who get through it, to those who don’t: you are forgiven and entirely justified in checking out long before the lede.)

Let’s just start with what should be obvious: people's assessments of what is "polite," "appropriate," "provocative" -- whatever--are NEVER going to be the same. And yet, this is ultimately the underlying theme I see in just about every blogwar I’ve ever witnessed. We are a country of many cultures, and not all cultures within this society have the same standard: this is what diversity is about. Difference. And being able to live with that difference without getting one’s undies twisted twenty times over at the slightest transgression of the “missed manners” mark.

Every come to Metajesus meeting in the blogosphere centers on the issue of "community standards", and the going line is always, "sure, we welcome you to our community, but you must accept our "community standards."

I challenge that prerequisite to acceptance by a community. Think about what it says: yeah, sure, we’d like to hear what you have to say, but you must package it in terms that we deem acceptable—especially if you seek to address this community with some grievance, some issue, some cause that we do not consider “our own.” It’s about like inviting someone who speaks only French and saying, “Sure, we’d like to hear what you have to say about freedom fries, and how these have had a detrimental effect on you and your community, but, by golly, don’t expect us to learn French—you come on back when you have that English polished up a bit, ya hear?” In an American context, it’s like asking the “culturally othered” to coat their every word in a “pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top”-discourse—lest one be dismissed as “bitter,” "drunk"--or worse.

My hackles go up whenever these blogs trumpet the self-congratulatory “strength in diversity” tune because, while there may be diversity of party-affiliation, diversity of economic status, (a smidgeon of) racial and ethnic diversity, (a bigger smidgeon of) gender diversity, there is no REAL diversity of community standards allowed to coexist side by side. It is perhaps the difference between a wild prairie and a manicured suburban lawn. The manicured suburban lawn is the “garden standard” for dominant culture, where even standard garden variety dandelions are disruptive—and must be weeded out, eradicated. And the thistle, the relentless thorn-in-the-side-sticking weed with its roots planted firmly the ground over there, right along the property line of the front-yard forty: hell, fumigate the fuck out of it! Hail Herbicide!

I call it strip-mall diversity: you may buy a burger at McDonalds, Wendy’s, BurgerKing or White Castle, what you may not do is walk into one of those establishments and scream at the top of your lungs: YOU MOTHERFUCKING BEEFEATERS ARE DESTROYING THE PLANET WITH YOUR GLUTTONY AND GREED!!!!!

That would be rude. You would be considered crazy, delusional—you may even be at risk of arrest. No one will bother to ask whether what you said was true, or whether there might have been some mitigating circumstance to justify your violation of the suburban strip-mall diversity code. You’ll be off to the batshitloony bin, no questions asked. This standard prevents us from engaging in outrageous acts of courage and kindness. Like this one.

But let’s say an Argentine immigrant is sitting there (either in the establishment as a customer or just outside the door holding a paper cup with some chump change in it, basking in the unreflected glory of having dared to dream the American dream and having a nightmare instead). He can barely contain himself. Silently, he is cheering on the guy who just walked into the Burger King and screamed. “Bout time somebody has the fucking guts to tell it like it is!” he is thinking to himself. And no, he doesn’t think it was rude. It was honest. It was, from his perspective absolutely justified and absolutely appropriate. It may have even been the only appropriate response--from his perspective.

This is a very big problem in America, and it is partly a geographic one: unlike most other places in the world, here you can get in a car and drive 20 hours without having to switch languages, without having to switch currency, without having to “do in Rome as the Romans do.” You can stop at a Starbucks or any number of other retail establishments at the beginning of your journey in New York, and when you get to San Francisco, lo and behold, you can stop at the very same store, speaking the very same language and pay with the very same currency at the very same strip mall. That fact alone sets America’s relationship to “diversity” apart from just about everyone else’s. And those geographic areas that do not conform to the strip mall standard—Indian reservations, the “Hood”, Chinatowns and Latin quarters, etc.—are cordoned off into separate and outrageously unequal enclaves, more often than not, into areas, to cite Russell Means, “Where White Men Fear to Tread.” So even where true diversity of culture does exist in this country—that is, those communities whose community standards depart substantially from the suburban strip-mall standard--are isolated from the rest, allowing outsiders to those communities to spend entire lifetimes without ever so much as coming in contact with members of those communities in their communities—and thus to remain utterly oblivious to the standards that prevail in those enclaves. Whatever encounters the strip-mall suburbanites have with “those people” take place on the proverbial “other side of the tracks,”—be it in corporate board rooms, factory assembly lines, the classroom, public bathrooms, or wherever. Contact between people who live where white men fear to tread and where the suburban strip-mall standard prevails will occur under the terms of the strip-mall standard. You may not SCREAM the truth to power. You may only “speak” it, preferably in a squeaky, high-pitched ‘have-a-nice-day’ voice. Barring that, a whisper. DO NOT SHOUT! no matter how much it makes you wanna holler!

Here is a real-life example of what I mean:

Inner city school. Student population 100% economically disadvantaged--75-80% African American; teacher/staff population 90% middle-to-upper-middle class suburban American.

A group of 6th graders, 6 Black, one white, are sitting around watching some Boyz from the Hood-type video during their scheduled “free time.” In retrospect I know what I hadn’t known before: only one of those kids had the feeling he was “getting away with something.” According to the standards of their community, the remaining 6 were “behaving.” Very well, actually. Only the white kid was engaging in behavior that was apparently unacceptable to his community standards (i.e., listening to foul language!).

The white kid’s mother enters the room. Sees what’s going on. Is shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Goes to the VCR and yanks the video from the machine. Her action is entirely acceptable according to the standards set by her community, her worldview—indeed, her world, i.e., the dominant culture. But, from the perspective of the six remaining students, she has just engaged in totally unacceptable behavior. First of all, the tape in question was the private property of one of the black students, and, for students like this who have very little by way of “property,” every little bit is more or less sacred. In their eyes, she just “stole” their personal property—and for what?—they weren’t doing anything wrong. If they had been, they would have at least expected her—as an adult—to respond with some form of “disciplinary” action. But in this case, it wasn’t like they had to sneak that video out of the house in the morning: it may have even been a gift from a parent, or an uncle. She was “violating” them, and only a fool would believe that the sense of violation was not aggravated by the fact that she was white.

What ensued was something which, from my perspective and from the perspective of most adults in my community, was entirely justified (though not necessarily recommended or condoned because unlike the children, we know that there are some things these other communities “just aint never gonna get,” so it is sometimes indeed best to stick your asscheeks together, bite your tongue, and silently recite to yourself ten “Hail Missus and Massahs!”): one of these kids, forgetting the rules for survival in this environment, says: “what the fuck you doing bitch?” The rest of the kids joined in, offering similarly inappropriate commentary.

OK. There it is. Yep. Clearly, they crossed the line. And even in my community, no one would question the notion that they did. Bad news. Bad behavior. Totally inappropriate. Smack down time. And yet, where did this problem actually start? What caused this kid to cross the line: to me it is clear—the white kid’s mom who came in that room, bundled up in the iron-clad standards of her world and worldview, seriously violated the community standards of the majority of people there. She had no business so much as touching that tape. If anything, she should have yanked her kid out of the room and scolded him (“What’d I tell you, son, I don’t want you watching that kind of stuff.”). It is her right and responsibility to determine what she considers acceptable for her child. To impose that same standard on everyone else is nothing if not just plain rude. Her behavior was driven by a complete and total lack of awareness for the fact that she was in the minority in that environment and had no business imposing her community standards on those kids. But, of course, in the monochrome world of America, “white makes right.” And people still have to keep asking themselves why we can’t all just “get along.”

Needless to say, the kids were in deep shit. By the time I got involved, they were fuming.
“Man, Miss Lilian, it ain’t fair. It ain’t fucking fair. We wasn’t doin nothin wrong. We was just sittin’ there watching the movie, that bitch had no right to come in and steal that tape. Who the fuck she think she is. She can suck my dick!”

Ah, from the mouths of babes! That is a verbatim recount of what I encountered when I was called in to mediate in this dispute. Now, I suppose I was remiss in not writing the kid up for an additional two “fucks”, one “bitch” and the “she can suck my dick” which was probably worth TWO write-ups. But my motto has always been, “don’t sweat the small stuff” (unless the shit sticks tenaciously in your craw that even your dentist can't get it out!).

I looked at the kid. He’s the one the school had placed in “remedial” classes—until I started working with him, and realized the kid was not stupid, he was bored. And one reason he was bored was that he suffered from what I have since come to call “hyperintelligence.” Clearly, the kid was smarter than half the staff that was trying to teach him. About three weeks prior to this incident, I’d convinced the principal to give it a shot by placing him in the “gifted and talented” program. Course, after two years of being labeled “stupid” and going to the “dumbass class,” the kid was going to need more than a couple of weeks to recover from the indignation, demoralization and utter injustice of that situation. And this most recent incident was, to him, like adding insult to injury.

So instead of writing him up or otherwise reprimanding him for the two “fucks,” one “bitch” and the “she can suck my dick,” I just looked at him and said: “DeAndre, I don’t think it’s big enough for that.” Four of the six kids were girls—and my man DeAndre was definitely a Lady’s man: when my comment elicited giggles from the girls, DeAndre squirmed in his seat, and the red on his face could have outshined a rocket’s red glare!

Funny. In the remaining two years I spent working with that kid, I never heard another foul word from his mouth. Not one. Sad thing is, had anyone with the “community standards” of the dominate culture been standing at my back with the Puritan morality whip, I’d have been the one getting the write-up—these days, more likely a pink slip, if not a lawsuit!

So now I think I figured it out. I know what Stephen Colbert did wrong. Uh, rather, did right. He violated the suburban strip-mall diversity code. And that’s why I like him. Because actually, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my more or less lifelong role as an “embedded” non-Black member of Black communities, it is this: Black people know better than anyone how to tell someone to FUCK OFF without that person so much as noticing. This is the lesson of 500 years of having to stick your asscheeks together and walk on eggs just to get a seat at the table.

I don’t know where Colbert learned that lesson. All I know is that mofo’s got it down pat. And clearly, that’s what’s got his detractors’ undies bunched up.

(...and to put the moral of the story back into Metamode, my suggestion for a more peaceful coexistence and more “prairie style” sense of community would be, before you take offense, before you start throwing the “sanctimonious holier-than-thou fuckwads” and troll rates around, ask yourself some questions:

Would a German think this is rude?
Would this be considered “rude” in Dakar/Baghdad/Johannesburg?
Would a homeless person living on the street in a 99% African American community consider this statement “rude”? If so, would they applaud this anyway (perhaps because of its rudeness?), or would they be offended that the person who said it so much as dared to say this in this way?
Would this statement/behavior be considered “rude” universally: that is, in every time, place, situation, language, country, CONTINENT?
Would the black woman lawyer in the office next door—regardless of whether she’d have written something like this herself—might get a kick out of this (even if she might not admit it)?
Might there be someone, anyone, out there who—like the Argentine guy sitting outside the BurgerKing—might actually applaud this?
Is there some mitigating or aggravating circumstance that might merit this violation of our community standards (case in point: Ben Marble of Gofuckyourself Mr Cheney fame), or do we have to get the herbicide out and eradicate that disruptive little dandelion or that annoying thistle over there?

Those questions might help us put the suburban strip-mall diversity code behind us).

On The Radical Roots of Barack Obama

On the Radical Roots of Barack Obama (Rolling Stone) (+)

Mon Feb 12, 2007 at 14:12:01 PM PST


(Mission to Win the Heart and Mind of Gottlieb: Phase III--In a recent comment on this thread MLW's very own beloved Gottlieb made the mistake of challenging me to "convince" him that Obama's "the Man."

Gottlieb wrote:

Look forward to more of your 'propaganda' about this man. I am looking to be convinced.

Therein lie the roots of Phase I of the Mission to Win the Heart and Mind of Gottlieb; Phase II continued here on a not altogether serious note.)

We now enter

Phase III: On the Radical Roots of Barack Obama, citing from an article titled "Destiny's Child" by Ben Wallace-Wells, Rolling Stone

"He's got the whole world in his hands, he's got the whole world in his hands."

He's got the whole world in his hands? What do I mean by that?

Rev. Jim Wallis is cited by Rolling Stone as saying, about Obama:

If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from just look at Jeremiah Wright.

Who is Jeremiah Wright you say? He is the pastor of Obama's church:

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city's far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There's the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"

As Rolling Stone continues:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons.

But, perhaps more importantly:

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church -- the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

He's got the whole world in his hands. By that I mean that this man--with his "from Honolulu to Harvard"-history has the kind of hands-on, first-hand experience that no presidential candidate in my memory has ever possessed:

Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, back when the Hawaiian islands were still a wary and weird part of America, half military base, half pan-Pacific outpost. His own background was even more singular and chancy: Obama's father was a Muslim from Kenya, the son of a farmer, who grew up tending his father's goats and who, through an almost impossible succession of luck, won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii. At the time, Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, was eighteen, a student at the university, the daughter of a blue-collar couple from Kansas. When Barack was two, his father left the family and returned to Kenya. Barack's mother remarried, moving with her son to her new husband's home in Indonesia.

To Barack, the country seemed exotic (he briefly owned a pet monkey named Tata) but also "unpredictable and often cruel." He recalls watching floods swamp the countryside and seeing the "desperation" of poor farm families who "scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away." (In January, the conservative Washington Times alleged that Obama had attended a hyper-religious Islamic madrassah as a child in Indonesia -- a charge that the senator has denied.)

Obama spent four years in Jakarta before moving back to Honolulu, where he lived with his grandparents and won a scholarship to the private Punahou Academy, the place in Hawaii where all the Ivy League-bound kids go. (In his autobiography, he notes that when he hung out with a black friend, they together comprised "almost half" of the African-American population of Punahou.) He cops to "experimentation" as a teen, saying he smoked weed and even did "a little blow." He played basketball -- "with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent." Even today, his friends say, Obama talks a mean game. "He's a bit of a trash-talker," says Butts. "You see that competitive side of him come out when he's playing Scrabble or basketball."

After graduating from Columbia University, Obama spent four years as a street-level organizer in Chicago, where he met and worked with Wright, before attending Harvard Law School, where he was made the first black president of the law review. Winning the position required political savvy: "He was able to work with conservatives as well as liberals," recalls his friend Michael Froman, now an executive at Citigroup. Laurence Tribe, the renowned constitutional scholar, considers Obama one of his two best students ever: "He had a very powerful ability to synthesize diverse sources of information." When Obama returned to Chicago, he turned down big-money firms to take a job with a small civil rights practice, filing housing discrimination suits on behalf of low-income residents and teaching constitutional law on the side. He had thought he might enter politics since before he left for law school, and eventually he did, winning a seat in the state Senate at the age of thirty-seven.

Neither the "world out there," nor the real-world reality of these, our very own "mean streets" of urban America is an abstraction to Barack Obama. He has lived it. And these experiences shape his worldview. They shape his thinking, and are the bedrock of his thinking.

It has become fashionable, given Obama's charisma and compassion, to compare him to Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 campaign for the presidency achieved near-rock-star status. But Obama is not Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy grew up studying how to use America's power, and in his forties he began to venture out and notice its imperfections. Barack Obama came up in a study of those flaws, and now, thrust into a position of power in his forties, is trying to figure out what to do with it.

Samantha Power is part of a generation of thinkers who, like Obama, came of age after the Cold War. They worry about the problems created by globalization and believe that the most important issues America will confront in the future (terrorism, avian flu, global warming, bioweapons, the disease and nihilism that grow from concentrated poverty) will emanate from neglected and failed states (Afghanistan, the Congo, Sierra Leone). According to Susan Rice, a Brookings Institution scholar who serves as an informal adviser to Obama, their ideas come from the "profound conviction that we are interconnected, that poverty and conflict and health problems and autocracy and environmental degradation in faraway places have the potential to come back and bite us in the behind, and that we ignore such places and such people at our peril.

Over the past two years, Obama has come to adopt this worldview as his own. He came back fascinated from a quick trip to a U.S. project in Ethiopia, where American soldiers had parachuted in to help the victims of a flood: "By investing now," he said, "we avoid an Iraq or Afghanistan later." The foreign-policy initiatives he has fought for and passed have followed this model: He has secured money to fight avian flu, improve security in the Congo and safeguard Russian nuclear weapons. "My comment is not meant to be unkind to mainstream Democrats," says Lugar, "but it seems to me that Barack is studying issues that are very important for the country and for the world.

When Obama fails to act radically enough for anyone's taste, it's because his hands are by the contraints of Washington. But you can take it from me, Gottlieb, one thing I do know about folks here on the mean streets of my neighborhood: sooner or later, they figured out a way to get things done, even when their hands are tied.

This passage from the RS article is key in that regard:

"In Africa, you often see that the difference between a village where everybody eats and a village where people starve is government," he tells me. "One has a functioning government, and the other does not. Which is why it bothers me when I hear Grover Norquist or someone say that government is the enemy. They don't understand the fundamental role that government plays."

There are limitations to this view of the world, of course, and there are those who believe that for all his study, Obama has been too cautious on the big issues. When he was running for the Senate, Obama was an early and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. "I think our foreign policy has been all bluster and saber-rattling and continued mistakes over the last several years," he says. But since he arrived in the Senate, many of those who hoped Obama would become a great liberal champion have been disappointed. He has voted with conservatives on tort reform and industry-friendly provisions in the bankruptcy bill, and the troop-pullout bill he introduced in January was a late and unremarkable entry in the debate over Iraq. "Those of us in the Chicago progressive community still believe in Barack Obama," says Joel Bleifuss, editor of the left-wing magazine In These Times. "But at the moment we're pretty much taking it on faith."

Rolling Stone has opened the floor for debate on the question: Does Obama have the stuff to get him to the White House?

I think he does. Question is: does America have the stuff to let him? Do we have the stuff to put him there?

Breaking Godwin's Law: Don't You Dare!

(+) Breaking Godwin's Law. Don't You Dare!
May 02, 2006 at 13:35:40 America/Los_Angeles


(this may have to be a drive-by. I'm supposed to be getting some work done. Ahem. But I just couldn't resist making a plug for the OpEdNews article by Lonna Gooden Van Horn America's Hitler: Doing the Unthinkable -- Comparing Bush and Hitler -- Part one of five parts:)

We all know it by heart: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.


myleftasscheek :: Breaking Godwin's Law. Don't You Dare!
What is more, anyone who dares to draw serious parallels between Nazi Germany and the current administration and/or person of GWB, is quickly dismissed as a nutcase—no matter what their credentials, experience, or point of comparison. No Zyklon B. No Nazi.

You can’t expect to be taken seriously drawing parallels between Bush and Hitler--and this piece Worse Than Watergate? Yep. Worse yet. Worse than Hitler., for example, was never meant to be taken seriously either. Forgive me. I had a fit.

On thing Lonna Gooden VanHorn said is something I’ve been seeing for quite some time now:

It is interesting to note that many of the people who are most convinced of the truth of the premise that Bush is like Hitler and America is like Germany was in the 1930’s are people who lived in Germany while Hitler was in power.

This direct quote from someone who lived through the Nazi era struck me:


“So why, now, when I hear GWB's speeches, do I think of Hitler? Why have I drawn a parallel between the Nazis and the present administration? Just one small reason -the phrase 'Never forget'. Never let this happen again. It is better to question our government - because it really can happen here - than to ignore the possibility.

“So far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I've seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive war'. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of 'undesirable' aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one's neighbors -and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to 'fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed 'enemies'. The establishment of 'Homeland Security'. The dehumanization of 'foreigners'. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of 'goodness' and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies…”

It struck me because I’ve heard it so many times before from people in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and here in the US. I hear it all the time.

As many of you know: I lived in Germany for ten years, I speak German fluently—indeed, I am a translator and teacher of German-language literature, with heavy emphasis on Holocaust and Nazi Germany--I know many people—many—personally who lived through the Nazi era, some as Jews, some as Germans.

It's almost like this knowledge is a given--a basic assumption shared by everyone I know who is intimately familiar with the Nazi era (that is, 90% of my professional colleagues, clients, collaborators, etc.). It is like the unspoken known. Unspoken, and unspeakable. We talk about it behind closed doors, but what happens in the office stays in the office.

After the election, I called an old friend, retired professor of German, Catholic, married to a German Jew she met in New York, where both of them had fled (independently) from the Nazis, to tell her I thought the thing was rigged. She said:

No. It’s just like Nazi Germany. Genau das Gleiche! (trans. Exactly the same!). The people need their Führer and they all just fall in like sheep behind him. This flag-waving, this god-talk, it’s the same. Nein, du, es ist das Volk. (trans. No, dear, it’s the people.).

In my department, at conferences I attend (here and in German-speaking countries), everywhere in Germanic Studies related professions, this parallel is so evident as to be widely accepted as valid, but it cannot be articulated because it cannot be taken seriously. This is a problem.

So here it is: Myleftasscheek’s Law (whereby MLA’s ‘credentials’ for saying this is that she knows probably half the country’s “Germanists” personally as the result of 20 yrs’. academic, professional and personal immersion in German culture, inside and outside Germany):

“The more a person actually knows about Nazi Germany, the more coherent the comparison becomes.”

This means that German exiles (both Jewish and Gentile) who lived through the period; people who study, teach and translate German literature, culture and language; native Germans (indeed, native Europeans!) of every stripe; professors, academics, and students of German will likely be in a better position to tell you whether the parallel has any merit.

But they can't.

Because seriously suggesting anything of the kind—in scholarship, or the classroom, in casual conversation, even, as Godwin’s Law attests, on the blogs--necessarily lands you in the batshitloony binLaden bin, very few people with comprehensive, in-depth and gory detailed knowledge of the Nazi era are willing to go within a ten-foot pole of this beastly comparison because the “Godwin’s Law” of my profession is: DO NOT COMPARE the Nazis to the current regime. To do so is to commit professional suicide.

So Myleftasscheek’s Law certainly cannot be taken seriously. And the source cited here, Lonna Gooden VanHorn—she’s the lady with the book truck. Obviously, a total nutcase.

So I won’t seriously suggest there’s any merit to her observations, nor will I deny, however, that these thoughts have crossed my mind a time or two.

I thought they were kind of interesting, which does not necessarily mean that I take them seriously ...

Consequently, Bush, in the fulfillment of his mission has the potential to kill an unthinkable number of people. Iraq is only a good start. He may be, as Nelson Mandela has said, a man of “little foresight” who “doesn’t think properly, ” But if the past four years have proven anything, they have proven he is “resolute.” It is not likely that widespread death, which seems to be an abstraction to him – aided by the fact that he has never attended a soldier’s funeral – would cause him to doubt the path Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perls have set him upon. Not only did Bush say “Bring ‘em on!” He also uses the term “stay the course.” He may not believe as Henry Kissinger wrote that “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals,” but he certainly believes the second part of that statement – that they are “to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” General Zinni said the path Bush has set himself upon so resolutely leads us right over a cliff. But Bush, like Hitler, knows that frightened people like to be led by someone who is confident. Even if he is confident and wrong.
...
Bush has a potential Hitler really did not have. He has the potential to virtually end life on earth. His power mad underlings, the ones former CIA agent Ray McGovern says were called “the Crazies” during the first President Bush’s administration, talk about “limited” and “winnable” nuclear war. Bush himself, of course, has a “nukaler” bomb proof underground bunker. And Bush’s virulent faith might convince him that God would rescue “God’s country” and “good Christian” people from any devastation his acts might rain down on the “evil” people and the “evil” countries. Against, I might add, all historical evidence to the contrary. After all, fifty million people, the majority of them Christian people, died during WWII. And, while the Crusaders were certainly dedicated to their mission, on the whole they lost those early Christian wars.



As the postwar Austrian poet laureate Ingeborg Bachmann once summed it up nicely in these lines from "Curriculum Vitae"


... the night is
damned long, beneath the dregs
of a jaundiced moon, in its bilious
light, above me, on the rail of imaginary power
the sled of brocaded history
sweeps by (I cannot stop it).



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Yes, it is the same (8.75 / 4)

On Reproductive Responsibilities: An “unwanted” Child’s Eye View

I was an unwanted child, born in 1961. Had abortion been legal, I may not have existed. I was the fourth of sixth children, none of which my mother could afford. Higher education was not an option for my mother—it never was, neither for her, nor for her mother or grandmother before her. The underclasses, especially people of color, never had this expectation to begin with. And in my experience with this class of people, whether or not they can feed the child is to this day the primary factor to be considered in deciding whether to abort, give up for adoption or keep any “unwanted” pregnancy.

When my mother was “forced”—not once, not twice, but three times at least, to bring a child into the world which she could not feed, there were no aspirations to be abandoned, no childhood dreams to be shattered, no adolescence or naiveté to be lost: that had already gone down the tubes when she became the primary breadwinner in the family as a teenager—waitressing and cleaning houses to feed and clothe her younger siblings.

I was also the product of rape. Marital rape. It must have been a very difficult decision for my mother: this child, to keep or not to keep. She kept. Even though she could not afford it. Even though she must have known what she was keeping was a lifetime reminder of rape. We both bore the scars of that decision—and to this day, I cannot tell you whether her decision was right. I’ve written about it; many a time. I do not know whether legal abortion would have made her life—or mine--any easier. Whether she’d have chosen to abort. I know that her decision to have and to keep me was hell on both of us. She took her scars to the grave. I still live with mine—and to some degree, with hers. Such is life. Shit happens. Get over it. At least that’s what I tell myself—and it’s what’s enabled me to dream those dreams, aspire those aspirations, exercise those freedoms that were never an option for my mother.

The next child—the little sister I wasn’t supposed to know I had and who finally “found” me after many years of searching—my mother gave up for adoption. But that was a decision she couldn’t live with either. So when she got pregnant yet again, she kept the child. Even though she knew this time she really couldn’t afford it. Even though she knew she really was in no position to give this child half a shot at a half-way decent life. And I don’t believe my mother’s deliberations in this regard were centered on anything but that: whether or not she could provide for these children. Because, as I said, the dreams, the aspirations, the adolescence, the naiveté were luxuries she and others like her could not afford, and many like her still cannot afford today.

Looking back on all this as an adult female—one who fought ferociously for abortion rights not only here in this country, but in Germany as well; one for whom the ultimate consequence was never to have children—uh, er, never to get pregnant in the first place... I think about that sometimes now, when people familiar with my work with children ask, “Miss Lilian, you’re so good with kids. You’d have made such a good mother, why don’t you have any of your own?”

I can’t tell them the whole truth. As I’ve written before, the scars are scarcely visible, after all. Naw. I just say, “You know, there are so many children in the world whose parents really could use a helping hand. If there’s anything I can offer these children—and their parents—well, then here I am. Besides, it’s nice to be able to send them home at 6!”

At this stage in the game, in the year 2006, at a time when we are losing elections to madmen who are putting the entire human and animal population, not to mention the environment, at risk, I think it’s time to look for a different approach to “reproductive freedom,” one that focuses less on so-called “reproductive rights” and more on “reproductive responsibilities.” Again, this is 2006. Not 1966. Not 1976. At this stage in the game, anyone who is having “unprotected” sex is risking more than an unwanted pregnancy—one that may not only destroy the dreams and aspirations of the mother, but one that may in fact leave the child permanently scarred.

Do I blame my mother for bringing me into the world knowing she was in no position to do so? How can I? Not unlike Cali, she didn’t have many options—before or after the fact. Not even birth control. But that was then, this is now. Unless I’m sorely mistaken, condoms were not being sold in vending machines in public restrooms at the time. But they are NOW.

I frankly cannot understand the decision on the part of anyone right now to bring a child into the world, no matter how well-situated they may be. I just do not understand it, and I certainly do not envy anyone seeking to raise a child in this environment—just about anywhere in the world. But, hey, it’s not my place to understand, and not my position to judge.

Spades Anyone? (Humor Me in My Momentary Obamania;-)

OK, people, I can't stop. Please, just humor me for a few here, understanding that this is likely but a temporary intoxication resulting from the overdose of Obamania currently taking me, my city and state by storm. Everyone knows I'm a sucker for the good stuff--if you're gonna get "hooked," you may as well get hooked on the good stuff-the cheap shit isn't worth the hangover. And this applies to any form of "drug": truth, lies, ignorance, arrogance, tobacco, pot, booze, blogs, books-and especially, drums.

I've never been much of a gambler, though I'm certainly grateful for the fact that this particular addiction has worked to the benefit (albeit with some detriment) of Native American communities over the past 20-some-odd-years.

And, while I'm not much of a card player anymore, I have an affinity for card-playing analogies that goes back to my days as a juvenile offender doing time in correctional facilities where I learned to play the game of spades. In every urban juvenile detention facility I ever visited, playing spades was second only to smoking Kool 100s on the list of number one priority pastimes. We did it by marathon. And it was deadly serious--cause the ante was, well, what else? Kool 100s. So the better you were at it, the more Kool 100s you had to either smoke yourself or to use as capital and/or petty cash in the market economy of the "inside." In the social structure of the juvenile detention facility, popularity and prestige were determined to a large degree by your ability to play--and play to win--this game. Took me a while to get the hang of it, but hey--the power of addiction is fierce--and my self-preservation instincts as a chain smoker kicked in pretty quickly back then. Before long, whatever else spoke for or against me in this "prison population," one thing was clear: no one wanted me on the opposing team in a game of spades. Nopity.

(Yeah, I'm still trying to get over my badass self).

My great grandmother, the last person in my immediate family to have lived on the Reservation and the last person in said lineage not to have fallen prey to the perils of alcoholism and the attendant social dysfunction (like "doing time"), was a passionate card player. One of my most treasured possessions is a 1984 article from the Green Bay Press Gazette titled "Old hat: City Sisters first voted in 1920." It features a delightful image of my great grandmother, Maude, (then age 98) and her sister, my "Aunt Olive" (then age 95) at the voting booth. (Unfortunately, I do not have the original, only bad copies-or that image would be my desktop!)



The text (by Tom Murphy):

Herbert Hoover? "Heavens, no!"

Warren Harding? "Who ran against him?"

FDR? "The best president we ever had."

Richard Nixon? "Who could vote for him?"

There's a bit of pixie-and a lot of spunk-in 98-year-old Maude Rasmussen and her sister, 95-year-old Olive Campbell, who provided the answers above.

Ronald Reagan is too old to be president," said Olive. "He's a nice man, pleasant and all that, but too old."

Maude agreed with her younger sister but allowed as how the president "might be good at Spite and Malice," the ladies' favorite card game.

If there is no doubt about their partisanship, there is also none about doing duty.

The sisters voted Tuesday at the Green Bay Fire Station No. 6. ...

Independent and proud. Alert and quick-stepped.

Olive admitted voting for Walter Mondale.

"That would be telling," said a more impish Maude when a reporter pried.

They did not mind the 13-minute wait to vote. A photographer's mention of their ages brought smiles of admiration from the 35 other persons at the cramped, four-booth polling place.

...If Olive and Maude were aware of the odds against their man winning Tuesday, it didn't show. This was, after all, 25th presidential election held in their lifetime.

Old hat.

In 1920 they voted for James M. Cox. He ran against Harding.

So what's that got to do with my new-found intoxicant, Obamania?

He's a poker man. Just as I suspected. Texas Hold Em is his game:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - Long before he became a political rock star with designs on the White House, Barack Obama was known to his friends in the Illinois legislature as a fearsome poker player.

During weekly games of Texas Hold 'Em with his fellow state senators, Obama played a 'tight' style of poker - patiently waiting for the right cards, folding when dealt a bad hand and taking few unnecessary risks.

"He knew the chances of winning and he knew he was going to walk out of there even, or ahead, almost every time," says Illinois state senator Terry Link, a former poker partner who had his wallet emptied by Obama on many occasions. "He never went into a game like a riverboat gambler."

Obama used the same strategy he brought to the card table in Illinois - cautious and somewhat conservative - as he weighed the risks of running for the presidency in 2008.

Win or lose, Obama's White House bid likely to pay dividend

Here are the "rules" for Texas Hold `Em:

Most Texas Hold 'Em Poker games start with the two players to the left of the dealer (the button) putting a predetermined amount of money into the pot before any cards are dealt, ensuring that there's something to play for on every hand. This is called "posting the blinds." Most often, the "first blind" -- the player to the left of the dealer -- puts up half the minimum bet, and the "second blind" puts up the full minimum bet.

Each player is dealt two cards, face down. These are known as the "hole cards."

Betting Begins

A round of betting takes place, beginning with the player to the left of the two who posted the blinds. Players can call, raise, or fold when it's their turn to bet.

The Flop

After the first betting round, the dealer discards the top card of the deck. This is called burning the card and is done to ensure that no one accidentally saw the top card, and to help prevent cheating.

The dealer then flips the next three cards face up on the table. These cards are called the "flop."

NOTE: Eventually, a total of five community cards will be placed face up on the table. Players can use any combination of the community cards and their own two hole cards to form the best possible five-card Poker hand.

After the flop, another round of betting takes place, beginning with the player to the left of the dealer (the button). During this and all future rounds of betting, players can check, call, raise, or fold when it's their turn to bet.

Fourth Street

The dealer burns another card and plays one more face up onto the table. This, the fourth community card, is called the "turn" or "Fourth Street."

The player to the left of the dealer (the button) begins the third round of betting.

Fifth Street

The dealer burns another card before placing the final face-up card on the table. This card is called the "river" or "Fifth Street."

Final Betting and The Winner

Players can now use any combination of seven cards -- the five community cards and the two hole cards known only to them -- to form the best possible five-card Poker hand.

The fourth and final round of betting starts with the player to the left of the dealer (the button).

After the final betting round, all players who remain in the game reveal their hands. The player who made the initial bet or the player who made the last raise shows their hand first.

The player with the best hand wins.

I don't know. Looks to me like we're heading into the turn on Fourth Street.

Now I don't know whether it's such a good idea to rely on Internet strategy tips for winning presidential elections in this country, but whatever the Democrats have been relying on for the past two election cycles sure as hell hasn't been working. Here's what the the Net advisers have to say about Fourth and Fifth Street:

Fourth Street and Fifth Street

Also know as The Turn and The River, respectively, the fourth and fifth community cards give you two more chances to either get out of the pot before you lose even more money -- or increase your winnings.

At this point, it's likely there will only be one or two other players still in the pot with you. The best advice here is to be cautious. After fourth street, don't stay in the pot hoping for a straight or flush, unless you can do so on a check (that is, without putting more chips into the pot). Although there will be times when you would have drawn the straight or flush, they will be outweighed by the times you wouldn't.

The bottom line is this: Don't allow yourself to get sucked in too far with a weak hand.

That said, there is a point where the investment you've already made virtually dictates that you hang in there. It's useful to measure this in terms of percentage of your chips. For example, if you've already committed 40% of your chips to the pot, another 5% isn't that much. This is a gray area, so once again the best advice is to be cautious.

I don't know whether these little tidbits will do much for those folks still worried about whether Obama is going to "sell them down the River." I do know, however, that when it comes down to winning and losing the really tough battles in life, the lessons I learned at the card table in the various "houses of D." have served me far better than anything I've ever learned in any other educational setting I have had the privilege of visiting.

And that's another reason I'm keeping my bets on Obama-until he decides it's time to "fold."

One thing is clear, he would not even be in the game if he did not have a card or two left to play.

Stay tuned. ;-)

The Peace Pragmatist (My First DKos Diary)

I've never made a very good voyeur, and everyone knows I never know when to STFU, but with all the hullabaloo out here, I simply could not resist digging up this old piece: My First Dkos Diary, (August, 2005), posted under the nom de guerre "Starkravinglunaticradical"--originally titled:

Visualize War! Hometown Hippy Responds to Markus Moulitsas

Good Morning America, this is Chicago!

Wow. I woke up this morning feeling like a visitor from another planet.

As a starkravinglunaticradical who has always been opposed to violence of any kind-be it domestic or foreign-I suspect that, in the world according to Kos, I'd be lumped together with the "touchy-feely hippy types," some of whom, we must never fail to note, have since "grown-up" to earn PhDs, JD s, MD s, etc. and currently lead productive (though not necessarily prosperous) lives disguised as "professionals" in various sectors running the gamut from university positions to corporate management and the legal profession.

Reading DailyKos has been the most pleasurable part of my morning routine for about the last year. This morning, Markus Moulitsas-that is, the great Kos himself-posted the following statements on his liberal blog:

I'm not anti-war. As I've said before, I'm a military hawk. I supported the Afghanistan War and I supported the Bosna and Kosovo interventions. I'm not one of these touchy-feely hippy types that thinks war is inherently bad. I laugh at people who think they can "visualize peace".

Unlike most people reading this, I grew up in a country at war.

The War Pragmatists
by Marginalized Margarine Queen

Never mind that the "touchy feely hippy types" likely comprise a large portion of the constituency that has allowed DailyKos to become the primary source of income for Markus Moulitsas as Kosmic Kingpin of the highest-trafficked political blog in the `Sphere, ranking, according to Blogstreet, in the top-5 of all weblogs in popularity, in the top-10 according to Technorati.

Here's the statement that blew me away and forced me to ask just who is further divorced from reality: Kos, or the rest of Americans born on or after 7 December, 1941.

"Unlike most people reading this, I grew up in a country at war."

WTF? I was born in the United States of America, it is where I grew up. In 1984, with the re-election of Ronald Reagan, I left the country in search of political asylum from a population stupid enough to put Darth Vader in a cowboy hat at the reign for a second term. I remained in exile until 1992, when I returned to my homeland just in time to vote for Ross Perot.

So, there's an almost decade-long "memory hole" in my cultural consciousness as an American, perhaps best illustrated by such memorable moments as the time I asked someone if there was a copy shop nearby, to which a friendly stranger replied, "There's a Kinko's down the street," and I had to ask, "Kinko's? What's Kinko's?" or the time I lost any shred of credibility while addressing a group of 5th graders on the south side of Chicago when they said, "Hey, you's wearin' MC Hammer pants!" and I said, "Who's MC Hammer?" (I was clad in the traditional garb of the Malinke people of Guinea, West Africa, a place I visited often in my nearly decade-long period of self-imposed exile from the country of my birth).

Upon reading this statement, I had to ask myself: did I miss something truly relevant in my absence? Did the "touchy-feely hippy types" actually manage not only to "visualize peace" sometime between the mid-80s and the early 90s which the European press failed to report? Did I happen to blink and miss a brief moment of PEACE? Was there actually a day or two somewhere in there when my country was not dropping bombs on someone somewhere in the world?

It only took one google-hit to confirm that I had in fact missed nothing of the sort: the country I grew up in (i.e., the US) has been engaged in some form of military intervention ever since the day I was born in 1961 see here. Nope, not a single moment of peace had been sucked down my memory hole.

OK, what Kos is saying is that, unlike most of his readers, he actually grew up in a country where war was not displaced to some distant land way beyond the wild blue yonder, some neverneverland where its citizens would never contend with the consequences of their wars on a daily basis, but instead watch their wars from afar--as a mere abstraction, a minor distraction, a defense budget infraction and media attraction. Kos grew up in a country where war was staged on his doorstep, in his own backyard.

Unlike many of us here I did at least have the opportunity to see my defense-budget tax dollars in action while living in Germany during the $13.1 trillion-abstraction that was the "cold war"-even if that amounted to passing cruise missiles at 120 mph while racing up and down Hitler's Highway-otherwise known as the "Autobahn"-in my late-model Citroen.

I even had the amusing "pleasure" of once having a minor fender-bender with a US military vehicle: so distracted was I by the US-military convoys clogging traffic in the small northern German town of Neumünster during one of those exercises in insanity staged annually every fall, when NATO troops dressed up in full military garb, hauled out their trucks, tanks and toys and played "war" not on a video screen, but in the fields and forests of Germany, that I once rear-ended a US military VW-bug, put a dent in the fender and paid for it dearly in the subsequent 6-week long bureaucratic nightmare resulting from military personnel's refusal to accept my generous offer of 50 bucks to pick up the tab for the bumper, insisting instead that even this little fender bender would be handled strictly by the book.

Those NATO maneuvers really used to piss me off because they always caught me off guard: I'd go out for a peaceful walk in the woods, only to find myself surrounded by British and American boys all dressed up in fatigues with nowhere to go but my little patch of wood. In my absolute disgust for what the US had become since 1941, I suppose just hearing a word of English was enough to set me off because it reminded me of just how ugly my country had since become. I never imagined that barely a decade would pass before I'd be sitting here again in Chicago, thinking ugly fucking Americans, man!! No, even worse. We Ugly Americans have since become hideous. Obscene.

As Winona LaDuke recently stated, speaking last spring at the University of Illinois-Chicago, there is barely a shred of decency left in this country. And I could not agree more.

OK, my personal politics, as a "touchy-feely hippy type" (who happens to have a PhD in German, and thus a convenient "disguise" that allows me to pass for something more "legitimate"--respectable, even!) aside: the point is "LIKE MOST PEOPLE READING THIS, I GREW UP IN A COUNTRY AT WAR"-a country too busy "visualizing peace" to take time out to "visualize war" and thus understand the consequences of perpetual military intervention.

For the record: this country has been at war since 1941. Conveniently, many of us prefer to "visualize peace"-and in this, we act very much in accord with the US government, which is doing everything in its power to prevent us from "visualizing war."

So, today, my fellow Americans--doves, hawks, pragmatists and peaceniks alike--I invite you to VISUALIZE WAR, and offer this stunning audio-visual tool as just one step in that direction. For the more faint at heart, might I suggest the following alternative:.

And, lest we forget, the most hideous
of them all.

I say, to hell with Peace, VISUALIZE WAR.

"The Vast Tapestry of Lies on which We Feed...": Harold Pinter on "Art, Truth and Politics"

Marginalized Margarine Queen©2005
Well, so I guess I knew this blog was going to be as much about writing as it is about politics. And, ever since I was recently “tipped off” by Harold Pinter’s German agent that his acceptance speech would be a “doozie,” and probably worth the time to listen, I’ve been anticipating the speech. I sat down to watch it late last night, with a glass of red wine--which, as the Germans say, is the nectar of truth.

It was better than I expected, and indeed rife with perhaps more truth than most my compatriots this side of the big pond are willing to swallow--even if they think to wash it down with a quart or two of Cabernet. The 45-minute speech on “Art, Truth and Politics” can be viewed here.

The full text of the lecture has since been posted on the site. Pinter begins by citing a statement he made in 1958 (also available on his website):

"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

We—especially “we, the American people”—would be well-advised to view the remainder of his statements in the context of this preface in which he clearly establishes his intended audience: Pinter is speaking to us as ‘citizens’ of the United States; more charitably perhaps, as citizens of the world. He is not asking us to suspend the theatrical disbelief that is the stuff of drama. No, hier schenkt er uns den reinen Wein ein, beseeching us to look in the mirror of our own history, and our own complicity in world history. Indeed, Pinter’s statements on the Bush and Blair regimes are likely to circulate as damning indictments through the blogosphere with the usual goading, gleeful fanfare of the "Blame BushandBlair Game"--and we would certainly be remiss in not taking very seriously his call to bring these criminals to justice, but let us not enlist these words to further perpetuate the dynamics of denial that keep us firmly ensconced in this vast tapestry of lies we, too, have swallowed all too willingly, hook line and sinker, in our continued efforts to save the ship of fools that arrived on these shores but a few short centuries ago.

OK. Let’s forget about the “distant” past, those centuries of dishonor and genocide for which we, the American people of the postwar generation, really cannot be held accountable: the sins of the fathers shall not descend upon on the sons and daughters of the American devolution! Forget about the American Holocaust and the Middle Passage. What's done is done! Let’s just look at the truth about ‘our’ country, the truth about America, the truth about her people, yes, the truth about us and what we have and have not done in the past fifty years or so. These are not the 'sins of the fathers'--they are the crimes in which we the people are complicit, whether by virtue of indifference, of apathy or sheer ignorance--this is the stain on the soul of our nation and our national identity. Wiping BushCo from office is not going to do much by way of cleaning up this part of the mess we have made.

Lie back on the cushions of your couch, America, wherever you are. Lie back and think of England--listen to what Pinter has to say about you and your most recent past....None of this happened on BushCo's watch. None of it.

.... President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The UK’s Guardian reports on passages I suspect the American media (and the American public, the liberal left included) is likely to conveniently gloss over, lest the proverbial mirror of American self-love be shattered and the truth actually stare us square in the face from jagged edges of the glinting shards.

At one point, for instance, Pinter argued that "the United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the second world war". He then proceeded to reel off examples. But the clincher came when Pinter, with deadpan irony, said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." In a few sharp sentences, Pinter pinned down the willed indifference of the media to publicly recorded events. He also showed how language is devalued by the constant appeal of US presidents to "the American people". This was argument by devastating example. As Pinter repeated the lulling mantra, he proved his point that "The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance." Thus Pinter brilliantly used a rhetorical device to demolish political rhetoric.

I think the Guardian is wrong to dismiss these statements as a “rhetorical device” brilliantly deployed in the service of demolishing “political rhetoric.” This is not about political rhetoric, nor is it merely about the 'willed indifference of the media,'--it is as much about the 'willed indifference' of the American people. These things have happened on our watch.

This is the gut-wrenching admonishment of a man in the last throes of life, desperately seeking to prevent the inevitable damnation of turning in his grave for eternity lest these, perhaps his last living words, not be heeded by their intended audience: We, the American people. Look at the lines on this man’s face, look into his eyes. This outrage. This absolute solemnity, brutal honesty in response to a 50-year worldwide assault on human dignity: this, America, is who we really are. This is perhaps Pinter's last stand. Are we going to take it sitting down, or are we going to get up from our couches and take a good look in the mirror?

Do we dare look in the mirror Pinter is holding up to us in this speech? I don’t know. I only know that I fear that once again, a select few of us--the Radical Left--will be left standing here holding the shards in our hands. And there will be nothing left but to use them to etch and inscribe—on some transcendental slate somewhere—the memory of what might have been, if it hadn’t been this.

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

My thanks and deepest admiration for any man who dares to speak the truth this eloquently. My regrets that so few are likely to heed his words.

For today, though, I'm just left reeling in the drunkenness of these tides of truth washing over me.

Smashing, I say, simply smashing.

Heart of Whiteness

The Heart of Whiteness
Marginalized Margarine Queen©2005

[WARNING! The following piece, while it addresses some very serious issues and contains a number of legitimate “action items,” is also riddled with sardonically "black" humor which may be offensive to some readers. Parental supervision may be advised.]

(formerly titled: What the Fuck Is Your Problem, Babe!?)

Ok, I admit. I’ve been sitting here asking myself: What the fuck is your problem?

Hmm.

What the fuck is my problem? I’ve wracked my brain for an answer. Scoured the lines on my face in the mirror, checked under the table, the desk, the living room chair, cleaned up the office and am starting to feel like George Bush looking for WMD or the GOP trying to find a Black man from the City of Chicago to run against Obama. To be honest, I really don’t have a problem: I’ve got a decent (extremely flexible) job, money in the bank, wonderful husband, students galore, a few good friends, closet full of haute couture, car’s paid for, fridge is full. What the hell.

When in doubt, look it up.

So I went to Jeeves and typed “what the fuck is your problem?” Lo and behold, there it was!

White People. That’s my fucking problem. White People who don’t get that it’s not my problem, it’s theirs. I found at least one white guy who agrees (there are a lot of them, you know, and yet far too few, and many more who know it, but are afraid to say it: the problem that dare not speak its name).

It’s not about Indians, it’s not about Blacks. The problem is white people, and until that problem is addressed, all the talking in the world on the subject of “what can I do? say a powerless few.” is not going to get us anywhere. It would amount to telling Marie Antoinette to slap a band-aid on her head.

I haven’t yet read Robert Jensen’s recently released The Heart of Whiteness, but I’ve heard about it. Excerpts from the book which argues that, when it comes to racism, white people are the problem, were published this September in The Houston Chronicle under the title “The new White People’s Burden: Take a hard look in the mirror”.

And in fact, this is nothing new: people of color have known it all along, and a lot of white people have been saying it too. It is the underlying assumption behind the journal Race Traitor, co-founded in 1992 by John Garvey and former Harvard history professor Noel Ignatiev . It’s certainly not new to me, either, and I have been publishing articles in that journal since around 1995 in which I have repeatedly pointed to precisely this problem.

Frankly, since I personally have had increasingly less contact with white people since then, I haven’t really felt so much like I had a problem. But ever since Katrina, I’ve really had a problem. Going out in the world has been a serious problem for me, I confess.

And it was Jensen’s Houston Chronicle article that helped me understand why. Sheesh. How can anyone be so stupid as to miss the obvious?

Here’s what he writes:

As devastating as the physical destruction brought by Katrina has been, it may turn out that one of the hurricane's most enduring legacies is the way it made visible the effect of racial and class disparities on who lived and who died, who escaped early and who suffered from being left behind.

Such realities have always been clear to those on the bottom of the hierarchy, of course, and to others willing to face the reality of white supremacy predominance. But now all of white America has an opportunity to see what racialized disparities in wealth and well-being look like, in painfully raw form.

Fair enough. We all know that.

But this question really gets to the heart of what my fucking problem is:

Will we take that opportunity, or turn away out of fear? Do we have the courage to face the meaning of what we have seen?

There you have it: my fucking problem in a nutshell. Apparently, America’s answer to this question is an emphatic: NO. I really thought, I sincerely believed, that, even if white rednecks in Texas kept believing “this was working out very well” for “those people” “in that part of the world," the rest of us, would get up off our asses, our keyboards, our couches and chairs, and take to the streets in a frenzy of public outrage. That didn’t happen. The fact that it didn’t is a fucking problem.

OK. So the guilt trip’s not working. I get it. But let’s look at what Jensen proposes:

We can pretend that we have reached "the end of racism" and continue to ignore the question. But that's just plain stupid. We can acknowledge that racism still exists and celebrate safe forms of diversity and multiculturalism while avoiding the political, economic, and social consequences of white supremacy. But, frankly, that's just as stupid. The fact is that most of the white population of the United States has never really known what to do with those who are not white. Let me suggest a different approach.

Let's go back to the question that W.E.B. Du Bois said he knew was on the minds of white people. In his 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote that the question whites were afraid to ask him was: "How does it feel to be a problem?"

Du Bois was identifying a burden that blacks carried — being seen by the dominant society not as people but as a problem people, as a people who posed a problem for the rest of society.

Du Bois was right to identify "the color line" as the problem of the 20th century. Now, in the 21st century, it is time for whites to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question at the heart of color. It's time for white people to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, we are the problem.

The moral task of white America is to do something that doesn't come naturally to people in positions of unearned power and privilege: Look in the mirror honestly and concede that we live in an unjust society and have no right to some of what we have.

We should not affirm ourselves. We should negate our whiteness, strip ourselves of the illusion that we are special because we are white, steel ourselves so that we can walk in the world fully conscious and try to see what is usually invisible to us white people. We should learn to ask ourselves, "How does it feel to be the problem?"

That is the new White People's Burden. Instead of pretending to civilize the world, let's try to civilize ourselves.

In an earlier piece in which Jensen addresses the issue of racist Indian mascots (and in the broadest sense, a subject I have touched on elsewhere in some of my posts to this forum, i.e., the “power of naming and claiming” (LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred), he also speaks to a matter that has generated considerable confusion in my recent postings on the subject of the past:

Let's start with the past, which people often want to avoid. It's history, they say. Get over it -- don't get stuck in the past. But this advice to forget history is selective; many of the same folks who tell indigenous people not to get stuck in the past are also demanding that schoolchildren get more instruction in the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers. It is commonly asserted, and undoubtedly true, that Americans don't know enough about their own history (or that of the world). The question isn't whether we should pay more attention to history. The relevant questions are: Who gets to write history? From whose point of view is history written? Which historical realities are emphasized and which are ignored? So, let us not take the seemingly easy -- but intellectually and morally lazy -- path of selectively contending that "history doesn't matter." Everyone knows it matters.

And in this context, Jensen also provides insights into related issues that have come up in the context of recent discussions on liberal-progressive blogs:

I am not asking anyone who is white to feel guilty about this. I do not feel guilty about this. I feel incredibly pained and saddened by it, just as I feel pained and saddened by other acts of brutality that litter human history. But I cannot take on guilt for events that happened before I was born. Feeling guilt for things outside my control would be illogical.

However I can -- and should -- feel guilty about things I have done wrong in my life, over which I do have control. I should feel guilty not simply so that I feel bad, but so that change is possible. Guilt is healthy when it leads to self-critique, to moral reflection, to a commitment to not repeating mistakes. We can feel that guilt both individually and collectively. We can see what we have done wrong or failed to do right, both by ourselves and with others. That brings us to the present.

... One easy place to start could be eliminating a nickname and logo to which a significant number of Indians object. All that white people would have to do is accept that simple fact, and change the name and logo. It would cost no one anything, beyond the trivial expense of changing the design on some stationary, uniforms, and university trinkets.

But wait, many white people say, isn't systemic poverty on reservations more important than a logo? Of course it is. Are there more pressing problems for Indians than the Fighting Sioux design? Sure. But there is nothing to stop anyone from going forward to address other problems and, at the same time, taking the simple step of changing the nickname and logo. It's not an either/or choice.

In the course of the past year or so, I have been asked countless times why I reacted so strongly to the casual metaphorical use of a term like “trail of tears” on Thanksgiving Day on the Democratic "liberal blog," Daily Kos and many have understood why. But some have not. Jensen’s discussion of the use of Indian images as mascots in team sports might help to clarify:

Why should Indians have the right to make the decision over how their name and image are used? Because in the absence of a compelling reason to override that right, a person or group of people should have control over their name and image. That's part of what it means to be a person with full humanity. And in this case, the argument for white people giving Indians that power is intensified by the magnitude of the evil perpetrated by whites on Indians.

To acknowledge all that is to acknowledge that the American nation is based on genocide, on a crime against humanity. The land of the free and the home of the brave, the nation that was born as the vehicle for a new freedom, rests on the denial not only of freedom, but of life itself, to a whole group of people -- for the crime of getting in the way of what the European invaders wanted for themselves, the land and its resources.

And finally from one white male to his fellow Fighting Whites, Jensen issues an invitation:

I am calling for white people to acknowledge that we have no right to choose how Indians are named and represented. We have no standing to speak on the question. Our place is to shut up and do what we are told. Let me say that again, for emphasis: We white folks should shut up and do what Indians tell us. Let's try it, first, on this simple issue. We might find it is something we should do on a number of other issues.

And if we do that, individually and collectively we will take a step toward claiming our own dignity and humanity. The way in which white America refuses to come to terms with its history and the contemporary consequences of that history has material and psychological consequences for Indians (as well as many other groups). But in a very real sense, we cannot steal the dignity and humanity of indigenous people. We can steal their resources, disrespect them, insult them, ignore them, and continue to repress their legitimate aspirations. We can try to distort their own sense of themselves, but in the end we can't take their humanity from them.

So call him a windbag. Tell him to fuck off. Whatever. Call him a "sanctimonious holier than thou prick." Perhaps you would prefer to be more polite and call him a "bigot," a "racist," or an "asshole." It's a typical knee-jerk reaction--especially for "liberal-progressives" who would are more comfortable sending folks like this up a river in Egypt than they are dealing with the issue of Identity Politics and White Privilege honestly and in any meaningful way.

(If you still don’t get what the problem is, maybe this will help. Otherwise, I give up. Go play in the street or something.)

But, if you want to take his advice, here are a few suggestions for getting started:

First of all, educate—yourselves, your children (their teachers!), your neighbors, friends and enemies.

One of the best resources I know for unraveling the lies that American history teaches all of us is James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. Check out his site, he’s since published a number of additional titles that are equally valuable. You may want to consider purchasing this and other titles from another grumpy old white guy Thomas Metz, director of the Honor Resource Center and proprietor of an online bookstore. Tom has been diligently engaged in the attempt to deal with his fucking problem and mine for a lot longer than it’s been fashionable to do so, and in addition to providing a wonderful resource with a carefully “vetted” selection of titles for educating white people, he’s been doing a lot for the Native peoples in southern Wisconsin. Check out his site. It’s marvelous and worthy of support. Tom is truly an unsung hero.

Do the mascots piss you off as much as they do me? Want to piss off your Redstate friends, family and foes next holiday season? Send ‘em some Fighting Whites paraphernalia. Proceeds go to the Fighting Whites Scholarship Fund which, by 2003, had raised $100,000 in scholarship funds for Native students.

Systematic poverty piss you off? Sure pisses me off. And it pisses me off especially on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Been working on this particular problem for a number of years, but, hey, my resources are not unlimited. You can help me get over your fucking problem this holiday season (and throughout the year) by putting one of the many, many organizations and private individuals who have declared themselves Friends of Pine Ridge Reservation on your shopping list. This is an incredible site and a tremendous resource for anyone sincerely interested in taking a bite out of the problem. You can spend hours browsing there and looking for individuals and organizations to match your interests. I would advise against contributing to any of the government agencies that are also listed on the site, however, and make a sincere attempt to support Indian-owned and-or operated groups and projects.

Here’s the hottest tip since Columbus. The White Earth Ojibwe Winona LaDuke’s Native Harvest store . You can max out your credit card, impress friends, family and neighbors with exotic culinary delights that are in fact the most domestic of all: wild rice, maple syrup...and the packaged gourmet soups are exquisite. This is a 100% Native owned business that provides jobs for community members based on a truly innovative model for establishing a sustainable economy on the reservation.

There are many ways you can help....

Native Harvest
Honor Resource Center
Friends of Pine Ridge
We Look in All Directions
Turtle Island Productions Fighting Whites
Robert Jensen What the Fighting Sioux can tell us about White People
White Privilege
The New White People’s Burden: Take A Hard Look in the Mirror
Tim Wise
PowerNomics Corporation of America
Harlem Children's Zone
Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble