Black White Man

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-30/a-rapper-salutes-the-slave-trade/

The instances of racism that make me the most sad are those that are internalized racism.   When I was living in Africa, I saw it a lot.   One time, I was riding a bus and we were at one of the standard security checkpoints.   The soldier checking our papers started by saying that although he had black skin, he had a mind like a white man, so we better not try to get anything over on him.   In this country, I think that the problem is perhaps even more severe.   The only things that most Americans of any race learn about Africa are the old colonial images of spear-chucking savages, and the more modern images of Rwandan style civil war.   If this is all that young Black people are learning about Africans, then is it surprising that they consider European involvement — any European involvement — to be beneficial?   Soulja boy got a lot of bad press for his “shout out to the slave masters”, but really this is a failure of education which is much more endemic than one rapper.

Here’s a list which includes a fair number of historical and modern synonyms for “multi-racial”

I would like to start compiling a comprehensive list, including slang.  I’d like to try to include terms that some might consider derogatory, if you all will indulge me and try not to be insulted.   I’ve heard, to describe myself and my friends:

• Zebra
• Zebra head
• Oreo
• Reverse Oreo (white skin, black inside)
• Mulatto (oddly missing from the linked list)
• Metisse (in Francophone African countries, used to describe people of mixed White and Black ancestry)
• Coloured (in Anglophone African countries, used to describe people of mixed White and Black ancestry)

What else?

Bitch if the New Black (via Jezebel)

Black is the New President, Bitch (via Jezebel)

For those of you who missed it, Saturday Night Live is slowly coming back to both political relevance and actually being consistently funny for the first time since Will Farrell left. I think this is the first time they’ve been both since Eddie Murphy!

In these links Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan play out for us a conversation that’s happening all over the country, but is too edgy for most of the mainstream media. Is Clinton a bitch, and do we want a bitch for a president? Does Obama have a shot at the White House because he’s Black, or despite it?

Personally I think that Tina Fey was on point for every single one of her arguments, while Tracy Morgan resorted to easy personal attacks on Senator Clinton… but my goal here is more to present the links than to comment on them, so I’ll stop there and let you judge for yourselves.

Chasing the dream (via MSN)

I’ve found the media coverage of this anniversary to be extremely interesting — and for once I’m not angered by the media to the point of speechlessness.    This is exactly the kind of discourse that I think our nation needs, and I found the article to be wonderfully balanced in that it presented arguments that we have achieved the dream, as well as arguments that we have not — often juxtaposing arguments within the same field, such as comparing perhaps racially equal housing policy with perhaps biased behavior on the part of real estate agents.

Since Obama’s speech, I’ve been trying to be conscientiously more open-minded to the point of view that there’s no longer racism in our society.   I completely reject the idea, but I think that the conversation about it is critically important to our society.    And in order to have that conversation, the people on my side of the argument have to be able to have a rational discourse without resorting to name-calling and without estranging and polarizing people who merely disagree.   MLK was a unifier and his appeal was universal.    He wouldn’t have gotten much done otherwise — ultimately the civil rights movement was won through votes cast by white politicians to enact civil rights legislation.

As someone who has felt a lot of racism, I can only imagine how angry the average dark-skinned black person is.    But I do believe that a lot of racism comes out of ignorance about how hard it is to be Black (or Hispanic, or a woman, or whatever) moreso than real malice.   Sure, the malice exists.   But it’s important I think to distinguish between people who are well-intentioned and people who aren’t.   We should be able to have the kinds of conversations which are kicked off by that MSN article with the well-intentioned bunch who simply happen to disagree with us, and that’s definitely something that I have to be a little bit better about.

http://www.emaxhealth.com/24/18471.html

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=49077

I didn’t need a Harvard professor to tell me this, but I suppose that some people do, and I’ll just accept that and move on.     Many have mocked the concept of Black rage, and so forth, but I wouldn’t.    Now what I want to see is studies being done on the stress of being poor, and maybe some cross-referencing.

As a multi-racial, cross-socio-economic, internationalist — put quite simply, I’m a huge mutt — I spend a lot of time thinking about the similarities and differences among people’s conditions, and specifically how oppression affects people of different backgrounds in similar or different ways.    Yesterday’s post about building straw man arguments out of people’s real complaints about racism got me thinking about how a correlation could be drawn between racism and sexism in this regard.    It’s often said that the laws surrounding sexual harassment and rape allegations are unique in our legal system in that they don’t require traditional objective proof — leaving the room open for a woman to falsely accuse a man and get away with it scott free on “just her word.”    While on the face of it this argument makes sense, taken in the background of our current society (where statistics say that somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd of all women get sexually assaulted in some way over the course of their lifetime) it’s a ludicrous assertion.   If some very small minority of women are able to abuse the formal structure of the present law, it pales in comparison to the very large population of women who are being ignored by it on a daily basis.

Jennifer over at Mixed Race America has a very good post about The White Spokesperson.

It may be my mixed-race, hodge-podge, moving-all-over-the-country-and-the-world lifestyle… but I really see race and ethnicity are more of a spectrum than a finite number of “groups”. As a white-skinned black guy, I have a lot in common with dark skinned black folk… but some things I don’t experience directly. Cops don’t pull me over and harass me. Women don’t pull their purses tight when I pass. My white in-laws don’t really have any issue with me marrying their daughter.

But sometimes this causes people (both Black and white people) to think that I don’t feel racism at all — which just isn’t true. I’ve been threatened by the Klan and by neo-nazis. I’ve been called out and ostrasized. I’ve felt like an outsider in the largely white communities that I’ve grown up in.

Jennifer brings up a lot of good points in her post. One of the minor things that she brings is up is the idea that Asians are somehow not “really” minorities (probably because they are, on average, no less affluent then whites), which is an opinion which I’ve encountered quite a bit as well. She’s Asian American and I’m Black, but we both have this experience of being perceived as “the minority that’s not _really_ a minority.” BS. Definitely persecution against some minorities is worse than others … but that’s not to minimize the alienation that any minority can feel. And I can attest to one of the main points of her post, which is that moving through a white community day in and day out can be tiresome. Any minority feels it — I’ve lived in (white) communities of American expats living abroad, and the fatigue is the same. Integration is, on the whole, a wonderful thing. But, damn if it’s not tiring, and sometimes it’s nice to retreat into a comfortable zone of your own culture.

And so does this lady — follow the link for a good overview of the Boondocks as a whole.     It’s one of my favorite things on TV at the moment, and the strip is almost as good.