Tag: Barack Obama

Race in America, late summer, 1963

“We often hear it said here that while the Negro drive for equality is a justifiable movement, in the last year the Negroes have been pushing too hard and too fast….”

NBC News did a very interesting thing last month: it rebroadcast the August 25, 1963 episode of the news panel program Meet the Press, 50 years after the original broadcast. You can read the transcript at the site as well. The guests were Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, and Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were speaking three days before the massive March on Washington.

What I found fascinating is that there are two overriding themes in the questioning. One comes in the first question from Lawrence E. Spivak, “permanent member of the MEET THE PRESS panel,” and future moderator of the program: “Mr. Wilkins, there are a great many people, as I am sure you know, who believe it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting. What do you see as the effect on the just cause of the Negro if you do have incidents, if you do have any rioting?” Love the use of the word “militant.”

Of course, the march was peaceful, as Wilkins suggested would be the case, even larger than Wilkins’ upper estimation of up to 190,000 participants, and with a great number of them white people.

I found this concern particularly interesting in terms of current MTP host David Gregory’s description of the times: “The previous months of 1963 were tumultuous ones in the civil rights movement.

“King was jailed in April, images of brutality were widely publicized as police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and the NAACP ‘s Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson Mississippi in June.”

The other emphasis was based on this question to Dr. King: “We often hear it said here that while the Negro drive for equality is a justifiable movement, in the last year the Negroes have been pushing too hard and too fast…. There has been concern about the sit-ins, about some of the incidents that have happened in connection with them. Do you find any substantial reaction among white people to this effect, or does it affect you in any way in the conduct of your movement ?”

I always found this notion that fairness coming “too fast” laughable, given, as Dr. King noted that black people at the time had “waited for well-now 345 years for our basic constitutional and God-given rights.” I remember that national polls into at least the 1980s suggested that white people thought the black people were moving too quickly towards equality, a view not shared by black people.

Less than a month after the “I Have a Dream” speech, four black girls were killed in their Birmingham church, as Arthur noted. I was pleased that President Obama signed legislation posthumously awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. But I was saddened to discover that the body of Addie Mae Collins had gone missing, probably in the first five years after her death.

I found it ironic that the panelists on that 1963 segment of MTP talked about violence BY blacks when violence TO blacks was so often the reality in the day.

Fortunately, we live in post-racial America in 2013, where the selection of a Miss America of Asian Indian descent was universally cheered. OK, NOT so universally cheered. At least we can be comforted (?) by the fact that if she had eligible to be competing for Miss India, she probably wouldn’t have even made it to the finals.

March on Washington, a half century later

When Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball in 1947, that did not mark the end of racism and segregation.

It’s likely you’ll see a LOT of stories about the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Every single one will marvel at how much progress has been made in America in the area of race, since 1963. Almost all will point to a black President, the current Attorney General, and two recent Secretaries of State as examples. The divergence in opinions come on this point: some will claim that we have “reached the promised land,” making sure to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. from that day a half-century ago – as though he were the only speaker there – while others will suggest that we haven’t quite gotten there yet.

When President Obama suggested that we look at race again in light of the Trayvon Martin case, that Obama could have been Trayvon 35 years ago, some, such as Touré at TIME, thought it was a brave personal observation. He wrote: “The assertion that blacks are hallucinating or excuse-making or lying when we talk about the many very real ways white privilege and racial bias and the lingering impact of history impact our lives is painful. It adds insult to injury to attack all assertions of racism and deny its continued impact or existence.”

Others labeled Obama “racist-in-chief”, playing the “race card” and worse. When Former Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough lit into Fox News talk-show host Sean Hannity last month for suggesting that Martin was a messed up teenager who “had it coming” when he was killed by George Zimmerman in their February 2012 confrontation, the bile cast on the Morning Joe host, Martin, his parents, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, among others, by a website I follow was toxic. The always dreadful Ted Nugent said that Martin had been ‘Emboldened’ By Obama, “the first black president as a ‘Black Panther’ running a ‘gangster’ government.”

Here are four charts suggesting Obama’s right about being black in America. Being profiled is, more than anything, disheartening, I can tell you. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon, Lavar Burton, the original Kunte Kinte of Roots fame, noted how he had taught his sons to keep their hands open and out of the car. Meanwhile, a white guy on the same show noted that he had once locked his keys in the car, so he tried to break in; a New Orleans police officer stopped him, saying, “No, you’re not doing it right.”

There’s this show on ABC called What Would You Do? It’s a hidden camera show that looks at human psychology. I don’t watch it, but I find it interesting that several of their experiments involve race. A most powerful one involved actors pretending to be bicycle thieves. From this story: When a white young man appeared to be taking a bike, most people didn’t question it. Yet when the African-American actor took his place, “the reactions were more pronounced. At one point, a crowd assembled around the purported thief and confronted him directly. One man pulled out a cellphone and said he was calling the police, which he was about to do until the cameramen filming the event stepped forward.”

When Jackie Robinson joined major league baseball in 1947, that did not mark the end of racism and segregation. It took over a decade before every team had at least one black player. It was 1987, when Al Campanis, general manager of the DODGERS, which was Jackie’s team, rationalized on national TV why there weren’t more blacks in baseball management; I watched it live, stunned. As a direct result, the sport was far more aggressive in making sure minority candidates at least got interviewed for a management position. They took an AFFIRMATIVE ACTION to rectify a system, not of overt racism, but merely cronyism, hiring the guys one already knows.

And speaking of which, the US Supreme Court seems destined to gut the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, under the mistaken belief that everything is all better now. The economic inequities would otherwise. Almost 400 years have passed since blacks came to America, and that there is still work to be done does not negate the progress. Nor does the progress suggest that Martin, if he were still alive, and his colleagues, some of whom still alive, and their successors, would be resting on their laurels, satisfied that the work is done.
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Leonard Pitts: Living in a time of moral cowardice.

If you could somehow magically bring [Martin Luther King, Jr.] here, that tomorrow would likely seem miraculous to him, faced as he was with a time when segregation, police brutality, employment discrimination, and voter suppression were widely and openly practiced.

Here is tomorrow, after all, the president is black. The business mogul is black. The movie star is black. The sports icon is black. The reporter, the scholar, the lawyer, the teacher, the doctor, all of them are black. And King might think for a moment that he was wrong about tomorrow and its troubles.

It would not take long for him to see the grimy truth beneath the shiny surface, to learn that the perpetual suspect is also black. As are the indigent woman, the dropout, the fatherless child, the suppressed voter, and the boy lying dead in the grass with candy and iced tea in his pocket.

Where in the world is Binghamton, New York?


President Obama is taking a bus tour of upstate New York. If his driver uses the map shown on MSNBC, the President will be traveling far less than he needs to.
regionsmap
Here are where places ACTUALLY are in New York State. The cluster of cities in the MSNBC map is closer to Glens Falls, north of Albany.

Scranton, Pennsylvania should also be farther east and a little farther south, but that error isn’t as egregious as putting Buffalo more than 400 miles east of where it actually is located.

This is why I tend to be ever so wary of GPS-type software. It’s like that episode of the American version of The Office when Michael Scott drives into a lake or river because the GPS says there is a road ahead.

Some years ago, I was with a relative trying to find a street with GPS. I was convinced the second time through that the road we were seeking hadn’t been added to the system, but the relative tried another three or four times, with the same circular result.

The last time we drove the Charlotte, NC, the Mapquest directions took us off the highway a couple of exits early, having us worm our way through unfamiliar side streets before finding our way.

I should note that bad maps is not just in the skill set of one TV network. Dustbury notes that Headline News put an Idaho town in Oklahoma. And, famously, NBC News moved Vermont to New Hampshire, eliminating New Hampshire from the map altogether, which led to an on-air correction.

Nor is it just an American thing. A Guardian correction from August 12 demonstrates why you should be absolutely sure when you use Britain (for either the United Kingdom or the island) or England (for the country).

Of course, this just makes a geographically challenged audience even more perplexed!

That equality thing

I told Arthur, who is “New Zealand’s foremost gay American-born podcaster, blogger and such like,” that he ought to write a book about the parallels and divergences in equality issues in the United States and New Zealand.

It’s happening so quickly that I’m having a difficult time keeping track, but marriage equality has moved forward quite a lot in the past year since President Obama had given his support for same-sex marriage. Whether people support it, or not, there seems to be almost a sense of inevitability that it will happen nationwide, sooner or later, regardless of what happens in the Supreme Court this month. (Though if SCOTUS DOESN’T strike down DOMA, it will rather suck for a lot of people right NOW.)

National Basketball Association player Jason Collins comes out as gay this spring, and other than a lot of support, from the President to other sports figures, on down, the reaction mostly seems to be, “Hey, no big deal.”

All of this worries me. It seems that a level of complacency could easily set in. Moreover, when certain social progress takes place – lesbian couple on the cover of the New Yorker magazine – there is, most likely, a certain level of backlash.

I was listening to one of the podcasts of Arthur@AmeriNZ perhaps a year ago, maybe longer, and he, or Jason of 2political, was wondering whether the whole gay pride parade might be no longer necessary in certain places, such as in New York City. I would submit that because marriage equality came to New York State in 2011, it is MORE important to do so. It’s especially the case in the wake of incidents such as eight apparent NY Knicks fans wanted in an attack on a gay couple in the city not long ago, part of a wave of anti-LGBTQ crime which I’m convinced is in response to increased rights for gays.

Regardless, for me, it’s important to have such events in places such as Albany, NY. At my previous church, back in the 1990s, I asked Lillian Johnson, who was a pillar of the church before she died about a decade ago, what activities of support for gay rights we ought to be engaged in. This was not a single conversation, but something I brought up several times. Her answer was always the same. “We did something about that; we had a speaker here in 1975.” That was, BTW, well before I had attended the church, in 1982, or joined, in 1984. I thought that having another speaker, or several, might be in order.

Whereas my current church has participated in the city’s gay pride parade for many years, has a rainbow flag hanging from the bell tower every June, and in the church assembly hall the rest of the year. The Gay Men’s Chorus sings in lieu of the usual choir the first Sunday in June. The church has an active More Light Committee. There is no ambiguity in the church’s values or position, and I appreciate that.

This article suggests that people who now come out in support of marriage equality are not heroic, because there are so many other issues that LGBTQ people have to deal with, and that is true. But if the marriage issue has become “low-hanging fruit” easy to pick, then I say, “harvest away.”

I told Arthur, who is “New Zealand’s foremost gay American-born podcaster, blogger and such like,” that he ought to write a book about the parallels and divergences in equality issues in the United States and New Zealand. New Zealand passed marriage equality in 2013, which he wrote about extensively. BTW, he responds to a comment of mine in the first four minutes of his most recent podcast.

We were having this discussion in our adult education class at church, and it was suggested that the mainline Protestants are PERCEIVED to be less vocal about justice issues quite possibly because it is less hierarchical than the Roman Catholic church (with its cardinals) and less bombastic than the megachurch folks. Noted because I LOVE this: The Rev. Kathryn Johnson’s pointed memo…to the United Methodist Church is in response to charges being brought against the Rev. Dr. Thomas Ogletree. “He is facing charges in a possible United Methodist Church trial because he performed a same-sex wedding in New York City, where such marriages are fully legal. The wedding was his son’s.”

Great tweet by Evanier this month: “Donald Rumsfeld comes out against gay marriage; says if we stop it, we’ll be greeted as liberators.”
Amy’s poem, Queer
VIDEO: Same Love – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, featuring Mary Lambert
Cheri’s essay
Watch these straight people answer a question gay people have been asked for years

This week in Obama political scandal

It’s the attempt by the federal government to make legal acts, or marginally illegal acts, literally a federal case.

President Obama is currently embroiled in three situations labeled as political scandal. The IRS scandal is the most problematic in that it involves a highly disliked arm of government that affects almost everyone’s lives. But I agree that the REAL scandal in the IRS issue is that there are lots of political groups on both ends of the political spectrum getting tax-exempt status, when that designation should be limited to more cultural/civic issues. Since the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court in 2010, there have been far more organizations of every political stripe trying to influence elections, sometimes illegally. Also, the richer applicants fell under lesser scrutiny, a real class distinction. The President has shown public indignation over this particular issue, but he may be missing the bigger picture.

The notion that the Benghazi story is bigger than Watergate and Iran contra combined suggests that the “silly season” has already begun, Bob Woodward’s assertion notwithstanding. If there are altered documents, it may be Republicans feeding them to the mainstream media. At the end of the day, the real story on the government side will be that the US was ill-prepared for an attack in a hot spot, on a significant day (9/11 in 2012) despite warnings within the Administration, that no help was available to those who died there; that’s the scandal. The “talking points” of who said what, and when? An issue will be made of this, but it seems like usual interagency jockeying, rather than malicious intent to me.

I’m much more concerned by the unethical seizure of phone records of Associated Press journalists in connection to media leaks; it’s not just that First Amendment “freedom of speech” thing; it’s a Fourth Amendment “unreasonable search and seizure” thing, which has the effect of stifling whistleblowers. It’s the attempt to make legal acts, or marginally illegal acts, literally a federal case. One saw this in the Aaron Schwartz case, huge governmental overreach. The story of the octogenarian nun in federal prison for protesting may tick you off as it did me.

The President, as noted, seems to be worked up over one of these issues, but is more defensive about the other two. I would wish he’d get more excited about trampling people’s constitutional rights, but that does not appear to be in the cards. I find his behavior disappointing, to say the least.

Still, when the I word gets thrown around, I agree with this assessment: “it would take about fifty of each of the three to collectively equal Watergate, let alone the impeachment and incarceration we should have had over Iraq.”

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