Pitts: 'Race is the stupidest idea in history'

Sums up Pitts:  "Race is the stupidest idea in history. It is also, arguably, the most powerful."

His meditation on race -- and humanity's relatively recent preoccupation with race, and how it determines identity -- is worth reading in full.  

In America, attitudes and prejudices about race concern mostly blacks, and mostly black males, in negative ways.  Ironically,

When Africans were gathered on the shores of that continent to be packed into the reeking holds of slave ships for the voyage to this country, they saw themselves as Taureg, Mandinkan, Fulani, Mende or Songhay -- not black. As Noel Ingnatiev, author of How The Irish Became White, has observed, those Africans did not become slaves because they were black. They “became” black because they were enslaved.

On the flip side, continues Pitts:

I’ve often thought the word “white” had a tendency to discomfit the people to whom it is applied, to carry some hint of accusation that is no less real for being unspoken. In my experience, white people are often ill at ease with being referred to as white people.

There is, I think, a reason for that. “Black” and “white” are equally artificial, but black fairly quickly took on the contours of a real culture.

Whereas "white" includes all the categories not covered by anything else. Like on those applications and Census forms, where we white guys are supposed to check "Non-Hispanic White." [SPOILER ALERT: I'm white.] That's a pretty big catch-all, if you ask me.  Although there is a lot of truth to this, too: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ . So maybe a true "white guy" culture with our own shared historical identity -- shaped by pop culture and consumption trends -- is indeed coalescing in America?....

Seriously though, I should add that, among academics, the idea is taking hold that we should talk about ethnicity, not race. FYI, here's as good a definition of ethnicity or ethnic groups as any:

An ethnic group is a social category of people who share a common culture, such as a common language, a common religion, or common norms, customs, practices, and history. Ethnic groups have a consciousness of their common cultural bond. An ethnic group does not exist simply because of the common national or cultural origins of the group, however. They develop because of their unique historical and social experiences, which become the basis for the group’s ethnic identity. For example, prior to immigration to the United States, Italians did not think of themselves as a distinct group with common interests and experiences. However, the process of immigration and the experiences they faced as a group in the United States, including discrimination, created a new identity for the group. 

If you accept this definition then you must conclude, as Pitts has, that the term "African-American" is meaningless. Indeed, a long time ago I babysat for an African-American woman who emigrated from South Africa, and she was white as can be. But there are even more subtle but important distinctions than that among the so-called African-American community....

P.S. -- Happy New Year!  (That is, if you subscribe to the Western-European-centric Gregorian calendar....)

Dumbest idea in history? Race

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.

January 1, 2013 | Miami Herald

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/01/01/178695/commentary-dumbest-idea-in-history.html#storylink=cpy

What do you expect of black students?

I like this better than one of Pastor Manning's sermons. Pitts makes the choice simple: Would we rather pay a little money now to help at-risk black students become law-abiding net producers, or would we prefer to pay a lot of money later to keep them locked up and become a net drain on society? None of us should let his principles stand in the way of supporting what works, even if it means spending more money and attention on black children than on whites to give them what they can't get elsewhere.

Bush was right to decry "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for black youth. Likewise, we should reject the belief that black at-risk youth are beyond saving, or that they don't respond in the same way as white youth do to the same stimuli: caring teachers, safe and nurturing schools, regular meals and medical care, opportunities to excel, praise and recognition from adults, and calls for personal achievement and responsibility.

Kids are kids, people are people, and we all want and need the same things.

Commentary: What do you expect of black students?

By Leonard Pitts, Jr.

July 3, 2009 | CNN.com

Back in 1972, on an episode of "All in the Family," Gloria posed the following riddle to Archie and Meathead.

Father and son go driving. There's an accident. The father is killed instantly, the son is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon walks in, takes one look at the patient and says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."

The answer to the apparent paradox eluded Archie, Meathead and the guys down at Kelsey's bar for the balance of the half hour. They floated theories involving stepfathers, sons-in-law, priests, adoptions and returns from the dead. All of which Archie apparently found more believable than the true answer which was, of course, that the surgeon was the boy's mother. "If that's the answer," he spouted, "that's the dumbest riddle I ever hoid!"

Thirty-seven years later it is, perhaps, difficult to appreciate why this riddle ever was a riddle, how so apparent an answer could have stymied Archie, Meathead and, I would wager, the vast majority of the viewing audience.

The riddle speaks volumes not just about how the world has changed in four decades, but also about how unconscious expectations can blind us to the obvious. In 1972, one expected a man when one heard the word "surgeon."

Much as, in 2009, one expects a white kid when one hears the word "scholar."

People will deny this, will say all the right and politic things. But the disclaimers will be as thin and transparent as Saran Wrap. Black, white and otherwise, we are all socialized by the same forces and all carry, by and large, the same unconscious assumptions. One of which is that a certain level of achievement is black and another is white.

This is what you are hearing when a black kid speaks standard English and another black kid chides him for "talking white." This is what George W. Bush was alluding to when he decried "the soft bigotry of low expectations." And this is what we need to address forthrightly if we ever hope to close the so-called achievement gap that looms between black kids and white ones.

In 2007 and 2008, I traveled the country for a series of columns called "What Works," aimed at profiling programs that addressed that gap.

I traveled between big programs and small ones, from the Harlem Children's Zone, which encompasses 90 square blocks of holistic education, family counseling, medical care and tutoring in New York City, to the Freedom Project in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which offers field trips, martial arts and academic enrichment in a rural county where the median income is $25,000 a year and the teen pregnancy rate is said to be 25 percent.

I toured Self Enhancement Inc. in Portland, Oregon, a KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) School in Gaston, North Carolina, the East Lake Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, and many others. In all these places, I saw black kids -- well-spoken, clean-cut and noon-sun bright -- making a lie out of other peoples' expectations.

Over the course of 13 months, common themes began to emerge whenever I would ask why kids such as these were doing such wondrous work in these places and substandard work elsewhere.

We have more power to fire bad teachers and reward good ones, they said. We require parental involvement. We have a longer school day and a longer school year. We mentor children that need it. We counsel children and families that need it. We are invested in them and make sure they know it.

Most of all, they spoke of the simple power of expectation: making it a conscious point to look for greatness in black kids in whom people had not thought to look for it before. What I came to understand in those interviews is that we already know the secret to improving academic performance for African-American children. What is missing is the will to do so.

And that, I think, is because where they are concerned, we have other expectations.

I asked Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, how he justifies asking for money to uplift poor kids in Harlem. His response struck me: "Someone's yelling at me because I'm spending $3,500 a year on `Alfred.' 'Alfred' is 8. OK, Alfred turns 18. No one thinks anything about locking him up for 10 years at $60,000 a year."

But then, we expect Alfred to be locked up, don't we? Expect it so blithely that we will not challenge the expectation even when it works against our own economic self-interest. Canada, after all, presents a rather stark choice: invest a smaller amount early and produce a citizen who pays taxes and contributes to the system or pay a much larger amount later for the upkeep of a citizen who consumes tax monies and contributes nothing.

That we consistently choose the latter says something about how we assess the educability, the salvageability, of African-American kids.

Thirteen months of interviewing young scholars left me more impatient than ever with a culture that writes off black kids because they are black kids. Somewhere between the 13-year-old in rural Mississippi who wants to go to Harvard and the second-graders in Harlem studying Vincent Van Gogh, I ceased being surprised and started being angry that what I saw was still the exception and not the rule.

Everywhere I went, there were black kids excelling. And at some point, you say to yourself: well, of course.

What did you expect?

T.I.: 'We have to put our guns down'

If homeboys can decide that guns shouldn't be "part of everyday life," then maybe good ole boys can, too.

 

Responsibility Is A Lifestyle: It's Time to Bury Da Beef

By T.I.

May 11, 2009 | HuffingtonPost.com

 

In a few weeks, I will begin a one-year prison sentence for being in the possession of illegal firearms. Where I come from, having a gun is just part of everyday life. But, through this painful process of going to court and being convicted, I realized that I had to make a change. I made some bad decisions. I broke the law and will accept my punishment. With deep reflection about where my life was headed, I have begun the process of redemption, and decided that before I go to prison, I want to speak to young people about responsibility as a lifestyle. I hope that through my mistakes, young people can begin to learn, as I did, that we have to put our guns down and start to give our guns back. It pains me inside to hear about so many of our people dying because of gun violence. Just in the past weeks, a 13-year old boy was shot in the head in Harlem, a 17- and a 19-year old were murdered in a double homicide in Queens and a 15-year-old was chased, beaten, shot and burned in Chicago.

 

We will gather today in Harlem, with many mentors and supporters by my side, including Rev. Al Sharpton, Russell Simmons, Kevin Liles, GlobalGrind.com, Political Swagger, Mobile Regime and the C.H.A.N.G.E. Initiative to share the message that now is the time. Now is the time to speak out against gun violence. Now is the time to take responsibility for our actions. Now is the time to make our communities safer. Now is the time to support good legislation, like the S.N.U.G. bill in NY. Now is the time to give back our guns. Now is the time for me to lead by example.

 

We can and we will do better.

Stuff white (liberal, latte-drinking) people like

Interesting op-ed. Of course you should also check out the site under discussion.

#76 "Bottles of Water," #77 "Musical Comedy," #80 "The Idea of Soccer," and #101 "Being Offended" are some of my favorites.

As Homer Simpson observed, "Ha ha, it's true, it's true. We're so lame!"

The White Stuff
By Samhita Mukhopadhyay
July 11, 2008 | American Prospect

Taibbi: 'We love our black/Jew/redneck jokes and... misogyny'

This is the only interesting thing I've read about the ho-hum scandal involving Don Imus. Reading this ought to make you feel at least a little uncomfortable. If we're really going to have a "national dialog" about race and gender and rap music, it ought to go something like this....

THE LOW POST: The Imus Sanction

In a media shitstorm, everyone ducks for the cover of easy moral outrage

MATT TAIBBI | Rollingstone.com

Ultimately, the fact that rappers are now being held accountable for something Imus said shows the bias many people have against hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is often the scapegoat of everything gone wrong in America, but hip-hop didn't slander the Rutgers women's basketball team, Don Imus did, so let's stay on point here...The point is, hip-hop didn't invent cursing, slurs, bad language, sexism or misogyny, though hip-hop like so many other fictional forms of the culture uses this type of language as a form of expression, however problematic it might be. This expression represents the way people in the streets talk. It might not be pretty or politically correct, but it is a unique form of fictional expression that emerges from the minds and mouths of young black men.

-- Dr. Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC, writing for ESPN.com

The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it -- or overplay it, as it were.

We all knew that the angry-white-guy columnists of the Townhall.com ilk were going to turn even the previously-hated liberal Imus into a martyr of the political correctness age ("Imus, Political Correctness and the end of America" was Douglas McKinnon's not-at-all-hysterical offering). We knew Al Sharpton would show up, business card in hand, at the back of the ambulance, offering his services. We knew campus feminists would surface en masse to paint Imus as a hatemongering symbol of the old-boy white male power structure that secretly still insists on its power and privilege in American society, his show a daily vulgar wink to fellow members of the Matrix. And we knew -- or at least I knew, since I've personally been through a couple of these media ass-whippings before -- that virtually every editorial denouncing Imus would include a line in there that would read something along the lines of, "And the worst thing is, his so-called 'jokes' aren't even that funny."

Canny observers of the cultural issues underlying the Imus controversy could have also made a few other predictions. The first is that the angry-white-guy crowd would try to turn the tables on Imus' accusers and point the finger at the hip-hop culture that introduced old white liberals like Imus to words like "nappy-headed hos" in the first place. The second is that black intellectuals like the above-quoted Dr. Todd Boyd of USC would use their advanced degrees to find a way to split the necessary rhetorical hairs to repel these attacks, dismissing Imus as a worthless bigot on the one hand while upholding rap and hip-hop as a "unique form of fictional expression" deserving of the broad indulgence we grant to true art forms.

They're all full of shit, all of them. With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened, and used the occasion of a radio jock stepping in shit to robotically jerk off his constituency for a cheap buck.

First of all, let's just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America's TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ's sake. Paris Hilton -- dumb, rich -- gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they're basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.

The idea that NBC -- the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson's tits -- was "offended" by the use of the word "ho" is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that "ho" would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years. You can't see that? Trivia-battling sluts in Ho-llywod Squares? An irony-for-irony's-sake callgirl-improvement show called Pimp My Ho? Would you bet real money that the Paris-and-Nicole vehicle The Simple Life wasn't originally called Whore Acres at some stage of the pre-production process? I sure as hell wouldn't. Programming decisions of the The Bachelor ilk aren't spontaneous mid-show farts by an aging drug-battered brain like the Imus deal -- they're wide-awake decisions, forged in the crucible of number-crunching corporate reflection, to use reactionary images of cheap brainless skanks to sell Fritos and pickup trucks.

The race question is even more ridiculous. Dr. Todd Boyd notwithstanding, there's just no way to talk about the Imus incident without talking about hip-hop and rap culture. Let me just say right up-front that I listen to a lot of rap music. I'm one of those revolting well-off suburban white kids who grew up on PE and NWA and privately mourns the fact that he looks like an idiot in a Starter jersey. I love rap music, always have. But as an adult white male I also know a minstrel show when I see it, and that's what rap has turned into.

Satan himself couldn't have designed a more effective vehicle for marginalizing black culture than modern hip-hop. In the early days rap music was scary social commentary; it was raw and real and it vividly described a violent street culture that white people didn't know about and didn't want to know about. But very quickly rap turned into a multibillion-dollar industry in which the same corporate behemoths who sold us crap like Garth Brooks and boy bands and Britney Spears made massive profits selling a stylized, romanticized version of black misery to white kids in the suburbs.

That was bad enough, but even worse was the way black politicians and black intellectuals so easily bought into the idea that these endless video images of gun-toting, ho-slapping black men with fat wallets, rock-hard tattooed abs and fully-accessorized rides were positive living symbols of "black empowerment" and "black manhood." Like Tupac was the next Malcolm or something.

Yeah, right. Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to not see through this shit? Here you've got the modern-day version of The Man signing big checks to back your record deals and cheering along as all the artistic talent from the black community starts walking around in public wearing one-word stage names like strippers, writing song lyrics featuring preschool-level spelling and primping endlessly for the cameras with gold teeth and swimming pools and pimped-out cars -- all of them absurd caricatures of the capitalist wealth fantasy. How exactly is any of that that different from the minstrel show, the conk and the zoot suit? The black man who can dance and sing, but can't control his urges, can't resist pussy and just can't get enough of what Whitey is selling, can't stop preening in his Caddy...that's innovative? That's empowering?

Bullshit. Rap was real once, but once it became an industry it turned into the same con white people have been playing ever since they set foot in this country. It's a bunch of shiny trinkets for the isle of Manhattan. Here's your Hummer and your bitches, knock yourself out. You need us, we'll be buying the African grain market. Oh, and, thanks for the cap, my kid loves it, he wears it sideways just like you...No matter how catchy the music is, on a deeper level, that's what big-money rap acts amount to now. And the longer the black community eats it up, the more time Whitey is going to have to laugh all the way to the bank, like he always has.

Pop Quiz: Where did the practice of calling all black women, and especially black women who are not actual prostitutes, hos? I seem to remember a line from Boyz n the Hood where some girl complains to Ice Cube about his habit of calling all women bitches. "Oh, I'm sorry, ho!" is the answer. Laughs all around. When the Imus thing hit, we heard Snoop Dogg explain that the difference between rappers using the word "ho" and Don Imus using it is that unlike "old-ass white men" like Imus, rappers are "not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit." Oh, I get it, Snoop -- you were satirizing the hos and bitches. You obviously checked the crowd to make sure nobody had a degree when you did your "So all the niggaz and the bitches, raise your muthafuckin hands in the air!" act. And it was satire when Ludacris did his thing: "but hos dont feel so sad and blue/cuz most of us niggaz is hos too."

People say that Don Imus isn't funny, but let's face it, there is a joke in all of this. It's a joke on the black community. And the joke is this: white people don't even have to call black people niggers and bitches and whores anymore. They do it for us. From Whitey's point of view that's a hell of a punchline. The mistake Imus made was saying it out loud.

As for the people who say there's no connection between hip-hop and what Imus said, they're out of their minds. Without Ludacris and 50 Cent and "We Luv Deez Hoez," Don Imus doesn't even know what a ho is. The unspoken truth about the Imus story is that there is no difference at all between what Imus does and what Snoop Dogg does. They both get paid to make ethnic slurs. In this case they both use the same one, one stealing from the other. The only difference is that Snoop doesn't know the joke is on him, too.

That is a dark and ugly truth and I suspect that its very ugliness is what so many people were hiding from when they pretended to be "outraged" by Don Imus. Because everyone knows that the issue with Don Imus isn't what he said, but who said it and in what context.

We've got a TV entertainment industry that ritualistically demeans women, a recording industry that makes billions cartoonizing black culture and a radio and film comedy industry that lives almost exclusively off lowbrow racial stereotyping. Guys like Carlos Mencia even use the same jokes over and over, changing words here and there to fit the different stereotypes. (Mencia did "That's like going to Compton and finding the only Hispanic teenage girl who isn't pregnant" and he also did "That's like going to a NASCAR event and finding the only white girl who doesn't have a black eye.") Every comic in America does this shit. It's gone so far that we even make jokes about making jokes about ethnic groups (Sarah Silverman's song about "I love you more than Asian people are good at math" comes to mind). And we get critics to bail out these comics by saying things like "He/she mocks bigotry and stereotypes by ironically embracing them" (the Voice's Michael Musto has used that one before) but deep down inside we all know that's bullshit. I dare anyone to watch tape of Richard Pryor doing his impression of a stuttering Chinese restaurant owner and then tell me with a straight face that Pryor is "mocking Asian stereotypes by ironically embracing them."

Of course he isn't. He's laughing at stuttering Chinese people. And the way Richard Pryor does it, it's funny. If Pryor were still alive and coherent today we'd put him on HBO, where he'd do huge ratings with the very same people who are pretending now to be appalled by Don Imus. Because we love our black jokes, we love our Jew jokes, we love our redneck jokes and we love our misogyny -- we just don't want it all on the wrong network in the wrong time-slot, coming from a white guy, in whose mouth it might very well sound like the bigot in all of us. And when it does pop up in the wrong place, coming from the wrong person, we've got to pull the "I'm shocked, shocked" act and pretend it's a criminal aberration. Because that's much easier than facing the truth about what we just heard.