Ending Another War

I'll go ahead and be critical of Joe Biden, and the Clintons, and Republicans, and myself - and anyone else who was more than a bit dumb about all that get-tough-on-crime bullshit from back in the 80s and 90s.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, but...

And I'm not trying to be all woke and shit. I don't think I'm simply following a trend again, which is pretty much what we were all doing 35 years ago - I just got fooled.

I had plenty of company of course, but that's not an excuse, or even a good way to explain it.

I was just wrong. My outlook, my attitude, my philosophy - all of it - flat fuckin' wrong.

If there's nothing particularly racist about our criminal justice system - which, BTW, doesn't exist in isolation from the society it's supposed to serve - then that justice system wouldn't be choked with brown people all the fuckin' time.

And if that society isn't racist, but somehow POC are still way over-represented in the statistics and the prison population etc, then there must be something actually wrong with POC, and if that ain't racist thinking, then the whole fucking universe is upside down and backwards.

There is something very very very wrong with the way we've been doing things.

Brookings Institution:

The War on Drugs, not the war in Afghanistan, is America’s longest war. It has used trillions of American taxpayer dollars, militarized American law enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local), claimed an untold number of lives, railroaded people’s futures (especially among Black, Latino, and Native populations), and concentrated the effort in the country’s most diverse and poorest neighborhoods. The War on Drugs has been a staggering policy failure, advancing few of the claims that presidents, members of Congress, law enforcement officials, and state and local leaders have sought to achieve. The illicit drug trade thrived under prohibition; adults of all ages and youth had access to illicit substances. Substance use disorders thrived, and policymakers’ efforts to protect public health were fully undermined by policy that disproportionately focused, if unsuccessfully, on public safety. It is time for an American president to think seriously about broad-based policy change to disrupt the manner in which the United States deals with drugs.

Despite its dramatic policy failures, the War on Drugs has been wildly successful in one specific area: institutionalizing racism. The drug war was built on a foundation of racism and xenophobia. As I have written in Marijuana: A Short History, the historical foundation of drug policy in the United States was to vilify African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants from Asia and Mexico, and other outgroups, and to turn White America against each. Michelle Alexander and numerous others have effectively highlighted how America’s criminal justice system from arrest to trial to incarceration to post-release conditions disproportionately punish people of color, creating a cycle of harm in their communities.

We know the design and enforcement of America’s drug laws were racist in intent and in practice. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 enacted penalties for possession of crack cocaine (a substance predominantly used by poor and minorities users) that were 100 times higher than for the possession of powder cocaine (a substance used more often by wealthier, white users). And while Congress in 2010 reduced that disparity in penalties from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, and in 2018 President Trump signed a law making that change retroactive, thousands of low level offenders were left out from resentencing because of a loophole. And in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the retroactive resentencing effort for those low-level offenders.

In addition, research shows that Black and white Americans use cannabis at roughly the same rates. However, Black Americans are more than 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for a cannabis offense than are white Americans. And even in states that have reformed their cannabis laws, the institutionalization of racism in police departments’ enforcement of the drug war sustains, as Blacks are more than two times as likely as whites to be arrested for cannabis offenses in those legal jurisdictions. And while cannabis offenses have plummeted in those states, the impact of those remaining arrests and convictions are felt in an outsized way across Black and Brown America and in Native American communities.

The 2018 law mentioned above was titled the First Step Act. This label was fitting in that it described the long road toward broader criminal justice reform and for justice in the communities that the War on Drugs targeted for decades. And in his 2019 State of the Union Address, President Trump praised that bill becoming law, by noting that it addresses the explicit racism in the American criminal justice system. He noted,

“This legislation reformed sentencing laws that have wrongly and disproportionately harmed the African American community. The First Step Act gives nonviolent offenders the chance to reenter society as productive, law-abiding citizens. Now States across the country are following our lead. America is a nation that believes in redemption.”

President Trump was right that America believes in redemption, but only in theory. It rarely advances redemption in practice. Every president in the 20th and 21st centuries helped perpetuate, in some way, a drug war with one “crowning achievement”: systematically harming minority communities in America with intent and malice. Supporters of prohibition, be they presidents or other elected officials, advocates, law enforcement leaders, or everyday citizens wrap themselves in a mystical cloak of “protecting the children” and “keeping communities safe.” In reality, that hypocrisy has sought simply to protect white children (a failed effort) and to keep white communities safe (another missed target).

If prohibition supporters cared deeply about children and the safety of communities, they would look at what the War on Drugs have done to Black and Brown children and communities and be sickened. They would see families divided, young people (especially young Black men) have dreams dashed and future opportunities restricted, communities rocked by gang and police violence, systematic underinvestment with simultaneous over-policing in cities, and dozens more disastrous consequences because of their failed drug policies. Prohibition supporters from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue should consider how the drug war has harmed specific American communities and recoil, but instead, they ignore reality and refuse to advance legitimate alternatives.

It is time for President Biden to face the reality of his role and the role of his colleagues and predecessors in advancing the drug war. He must consider vast reforms—some which require the cooperation of Congress and others than can be implemented via executive action—that deal with drug policy in a thoughtful and reasoned, rather than anachronistic and heartless way. Mr. Biden must realize that choices about drug reform—pardons, sentencing reform policy, the expansion of mental health and addiction services, cannabis legalization, police reform, prison reform, community reinvestment—should not focus on whether those reforms come without costs. Mr. Biden must compare whether those reforms are a policy improvement over the status quo: prohibition.

Too often elected officials, policy analysts, advocates, and citizens hide behind the cowardice of highlighting the challenges that drug reform can potentially cause, while refusing to speak and think bravely about the comprehensive failures and harms perpetuated by current policy. Mr. Biden can no longer do what he and his predecessors have done: sit idly by, awaiting a perfect policy to replace the unmitigated failures of the War on Drugs. A significant part of the electoral coalition that swept Mr. Biden to the Democratic presidential nomination and eventually to the White House were Black, Latino, and Native Americans who have been harmed the most by the War on Drugs.

Part of that solution must be an embrace of full-scale criminal justice reform that works to inject fairness into a system that has, for centuries, disproportionately punished people of color, the poor, the undereducated, those without personal or political connections, and any others in our society who fall on hard times. Drug reform—and particularly—cannabis reform must sit at the forefront of the president’s efforts to chase the type of justice that has eluded so many for so long. Legalizing cannabis, focusing broader drug reform efforts around public health policy rather than inhumane criminalization, prioritizing law enforcement funds toward violent crime rather than petty crime, coordinating an intergovernmental effort to harmonize criminal justice reform through legislative and executive efforts, and reinvesting in the communities that our government has targeted and persecuted are a requirement for President Biden to be the humane and justice-oriented president he marketed himself to be in the 2020 campaign.

Eight months into this administration, Mr. Biden faces an embarrassing reality with regard to drug policy. Donald Trump, who received only 8% of the Black vote in 2016, did more as president to change drug policy and ameliorate the effects of the drug war for communities of color than has Joe Biden, who won 87% of Black support in 2020.

In the same way this president took the bold step of ending America’s second longest war in Afghanistan, he should take the equally bold step of ending America’s longest war: the War on Drugs.

Who Ya Callin' Snowflake?

From the good folks who constantly sneer at "safe space", and who love to bitch about all the cupcake libtards who can't stand a little hardship.

WaPo: (Kimberlé Crenshaw - Twitter: @sandylocks)

The nation’s summer holiday season was refreshed this year with the addition of Juneteenth National Independence Day a few weeks before the Fourth of July. The day symbolizes the end of enslavement in the United States, and its place on the federal calendar was won in large part thanks to the energy of the broad movement that emerged last year in response to the murder of George Floyd.

The speed and virtual unanimity with which June 19 joined July 4 might seem to foretell a new reckoning with America’s brutally racist past, spurred on by 2020’s push to confront injustice. Yet instead of a new era of honesty and critical inquiry, the United States is being dragged into a moral panic about anti-racism itself, as agitated parents, right-wing activists and red-state lawmakers rail against their version of critical race theory. Their assault would allow only for a “history” that holds no contemporary consequences; racism ended in the past, according to the developing backlash, and we would all be better off if we didn’t try to connect it to the present.

So in the same week when Juneteenth became a national holiday, schoolteachers in Texas, where the commemoration originally marked the end of slavery in that state, could teach about these events only at their peril: Texas now precludes any teacher from exploring the state’s own history of enslavement if any student should “feel discomfort, guilt, [or] anguish . . . on account of the individual’s race or sex.” On the federal level, the same Republican senators who voted for the Juneteenth holiday also demanded that the Education Department end its effort to encourage schools to fully explore the history of enslavement, saying the push involved “divisive, radical, and historically-dubious buzzwords and propaganda.”

In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an ill-conceived, overbroad bill that chills the long-overdue reckoning with the Tulsa Race Massacre — a vicious orgy of racist violence carried out in 1921 against one of the nation’s most affluent African American communities. This new law, passed under a special emergency provision, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” implying that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Texas and Oklahoma join a list of six states that have ratified such legislation, with more than a dozen others considering it. These laws cut off the necessary classroom discussion of racial justice and reconciliation taking shape in Tulsa, Houston, Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta, Chicago and other communities across the country inspired by and responsive to #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName.

Banning ‘critical race theory’ would be bad for conservatives, too

Proponents of such reactionary legislation insist that nothing in the laws bans teaching about historical racism. Technically, that’s true: The text of these laws does not necessarily mention particular historical events, critical race theory or the 1619 Project. That would be far too obvious.

Instead, the laws’ language — often eerily identical — is even more insidious: It explicitly sets out to sanction certain feelings as part of a disingenuous crackdown on racial division. In closing off room to explore the impact of America’s racist history by citing “division” — a subjective condition that turns on any student’s (or parent’s) claim to feel resentment or guilt — the laws directly threaten any teacher who pursues a sustained, critical understanding of the deeper causes, legacies or contemporary implications of racism in fomenting uncivil discord.

The hysteria about this putatively un-American inquiry is possible in part because Americans are not often taught about the policies and practices through which racism has shaped our nation. Nor do we typically teach that racist aggression against reform has been repeatedly legitimized as self-defense — an embodiment of an enduring claim that anti-racism is racism against White people.

The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy

This pattern of defending white supremacy by resorting to group interest embodies the very opposite of the individualism so frequently touted in conservative politics. Very few Americans learn that just after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson vetoed legislation protecting the civil rights of newly freed African Americans, essentially claiming such laws to be preferential treatment for Blacks and reverse discrimination against Whites. Nor is there much candid discussion today about how the wave of White racial terrorism that destabilized Radical Reconstruction in the South was framed as self-defense. This was followed by White segregationist rule for the better part of the 20th century, buttressed by the acquiescence of the Supreme Court and the supposed greatest legal minds of the era.

The reverse-racism trope emerged again after World War II, when segregationists denounced the simple demands for nondiscrimination in public accommodations as assaults on Whites’ civil rights. Likewise, the Southern Manifesto against school desegregation, signed by dozens of White lawmakers, framed widespread resistance to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in terms of defending White heritage and the well-being of vulnerable White schoolchildren. Unsurprisingly, White children are once again the front line in this current war against critical race theory in the classroom — it’s a tried-and-true method of racial retrenchment.

But the comfort of a ban on whatever conservatives imagine critical race theory to be will further deny students and scholars the chance to understand the past. The massacre in Tulsa a century ago is just one telling example of how the convergence of law, institutions and individuals enabled diabolical attacks on American citizens. Examining Tulsa through the prism of the real critical race theory, which I’ve been a leading scholar in developing, would involve unearthing the conditions that allowed White institutions and leaders of the time to mobilize the law to set a massacre of hundreds in motion, and uncovering the long-term consequences. The legal dimensions would include the formal deputizing and arming of White citizens, the rounding up and interning of survivors, and the filing of charges against victims for inciting violence. Oklahoma’s new law and the others around the country would apparently forbid a close look at the massacre’s legal aftermath — namely, the failure to indict or prosecute anyone. Teachers would be further discouraged from mounting a broader inquiry into the massacre’s legal backdrop — the laws that corralled Blacks into certain neighborhoods and that shored up the economic segregation of professions. The prohibition of any discussion suggesting that there are contemporary responsibilities shared by society as a whole precludes consideration of what a long-overdue commitment to justice might entail.

What is critical race theory and why did Oklahoma just ban it?

We know from the history of race in America just where sanitized and whitewashed versions of our past lead — to assumptions that yawning inequalities in health, wealth and a range of other areas are simply inherent features of American life. The fact that the 1921 Tulsa Massacre happened was always knowable — a few survivors are still alive — but without a critical confrontation with our history, the long-term impact of the massacre fades into a bloody mist.

Those who want to expand our nation’s literacy about our racial past and those who wish it to remain illegible to all but a determined few do agree on one thing: that examining our history has consequences. The disagreement becomes volatile when those who embrace America’s promises ask that we take up the truths of our history, while critics claim it is only patriotic to perpetuate a lie. (Martin Luther King Jr. warned of just this sort of turn more than 50 years ago, in “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” his final book before he was murdered: “In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.”) Theirs is not a debate about ideas but rather an attempt — on behalf of the racially inequitable status quo — to shut down debate altogether.

The impulse to quash discussion of racism comes out of the same political movement that believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election — and that mobs ransacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 were justified in their bloodthirsty assault on democracy because they contend they were there to save it. Understood in context with parallel efforts to suppress democracy and protest, it should be clear that the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Indeed, beyond this incendiary 2022 campaign strategy lies the future of America. We cannot fight to realize our loftiest values if past and present injustices are made unspeakable. This is why anyone who marched for justice for George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor, anyone who can acknowledge that a sanitized history of the Civil War and Reconstruction led to nearly a century of segregation, anyone who does not want their children insulated from our nation’s past, anyone who is concerned about a creeping authoritarianism and the myths of the past that abet it, and anyone who believes in a truly multiracial democracy should be relentless in opposing the new efforts to banish anti-racist thought and speech from public institutions.

When it comes to racial reckoning, the future of our country depends not on whether we litigate who among us is guilty but whether we all see ourselves as responsible. Let us together stand up to these cynical attacks — we have seen them too many times before to fall prey to another cycle of race, reform and retrenchment.

Buncha whiny-butt pussies.

A Look Back

Here's a docu-series from 1965, narrated by Ossie Davis.

"The Southern Negro"

"We got some mighty good darkies here." 

Today's Quote

The fullness of racism’s cruel bounty is not found in the bodies of the dead alone, but also in the spirits of the living. Most of us will not be killed by police officers. White supremacy will not kill us so directly, so flagrantly. Instead it dogs our steps, wages niggling wars on our peace itself. Its power is in the daily theft of our joy, our dignity, our sanity. It is in the way we always have to weigh and calculate, how we can never assume good intentions and honest mistakes. Because it is always there, in swirling eddies around our ankles, waiting to drag us under.

“Slow Poison,” Ezekiel Kweku

Perspective

NYT OpEd from a 20-year Navy veteran.

Being Willing to Die for This Country Can’t Protect Me From It

By Theodore R. Johnson
Mr. Johnson is a retired Navy commander who has written extensively about the politics of being Black and American.

I can’t remember the exact moment it occurred, but at some point early in my 20-year career in the U.S. Navy, I picked up a survival tactic. It wasn’t a novel technique for handling being stranded at sea or navigating out of a dense jungle in enemy territory; it was how to survive an encounter with American law enforcement.

The maneuver was quite simple: Each time I was pulled over by police officers and they asked for my license and registration, the first thing I gave them was my military ID.

It was no guarantee that the stop would go smoothly, but when you’re a Black man and those swirling blue lights cast a shadow of yourself in the car, it’s wise to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible. The military identification card was a communiqué that I was neither a threat to the officers nor to the society they police. And I have no doubt that the ID card with my uniformed picture and rank on it encouraged nearly all the policemen who stopped me to extend a little more grace.

But watching the video of Army Second Lt. Caron Nazario being pulled over, held at gunpoint, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed — all while in his military uniform — was a stark reminder that not even a willingness to die for the country can protect you from it.

Seeing chemicals temporarily take Lieutenant Nazario’s sight, tears from pepper spray rolling down his face, I was reminded of the blinding of Isaac Woodard, a World War II soldier who was in uniform and on a bus ride home when he was beaten by police at a stop in South Carolina until his eyes permanently failed.

The ordeal also brought to mind World War I Army Pvt. Charles Lewis, who showed police his enlistment papers when they demanded to search his baggage and was jailed for assault and resisting arrest after arguing with officers about his innocence. That night, 10 days before Christmas, Lewis was lynched by a mob in Hickman, Ky., and the next day, the town found him hanging from a branch in his olive-green Army uniform.

For longer than there’s been a United States, two things have been true: Black Americans have served in all their country’s wars, and racism has prevented them from tasting the fullness of the very freedom many of them died fighting for. In the earliest conflicts, including the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Black people escaped enslavement to serve in the military, only to be returned to bondage once the conflicts subsided. The benefits made available to service members and veterans throughout the military’s history, including the early 20th century’s transformational G.I. Bill, were largely withheld from Black Americans who served.

And our enemies knew it. On battlefields from World War I to the Vietnam War, Black troops were peppered with leaflets from enemy forces essentially asking, “Why are you over here fighting us when America is attacking your people at home?” Adversary nations didn’t have to look far for such material; Black Americans have been asking the United States variants of this question for centuries. And we heard it again from Lieutenant Nazario, who asked while being assaulted, “I’m serving this country, and this is how I’m treated?”

The military service of Black Americans has long been part of a deliberate strategy of superlative citizenship, a “twice as good” for civic life and a means of making a direct claim on all the rights and privileges of being an American by taking on one of its important responsibilities. Superlative citizenship draws its power from challenging a national hypocrisy, demonstrating that the country is more wedded to the appearance of holding certain truths as self-evident than to a steadfast commitment to ensure every citizen enjoys the rights that spring from them.

Superlative citizenship is also an explicit counterargument to the racist tropes that have been used to justify why Black people have always experienced a lesser version of America than many others. It asks a stubborn nation how it’s possible that a people historically deemed biologically, intellectually, culturally and socially inferior can be exemplars of the American spirit, performing the excellencies of citizenship even though the nation has not delivered on its promises.

It’s because of the prestige military service confers that few things challenge America’s conception of itself like a Black American in a military uniform. The differing societal statuses attached to race and to service in the armed forces create tension between Blackness and the uniform — the former long perceived as incompatible with being a real American and the latter suggesting the fullest embodiment of it.

Of course, as body camera footage of Nazario’s detainment clearly demonstrates, superlative citizenship exhibited by Black Americans is insufficient to avoid surveillance and violence. This plays out in many ways, large and small, from lethal confrontations to life’s smaller but consequential indignities. While in uniform, I was trailed for more than a half-hour by a department store’s loss prevention employee in the mall across the street from the Pentagon, as if I’d risk my career or my freedom for a polo shirt on clearance. And when telling my graduate class about seeking some sense of safety during a traffic stop by showing my military ID, one of my active-duty Army students told me how he’d tried that once and was quickly told, “That’s not going to help you, boy.”

And yet, though insufficient to stop racial discrimination, the violation of a Black American in uniform can be instrumental. When President Harry Truman learned of Mr. Woodard’s blinding and the violence exacted on other Black veterans, it led him to sign the historic executive order desegregating the military in 1948. Would the nation care about the video of Lieutenant Nazario, causing a cop with poor judgment to be removed from the force, if he hadn’t been a military officer in uniform? Would Lieutenant Nazario even be here to tell his story, or would he have shared the fate of Philando Castile, George Floyd, Daunte Wright and Eric Garner, whom Lieutenant Nazario called his uncle?

Of course, the uniform comes off; race doesn’t. This is why before letting Lieutenant Nazario go after not charging him with anything, according to the lawsuit he filed, the policemen who violently accosted him threatened his career if he spoke out about the stop. The implication was clear: Once the uniform is off and the military ID taken away, he is just another Black dude in America — a sober reminder that to too many people, the uniform matters more than the Black life it clothes.

Rape-Colored Skin

Finally got around to this. Sorry it took so long.

NYT, Caroline Randall Williams:

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

On Monuments

NYT - Charles Blow:

Washington would free his slaves in his will, when he no longer had use for them.

Let me be clear: Those black people enslaved by George Washington and others, including other founders, were just as much human as I am today. They love, laugh, cry and hurt just like I do.

When I hear people excuse their enslavement and torture as an artifact of the times, I’m forced to consider that if slavery were the prevailing normalcy of this time, my own enslavement would also be a shrug of the shoulders.

I say that we need to reconsider public monuments in public spaces. No person’s honorifics can erase the horror he or she has inflicted on others.

Slave owners should not be honored with monuments in public spaces. We have museums for that, which also provide better context. This is not an erasure of history, but rather a better appreciation of the horrible truth of it.

I Think I See The Problem

It's white people. Without white people, we'd still have people killing people, but at least there'd be a much better level of equity to it.

Bullworth had it right:

A 2-Minute Hate

The slave trade.

We get caught up in the ideology, sometimes to the point where some of us can't quite figure out that hating slavery isn't supposed to translate to hating the slaves for having been enslaved.

I'm left with the sense that we're indulging ourselves in a little Blame-The-Victim exercise as we try to resolve our internal dissonance.

Anger turned inward is depression, and that feels bad.

Anger turned outward is aggression, and that feels better. 

New Music

...about the same old shit too many people still hafta put up with.

Common:
  I Used To Love H.E.R.
  Letter To The Free
  The Day The Women Took Over
  Little Chicago Boy

Get out and vote

It never feels like it's enough, but it's what we've got

And eventually, if we keep doing it right, it works

Today's Quote

"I guarantee you that every person of color in this country has faced an indignity, from the ridiculous to the grotesque to the sometimes fatal, at some point in their - I'm going to say last couple of hours - because of their skin color.  Race is there, and it is a constant. You're tired of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it."

--Jon Stewart

The System Ain't Broke

...it's fixed.

The Real News Network

Black But Not

Today's Podcast

OUR NATIONAL CONVERSATION ABOUT CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE

Authors Baratunde Thurston (How To Be Black), Raquel Cepeda (Bird Of Paradise: How I Became Latina) and Tanner Colby (Some Of My Best Friends Are Black) host a lively multiracial, interracial conversation about the ways we can’t talk, don’t talk, would rather not talk, but intermittently, fitfully, embarrassingly do talk about culture, identity, politics, power, and privilege in our pre-post-yet-still-very-racial America. This show is "About Race."

Today's Keith

I was going to say at least this one got pushed off the front page by the murders at Mother Emmanual, but really it's part and parcel of the same problem.  Which will stay a problem and which will continue to give rise to a variety of manifestations of that problem until we find the courage to look at it straight-on and deal with our shit.

Undercurrent

So, 5 guys - the receiver corps - who play for the St Louis Rams did the Hands-Up-Don't-Shoot thing when they came out of the tunnel during introductions yesterday.



Which BTW just continues a long proud tradition of Americans standing up for what's right, and being unafraid to speak the truth.



I remember thinking back then that it wasn't cool for Carlos and Smith to do that, but I was fortunate enough to have people in my life to present an alternative viewpoint - to teach me that ya gotta take your shots whenever the chance comes along.  Powerful people are 'in charge' and they need everybody to stay in line, and if staying in line makes permanent losers out of a significant bunch of Americans who're supposed to be getting exactly the same chance as everybody else, then somebody has to have the balls to step outa that line; somebody has to throw a little sand in the gears; somebody has to take one small moment to remind us that all anybody really wants is for this country to try a little harder to live up to its promises.

Anyway, then the Rams hung 52 on the Dog-Ass Raiders.  

And Dallas lost.

And my Donkeys beat KC to stay on top in the AFC West.

Pretty good Sunday.

Smelt It, Dealt It

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive

hat tip = Raw Story

Today's Eternal Sadness

Another white neighborhood, another white cop, and another dead black guy.

Addicting Info:

At this time there is no evidence to suggest that this was anything more than a terrible accident. However, once again it raises questions about racial attitudes in America. Jonathan Ferrell was black. From the information and photos available on the Bradfield Farms HOA’s website the community appears to be a middle class, mostly white neighborhood. Based on reports there is no evidence that Ferrell attempted to enter the residence of the woman who called police, or that he attempted to accost her in any way, yet apparently she did not try to communicate with him, even through a locked door. Instead she hit her “panic alarm” and called police. Just as George Zimmerman decided that Trayvon Martin was out of place in the community where he was killed, could both the woman and the police officers have assumed that Ferrell was “up to no good” because he was “out-of-place?”

As the Trayvon Martin case proved, the media created myth of the criminal young black man is alive and well in supposedly “post-racial” America. While we will never know for sure, there is a good chance that had Jonathan Ferrell been white, he would still be alive.

Respectability Politics

Jay sounds a bit angry - and if you can make Jay Smooth angry about anything, ya done fucked up pretty bad.



Yes - that's what Jay Smooth sounds like when he's pissed off.

Feelin' It

White Privilege - pretty much the king of all redundancies.



Hayes works for a company owned by a company owned in turn by a company that's being run by a lot a people who aren't voting for many Democrats - not the librul Dems anyway - but still sometimes he dances dangerously close to the point where he almost but not quite says there's an awful buncha bullshit about the way we're doin' things here.

Props when they're due tho'.  Nicely done, Chris.