A 'Cosby' dad's rules for his kids couldn't shield them from racism

This Cosby-eqsue Ivy League black father did everything -- and more -- that conservative Republicans said he should do to raise his privileged black kids... and yet white racism still got to them.

Reading his "rules" for his kids was a real shock to me. Black readers won't be surprised, but I think most white readers would share wonderment at just how far blacks must go not to trigger our prejudices:

My wife and I used our knowledge of white upper-class life to envelop our sons and daughter in a social armor that we felt would repel discriminatory attacks. We outfitted them in uniforms that we hoped would help them escape profiling in stores and public areas: pastel-colored, non-hooded sweatshirts; cleanly pressed, belted, non-baggy khaki pants; tightly-laced white tennis sneakers; Top-Sider shoes; conservative blazers; rep ties; closely cropped hair; and no sunglasses. Never any sunglasses.

[...] [W]e came up with even more rules for our three children:

1. Never run while in the view of a police officer or security person unless it is apparent that you are jogging for exercise, because a cynical observer might think you are fleeing a crime or about to assault someone.

2. Carry a small tape recorder in the car, and when you are the driver or passenger (even in the back seat) and the vehicle has been stopped by the police, keep your hands high where they can be seen, and maintain a friendly and non-questioning demeanor.

3. Always zip your backpack firmly closed or leave it in the car or with the cashier so that you will not be suspected of shoplifting.

4. Never leave a shop without a receipt, no matter how small the purchase, so that you can’t be accused unfairly of theft.

5. If going separate ways after a get-together with friends and you are using taxis, ask your white friend to hail your cab first, so that you will not be left stranded without transportation.

6. When unsure about the proper attire for a play date or party, err on the side of being more formal in your clothing selection.

7. Do not go for pleasure walks in any residential neighborhood after sundown, and never carry any dark-colored or metallic object that could be mistaken as a weapon, even a non-illuminated flashlight.

8. If you must wear a T-shirt to an outdoor play event or on a public street, it should have the name of a respected and recognizable school emblazoned on its front.

9. When entering a small store of any type, immediately make friendly eye contact with the shopkeeper or cashier, smile, and say “good morning” or “good afternoon.”

These are just a few of the humbling rules that my wife and I have enforced to keep our children safer while living integrated lives. 

So as it turns out, to avoid white judgment and racism, well-heeled black kids must learn not only not "act black," not only to "act white," but also to act better than white.

(UPDATE: 12.06.2014): Not to disparage Mr. Graham, I meant "Cosby" dad in the sense of the 1980s TV show with the well-adjusted black upper-middle class family interacting easily with whites. I wrote this just before all the recent accusations about rape came out about Bill Cosby. I meant no disrespect to Mr. Graham or his family, in fact the opposite. So I'm keeping the original title of this post because I think it still conveys succinctly the essence of my (well actually, his) argument.

I taught my black kids that their elite upbringing would protect them from discrimination. I was wrong.

By Lawrence Otis Graham

November 6, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1Ap8PIt

VIDEO: John Oliver critiques U.S. police militarization

I've been posting against police militarization since 2012, following the reporting of Radley Balko at HuffPo and WaPo. So I'm glad to see it's finally getting national (actually global) attention, and Balko is recognized as the foremost expert.

As Oliver notes, the big issue is not small-town police's Pentagon-provided equipment,  but rather how police have come to see those whom they are supposed to serve and protect as a hostile Other, and see themselves as armed Occupiers.

Cox: Gerrymandering and voter-ID laws are systemic racism

I'll say it again: I'm not necessarily against voter ID in order to vote, although I think it's an extravagant non-necessity.  But any such ID should be a national  ID; it should be free of charge (because voting must be free/poll taxes are illegal); it should have a very long duration (at least 10 years) and be renewed at any number of places; and any kind of photo-ID law should be grandfathered in, along with state and national outreach programs, hotlines, etc.  

But really, given modern technology, voting doesn't require a photo-ID to avoid the rare case of fraud. Voting can and should be as easy and secure as using an ATM. Polling stations, while they should always probably exist in some quantity to serve poor areas, are as outdated as tricorn hats.

If the true goal was to prevent voter fraud (even though there is none to begin with) while preserving citizens' most sacred democratic right -- the right to vote -- then we would certainly go about it otherwise, not making people who are lifelong eligible voters suddenly ineligible, as Republican state legislatures have. 

Voter-ID laws are a cynical and desperate ploy coordinated by the national GOP; and they a prime example of systemic racism that conservatives deny even exists.

Voter ID's last stand: let's finally declare laws what they are – racist on purpose

By Ana Marie Cox

July 16, 2014 | Guardian

This week, the US Department of Justice and the state of Texas started arguments in the first of what will be a summer-long dance between the two authorities over voting rights. There are three suits being tried in two districts over gerrymandering and Texas's voter identification law – both of which are said to be racially motivated. In its filing, the DoJ describes the law as "exceed[ing] the requirements imposed by any other state" at the time that it passed. If the DoJ can prove the arguments in its filing, it won't just defeat an unjust law: it could put the fiction of "voter fraud" to rest once and for all.

These battles, plus parallel cases proceeding in North Carolina, hinge on proving that the states acted with explicitly exclusionary intent toward minority voters – a higher standard was necessary prior to the Supreme Court's gutting of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) back in January. Under Section 3, the DoJ had wide latitude to look at possible consequences of voting regulation before they were even passed – the "preclearance" provision. Ironically, because the states held to preclearance had histories of racial discrimination, some of the messier aspects of the laws' current intentions escaped comment.

But meeting that higher standard of explicit exclusionary intent comes with the opportunity to show some of the many skeptical Americans the ugly racism behind Republican appeals to "fairness" and warnings about fraud. Progressives have tried, and mostly failed, to show the institutional racism underpinning the sordid history behind voter ID laws; that may have been too subtle. In courts in Texas and North Carolina, the DoJ will make the jump from accusations that laws have a racial impact to straight-up calling voter ID laws racist.

This ought to be interesting.

The DoJ filing in Texas lays it all out pretty clearly, putting the voter ID law in context of a concerted legislative strategy to deny representation to the state's growing Hispanic population, including Republicans advancing more and more aggressive voter ID bills over the years. The filing points to the anti-immigrant rhetoric that laced the floor debates over the law, and to the measures taken by the Republican-controlled state house to limit the participation of Democratic minority lawmakers in considering or amending the legislation (the bill was heard in front of a special committee selected by the governor, on an expedited schedule). And, the DoJ notes, lawmakers produced "virtually no evidence during or after enactment of SB 14 that in-person voter impersonation – the only form of election fraud addressed by the identification requirements of SB 14 – was a serious problem."

Perhaps the most significant piece of context in the voter ID suit is how Texas's voter ID law came on the heels of the redistricting that the DoJ claims was also racially motivated. In the redistricting cases, DoJ's allegations of malicious intent have been helped along by the admission of the state that it had malicious political intent. The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, chose as his defense in that case what only can be called the Lesser Evil Strategy – stating up front that the state's GOP legislators had ulterior motives, but not the ones that the VRA outlaws:

[R]edistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats ... [They] were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.

Abbott's smugness – and his apparent faith in partisanship as a permissible and distinct form of discrimination – will take center stage as the DoJ presses on with both suits. In court, Abbott will be asked to prove his ignorance of demographics for the very state in which he is currently running for governor. Out of court, other GOP defenders of the law will have to do more or less the same. And they will need to defend the outrageous details of the law – such has how a concealed carry permit is a permissible form of voter ID but a federally-issued Medicare card carried by an elderly woman is not.

Some people of Texas may support the kind of bullying Abbott has prepared to defend, and most progressive activists are hardened to it, but I think average Americans hate it. Putting malice under a national spotlight might be the best way to turn people against voter ID laws in general.

Right now, Americans support the idea of voter ID laws by huge margins: polls show favorable attitudes toward a generic "ID requirement" to be between 70 and 80%. Approval exists across all demographic groups – even among black voters (51%), one of the groups that is, of course, disproportionately disenfranchised by these laws.

But the reasons that the public supports such laws aren't the same as the GOP's reasons for pursuing them: Republicans want to prevent specific types of people from voting; the American public wants voting to be fair.  That's why conservatives have had to hammer so hard on the false narrative of "voter fraud" – to convince everyone that it's what the laws are really about.

Add context to the "ID requirement" poll question that Americans get behind, though, and public support changes dramatically. Asurvey in North Carolina (taken as the state was considering taking up an amendment on the issue) found initial support for voter ID to be 71%. Pollsters then drilled further down and came up with numbers that speak to a truly democratic impulse:

• 72% say it's wrong to pass laws that make it harder for certain people to vote.
• 62% say they oppose a law that makes it harder for people of one party to vote.
• 74% say there should be demonstrated problems before legislators apply a fix.

If nothing else, these results suggests that Abbott's argument that supposedly party-based redistricting isn't the free pass – at least, from the public's standpoint, if not the court's – that he thinks it is.

In North Carolina, pollsters found that support for the law decreased as the 2012 election neared and voters started to pay attention and become educated on the issue. Voting rights advocates filled yet another suit based on disenfranchising young voters, which could make a further difference. (Way to keep pissing off millennials, GOP!)

That context effect is true nationwide. A different survey found that informing respondents that "Opponents of voters ID laws argue they can actually prevent people who are eligible to vote from voting" brought support for voter ID down by 12 points.

Pollsters have not publicly investigated whether Texan voters would show a similar shift, though it could be significant that support in the state for voter ID has remained at around 66% for the past two years, less than its support nationwide. Of course, 77% of Texasbelieve "voter ID laws are mainly used to prevent fraud," an alternate-reality bubble that attention to these cases may just yet pop.

It's the Department of Justice that'll have to bring this to pass. The GOP has always easily waved away "systemic" racism charges, like those made under the non-gutted VRA, as either outright inventions or the result of looking for equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. Making clear the racist intent of voter ID laws will bring the discussion back to where it belongs: on equal opportunities, in the voting booth.

Coates: The case for reparations

This landmark essay is long, I know. But so is American history. Maybe not in years, relatively, but in certainly in events -- and in inventive injustices against blacks.

Some of my Republican friends will snap back at me without reading this, or just ignore it,  but really, REALLY, you need to read this. If nothing else, it's a fascinating history lesson that -- no, sorry Common Core -- our lib'rul public education system still doesn't teach us.

To quote Coates's essay selectively to discourage reading it would be a further injustice.  Still I can't resist quoting this, taken out of context, but still wonderful rhetoric:

Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.

And this statistic: think about the wealth created, with compound interest, and what it would be worth today!:  "By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports."

And this:

“In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.”

Before we leap from justice to practicalities, let's consider Coates' compelling -- I daresay spiritual -- definition of reparations:

Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

And without quoting, I can guess why Coates spends so much of his essay on the history of Chicago, because our President was a community organizer there. For all you whites who think cities like Chicago and Detroit "just happen," you need to read this.

Additionally, Coates offers us the amazing example of the turnaround effect German reparations had on the economy -- and morale -- of the state of Israel.

Finally, if you'd dismiss Coates's essay because it was written by a black guy, then I'd urge you to read these two articles at Bloomberg and Slate, respectively. 

UPDATE: So my Republican buddy wrote back almost immediately, and predictably, with this:

I actually believe reparations would be just.  But I also know it wouldn't fix our race problems, nor would it fix the wealth gap long term.  The black family has been broken down by leftism.  They abort 40% of their babies, and the left has done everything to teach them they can't help themselves.  They are stuck in schools run by Democrats where they will be lucky to learn to read.

If you give an uneducated person a lot of money, they will blow it.  The white man will convince the people who get the money that they need to spend it on making their ride look phat.  The money will end up back where it started because the only thing they were taught in school was that the glaciers are going to melt and that Obama rides Unicorns and shoots rainbows from his wrists.

To which I replied:

This is what Coates meant, when I said not "to leap from justice to practicalities." Cash payments might not be the only form of reparations.  Read the article. For example, off the top of my head, taking Coates's example of how FHA loans discriminated against blacks while doubling the rate of white home ownership, part of reparations could be for black home ownership -- and not just guaranteed loans, but something more tailored and smart.

Reparations could be for special job training centers, special black enterprise zones, special black small business loans... use your creativity....  

UPDATE (03.06.2014): Ta-Nehisi Coates replies to critic Kevin D. Williaomson at National Review of his essay "The Case for Reparations" with "The Case for American History." Here's my favorite excerpt:

The governments of the United States of America—local, state and federal—are deeply implicated in enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, New Deal racism, terrorism, ghettoization, housing segregation. The fact that one's ancestors were not slave-traders or that one arrived here in 1980 is irrelevant. I did not live in New York when the city railroaded the Central Park Five. But my tax dollars will pay for the settlement. That is because a state is more than the natural lives, or occupancy, of its citizens. People who object to reparations for African-Americans because they, individually, did nothing should also object to reparations to Japanese-Americans, but they should not stop there. They should object to the Fourth of July, since they, individually, did nothing to aid the American Revolution. They should object to the payment of pensions for the Spanish-American War, a war fought before they were alive. Indeed they should object to government and society itself, because its existence depends on outliving its individual citizens.

A sovereignty that dies with every generation is a failed state. The United States, whatever its problems, is not in that league. The United States' success as a state extends out from several factors, some of them good and others not so much. The mature citizen understands this. The immature citizen claims credit for all national accolades, while disavowing responsibility for all demerits. This specimen of patriotism is at the core of many (not all) arguments against reparations.

And this, Coates's conclusion:

"The people to whom reparations were owed," Williamson concludes. "Are long dead." Only because we need them to be. Mr. Clyde Ross is very much alive—as are many of the victims of redlining. And it is not hard to identify them. We know where redlining took place and where it didn't. We have the maps. We know who lived there and who didn't.

This was American policy. We have never accounted for it, and it is unlikely that we ever will. That is not because of any African-American's life-span but because of a powerful desire to run out the clock. Reparations claims were made within the natural lifetimes of emancipated African-Americans. They were unsuccessful. They were not unsuccessful because they lacked merit. They were unsuccessful because their country lacked the courage to dispense with creationism. 

The Case For Reparations

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Frum: Why NRA wins while other conservatives lose

A more illiberal and un-PC person than myself might summarize Frum's arguments thusly: the NRA speaks to the racial prejudices and economic insecurities of conservative rednecks.

Well, duh.

Why Gun-Rights Backers Win While Other Conservative Causes Lose

By David Frum

April 29, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/why-gun-rights-supporters-win-when-other-conservative-causes-lose/361396/

Max Blumenthal on 'Goliath' and Israeli apartheid

This is a must-read interview with journalist Max Blumenthal whose latest book is called Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.  

Blumenthal, a Jewish American, has been labelled an anti-Semite and anti-American by the Israeli lobby for accurately describing what life is really like in Israel today.

Read on!...

An Interview with Max Blumenthal: Inside Israel’s Apartheid State

By Joshua Frank

January 2, 2014 | CounterPunch

URL: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/02/inside-israels-apartheid-state/

Problem solved?: GOP cuts food stamps

In case you weren't paying attention, the House GOP's vote on the annual farm bill showed us two things: 1) food stamps for hungry people are bad; and 2) agricultural subsidies for Congressmen and rich farmers are good. What do those two things tell us?

It’s the juxtaposition of the two programs that so clearly exposes the party’s agenda. Anti-government ideology can justify even the most vicious cuts to the safety net. It can’t justify the massive socialist scheme that is agriculture policy. And, to be fair, conservative intellectuals generally don’t justify agriculture socialism. But the Republican Party certainly does. The ultraconservative Republican Study Committee recently banned the Heritage Foundation from its meetings because Heritage denounced the GOP’s farm subsidies. There is a grim hilarity here: Republicans punished Heritage for its one technocratically sane position.

The GOP's stance on these two issues also belies their hypocrisy on social spending:

Obama has attacked the GOP farm-subsidy bill for spending too much. Here is the one chunk of social spending where Republicans are not only failing to issue hostage threats to secure the cuts they demand, they are also refusing to cut spending as much as Barack Obama asks. And the program they pick to defend is, on the substantive merits, the most unjustifiable program of any significant scale in the federal budget.

But that's OK, because this wasteful federal spending doesn't go to black ghetto queens: 

It is also one that accrues to disproportionately wealthy and overwhelmingly white recipients. (As opposed to Obamacare, whose beneficiaries are disproportionately poor and non-white.) 

That's really the only thing that matters to Republicans nowadays. Because it's clearly not about the numbers. It's simply a question of: could this federal spending possibly benefit a single brown-skinned person who games the system, no matter how many people genuinely need it? 

More broadly, Republicans' present meme that, If only we could repeal Obamacare and reduce food stamps, our economy would take off!, is completely asinine and without economic merit.  We liberals and Democrats must not let such idiotic thinking go unchallenged as a "credible" policy alternative!

Republicans: We Were Too Nice to the Hungry, But We’ve Fixed That

By Jonathan Chait

September 20, 2013 | New York Magazine

URL: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/09/republicans-we-were-too-nice-to-the-hungry.html

The real decline and possible REBIRTH of Detroit

Joyce's article about the real Detroit, its "4 economies," and the hopeful developments there is worth reading in full.  

But I want to highlight the racial, or rather, racist elephant in the room that Joyce, a native Detroiter, points out while the MSM ignores it.  This might sound like the urban area near you:

And yes, race does have everything to do with it.  There are three counties that make up the political economy of Southeast Michigan.  Wayne County encompasses Detroit but also includes large suburbs such as Dearborn,  Livonia (the most segregated city of more than 200,000 residents in the entire country) and most of the affluent Grosse Pointes.  Oakland County immediately north of Detroit is the 4th most affluent county of its size in the United States.  Nearby Macomb County is predominately working class and the “birthplace” of “Reagan Democrats”.  

Much of the Detroit punditry one reads or hears conveniently ignores race altogether, concentrating instead on the decline of the domestic auto industry or macro economic trends.  Usually when race is included on a list of “causes for Detroit’s decline,”  it is described with weasel words such as “racial tensions” or “the racial divide.”  Nonsense. What it was and what it remains,  is white racism pure and simple.  Bloviators love to talk about the “unsustainable legacy” costs of pensions for city workers.  They never talk about the “legacy” costs of racism. 

By 1980,  African Americans out numbered whites within the city limits of Detroit.  Yes,  capital started leaving Detroit in the 1940’s. But the population disinvestment is just as important.  Make no mistake about it.  The extreme segregation that has long characterized Southeast Michigan was anything but accidental. 

For decades,  it was the policy of the Federal Housing Administration to deny loans to African Americans trying to buy houses in the suburbs.  To this day,  if you buy a suburban house that hasn’t changed hands in a long time,  the deed may well contain a “restrictive covenant” that explicitly prohibits the sale of the house to Negroes. 

That’s not all.  Twenty-three out of twenty-three attempts to create a tri-county transportation authority to improve region-wide public transit went down to defeat in the white controlled state legislature.  So,  not only was it impossible for African Americans to buy homes near where the jobs were moving,  it was difficult to get to suburban jobs that came along with suburban growth.

And just to add insult to injury,  the financial institutions that wouldn’t lend money to African Americans to move out of the city wouldn’t lend it for home improvement in the city either. But they would charge more,  far more,  for home and car insurance.  For those too young to remember,  that practice was called redlining.  It’s still prevalent today. 

One dramatic example of the cost of racism born by Detroit is this:  Detroit has an income tax on those who work within the city limits.  The two-tier tax is lower for those who work in the city but live in the suburbs.  In enacting the tax,  the state legislature required employers based in the city to collect the tax via payroll deduction as they do with federal and other taxes.  Suburban based employers are not required by the law to collect the tax. Most of them don’t.  The revenue lost to Detroit per year is estimated to be as much as $142 million.   

Zooming out our historical lens even further,  we see the unbroken pattern of white supremacy even more clearly.  The counterrevolution to the civil war was the Jim Crow system.  The counterrevolution to the end of Jim Crow is mass incarceration and other components of the institutionalized racism that perpetuate and in some ways intensify white privilege today.  Detroit’s history as the national leader in residential segregation and all that flows from it definitely underpins today’s Detroit crisis and that of Flint, Pontiac,  Benton Harbor and Muskegon as well. 

While observers sometimes notice that a majority of predominately African American cities in Michigan are under some form of emergency management.  The question they don’t ask is,  why are there predominately African American cities in the first place? 

The beauty of this “willful ignorance” for many whites is that as the quality of life declined in Detroit,  the decline itself became the moral justification for whites for the inequality itself.  It’s an old story.  Slave society did the very same thing.  Slaves were routinely portrayed as lazy and shiftless.  To put the meme in contemporary terms,  the slaves were demonized as the takers and the slave owners were the makers. 

The Real Story Behind the Decline of Detroit … And Yes, Great Things Are Happening There Too

By Frank Joyce

September 2, 2013 | Alternet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/real-story-detroits-economy-good-things-are-really-happening-motown

Pitts: Black crime not a racial statement

Right on time, my man Leonard Pitts nailed it:

No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you [as a black person], you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.

Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.

We poor, oppressed white people!  Oh Lord, deliver us from this reverse racism!  

Hey, here's an idea: let's all overdose on tanning pills like C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man and then we'll be living on easy street... right? Right?  [Crickets chirping].

This white guy figured out how to beat reverse racism back in 1986.

Killing of Christopher Lane not a racial statement

By Leodard Pitts

August 27, 2013 | Miami Herald

I have nothing to say about the murder of Christopher Lane.

Except this:

The killing of this Australian man, allegedly by a group of boys who were bored and could think of nothing better to do, suggests chilling amorality and a sociopathic estrangement from the sacredness of life. The fact that these teenagers were able to get their hands on a gun with which to shoot the 22-year-old student in the back on Aug. 16 as he was jogging in the small Oklahoma town of Duncan, leaves me embarrassed for my country — and thankful I am not the one who has to explain to his country how such a thing can happen.

None of this will satisfy the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who have written me emails demanding (it is always interesting when people think they can demand a column) that I write about this drive-by shooting as an act of  racial bigotry, an inverse of the Trayvon Martin killing, if you will. There is a numbing repetitiveness to these screeds: Where is Jesse Jackson, they demand. Where is Al Sharpton? Where are you? Or as one subject line puts it: “Why no outrage!”

Actually, I have plenty outrage. Just not the flavor of outrage they would like me to have.

It is, for some people, a foregone conclusion that any time violent crime crosses racial lines, some kind of racial statement is intended. But violent criminals are not sociopolitical theoreticians, and violent crime is not usually a social manifesto. With relatively rare exceptions — we call them hate crimes — the fact is, if a thug shoots you, it is not because you are white, black, gay or Muslim, but because you are there.

So is Lane’s shooting one of those exceptions? A case can be made that it is. One of the young black suspects, after all, tweeted his anti-white bigotry back in April. The hashtag: HATE THEM.

But a case can also be made that it isn’t. Of the remaining two suspects, one is reportedly white and the other, the alleged shooter, apparently has a white mother. The prosecutor told the Duncan Banner newspaper there’s no evidence Lane was targeted because of his race, and in any event, bringing hate-crime charges is a moot point. In Oklahoma, hate crimes are misdemeanors; the boys are already facing felonies.

Again, none of this will satisfy those dozens, if not hundreds, of email writers, not to mention the authors of similar screeds on right-wing websites. What they’re doing is simple. They are using tragedy to play a cynical game of tit-for-tat: “I’ll see your Trayvon Martin and raise you a Christopher Lane.” In other words, they want to use this tragedy to validate their view that white people are victims of black racism.

And if all that was meant when African Americans decry racism is that sometimes white people do violence against you, then the email writers and right-wing pundits might have a point. But it isn’t and they don’t.

No, what is meant is that even when violence is done against you, you may automatically be considered the “suspect” and your killer set free. What is meant is that judges are harder on you, doctors less aggressive in treating you, banks more apt to deny you, landlords less likely to show you apartments, hiring officers more likely to round-file your application. What is meant is good luck hailing a cab in midtown Manhattan. What is meant is that other people will airily dismiss the reality of those things, or, as has many times happened to me, admit the reality but advise that you should accept your lot in silence.

Then in the next breath, those same people will ask you to empathize with how racially victimized they are. The sheer, blind gall of it beggars imagination.

Last week, Christopher Lane was killed for no good reason, apparently by three morally defective boys.

Sorry, but he’s the victim here. White America is not.

Racial media parity?

In an "ah-ha!" tone, my Republican agents have been feeding me recent news stories about the Australian white guy murdered, and the Oklahoma white guy murdered, both by "racists." Even though there is no indication these were racially motivated crimes.

Then we have FOX rushing to the scene, asking if the media coverage of the Oklahoma murder of Christopher Lane compares to the media coverage of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

None of this makes rational sense to me, I'm sorry.  I'm not being partisan here; this is just dumb.

It seems that we've moved on from insisting on some kind of "objective" left-right balance in news coverage of events, to insisting that we establish a black-white balance of media coverage of crime.

Why is this utterly pointless and stupid?

First, because you and I don't control the media.  But of course FOX and talk radio know that.  They play up the black-on-white crime, then accuse the "liberal" media of downplaying it.  Do I have to explain how self-serving and slanted that is?

Second, because so many thousands of murders escape the national media. We had more than 11,000 firearm homicides and more than 16,000 total homicides in the U.S. in 2012.  How many of them can you recall hearing about on the evening news or talk radio?  Exactly.

Third, these stories on FOX, the Blaze, etc. always mention Trayvon Martin, as in, "The media was so obsessed with Trayvon Martin... but they ignore THIS?!"  

First, refer to point #1.  Second, I challenge you to show me the black George Zimmerman. That's right, show me the case of the black man who murdered an unarmed white man and claimed it was in self-defense, despite police dispatchers telling the black man to leave that white man alone. Then the black man is set free, despite no contest that he shot and killed that white man, a white man who never bothered him or sought him out.

Yes, please, send me the link to that story, my Republican friends.  I can't wait to read all about it.

But until then, please do me a favor and shut up about race.

And fourth, most black crime is black-on-black.  That's a tragedy. Just like all crime is a tragedy. But what the hell does this have to do with the media or political correctness?

White people, stop pretending whites are an aggrieved minority and not an entitled majority who hold the keys to everything valuable in American life. Whining is un-American.

None of you whining whities would trade places with a black or Hispanic American for a minute, and that's all you need to know about race relations in the U.S.  

UPDATE (08.23.2013): OMG, this is so outrageously dumb: "A dead Australian is just the price you pay to be politically correct."  Yep, FOX's Greg Gutfeld said it.  

Oh no, I'd better stop being so liberal and PC, or else piles of dead Australians are going to start washing up on U.S. shores!....

Obama protesters chant, 'Bye bye black sheep'

Racism is not pervasive on the Right, no sir!

These people were all plants and cranks bused in by George Soros to make colorblind conservatives look bad.

Hundreds protest Obama outside Phoenix high school

By Laurie Merrill, Dianna Nanez and Linnea Bennett

August 6, 2013 | Arizona Republic

URL: http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/20130806obama-phoenix-protests-outside-school.html

Civil War redux over Southern voting rights

Yeah, well, this pretty much says it:

[W]hite southern Republicans enact voter ID laws because they do not want Democratic constituencies to vote, particularly people of color. Rather than embrace the changing demographics in the US and adopt platforms to address the needs and concerns of voters of color, Republicans have chosen to eschew these voters and wage an assault on civil rights, immigration and policies of diversity and inclusion. This is the endgame for the Republican Southern Strategy of race card politics. The GOP was able to win elections on the margins by appealing to the racial insecurities of disaffected working class whites. In the process, southern whites fled the Democratic party, and the GOP became the party of the white South. Now, this marginalized base of angry white voters is all that is left of the Republican strategy and of the GOP as well, so Republicans must remove the segments of the electorate that will not vote for them.

What the GOP is doing to itself, employing short-term, racist fixes like gerrymandering, voter ID and anti-immigration, reminds me of one of those over-injured, desperate, ageing athletes who keeps on taking cortisone and steroid shots in the hopes of eking out one more winning season, but in the process is destroying his bones, rupturing his tendons, and basically killing himself.

This voter ID thing may work for the GOP in 2014, but blacks and Latinos will remember it; and birthrate wins. They won't trust the GOP for another generation, at least. The Republican Party is killing itself to save itself for one more go-round.

The US civil war is playing out again – this time over voter rights

By David A. Love

August 2, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3hytm

How can black men escape profiling?

I'm re-posting this in full.  Whitlock's main point is compelling: we know what to do about black-on-black violence, but nobody -- including our black male President -- knows how to overcome racial profiling of black men.  Nobody.  Think about that.

Consider also that Whitlock is not some blame-everything-on-poverty black man: "Navigating the ghetto is difficult. But it's not remotely impossible." That comment somewhat eases upper-class white guilt without disempowering the poor.

Here's how Whitlock sums it up [emphasis mine]:

Without a shred of corroborating evidence, the police assumed and the prosecution team unwittingly conceded Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman without reasonable provocation.

Imagine that. An agitated fair-skinned man with a gun followed an unarmed black boy and the assumptions drawn favor the gun-toting, non-black man.

If there's a blueprint for black men to follow that will reduce negative assumptions being made about us, reveal it.  Many of us will adhere to it religiously and focus all of our attention on the drug war, mass incarceration and the other policies that fuel black-on-black violence and the destruction of the black family.

Whitlock is a columnist for FOX Sports, by the way.  Good on FOX, I guess, for not firing him for making this commentary on HuffPo.

The Real Problem: Race Baiters' Inability to Think, Comprehend

By Jason Whitlock

July 26, 2013 | Huffington Post

Here's what the race baiters on the right fail to comprehend: There's a clear-cut, easy-to-follow blueprint for avoiding the ravages of black-on-black violence and crime. America has yet to provide us a comparable blueprint for avoiding racial profiling.

That's why it's impossible for ordinary, rational black folks to let go of Trayvon Martin and the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial.

We know all too well the horrors transpiring in Chicago and other urban areas where the neglected offsprings of America's prison-institutionalized and prison-values-corrupted engage in a predictable war of hopelessness and self-hatred. The consequences of our drug war and its companion, mass incarceration, do not stop at prison walls.

We know that. We do also, however, know how to escape their wrath.

When my mother caught a burglar climbing through our kitchen window in 1975, she promptly took a second job and moved me and my older brother to an Indianapolis suburb.

[Nowadays a black woman would be lucky to get first job. -- J]

Willie Clark, my best childhood friend, grew up in a home just a few blocks from my old neighborhood. You could walk out his family's backyard and reach a government housing project in less than a minute. The entire area was rough.

Willie's parents had little trouble keeping him out of trouble. They raised him and his two sisters in the church. They taught him to be respectful and careful of where he went and who he befriended. They supported his athletic endeavors, kept tabs on his academic progress, demanded that he avoid drugs and nurtured a belief he could achieve something in this country.

He was raised in the 'hood. He graduated from college, opened an American Family Insurance agency, married and built a home in the suburbs for his wife and three kids. He moved up and moved out.

My dad owned small taverns (think ghetto Cheers) in Indianapolis' inner-city for 35 years. I loved the places, visited them often as a kid and socialized at them as an adult. I never once had any problems.

Navigating the ghetto is difficult. But it's not remotely impossible. If you're intent on avoiding trouble, use common sense and choose to interact with all people respectfully, you can, short of bad luck, stay clear of the nonsense. And, if all else fails and you don't want to walk the tightrope, you can do what my mother did and take the necessary steps to leave the ghetto.

For a black man, there is no game plan for escaping racial profiling. You can't run from the police. No neighborhood is safe. There's no style of dress that protects you. Your level of education and wealth are irrelevant. Proper manners and a deferential tone do not matter.

Years ago, I worked for the Charlotte Observer. I lived in Rock Hill, S.C. My picture ran inside the newspaper alongside my occasional columns. One day I was driving home from work around 5 p.m. when a police officer decided I fit the description of a black man who had pulled a string of burglaries. He pulled me over. I was in slacks, dress shoes and a button-up shirt.

He demanded I step out of the car. When I did, I discovered there were six cops and three additional police cars surrounding me and my 1985 Honda Prelude. For the next hour, I stood alongside a busy street as the lead detective berated me and accused me of being a cat burglar. I told him I was a sports writer for the local paper. He didn't believe me. He didn't let me re-enter my car and drive home until a police dispatcher called the Observer and was assured by one of my co-workers that I worked there.

I was not cited for any traffic violation. I had broken no laws. I was guilty of being black when the police were looking for a black burglary suspect.

I drove to my apartment and cried for the next two hours. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.  It's difficult to adequately convey the mix of outrage, fear and vulnerability I felt throughout the encounter.  I've never forgotten it. Twenty years later, the scar is still there. It burns every time a well-intentioned employee follows me as I shop for clothes.

Maybe this is a price the race-baiters on the right think black men should pay without objection for the privilege of living in this country. If that's their logic, then what they're really arguing is that black men are not full citizens with inalienable rights in this republic.

Or maybe their position is racial profiling is a tax all black men should pay because our criminal justice system and popular culture have judged and portrayed black men as inherently criminal.  Interesting.  Do we then retain the right to judge all white men as inherently racist and the masterminds powering a system that has dehumanized and criminalized black men for 400 years in this country?

Surely there's some middle ground. Surely reasonable men -- regardless of political bent and color -- can comprehend black people's angst over racial profiling and subsequent fear the Zimmerman verdict symbolically deputized non-black civilians to treat all black men as criminals on sight.

I don't wear a hoodie. I was never suspended from school. I never posed as a wannabe thug. But I know exactly how Trayvon Martin felt at 7:09 p.m., on Feb. 26, 2012. He felt a mix of outrage, fear and vulnerability.

The system (police and prosecution) apparently never even considered the possibility that in the rain and the dark a cowardly, wannabe cop provoked a kid he deemed an "a--hole" and a "punk" by approaching him with his hand on his holstered weapon or with his weapon drawn.

Without a shred of corroborating evidence, the police assumed and the prosecution team unwittingly conceded Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman without reasonable provocation.

Imagine that. An agitated fair-skinned man with a gun followed an unarmed black boy and the assumptions drawn favor the gun-toting, non-black man.

If there's a blueprint for black men to follow that will reduce negative assumptions being made about us, reveal it. Many of us will adhere to it religiously and focus all of our attention on the drug war, mass incarceration and the other policies that fuel black-on-black violence and the destruction of the black family.

Cornel West: Obama's racism speech hypocritical, too late

Brother West was having none of President Obama's bland and measured post-post-trial statement on the "not guilty" verdict of George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin:  

I think we have to recognize that [President Obama] has been able to hide and conceal that criminalizing of the black poor as what I call the re-niggerizing of the black professional class. You’ve got these black leaders on the Obama plantation, won’t say a criminal word about the master in the big house, will only try to tame the field folk so that they’re not critical of the master in the big house. That’s why I think even Brother Sharpton is going to be in trouble. Why? Because he has unleashed—and I agree with him—the rage. And the rage is always on the road to self-determination. But the rage is going to hit up against a stone wall. Why? Because Obama and Holder, will they come through at the federal level for Trayvon Martin? We hope so. Don’t hold your breath. And when they don’t, they’re going to have to somehow contain that rage. And in containing that rage, there’s going to be many people who say, "No, we see, this president is not serious about the criminalizing of poor people." We’ve got a black leadership that is deferential to Obama, that is subservient to Obama, and that’s what niggerizing is. You keep folks so scared. You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they’re still scared. And as long as you’re scared, you’re on the plantation.

Most liberal and moderate pundits gave Obama high marks for his unprepared remarks last week about being a black man in America.  Nevertheless, it's kind of pathetic that we need our President to interpret the African-American experience for us.  If you're black, you already know about it. If you're white, and you don't acknowledge your own prejudices, then you're kidding yourself and lying to everybody else.  So who was Obama addressing, the history books?

Cornel West: Obama’s Response to Trayvon Martin Case Belies Failure to Challenge "New Jim Crow"

Interview with Amy Goodman

July 22, 2013 | Democracy Now!

URL: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/22/cornel_west_obamas_response_to_trayvon

Stand your ground in Fla...unless you're black

Nope, no racial discrimination here, no sir:

An analysis conducted by the Tampa Bay Times last year showed that defendants in Florida who employ the “Stand Your Ground” defense are more successful when the victim is Black. In its examination of 200 applicable cases, the Times found that 73 percent of those who killed a Black person were acquitted, compared to 59 percent of those who killed a White.

Blacks Who "Stand Their Ground" Are Often Imprisoned

By Zenitha Prince

July 21, 2013 | New American Media

URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/blacks-who-stand-their-ground-are-often-imprisoned

Racist joke shows whites' real beef with 'welfare'

Pardon me for forwarding the ugly "joke" below that was forwarded to me by an old Tea Partyer, but it's a clear admission by white conservatives what their real beef is with "welfare" and a teachable moment for the rest of us: they really believe these federal programs are deliberate wealth redistribution from hardworking whites to lazy blacks.  (Or to "lazy brown-skinned people who speak gibberish, hate work and wipe their asses with American flags," to quote a true genius.)

In his recent op-ed "Why white America thinks ‘too much welfare’ is a black thing," Dr. Jason Johnson sums it up pretty well:

First, most social science research shows that to white Americans welfare automatically conjures up images of lazy promiscuous black women in the inner city, popping out babies like rabbits and turning government cheese vouchers into gold chains and plasma screen televisions.

Consequently for many Americans any question about welfare and the economy is really a question about race. This is not new, but in fact a longstanding narrative in American politics where during times of economic stress business and political elites have ‘protected’ the majority of whites from swallowing the harsh realities of American economics with a sugary dose of racial distraction.

The actual facts about welfare have always been pretty clear; whites and children are the greatest recipients and beneficiaries of various programs, but that’s not good fodder for talk radio.  From the beginning of government sponsored welfare programs, discriminatory policies were enacted to keep blacks off the rolls (like excluding farm workers and domestics in the 1950’s) and even once those policies were removed media and politicians, especially on the right, insisted on maintaining the myth that the face of poverty in America was a black thing.

In fact the racist joke below was told by Arkansas Tea Party leader Inge Marler at at an Ozark Tea Party rally in June 2012, although perhaps it's been around even longer.  The TP crowd loved it.  

---

From:
To:
Subject: Fw: Racism Explained
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:15:53 -0400

Subject: Racism Explained

RACISM EXPLAINED

A black kid asks his mother, "Mama, what's a Democracy?" 

"Well, son, that's when white folks work every day so we can get all our benefits, you knows, like free cell phones, rent subsidy, food stamps, welfare, school breakfasts and lunches, free healthcare, utility subsidy, & the list goes on & on, you knows."

"But mama, don't the white people get pissed off about all that?

"Sure they do, son, and that's called racism."