I See Ghosts

A few weeks ago, Republican Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed into law SB1070, which originally required peace officers in Arizona to stop and question people “where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien” about their citizenship status. No definition of reasonable suspicion was given, and the day after the law was signed, an American Citizen of Mexican descent was arrested for failing to have his papers birth certificate on his person. “The legislation would require … force public service employees to report suspected illegal immigrants.” This meant that the police could be sued by citizens who felt they weren’t enforcing the new law to their satisfaction. Subsequently, she signed a second law that withholds funds from schools which offer classes that “… promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” “The bill was written to target the Chicano, or Mexican American, studies program in the Tucson school system,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Horne.

A few days ago, Republican (Tea Party) candidate for the United States Senate from Kentucky, Rand Paul stated that while he is against and “abhors anything racist”, there are parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that he finds overreaching because they infringe on the “individual liberties” of racists who own restaurants to discriminate the race of their clientele. This is the same man who shouted to his supporters on the eve of his primary victory that he is on his way to Washington to “take our government back!”

In Texas, where Thomas Jefferson has been replaced by Newt Gingrich in high school history textbooks by an avowedly vocal and active conservative Christian block of Republican school-board members, they are now attempting to change the language of the books so that the next generation of students doesn’t learn about the slave trade which was the economic foundation of the United States, but rather they learn about the Atlantic Triangular Trade of which slaves were simply one component. Add to this the Alabama math teacher who tried teaching his geometry class angles by hypothetically assassinating the (first black) current President of the United States, Barack Obama, and these isolated incidents of racism, violence and oppression begin to define an ugly pattern in American civic life.

The problem with being a history teacher is that I see ghosts.

Watching Senator John McCain say the “economy is still strong” in 2008 echoed to me President Hoover’s response to the Great Depression; watching Senator Obama be chastised for youth and inexperience during that same campaign reflected Governor Clinton and Senator Kennedy’s treatment during their campaigns for the presidency; and watching Governor Brewer sign racial profiling into law and codifying ethnic erasure in schools sounds to me like the breaking glass on Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night”). The Night of Broken Glass was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria from the 9th until the 10th November 1938. (Kristallnacht was part of a broader racial policy of Nazi Germany, including antisemitism and persecution of the Jews and it is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the Final Solution, leading towards the genocide of the Holocaust.)

This comparison, though, was greeted with trepidation by friends of mine. I had invoked “Godwin’s Law“, one argued. I was giving in to “leftwing holocaust hyperbole“, said another. Neither grasped the larger frame of my comparison. Adolf Hitler is the modern boogeyman for the United States, probably because as a nation we were complicit in his atrocities through our actions and inactions, from sending the US Olympic Team to Berlin for the Summer Games in 1936 fleeing Nazi Germany. Be that as it may, the steps taken by Hitler and the Nazi Party that moved them and their nation from defeated and downtrodden to The Third Reich are being echoed today in the United States.

Let us examine these facts:

• The Nazis began their grip on government with a two-pronged strategy: 1-the Jews are bad, and 2-elect

Hitler to lead us back to glory. Today in Arizona “illegals” are bad, though they don’t know what they look like (except they look illegal, i.e. brown and not from “here”), and Rand Paul is going from Kentucky to “take [his] government back!” from the “un-American” President Obama.

• The Nazis began as a third political party, running candidates with staunch conservative, anti-Jewish, pro-Germany propaganda riding a wave of national dissatisfaction. Today in the United States, from the healthcare debate to clean energy to the lies about the tax code and the false tales of cancelled National Days of Prayer, the Tea Party is running candidates (and defeating Republicans) whose full-throated persecution of illegal immigrants takes place in states with Southern borders and more dark immigrants than not, legal and illegal. In Arizona, and California, and Kentucky, persecution of “the Other” is coupled with Sarah Palin‘s uber-nationalist “feel good about us and never apologize” national tour, endorsing candidates (Governor Jan Brewer) who share her views or at least bark at her command (Carly Fiorina). And politicians hoping to ride the wave are going further faster in hopes of grabbing power for themselves (Steve Poizner).

• Finally, the Nazi’s began their Final Solution to “the Jewish problem” with legislation that targeted German Jews specifically. They passed laws against the Jews for years before the death trains rolled, and the non-Jews in Germany complied. Each law, or bundle of legal segregation and oppression, appeared a reasonable reaction to a real or imagined woe of the people. Arizona’s laws, targeting phantom illegal criminals and demonizing inclusive education, are following the Nazi’s goose-steps in perfect time.

Obviously Jan Brewer and Rand Paul and Sarah Palin and the Texas School-board and the Alabama math teacher are not rounding up darkies and shipping them off to Manzanar. However, they are laying tracks toward that racially segregated, oppressive Us v. Them state of constant emergency with their calculated words and deeds just as surely as the Chinese and the Irish did when building the Trans-Continental Railroad. With each law passed, they are reaching out from beyond the grave to drag the United States back in time. And all that stands between the sad history of segregation and oppression, of marginalization and genocide, is the full- throated rebuke of evil from people of conscience, whether that is writing blogs and letters, being informed and informing others, getting out in the streets to organize, or running for the local and national offices which have the power and authority to squelch the hate that fear produces. Pastor Martin Niehmoller, writing in the midst of the Holocaust, put it more simply, “when they came for [someone else]/ I did not speak . . . [and] when they came for me/ there was no one left to speak.”

The problem with being a history teacher is that I see ghosts. In the last several weeks, the backlash against progress and inclusion, against the embodiment of the American Ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Opportunity has been staggering and shocking. But beyond being shocked, the need for Americans of Conscience to speak up and to act, to fight back in the name of the country we cherish and the humanity we struggle to embody is pressing and immediate. Marcus Garvey put into words my thoughts, the firing of my synapses which drove me to speak of Arizona’s laws in Nazi terminology when he too was attempting to rally his people, and so I leave you with his words. They are as pertinent in 2010 as they were when he spoke then in the 1920s, in the same country, fighting the same battle with a different face.

“Up You Mighty [Human] Race! Accomplish What You Will!”

Black Code, Arizona

In the late 19th century, after President Andrew Johnson ended congressional reconstruction, former-Confederates like Bob McDonnell passed laws in the southern United States which limited the rights of newly emancipated and enfranchised black men and women “legally”.  They included literacy tests in order to vote, fees to attend public schools, and poll taxes.  Poor whites were allowed to circumvent these laws which applied to them, too, allowing them to feel like they were part of the wealthy majority culture by “grandfather clauses”:  if the person applying had a grandfather who’d voted, they were exempted from the tax or tests.  These laws were called Black Codes, because they were designed to stop black people from participating in the citizenship of the United States.

Welcome to Arizona.

The Arizona state legislature last week passed a law which makes it illegal to be undocumented.  That means that I as a black mexican american citizen of the United States couldn’t run to the car wash or the grocery store without my birth certificate, because I look “illegal”.  This Brown Code is a celebration of a whiter nation because it also requires government agencies to enforce racial profiling.  Michael J. Fox could walk through Arizona without a second glance, but he was once an illegal immigrant to the United States.  The difference between the two of us?  Melanin.  The law that is sitting on the governor’s desk today is the codification of racism, as were the Black Codes after the civil war.  Like the Confederates of old (then called Democrats) who sought legal redress for their military and ideological and moral losses, the neo-conservatives in Arizona (now called Republicans) are seeking legal security that the United States will continue to be a nation of European-descended and controlled dominance after what they perceive to be a racial loss to President Barack Obama.

The Black Codes danced in time with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which limited the number of immigrants that could come to the United States for employment from China.  They were the precursors of legalized segregation immortalized by the famous “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson SCOTUS decision in 1896.  Legalized segregation gave birth to numerous avenues of discrimination and codified racism, none the least of which was the Bracero program which shipped immigrant labor from Mexico north when it was convenient and south when it was not.  And here we sit today with modern racists trying to sweep up and sweep out all the brown people under the guise of “immigration reform”.  This current legislation requires police to ascertain documents of citizenship from people without any reasonable suspicion except that they are darker skinned.  It is reminiscent of the pass laws which died with South African apartheid sixteen years ago, where black and brown citizens of that nation were required to carry papers but white ones were not.

It will be of some note whether Arizona Governor Jan Brewer decides to once again codify racism by signing the legislation into law, thereby putting her name down with Governor Wallace, or simply refuses to act and lets it “pass into law”, thereby washing her hands like Pontius Pilate.  Either way, much like the Black Codes and legalized segregation, this law will be struck down by those who have read the Constitution of the United States, and who believe that the ideals expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence are the providence of all citizens of this nation.

As President Obama recently stated, “the blessings of this country belong to every single American,” regardless of skin color.

Even in Black Code, Arizona.

Update: Governor Brewer signed the bill into law.  She “ameliorated” the damage done by signing an executive order to train law enforcement to enforce the law without racial profiling, as if that’s possible.

Sotomayor, Too

Republicans in the Senate are moving in again, circling like Jack and the savages over another judicial nominee of color who has the temerity to notice he’s not white.  Senator Sessions and his ilk repeatedly berated the “wise Latina” who now sits on the Supreme Court of the United States for having the audacity to be vocally and intellectually Puerto Rican American.  Never mind that her judicial temperament was distinctly moderate.  Update:  Senator Jeff Sessions now says it’s okay to be a person of color.

And now Professor Liu’s liberal views about a “living Constitution” which should actually apply to the people living in two thousand ten is anathema.  He’s already being accused of being “vicious, and emotionally and racially charged, and intemperate,” for having a different interpretation of the Constitution, a different vision of the United States than Justice Alito, a more notably conservative legal scholar.

The federal judiciary is the third branch of the United States’ government precisely to weigh the present circumstances with the legal precedent and “secure the blessings of liberty to … “ all the citizens of the United States.  In the beginnings of the country, that meant white propertied men only.  Since then, the definition of citizenship has grown, with the fourteenth, fifteenth and twentieth amendments, and the laws of the country have struggled to keep up with these changes.  Professor Liu is an eminent legal scholar, and the vilification of his appointment to the federal bench is simply another attack, less racially charged than stemming from the fear of CHANGE that the Republican party has made their bailiwick since President Obama was elected.  But like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; like the appointment of Justice Sotomayor; like the Patients Protection and Affordable Care Act; like the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act; Professor Liu will become an appellate judge for the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals.  They’re just lucky the President didn’t put him up to fill Justice Stevens’ seat.

I hate THEM, Vote for me

The Face of Hate

All politics are local, which means that there are two contests right now being contested that I have to take an interest in.  The battle for the executive office in California is being framed as the good white folk against those dirty illegal Mexicans (much like the Senate race in Missouri). With a snide smile hiding his fangs, Candidate Steve Poizner is running ads against Candidate Meg Whitman for the Republican nomination which focus solely on “services for illegals” and “just like Obama” and Governor Schwartzenegger, swinging at immigrants, women, brown and black people all in one fell swoop.  There are no positives in the ad except for the question, “Don’t we deserve a Republican?”

These politics of division were most recently on display in Virginia, when Governor Bob McDonnell officially forgot there were black people in that state during the Civil War.  And in his desperation to pick up the Orange County vote, Poizner is hating loudly and often, hoping that he will gin up enough anger to get those white hands to the voting booth.  Our state, though, cannot afford his divide and conquer attacks.  Like Carly Fiorina, who is trying to lie her way into the Senate seat for California currently held by Barbara Boxer, Poizner is doing his best to change his political dress by following John McCain into the Tea Party right wing.

Poizner hates THEM.  Unfortunately for him, there are more of us THEM than there are of him.  While I’m not crazy about Meg Whitman buying the Governor’s mansion, I’m staunchly opposed to the “subtly” racist, hyper-xenophobic and oppressive campaign that Steve Poizner is running.  It doesn’t bode well for how he’d govern.

The South Fails Again

And what he didn’t say . . .the North Won the Civil War.  Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election.  Democrats in Congress won the Health Care Reform battle, and are poised to do the same on energy.  Duke won the NCAA Championship this year, as did UConn.  While these are all facts, there are literally thousands of people who are not happy about them.  Stanford fans are frustrated that their team held UConn to 12 points in the first have but couldn’t win the game.  Butler fans are gluing their hair back in from that last desperate half-court miss.  Congressional Republicans are planning to “Repeal and Replace” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  John McCain and Sarah Palin are still out on the campaign trail.  And Governor Robert McDonnell of Virginia has proclaimed April to be Confederate History Month in his state.

Lee surrenders at Appomattox.

While it is not for me to dismiss the history and family pride of those who’s forebears believed that this was a nation for white people to own and black people to work, I heartily disagree.  And while it is not for me to say that the ideas of states’ rights which were tied to the battle of grey-suited warriors to free themselves from Republican tyranny and federal oppression is wrong, I agree much more with John Jay’s assessment that “Nothing is more certain than the indispensible [sic] necessity of government; and it is equally undeniable that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights, in order to vest it with requisite powers.”  I must, as a mature student of history, acquiesce to the fact that the story of the Confederacy is someone’s grandfather’s or grandmother’s story, and while they disagree (or don’t) with those views, they have a right to represent their history the same way I have the right to represent mine; to find those pieces with which they agree and find pride and cherish and celebrate them.

However, Gov. McDonnell is a one-sided celebrant, and herein lies the problem.  He makes no mention of the enslaved victims of the Confederacy, those on whom the burden of states’ rights onerously fell like a crushing weight.  He neglects, then, my grandparents in a way which has historically sought to invalidate their humanity by rendering them, as Ralph Ellison so eloquently denounced, invisible.  It is this racism of blindness which continues to trouble us in 2010.

Telling only part of the story is a lie of omission which perpetuates and exacerbates many of the current political and social ills of our day.  We saw this with the health care debate; we see it with Sarah Palin’s continued uttering; we see this with the Tea Party movement, both in its displays and its coverage; we see it with the stimulus package; on a daily basis, telling only the part of the story that helps us is the accepted norm.  Governor McDonnell, though, has just said something very different to the black people in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  He has just said that they don’t exist, by not including their participation in the Confederacy.  Though most of that participation was bad, and should serve as a reminder of the democratic ideals on which this nation was founded, there were black men, enslaved men, who fought in the Confederate army.  Are they not worthy of recognition?  There were black men and women who greeted the defeat of the Confederacy as liberation, as an entrance into full citizenship and the beginning of their acquisition of the natural rights they’d been denied.  McDonnell has said by his omission that the Confederate ideology of chattel slavery of African Americans wasn’t “significant for Virginia.”

Flying the Confederate flag for many southerners is an honoring of their ancestors, a reading of their historical maps as they make their own journeys. But just as Congressional Republicans won’t be able to repeal health care reform, Palin and McCain are going to lose again; Butler can’t take one more shot; Stanford can’t make one more block; and cheering the Confederacy while denying black folks won’t help the South rise again.

I Told You So

President Jimmy Carter is stating what I’ve been saying for a while (and was “taken to task” for in the comment section of the last post).  Namely, many of the attacks, both in the “substance” and tone, against President Barack Obama, are thinly veiled expressions of racist disbelief that a black man is POTUS.  And while I was compiling my evidence and articulating a reply, it suddenly dawned on me that I can lead horses (or elephants) to water, but I can’t make them drink.  Understand that this is not simply Republican-bashing.  It is simply a realization that while there are many independents and Democrats (and some Republicans) who disagree with the President’s ideological and practical governance of the United States, the extreme ideas by fearful and ignorant people are gaining traction with the not so ignorant because they hold one thing in common: Fear of a black planet.

There are groups of people angry and scared and confused whose sole similarity with each other is their hatred of the President.  Elderly people who will benefit from changing the manner in which their medical insurance is billed and their prescriptions are screaming at their elected representatives that President Obama is a socialist; people are saying “they want their country back,” but when asked what they means answer, “I don’t know”; Glenn Beck is on “national television” saying that the half-white President has a problem with white people…the President’s birth/legitimacy is still being questioned, by “concerned” almost-citizens and echoed by members of Congress – where were they when Senator McCain was running for the office?  And if you don’t know why that’s relevant, you’ve proven my point.

But alas, people who are in the majority rarely acquiesce that their domination of societal and cultural norms without confrontation and overwhelming evidence (and many times not even then).  Whether that is white people in the United States, men on the planet earth, English speakers, heterosexuals, the non-disabled… the domination doesn’t matter.  From our language to our institutions, the codified methods of discrimination are not rewritten without cataclysm.

Sorry… I got a little carried away.  Maureen Dowd, President Carter, and many others are beginning to speak the truth to power.  How long will it take before the people who disagree with the President’s policies, but don’t ascribe to the fearful racist elements that show themselves in screaming fits at town halls an as mouthpieces for economic predators acknowledge and disavow the people that drown out their legitimate arguments?

Just some final thoughts: Here is the post I was beginning to write. I’m including it more for the articles linked…

Unpacking the Knapsack

In critiquing the critics of the President, I have been accused of: a) playing the race card, b) being racist, c) loving a good stereotype, and d) falling back on hyperbole when I didn’t have any facts to back up my assertions.  Hence, I will attempt for those who, in good faith, misunderstand how race plays a part of the wildly aggressive campaign to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama, and in doing so simply acknowledge the symptoms without diagnosing the disease, thereby insuring the nation continues to suffer from the illness.

The ridiculous combination of conspiracies being hurled at President Obama are not new ground.  The level of serious consideration that they’ve gained in Congress, though, are.  From Republican Senators and Congresspeople questioning the President’s birthplace, to the continued lie that is “death panels”

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

Of National Lies and Racial America

Boy, Oh, Boy

Carter: Racism plays major role in opposition to Obama

Here . . . I’d get shot

It’s hard to hold on to a scepter when it is lubricated.  No matter how hard you squeeze, it continues to slip from your fingers;  no raising of the voice, entreaties to the beyond, historical references or inherited privilege will keep one’s hand on the rudder or help the power stay at home.

Such are the straights of white men in the United States in 2009.  With the minority population of the United States becoming the majority, the tide of equality and justice is turning.  A multiracial coalition elected a biracial president to preside over the United States of America.  Since power and justice are never willingly shared or granted by the powerful, racial animus has begun to seep (once again) into public discourse in frighteningly obvious and increasingly desperate ways.  Over the course of the last month, we have seen:

1. a white man eject a group of black children from a swimming pool in Philadelphia;
2. a white man accuse a Puerto Rican nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States of being racist (when that’s the reason he was denied the federal bench) because she acknowledges her heritage and the role race and gender have played in her life;
3. a white man go on television and cheerlead that she was not attacked enough for being Puerto Rican, and that affirmative action discriminates against him;
4. white firefighters vindicated by the SCOTUS when the discriminatory test they passed was validated; (a NY judge recently ruled differently in a different case)
5. a white police officer arrest arguably one of the most widely known and accomplished black men in the United States in his own home because he had the temerity to assert his right to be there;
6. nine white men introduce legislation into the Legislature of the United States requiring presidential candidates to provide proof of citizenship before they run in a veiled reference to the ludicrous notion that the first black POTUS isn’t a citizen of the United States;
7. another white man in the same house arguing that if federally funded abortion were available fifty years ago, the President’s white married mother would have had a “free abortion” because of financial incentive (he assumed she was an unwed, single mom);
8. the same white man arguing that the only black man sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States would have been aborted for the same reason;
9. the State of California issue an official apology to American citizens of Chinese descent for discriminatory laws passed over the last century, i.e. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Race is no longer the third rail of American politics.  It can’t be, with a black man as POTUS.  His presence, as demonstrated by the overloud and uncomfortable laughter at his press conference on Wednesday evening by the predominantly white press corps when he stated that if he tried to force his way into [his home] the White House, “I’d get shot,” forces the blind eye to see that we are not (and should not be) a colorblind nation.  We are not post-racial because we have never dealt legitimately on a national level with race.

Just as candidate Obama claimed that in some places, people who had suffered through generations of economic neglect “cling to their guns and religion, to their antipathy of people foreign to them” to explain their plight, so too are these white men clinging to their white privilege and inherited station, to their unspoken benefits and fantastic position, by blaming affirmative action and racial minorities.  From Indian wars to enslaved Africans, from Chinese exclusion laws to statutes forbidding interracial marriage, from the KKK to affirmative action, from Emmett Till to Jeff Sessions, race has been the tiller and the sail of “conservative politics” in the United States.  The maintenance of the status quo has always rested on the back and shoulders of the oppressed and discriminated populations of this country.  And the numbers of white people who continue to cling to this standard is increasingly vocal, even as it is numerically dwindling.  You have only to watch Alexandra Pelosi’s “Right America: Feeling Wronged” to hear and see them.

On a national level, though, it remains okay for representatives from predominantly white districts and regions to spout off their racist affirmations of their own superiority.  On a commercial level, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan are getting paid dragging their anger and dismay through the dirt to see what clings.  The arrest of Professor Gates and the subsequent anger of the white establishment at President Obama’s characterization of the police officers as acting stupidly are both indications that the work of the (rasicst) founding fathers is not done, and the conversation amongst people of conscience (white, black, brown, red, yellow, etc.) not to mention the daily work of education and preparation must continue.

Perhaps many of us were lulled into comfort by the election of the first African American President of the United States.  Let us then, return to the posture and postulation of Frederick Douglass, “Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.”  Unlike Pat Buchanan, I am clear that this country was built by millions of men and women, black and white and brown and yellow and red.  And it is our responsibility to continue to build it, to reach toward its ultimate potential.  Those confused and scared people who “want their country back”, that white, christian, uncomplicated and racially stratified utopia are living in a fantasy – that country never existed.

Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl, Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter and Sean Hannity, James Crowley and the rest will learn and understand that when the scepter has shattered on the floor.

Pat Buchanan’s White Fertilizer

“. . . no I’m not European, bein’ all I can . . .”

-Snoop Dogg

White men DID NOT build the United States. No matter what Pat Buchanan, Lindsey Graham, Jeff Sessions, or Jon Kyl would like to believe. Yes, they were instrumental in its creation and conception, but there have been a myriad of people from Abigail Adams to Crispus Attucks to Helen Keller to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Cesar Chavez to Dolores Huerta to Gloria Steinem to the Iron Angels to the Massachusetts 54th Infantry to the Windtalkers who have put life and limb on the line for the fulfillment of the promise and potential signaled by the “100% white men”-created Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. It is amazing to note, though, that both of these documents used, according to white man Thomas Jefferson, the founding documents of the Iroquois Confederacy as templates.

The confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court of the United States, though, gave these Southern Dixiecrats (oops! now they’re Republicans from the party of Lincoln) a huge microphone from which to spout even more invective toward racial minorities and women who have been the foundations of this nation since before its inception. From Graham’s “do you have a temperament problem” to Session’s open mouth, the Republican members of the confirmation committee walked what they saw as an acceptable line, attacking Sotomayor’s pride in her heritage, work for the Puerto Rican legal defense fund, and everything except her judicial record. That’s Pat, though, took it even further across the line. Both online and on television, this white man actually argued that she wasn’t qualified because she was Latina, that because she acknowledged not only her race but the role that affirmative action played in her education, somehow that makes her inferior. His spouting invective wasn’t simply restrained to the written word . . . he had the temerity, the sheer arrogance, to take his knapsack of white privilege and racial superiority on television for the broadcast world to see.

I do agree with Malcom X, for I would rather have racists stating that they are racist rather than hiding under a veneer of reasonable opposition. The arguments made by Pat Buchanan (and to a more timid extent, the members of the confirmation committee) are lasts grasps at a position of power in the hierarchy of social dominance in the United States. The stranglehold that white men have had on power (106 of the 110 justices on the SCOTUS have been white men; 43 of 44 POTUS have been white men; 413 of 535 members of Congress today are white men) flies in the face of the “rational insecurity” from which Mitch McConnell and others question Sotomayor’s work and philosophy, attack her family and community, and preach their colorblind message which means they are blind to every color but their own. And it has given some of them a false sense of security, a belief in their own superiority which is not only undeserved and a f*&^ing joke, but is offensive in the extreme to say the least.

Unrestrained by elected office, Pat Buchanan has become David Duke in a suit instead of a robe. He is in the running, like Audra Shay, on a platform which seeks to secure the white working class vote by telling them how special they are and how much the darkies are taking away from them, to be king of the klansmen. And he wants the party of Lincoln to follow him. Maybe he’ll pick Sarah Palin as a runningmate, too. Fortunately, thinking Republicans are seeing these racial attacks for what they are, more bullshit from little men seeking to attain or maintain power in a changing world.

Post-Racial America?

Update: The New York Post apologized . . . sort of.

Update:  The cartoon was published side by side with a picture of President Obama signing the stimulus bill.  A calculated equation?

I hate giving bushlit like this precious time from my day.  But my son is a black man in America.  My daughter is a black woman in America.  And stuff like this on the front page is why “I laugh, and eat well and grow strong.”  I understand why the white man who drew this thinks its not racist.  He’s simply connecting two current events in a humorous way, right?  Wrong.

Stereotypes of black men and monkeys are centuries old.  For more recent prejudices, check the original Tarzan the Ape Man movie.  The black man in charge of the stimulus bill is Barack Obama.  I’m going slow here for the uninitiated.  Whether you agree with the stimulus bill or not, believe it was written by a group of monkeys banging on a typewriter or not, it is “now the defining act of Barack Obama’s infant presidency.”  Drawing two white men shooting a monkey who is equated with the black president through the white men’s words and ideas is racist.

You don’t have to like it.  But that’s what it is.

I don’t blame the cartoonist.  His job is to make stuff up, put pieces together to get a reaction.  I do blame the editor for poor judgement.  While controversy sells papers, this type leads to boycotts and drops in sales.  And for other people to simply write it off as “Al Sharpton crying foul” misses the larger point.

Sharpton cries foul over NY Post’s cartoon monkey business

Sharpton blasts Post cartoon

Attorney General calls America ‘a nation of cowards’

Republicans, analysts question Obama’s foreclosure plan

From the Back of the Bus

Roland Burris is now the junior Senator from the state of Illinois.  For better or for worse, that’s what the Illinois Supreme Court and House of Representatives and Governor (and former junior Senator) have orchestrated in the last few weeks since the CHANGE was made real.  That’s not what this post is about, though.

In the jim crow era, segregation was the law of the land in the south, and the law of life in the north.  Black people and white people did not congregate in the same locations, with few exceptions.  And poll taxes, literacy tests, and other impediments were used to insure that the franchise was exclusive property.  The problem with this as a democratic political entity, though, is that it meant there were no black people in the halls of Congress, on the Supreme Court, or in the White House (unless they were serving dinner, or driving carriages).

In the last two weeks, we’ve seen the only black Senator resign his seat, to be filled with the only black Senator currently in the United States Senate.  That’s one percent.  That percentage indicates failure to me, both on the part of the dominant community, and on black folk.

Much is taken for granted in the MSM – that because President-elect Obama is black, systemic racism has been eradicated.  This is an absolute falsehood.  And despite Congressman Rush’s inappropriate language and assertions when Senator Burris was appointed, the nerves that he was dancing on were still raw because the underlying question is valid:

Are black folk still at the back of the bus?

My great grandmother was the daughter of a slave.  My maternal grandparents were born in the segregated South before the Great Depression (the first one, that is.)  My mother and father found each other while watching people their own age be beaten, murdered, lynched, sprayed, and while they were putting themselves in harm’s way for justice’s sake.  I do take much for granted, that I can do whatever I want to do in this country and this world, regardless of the color of my skin.  My children will be even more free, watching a black man take the oath of office before they hit the third and fourth grades.

But what of the young man “accidentally” shot by an Oakland police officer ringing in the new year?  Update:  The police officer has been charged with murder. What of the staggering number of black and brown youth failing out, dropping out, being pushed out of schools – from elementary through secondary and at the university level?  Why is the struggle to find positive black role models off the field of play so difficult?  Why do black people with an education lack authenticity in the public perception?  Why is learning considered acting white?

And before the critics and the naysayers begin to howl, riddle me this, Batman – why was there considerable conversation, inside the black community with chagrin and outside the black community with relief, that Barack wasn’t “really black” or “black enough”?

Because we are still at the back of the bus.

We are voluntarily paying our fare, getting off, and reentering through the back door.  For the second generation of integrated education, we have fallen off considerably. And there is a growing divide between the talented tenth and the rest.  Ernest Green succeeded because he had to deal with the reality of Central High School.  His education was valuable to him.  As it was and is to Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Colin Powell,Condoleeza Rice, Susan Rice and a host of others who grew up without the guarantee or assumption that they were going to be given anything for free, let alone an education.

This partial observation (there are many threads leading in and out of this train of thought) evokes a variety of questions, but chief among them are two:  Who is responsible for this status?  What can we do about it?

Different people are asking these questions in different ways in light of President-elect Obama’s victory in November, and his impending inauguration eleven days from now.  And other communities are asking the question for themselves as well.  Arianna Huffington asked it a few days ago on the HuffPost.  Bill Cosby will be on Meet the Press Sunday morning asking it.  And more than a few of us are asking it, answering it, and sharing our answers with the world.

I started this post with an observation that there is only one black Senator in a group of one hundred elected Senators representing the United States of America.  That’s one percent.  Literally.  Since more than one out of every hundred people is black in this country, I think there’s a problem with that, both on the country’s part, and on black folk.  The question is:

When are we going to move to the front of the bus?

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