Ever since they invented opinion polling, and started asking people about racism and "race relations" in America, white people have always believed black people weren't being treated all that badly. And they've always been wrong.
Black people have always understand that they were getting the short end of the stick - and they've always been proved right.
The cost of racial illiteracy is high — can we get a Duolingo course, please?
I’ve been white long enough to know there are different reasons why so many of my group have a hard time discussing race and racism in America.
For some, it’s about their own biases, which they seek to deny or at least keep from view, lest people conclude they’re not as open-minded as they profess.
For others, it’s defensiveness at the mention of ongoing inequality and unfairness still faced by persons of color. After all, acknowledging those might call into question the legitimacy of their own social status.
A third group would rather talk about class, gender, or sexuality — areas where, because of their relationship to those identities, they can focus on where they got hurt, rather than where they were advantaged (even as both things can be true, and often are).
For still others, it’s about a fear they might say the wrong thing despite good intentions, prompting a person of color — especially someone Black — to think of them as racist. So rather than risk it, they remain quiet, afraid to be the target of one of the woke mobs they’ve been told to fear by Bill Maher.
As an ironic side note, research suggests it is precisely when whites remain quiet in racial discussions that Black folks are most likely to think we have something to hide — specifically, racism. So by holding back for fear of signaling bias, we end up confirming the very suspicion we hoped to avoid.
But for my purposes, I want to focus on a fifth group of white folks who struggle with race talk. This group may overlap with the others but also comprises a not-insignificant portion on its own.
It’s a group whose skittishness is mainly due to a kind of functional illiteracy in the language of race, meaning the linguistics of racialized experience. This language is one that shapes how we speak of racial matters, and especially how directly or indirectly we do so.
Part of the tension between whites and Blacks comes from the lack of experience most white people have in Black spaces. This unfamiliarity makes it harder for us to discern the meaning behind certain things Black folks say or even the body language they evince while saying it.
Consider the classic Paul Mooney joke, which he often used as an example of the difference between a racist joke and a joke about race — a distinction many white folks seem to miss.
Little Timmy’s mom made him a chocolate cake for his birthday, and when she wasn’t looking, he smeared the frosting all over his face and said, “Look, mom, I’m black!”
So his mom slapped him and said, “Go tell your father what you just told me.”
So he did, and his father slapped him and said, “Go tell your grandfather what you just told me.”
So he did, and his grandfather slapped him and said, “Now go back to your mother.”
So he did, and when he got back to his mother, she asked him, “Now Timmy, what did you learn today?”
And Timmy said, “I learned that I’ve only been black for ten minutes, and I already hate you white people.”
That is race talk in one of its purest forms. It works because it calls upon a racialized history that informs the punch line. Furthermore, it’s a joke about race, which pokes fun at whiteness as a historical force but doesn’t indict or call into question white humanity.
Yet, I know white people who find it difficult to laugh at the joke — even though it is objectively hilarious — because they’re too busy wondering if Mooney literally hated white people and was just using Timmy in the joke to express his own bigotry.
White and Black folks have long used language differently
White and Black Americans have different experiences with language, which reflect differences in historical power relations between us.
For whites, having been in positions of greater power and influence, language has tended to be more literal. What we said carried weight, so we said what we meant and meant what we said — especially if we were middle class or affluent.
For Black folks, language has often been a weapon deployed to subvert the existing order.
From songs sung by enslaved persons — which gave the impression of passivity, but only because overseers didn’t understand the hidden meaning — to the use of words and phrases with secret meanings as part of the Underground Railroad, Black people have used language metaphorically. Other times they have leaned heavily on irony, saying one thing to mean another.
For those still confused, this is among the reasons it’s different when Black folks use a derivation of the n-word, and no, we still can’t, so shut up about it.
Blues and Hip-Hop continued this tradition, using words and phrases to process pain or challenge others in ways that are as symbolic and metaphorical as literal.
In the case of Hip-Hop, MC-ing, especially in its early days, often appeared as a more stylized version of the dozens — a Black verbal tradition largely foreign to white folks. The verbal taunts and put-downs that characterize the dozens are not to be taken literally. That first guy is not actually trying to insult the second guy’s momma. After all, both guys’ moms are probably friends, as are they.
None of it is personal. But if white folks found ourselves in the middle of a dozens round, I swear, most would probably waste time trying to explain how our mothers were not particularly full-figured at all, just big-boned.
What white people hear when Black folks say “white people”
I think understanding this is a lot easier for white folks who are from the South.
However fucked up we are when it comes to race, white southerners have more experience, typically, around Black folks, for reasons that are historically horrifying but also impactful. We experience a proximity, spatially and linguistically, that staid white New Englanders (or whites from large sections of the Midwest, mountain states, and Northwest) usually lack.
If you’re not from the South or didn’t grow up in a large city with a significant number of Black folks, you likely don’t speak the language of race.
As a result, when Black people start talking about race and racism, you think they’re talking about you.
When they talk about white people, you think they mean all 200 million white Americans, all the time, including those that were just delivered and haven’t even gotten their Apgar scores yet.
You believe their indictment of whiteness is personal because you don’t understand the broad and symbolic way Black Americans use language.
When Black people say “white people” or “white folks,” 9 times out of 10, they are not referring to 200 million individuals called white. For lack of a better way to put it, they are speaking of “Whiteness, Inc.” As in, the corporate entity registered in Delaware for tax purposes but with branch offices all over the country.
(That too is a metaphor — seriously, white folks, stop Googling “Branch of Whiteness, Inc. near me.” They’re not hiring right now, and anyway, you’re already on the payroll).
When Black people talk shit about white folks or whiteness, they are typically talking about whiteness as a state of mind. In fact, that’s what the late, great comedian, Dick Gregory, said whiteness was — and all it was.
When you speak race, because you’ve been immersed in it and learned its intricacies, you don’t get knocked off stride by Black people saying “white people this” or “white folks that.” Growing up in schools that were 35–45 percent Black, playing ball on nearly all Black teams, then living and working in Black communities, I heard stuff like that all the time. And I didn’t need folks to say, “Not you, Tim; we didn’t mean you when we said that.”
First, because I figured they probably didn’t — they saw me standing there after all — and second, because on the occasions when they did mean me, they would tell me so because we were friends or colleagues. We had a connection that would allow for that kind of honesty.
It’s when you don’t have that connection that you trip the first time a Black person says “white” and isn’t talking about Christmas or the shoes you’re not supposed to wear after Labor Day.
Although there is no easy solution to race-talk illiteracy — it takes time, connection, and a certain maturity that allows one not to take systemic critiques personally — it’s essential to bridge this divide sooner rather than later.
Perhaps just understanding the chasm between us, as I’ve tried to explain here, will be of some assistance.
If not, we’re gonna need someone at Rosetta Stone to get crackin’ on this right away.
Classic Time Wise, on the trap of white privilege:
The story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is one that speaks accurately and profoundly about America's original sin - the contradiction that continues to stab at the heart of our very existence.
Now we call it "paradox" because we like to think it's been mostly resolved, but when 30% of our population still believes in (or is sympathetic to) the notion of separation by class or by "race", then it has to be obvious that we haven't resolved much of anything - we've only changed the phrasing.
Remember your Ayn Rand: Contradiction exists, but it cannot prevail.
Like countless enslaved women, Sally Hemings bore children fathered by her owner. Female slaves had no legal right to refuse unwanted sexual advances. Sally Hemings was the child of an enslaved woman and her owner, as were five of her siblings. At least two of her sisters bore children fathered by white men. Mixed-race children were present at Monticello, in the surrounding county, across Virginia, and throughout the United States. Regardless of their white paternity, children born to enslaved women inherited their mothers’ status as slaves.
Unlike countless enslaved women, Sally Hemings was able to negotiate with her owner. In Paris, where she was free, the 16-year-old agreed to return to enslavement at Monticello in exchange for “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her unborn children. Over the next 32 years Hemings raised four children—Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston—and prepared them for their eventual emancipation. She did not negotiate for, or ever receive, legal freedom in Virginia.
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This is a painful and complicated American story. Thomas Jefferson was one of our most important founding fathers, and also a lifelong slave owner who held Sally Hemings and their children in bondage. Sally Hemings should be known today, not just as Jefferson’s concubine, but as an enslaved woman who – at the age of 16 – negotiated with one of the most powerful men in the nation to improve her own condition and achieve freedom for her children.
The Sage of Monticello & Shannon LaNier Jefferson's 6th Great Grandson
So, coming home from a long road trip where I did maybe 4 or 5 full demos and made a dozen or more calls on various clients and prospects in 8 different cities - I'd have a drink or 12 just to counteract the lingering effects of Road Buzz and collapse in a heap for a 14 hour nap.
Joe Biden comes home after a trip overseas where he ran a solid 4 days straight with a packed schedule of very high stakes meetings, which included one where he told Mr Putin basically, "Fuck around and find out", and then he goes immediately into celebration mode signing the bill that creates Juneteenth as a national holiday.
Juneteenth holiday marking the end of slavery becomes law after decades of inaction
President Biden on Thursday signed into law a measure that establishes Juneteenth as a federal holiday, taking advantage of sudden and broad bipartisan agreement to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States after years of debate and inaction.
In signing the measure — which resulted in an unexpected day off Friday for federal workers — Biden also used the occasion to advocate for more aggressive action on voting access and other racial equity measures that have been at the heart of his administration’s agenda.
“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. They embrace them,” Biden said in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with mistakes we made. And remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”
Biden and Vice President Harris, the first woman of color to serve in that position, stressed during the ceremony that a national commemoration of Juneteenth — a day marking the emancipation of enslaved people after the Civil War — should also compel the nation to work to achieve equality in education, in economics and in other areas.
“Folks, the promise of equality is not going to be fulfilled until we become real, it becomes real in our schools and in our main streets and in our neighborhoods,” Biden said. “It’s not going to be fulfilled as long as our sacred right to vote remains under attack . . . we can’t rest until the promise of equality is fulfilled for every one of us.”
Biden was flanked Thursday by several members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other lawmakers who had championed the Juneteenth legislation. Also by Biden’s side was Opal Lee, a 94-year-old activist from Fort Worth who had lobbied for decades to establish the day as a national holiday.
Underscoring the historical significance, Biden said establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday “will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have as president.”
In her own remarks, Harris noted that it took more than two years after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which declared an end to slavery in the United States, for enslaved Black people to actually become free. She, too, used the historic moment to implore for action.
“We have come far, and we have far to go. But today is a day of celebration,” Harris said. “It is not only a day of pride, it is also a day for us to reaffirm and rededicate ourselves to action.”
Because June 19 falls on a Saturday this year, the Juneteenth federal holiday will be observed Friday, according to the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the roughly 2.1 million federal civilian workforce. It is the first new federal holiday that has been established by Congress since 1983, when Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created for the third Monday of every January.
The near-unanimity around creating Juneteenth papers over much deeper disagreements in Washington — not only over legislation that is critical to the Biden administration’s equity agenda but a growing political debate across the country over teaching students about systemic racism with an approach that Republicans oppose and are seeking to use as a political weapon.
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Keep in mind that there were 14 Nay votes in the House on this thing.
Frederick Douglass was a “from here.” Where I was raised, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a “from here” is the opposite of a “come here,” and much is made of whether you were born on this side of the Chesapeake Bay or arrived later in life. In weighty matters, the question of just how many generations of your family have called this place home can become relevant, too.
One such matter is the Confederate monument at the Talbot County Courthouse, in Easton, a town of about seventeen thousand people. The monument, which is the last in Maryland on public property outside of cemeteries and battlefields, has two parts: a granite base, which was erected in 1914 and bears the names of ninety-six Confederate soldiers with some connection to the county—most carved in stone, others on two brass plaques—and a six-foot-tall statue, added two years later, of a young man with “C.S.A.” carved into his belt buckle and a Confederate flag in his arms. The front of the base is inscribed “To the Talbot Boys / 1861 - 1865 / C.S.A.”
For most of the past decade, that monument has shared the courthouse lawn with another: of Douglass, who was born into slavery some twelve miles from where his statue stands. Probably no one would be more surprised by this arrangement than Douglass himself, whose home state never seceded from the United States and whose home county voted against secession, sending more than three hundred soldiers to the Union Army. And yet there is no monument for the Union dead at the courthouse, or anywhere else in Talbot County.
The absence of a Union monument and the prominence of a Confederate one are part of why many a “from here,” like me, grew up believing that Talbot County was a Confederate stronghold. I love where I am from, so much so that I moved back to the Eastern Shore as an adult and, for years now, I have been one of many residents advocating for the removal of the “Talbot Boys” from the courthouse lawn. Earlier this summer, I thought I might be able to tell the story of how the Confederate monument finally came down. Instead, I’m left to confront why it remains.
Talbot County’s monument was installed fifty years after the Civil War, in an era when the gains of Reconstruction were already being reversed, Jim Crow was under way, and revanchist public commemorations of the Confederacy were spreading across the country. Thousands of squares and streets were dedicated to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, and historical markers to Confederate sites and causes went up anywhere that the United Daughters of the Confederacy could inspire local action. So common were these memorials that there were companies devoted to their production. Though defenders of the “Talbot Boys” insist that the statue is a one-of-a-kind effort to honor the local dead, in reality it once had an identical twin, known as “The South’s Defenders,” on the lawn of the Calcasieu Parish courthouse, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Both statues came from the W. H. Mullins Company, in Salem, Ohio, which had so many Civil War wares on offer that it advertised them in a catalogue: “The Blue and the Gray: Statues in Stamped Copper and Bronze.”
Advocates for the “Talbot Boys” also like to say that the monument has nothing to do with slavery, and that the political beliefs of those who are honored on it and those who erected it are unknowable or distinct from the motivations of Confederate champions elsewhere. In fact, many of those involved left extensive archives of their lives, detailing their thoughts about the Civil War and everything else. The effort to erect Easton’s statue was started in 1912, by a lawyer named Joseph Seth. He was not a Confederate veteran, but he was a sympathizer. He was also active in local politics, eventually becoming mayor, and not long before his election he decided the time had come to honor the “Talbot Johnnies.” The statue was dedicated on June 5, 1916. Ten years later, Seth published a memoir with his second wife, Mary, which recorded his views on, among other things, race relations on the Eastern Shore. “Slaves were held here from the early days of the Colony until the Emancipation Act, but they lived under a paternal, kindly rule,” he claimed.
That does not comport with the narratives of slavery from the enslaved themselves, and certainly not with the most notable account from someone forced to live and work in bondage in Talbot County. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass wrote of his master:
"He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."
At least fourteen of the men whose names appear on the Confederate monument in Easton owned slaves or belonged to slave-owning families, including the man whose name comes first: Admiral Franklin Buchanan, who married into the Lloyd family, which enslaved more than seven hundred people, Douglass among them, at their Wye House plantation. In the passage above, the man whom Douglass is describing worked for the Lloyds. The year before the Civil War began, nearly four thousand people were enslaved in Talbot County. Easton’s port had become a hub for the domestic slave trade, and the town’s slave market was located on the very grounds where the Confederate statue now stands.
The surnames on that statue also appear on local streets, towns, landmarks, and landings: a geography of place and power. Take “Tilghman,” the name of a nearby island, but also of Oswald Tilghman, who survived the war and helped Seth raise money for the monument. Around the same time that it was erected, Tilghman published a “History of Talbot County,” in which he described the death of another one of the statue’s honorees, his relative Lloyd Tilghman, at the Battle of Champion Hill, in Mississippi: “He was laid under the shade of a peach tree where his life’s blood ebbed slowly away, and another hero was added to that long list of martyrs who died for the cause, ‘the lost cause,’ though it be, still dear and will ever remain dear to the hearts of all true Southerners to the end of time.”
The piece goes on at some length, but you get the picture - there's a butt-load of conclusive evidence that those monuments are there to change history by controlling the narrative. They exist because white people were desperate to rationalize their atrocities and to further the agenda of White Supremacy.
By tearing down those monuments, we're not erasing history - we're acknowledging the reality of that history, and trying to accept responsibility for what our history has bequeathed to us.
Sitting here in my privilege, I never once thought about the connection between today's Karens and the old ways of controlling black people thru the use of terror. I love it when I get a little more educated.
August 12, 2017 CHARLOTTESVILLE — Ryan Kelly had been working all day when he heard a car rev its engine and saw a flash of metal speed by. He didn’t know what was happening; he didn’t think. He did what photojournalists do: pointed his camera and shot.
What he captured on Aug. 12, 2017, was an image that would command the world’s attention, win journalism’s highest honor and symbolize the worst moment of this university town’s worst day: a gathering of white nationalists and the killing of a young woman who came to protest them.
WaPo: White supremacists made Charlottesville a symbol of racism. Black residents say it still is.
Her whole life, Dorenda Johnson has endured racism in Charlottesville. Growing up in a city built with the help of enslaved people, she attended integrated schools but often found herself assigned to segregated classes. She spent years working as an administrative assistant in a University of Virginia hospital wing that — until last year — was named after a notorious white supremacist.
So she was hardly surprised in 2017 when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the college town for a “Unite the Right” rally — an event that transformed Charlottesville into a national symbol of racism. But the 61-year-old hoped the violence that left a counterprotester dead and dozens injured would finally jolt local leaders into a commitment to address the city’s racial inequities.
For Johnson, now a member of the city’s new Police Civilian Review Board, that day has not arrived.
“I said after ‘Unite the Right,’ ‘Well, now, hopefully your eyes will be finally open.’ Not! I am very disappointed and plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said Johnson, who lives with her two grown sons in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood of Orangedale-Prospect. “I would really like my sons to leave the city. I don’t want them to get stuck in a rut here. There is very little that they can do to better themselves here.”
In interviews with The Washington Post, numerous other Black residents and activists echoed her frustration. They said they are still pressing for change even as racial justice protests grip the rest of the country after George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police May 25.
It matters little, they repeatedly said, that much of the city’s leadership is Black, including the mayor, police chief and city manager/chief executive officer. They say gentrification continues pushing minorities and other low-income residents out into neighboring counties. About 20 percent of Charlottesville’s 47,000 residents identified themselves as Black, Black/Hispanic or other races in the most recent census data.
- and -
In recent weeks, “volunteer statue guards” have arrived at night armed with guns to ward off protesters eager to deface the statues of Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, according to C-Ville, a weekly newspaper in the city. (Last month, the Lee statue was splattered with red paint.) And burning tiki torches were recently discovered outside the homes of two local anti-racism activists. Similar flaming torches were carried by white supremacists three years ago in their march on the University of Virginia campus to the statue of Thomas Jefferson.
“These guys are not going away,” said one of the activists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for reasons of safety. “I keep finding alt-right stickers on my mailbox and all around my neighborhood. Did I feel like my life was threatened? After 2017, it’s hard to dismiss something like that.” There's a feeling of "wanting to get back to normal", but we have to keep in mind that "normal" wasn't a very good circumstance for way too many people. We have to try to get back to wanting something better - wanting to move towards that more perfect union. We have an awful lot of work to do.
Cops have to be held accountable, but cops also have to have some leeway so as to operate as freely as necessary. And there's the rub. Ruth Marcus at WaPo:
U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves couldn’t do justice for the plaintiff in his court, who had sued over police abuse. The Supreme Court won’t let him. So Reeves issued an opinion that dutifully followed the law — and blistered the justices for the all-but-insurmountable barrier they have constructed to shield police officers from being held to account.
Reeves, a Barack Obama nominee who sits in Jackson, Miss., and is the second Black federal judge in the history of the state, produced one of the most powerful pieces of legal writing I have encountered. His opinion is a 72-page cri de coeur directed at the Supreme Court, arguing that it must do away with the doctrine of “qualified immunity” for law enforcement officials.
Reeves begins with the larger context. “Clarence Jamison wasn’t jaywalking.” Footnote: “That was Michael Brown,” shot by police in Ferguson, Mo. “He wasn’t outside playing with a toy gun.” Footnote: “That was 12-year-old Tamir Rice,” shot in a park by a Cleveland police officer. “He wasn’t suspected of ‘selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.’ ” Footnote: “That was Eric Garner,” the Staten Island man who died after an officer put him in a chokehold.
Clarence Jamison was a Black man driving a Mercedes convertible.” In 2013, in Pelahatchie, Miss., an hour south of Philadelphia, Miss., where Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed in 1964. Because his temporary tag — he had just purchased the car — was allegedly folded over.
As Reeves recounts, Jamison’s fate was less dire than that of many others: “As he made his way home to South Carolina from a vacation in Arizona, Jamison was pulled over and subjected to one hundred and ten minutes of an armed police officer badgering him, pressuring him, lying to him and then searching his car top to bottom for drugs. Nothing was found. Jamison isn’t a drug courier. He’s a welder.”
Jamison wasn’t shot. He wasn’t killed. But he was frightened and humiliated, and his car suffered several thousand dollars in damage to its seats and convertible top. And, as Reeves found, his constitutional rights were violated: Officer Nick McClendon’s search of Jamison’s car violated the Fourth Amendment, and Jamison’s supposed “consent” to the search could hardly be deemed voluntary.
“In an America where Black people ‘are considered dangerous even when they are in their living rooms eating ice cream, asleep in their beds, playing in the park, standing in the pulpit of their church, birdwatching, exercising in public, or walking home from a trip to the store to purchase a bag of Skittles,’ ” Reeves wrote, “who can say that Jamison felt free that night on the side of Interstate 20? Who can say that he felt free to say no to an armed Officer McClendon?”
But none of that mattered, which brings us to the larger context that Reeves explores: the purpose of the federal civil rights law under which Jamison sued McClendon. Its popular name tells the story: the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction era-effort to respond to what a later court described as the “reign of terror imposed by the Klan upon black citizens and their white sympathizers in the Southern States.” The law, now commonly known as Section 1983, provides for damages against state officials who deprive individuals of their constitutional rights.
All good, but for the fact that the Supreme Court began to eviscerate the law more than 50 years ago. As Reeves explains, “Judges have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.”
We keep seeing an elasticity in the steady progress towards equality, as we take our small steps towards that "more perfect union". Whenever black folks (eg) have made significant strides, there's come a stretch of years that have seen white people push back, trying to make it the way it was - trying to Make America Great Again - trying to undermine the progress. Every fucking time. We have to do better. We have to raise people up, and we have to make it stick.
Grand Master Jay turned out his NFAC guys in Louisville yesterday. Reuters: A group of heavily armed Black protesters marched through Louisville, Kentucky on Saturday demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed in March by police officers who burst into her apartment.
Scores of the demonstrators, carrying semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and clad in black paramilitary gear, walked in formation to a fenced off intersection where they were separated by police from a smaller group of armed counter-protesters.
The Black militia dubbed NFAC want justice for Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician who died in a hail of gunfire when drug investigators bearing a “no-knock” warrant entered her Louisville home four months ago.
To be clear, I can do without the macho bullshit with the Emotional Support Weapons.
But, 2 things:
First, ain't it funny how the cops don't wanna fuck with you when you're packin'?
I don't like that line of thinking, because it seems to lend a little credence to the 2A fetishists' arguments about needing guns to stand against the tyrannical gubmint. I don't believe that's a valid conclusion here, but it's worth thinking about.
Second, there is definitely a weird kind of Good Karma vibe about this. And a call back to the Black Panthers demonstration in California 50 years ago - which funnily enough prompted then-Gov Ronald Reagan to help hustle through a piece of legislation that put some limits on open carry at the time.
And that's always been pretty interesting - that white people can get pretty reasonable all of a sudden when black people stand up and push back, giving us a little taste of our our shit.
But back to the but - even if your main intent is simply a show of force, some jagoff yahoo is going to obsess on "An unused weapon is a useless weapon", and there will be blood.
If you believe in the power of prayer, now is another really good time to pray.
WALTER SCOTT GEORGE FLOYD TAMIR RICE AIYANA JONES STEPHON CLARK BREONNA TAYLOR SANDRA BLAND ATATIANA JEFFERSON EZELL FORD AHMAUD ARBERY ALTON STERLING BOTHAM JEAN ERIC GARNER
He was a big part of American music - particularly the evolution from Big Band to tight little combos. And he can be credited with making it more possible for "negro acts" to cross over into mainstream white people's culture. I can hear his influence throughout the basic 3-chord Rock-n-Roll stuff, as well as with the players who're keeping his style of Jazz Standards alive (Diana Krall comes to mind). And, as always, there were times he was in danger just for being who he was - a black man making his way in a society that considered itself superior simply because of its whites-only attitude.
In 1956 Cole was assaulted on stage during a concert in Birmingham, Alabama, with the Ted Heath Band while singing the song "Little Girl". Having circulated photographs of Cole with white female fans bearing incendiary boldface captions reading "Cole and His White Women" and "Cole and Your Daughter" three men belonging to the North Alabama Citizens Council assaulted Cole, apparently attempting to kidnap him. The three assailants ran down the aisles of the auditorium towards Cole. Local law enforcement quickly ended the invasion of the stage, but in the ensuing melée Cole was toppled from his piano bench and injured his back. He did not finish the concert and never again performed in the southern United States. A fourth member of the group was later arrested. All were tried and convicted.
People who imagine that history flatters them - as it does indeed, since they wrote it - are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin, and they become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is where it appears to me most white Americans find themselves - impaled. They are dimly, or perhaps vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie. But they do not know how to be released from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.
If we want the world to be a better place, the first thing we have to do is to stop insisting that it can't be.
