Black History Month Archives - Page 4 of 4

13 o’clock: racism in reverse?

Americans increasingly view traditional partisan issues, such as health care and taxes, through a racial lens. To the extent that some view Obama’s positions on these issues as racially motivated, disagreements with the president may stoke fears of racial competition.

Every Black History Month, I put together some recent articles about the race for the adult education class in my church, and how the reason we still have Black History Month is because there’s still weird stuff going on. This year was better/worse than ever, with items like the issue of some noted cases of Shopping While Black or even Working While Black.

Hey, that Duck Dynasty guy said HE never saw any racism when he was growing up with black people, so it’s a good chance that racism never really existed at all.

But this really bowled me over: Study Finds White Americans Believe They Experience More Racism Than African Americans.

There’s a saying that “the new racism is to deny that racism exists.” If that is the case, it may explain a study conducted by researchers from Tufts University’s School of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School. Their findings claim that self-described white Americans believe they have “replaced blacks” as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America.

The authors say that their study highlights how the expectations of a “post-racial” society, predicted or imagined in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency, has far from been achieved.

The study finds that while both Caucasian and African Americans agree that anti-black racism has decreased over the last 60 years, whites believe that anti-white racism has increased. Moreover, the study finds that the majority of Caucasians believe that anti-white racism is a “bigger problem” than what African Americans face.

An astounding 11% of Caucasian respondents assigned the maximum rating of 10 to the seriousness of anti-white discrimination. Compare that with only 2% who reported the same of anti-black racism. Caucasians, the study found, often believe that racial equality is “a zero sum game,” where one group gains at the expense of others.

A white pastor friend of mine doesn’t understand this. She sounded like Deborah Foster, who wrote A Guide to White Privilege for White People Who Think They’ve Never Had Any. Foster, who is also white, wrote: “I say I experienced prejudice rather than racism because I firmly believe that racism must be bigotry combined with institutional power.”

So what is THAT all about?

Here’s one of several examples: Rand Paul compares not getting his way to Jim Crow and internment camps.

Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” [Senator Rand] Paul [R-KY] said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”

And the recent State of the Union, where President Obama noted that he would use executive orders when Congress failed to act launched a whole new wave of distress, though Jon Stewart eviscerated the mock distress of the Republicans in Congress.

Despite the fact that the number of executive orders by Obama is consistent with other Presidents, the NARRATIVE is quite different.

Want more “proof”? Obama Administration Mandates Racism in Schools. What’s THAT about? It’s about the Obama administration claim that:

that African-American and Hispanic students are more harshly disciplined than whites for the same infractions.. the guidelines… about school discipline will actually encourage racial discrimination, undermine the learning environments of classrooms and contribute to an unjust race-consciousness in meting out discipline.

Last year, in the Black History Month session at my church, I was finding EXACTLY that trend, with locale bringing criminal charges against (black) minors for things such as talking back in class, e.g.

The call by Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, to end mandatory minimum sentences also fuels this narrative. Now the fact that there is a systemic racism in the US criminal justice system is obviously irrelevant to the discussion.

Indeed, according to conservative media darling Ted Nugent, Trayvon Martin [was] ‘emboldened’ by Obama, whatever the heck that means. Moreover, Obama did not show proper outrage when three kids, two of them black, killed a white Australian living in Oklahoma. Indeed, Pultizer Prize-winning columnist Kathleen Parker suggested Obama’s utterly innocuous comments about Trayvon Martin [looking like his son, if he had had one] “nourished the killing passions” of the accused murderers of Chris Lane in the Sooner State. Or as the Daily Kos put it: Fox News bravely exposes President Obama’s blatant support for murdering white people.

The New York Times has a whole section called Racism in the Age of Obama. One article reads:

National survey evidence suggests that anti-black attitudes have largely persisted through the 2012 election and may even have become slightly worse. Attitudes about the president and his policies could be spilling over onto attitudes about blacks. Further, paradoxically, perceptions that American society has moved beyond race might also liberate prejudiced individuals to openly express their biases.

An additional development since 2008 also portends poorly for race relations. Americans increasingly view traditional partisan issues, such as health care and taxes, through a racial lens. To the extent that some view Obama’s positions on these issues as racially motivated, disagreements with the president may stoke fears of racial competition. This too has the potential to make racial issues more salient for a segment of the public.

The term “backlash”, or in the alternative, “blacklash, has often been used to describe race relations in the US since the election of this President. From another Times article:

Both the word “Obama” and the president’s image have become tools for harassing and otherwise discriminating, in the workplace and in places of public accommodation, against blacks and against whites in romantic relationships with blacks.

Add to this the well-documented overreach by the National Security Agency, non-racial in my mind, but perhaps not in others’, and there’s your perfect storm.

Thus, a retired general is willing to lead a coup against Obama.

In any case, if blacks are less well off, it must be self-inflicted; after all, Oprah’s a billionaire. One Colorado legislator suggested that poverty rates among blacks is higher because they eat too much chicken.

To prove that we are post-racial, here are 19 things conservatives insist on comparing to slavery
The national debt
Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare
Abortion! Abortion!
Gay marriage
Fair Housing Act
Food stamps
Public education
Social Security
Income tax
Medicare
Contraception
FEMA
Affirmative action (e.g., by SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas)
Illegal immigration
Climate change
Gun control
The TSA
Public employee unions
Any and all Great Society programs

The Daily Kos sarcastically put it like this:

For five long, hard years, not a single day has passed without former “Choom Gang” member Barack Hussein Obama rubbing his blackness in America’s (white) face.
So, it wasn’t all that surprising when he blackened Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—the GOP’s most celebrated holiday—by hanging around a soup kitchen, getting people hooked on government cheese.

No doubt, President Obama is living the dream—the dream of his Kenyan anti-colonialist father; meanwhile, the rest of us are stuck (enslaved) in a nightmare.

It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Jay Smooth did a great video about the difference between individualized and systemic racism, how we focus too much on what Paula Deen might have said, and too little about incarceration rates among blacks.

That said: Top 10 Myths About Black America – A Must Read include
1 There are more Black men in prison than in college.
2 Black people, particularly Black men are lazy
3 Black people abuse the Welfare system and are swelling it beyond capacity…

21 Things You Can’t Do While Black

27 Things You Had To Deal With As The Only Black Kid In Your Class:
Since I WAS the only black kid my my class for most of K-9, (a total of two other black kids for a total of a year and a half), I did hear these:
People told you you “sounded white.”
People asked you things like: “Do black people tan?”
“You know, I don’t even really see you as black.”

But it’s not all bad. I was touched by A [White] Woman Comes To Terms With Her Family’s Slave-Owning Past

Kate Byroade… always knew her ancestors had once owned slaves, but had been told again and again, particularly by her Southern grandmother, that the family’s slaves had been treated well…

“At first this seemed OK to me because it was OK to her,” Byroade continues. “But eventually I understood that the domination of another person’s free will was unacceptable.”

Or this story about a racially diverse church in South Los Angeles, despite, the fact that: “It is estimated that in 9 out of 10 U.S. congregations, more than 80% of the parishioners represent one racial group. And about half of all churches are racially homogeneous.”

Finally, I recommend to you the video Reverse racism by Aamer Rahman. It’s not very long, but I thought, spoke the truth.

How come there’s no WHITE History Month?

We still need Black History Month because we still are learning about, and attempting to rectify, discrimination. Racism is NOT over; it has morphed into more devious manifestations.

Jaquandor, who continues to be western New York’s finest blogger, wrote, even before I asked him to Ask Roger Anything:
May I ask, what’s YOUR response to the question that ALWAYS gets asked in February? I’m referring, of course, to “How come there’s no WHITE History Month?” Anymore I just snort and say “That’s all the other ones. We just don’t announce it.” Problem with that response is, it doesn’t always get taken as the sarcasm it is.
He added:
I really hate hearing that question, with its pouty tone and its implication that racism is over and we need to just stop talking about it.

Let me tell you some of the things we talked about at my church in late January and February:

Education- A married couple, church members, and retired school principals Rose and James Jackson, talked about “Educating all of our children: The Albany Promise,” which is a cradle-to-career partnership introduced by SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher; James is currently a New York State Regent.

In the course of the conversation, the Jacksons noted that there were interracial public schools in the city of Albany, where previously blacks were educated in segregated schools, with black teachers. At the same time, the black teachers were excluded from the new schools. After a legal challenge, black teachers were allowed. But the result is that many private schools – Catholic and otherwise – rose up in the city. The segregation of public schools in the city long predated the “white flight” segregation of other urban areas. So the problems NOW in Albany schools have a largely unknown historic basis from 140 years earlier.

The environment – Activist Aaron Mair spoke on Building Health Advocacy Capacity in Environmental Justice Communities: A.N.S.W.E.R.S. Community Survival Project. He told how the primarily black Arbor Hill section of Albany became the dumping ground, literally, of the Capital District’s waste until the community responded in the last couple of decades; recent history. But Arbor Hill is not an isolated example; NIMBY often means dumping stuff in someone ELSE’S backyard, those with less political and economic power.

Racial designations – as I noted before, the very changeable definition of race was not determined by black people but by the Census Bureau and social scientists of the past. Some may not realize that it’s difficult for many African Americans to trace their ancestry before 1870, “when the federal census first recorded all black people by first and last names. Before this, only free people of color were listed by name in the censuses, except for a few counties that listed slaves by first and last names in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. However…there’s a wealth of information on black people kept by the federal government for the years immediately following the Civil War.” Again, a historical issue affecting the current day.

Justice – pretty much what I wrote about a couple of days ago, where race is STILL a major determinant as to who gets incarcerated and executed. I noted last year the book and video Slavery by Another Name, whereby black people were incarcerated on trumped-up charges so they can work in the factories and the towns could make money leasing them out. I’ve read that the current private contractor prison system that exists in some states works best financially at near-maximum capacity, so one has to wonder if selective enforcement is taking place in those locales. Not that black people are the only victims of America’s tiered justice system, and do NYC cops have arrest quotas?

In each case, I wanted to have a historical perspective on current issues. And with so much blather out there, that’s vitally important. Some yahoo just recently, as in March 2013, suggested at CPAC that slavery was defensible because slave owners provided ‘food and shelter’. That slaveholders fed their investment, their source of labor, is true, of course, but its application a distortion of the institution’s injustice and brutality.

When others suggest that slavery could have been prevented if blacks had guns, that might literally have a soupcon of accuracy amid its absurdity. BUT the US government had long conspired to keep guns OUT of the hands of blacks; in fact, as I’ve noted, the Second Amendment was ratified to preserve slavery. One can’t recognize that we are experiencing The New Jim Crow – title of Michele Alexander’s important book – if one is unfamiliar with the old Jim Crow.

The yahoos might even be on the Supreme Court. The racism deniers such as Antonin Scalia likened congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” as Rachel Maddow noted on the Daily Show; I cannot recall a statement by such an important citizen so lacking in historical understanding. I mean, generations of people died in this country trying to vote; what “racial entitlement” is he’s talking about? And the notion that the United States has “moved past” its history of racial discrimination has been disproven repeatedly by the attempts to disenfranchise not only blacks but Hispanics and the poor.

If the Mormon church rewrites its racist history, and you don’t know the racist history of the Mormon church, you could believe the revisionist narrative.

When I wrote about film and race, it created an interesting dialogue with SamuraiFrog over that very disturbing segment of the movie Holiday Inn and other issues. Not incidentally, as a direct result of my post, someone has sent me a copy of Song of the South, which I haven’t watched yet.

We still need Black History Month because we still are learning about, and attempting to rectify, discrimination. Racism is NOT over; it has morphed into more devious manifestations.

So in answer to your specific question, there’s no White History Month because, as you suggest, much of American history has covered that area, while much of black history, beyond George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, and a relatively few others, remains hidden. Moreover, the United States is peculiar about race. I wish the country had had the reconciliation conversation South Africa engaged in after the end of apartheid.

Looking forward to NEXT month

There were a lot of deaths in the families of people I know in the month of February.

It’s not the warmer weather that I’m longing for, it’s a bit of sanity. February was Black History Month and is always brutal for me at church. I try to fawn off responsibilities to others, but, like a boomerang, they keep coming back to me. Lining up speakers, getting approvals, making sure equipment is set up, putting information into the church bulletin, etc.

Sunday, February 24 was a prime example. Go to the 8:30 a.m. service to make sure the guest preacher has shown up. Afterward, accompany him to a place for him to rest until the 10:45 service. Make sure the 9:30 adult education speakers are there and make sure they are set. Make at least some of the choir rehearsal, which starts at 9:30, but my cloning ability is frayed. Sing in the choir at 10:45 service, and also do the presentation of the ceremonial kente cloth, and read prayers of the people.

Thank goodness my wife has taken responsibility for the luncheon. But then there’s the clean-up afterward.

I would have been happy to have gone home then, as I was exhausted. Unfortunately, the husband of one of the choir members had died that week, and choir people support their own. So we sang at the 3 p.m. service.

Not that it was a BAD day, mind you. I thought everything went well. The guest preacher was good, the adult ed presenters were well-received, and the dinner was fantastic. I thought the music was fine; in fact, if I’m doing this correctly, you should be able to hear I’ve Been in the Storm So Long [LISTEN]; yes, there’s a one-second recording glitch at the end.

There were a lot of deaths in the families of people I know in the month of February. Our choir’s soprano soloist lost her father; him, I hadn’t met, but the rest of the people I knew. The former treasurer of the Friends of the Albany Public Library, Peg, passed away. So did the wife of the former president of the Friends; Len and Naomi Tucker had been married for over 70 years and were such a sweet couple. My friend Broome’s dad Michael died; he was always an interesting and entertaining guy. Our former secretary at work had her mother die in the early morning, then had to bring her father to the hospital for treatment of his heart that same day.

March means working on an initiative my church is supporting with Giffen Elementary School in Albany; my wife is even more heavily involved than I. There’s a church musical, and I have a part in that, on March 17, which means some rehearsals as well. And of course, there’s Holy Week, which church musicians and singers think of as hell week. (Someone suggested that was a sacrilegious sentiment – well, when you think about the betrayal, whipping, and crucifixion stuff prior to Easter…)

So I’m looking forward, more than usual, to April, when our office has a presentation to prepare by the end of the month; a piece of cake.

Black History Month and Segregation Denialism

“America struggles with ‘denialism,’ i.e., a refusal to face its grim past of racial crimes and human rights violations. ‘Other countries that have tried to recover from severe human rights problems that have lasted for decades…have always recognized that you have to commit yourself to truth and reconciliation: South Africa, Rwanda. In the United States we never did that. We had legal reforms that were imposed on some populations against their will and then we just carried on.’…

Every year for the past several, I have become the point person for the Black History Month celebration at my church. It is not a position I’ve ever sought, but it has obviously sought me. I had called a meeting of potentially interested parties in early December so that I might offload some of the responsibility. But I was so sick, not only did I not go to church, I had forgotten that I had called the meeting until after the fact. Opportunity missed; so it goes.

At the end of the first adult education hour, which featured a guest speaker, I recommended that people view Slavery by Another Name, a new PBS documentary based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, narrated by Laurence Fishburne (pictured) before the following session. Some folks did watch, and it is interesting to note that it was a piece of American history that most in the room were oblivious to. My wife and I had seen the film at an advanced showing at UAlbany a couple of weeks earlier.

From a description of the book:
Tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible ‘debts,’ prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude.

As it turns out prison officials in Alabama have “banned inmate Mark Melvin from reading” the book, as they, “says attorney Bryan Stevenson, felt it was ‘too provocative, they didn’t like the title, they didn’t like the idea that the title conveyed.'”

Stevenson made some cogent points as he filed suit. “America struggles with ‘denialism,’ i.e., a refusal to face its grim past of racial crimes and human rights violations. ‘Other countries that have tried to recover from severe human rights problems that have lasted for decades…have always recognized that you have to commit yourself to truth and reconciliation: South Africa, Rwanda. In the United States, we never did that. We had legal reforms that were imposed on some populations against their will and then we just carried on.’…

“Stevenson feels it’s ‘just a matter of time’ before the nation begins to minimize ‘what segregation really was,’ like a black version of Holocaust denial. That’s already happening. In 2010, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour claimed integration in his state was ‘a very pleasant experience.’ Actually, integration in his state was marked by, among other atrocities, a firebombing, a fatal riot, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the murders of three voting rights workers.

“The only effective weapon against such lies is to learn the truth and tell it, shout it in the face of untruth, equivocation, and denial. Bear witness.”

I also addressed issues of popular culture. I wanted to show a TEDx video by Jay Smooth, but it proved to be too technologically daunting. So I suggested that people look at his …Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race, and its predecessor, on my Times Union blog. Ah, a good use for it.

Slavery by Another Name PBS documentary

When you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human.

My wife and I got a babysitter last Friday night so we could take the bus – MUCH easier than trying to find parking at the uptown UAlbany campus – and watch Slavery by Another Name, “a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.” Though the film will be premiering on PBS, Monday, February 13 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT (check local listings), the real draw of viewing it early on a bigger screen was to be able to see the director of the film, Shelia Curran Bernard, and the writer of the book upon which the film was based, Douglas Blackmon, who I had seen before.

Narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, “The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality.

It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.” The movie notes the failure of the federal government, both after Reconstruction, and again in the early 20th century under Teddy Roosevelt, to stem the tide of forced labor.

As both the SBAN book and the movie made clear, the peonage system was, in many ways, far worse than the slavery before the Civil War. If one had slaves, one needed to protect one’s economic investment by providing some measure of food, clothing, and shelter. If one were a business, such as US Steel, leasing convicts, one could work someone nearly to death, or sometimes fatally, and then go lease someone else.

The speakers had no prepared comments but were just doing a question and answer period. Anyone who’s seen a Q&A knows that the quality of questions is all over the place. One person wanted to know why we never heard these stories before. Blackmon noted that the further away we are from it in history, the easier it is to look at it. In any case, there will be classroom material available to talk about this previously unknown, shameful part of the American postbellum past.

A question that intrigued me was, basically, how people could be so cruel to each other. The speakers noted that when you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human. This tied to another question about the new Jim Crow laws, which continue to incarcerate black people in disproportionate numbers; the speakers referred to Michelle Alexander’s book and other sources for further reference.

I must admit to laughing at a recent comment from the blog of SamuraiFrog “It’s Black History Month. So if you’re one of those complete idiots going on Facebook and whining about how having a Black History Month is racism against white people, please pick up a history book. And hit yourself in the head with it. Repeatedly. Until you black out.” The fact that THIS story has largely been missing from the history books makes the continued investigation of the lost black history, a/k/a American history, still relevant.