Gimme that ol’ time (racist) religion

Over at the blog ‘Taki’s Magazine’, John Derbyshire, until today a regular blogger for the National Review and the National Review Online (NR and NRO) where he lets his full on racist flag fly high and proud. I’ll spare you the absolute worst of it and just point out the three paragraphs below. I’m bringing these up because part of why I left the Republican party 20 years ago. They are also the least vile of Derbyshire’s paean to the ol’ racism which, clearly, he misses.

(13) In that pool of forty million, there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.

It was when I realized that this was the purpose I served for no small number of my conservative friends 20 years ago. I was their shield where they could, so they thought, invoke me in order to allow them to make very racist statements. I was the ‘black friend’ of “I’m not racist. I have a very good black friend and she agrees with me” fame. I didn’t enjoy that role, never asked for it and hated the feeling of being convenient instead of liked. I hated myself for staying around as long as I did.

(14) Be aware, however, that there is an issue of supply and demand here. Demand comes from organizations and businesses keen to display racial propriety by employing IWSBs, especially in positions at the interface with the general public—corporate sales reps, TV news presenters, press officers for government agencies, etc.—with corresponding depletion in less visible positions. There is also strong private demand from middle- and upper-class whites for personal bonds with IWSBs, for reasons given in the previous paragraph and also (next paragraph) as status markers.

Now, imagine going through your day with this nagging voice wondering if you are there because you are competent and/or well-liked or you’re there as a totem, a status marker, some ‘bling’ at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It is instructive to note that to Derbyshire friendship with a BFTTR (Black Friend To The Rescue) is mostly about convenience and status. The pleasure of having a friend is something you get ‘for free’. If it weren’t for our utility, though, one imagines that Derbyshire and those that agree with him (and there are plenty who do) wouldn’t really go to the trouble of weeding through us black folks.

(15) Unfortunately the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous. To be an IWSB in present-day US society is a height of felicity rarely before attained by any group of human beings in history. Try to curb your envy: it will be taken as prejudice (see paragraph 13).

Coveted? Envied? What world does Derbyshire live in? The link takes you to Barack Obama’s White House page. Because, you know, Obama has had the easiest Presidency ever.
Those of you who know me and the four of you who read my blog regularly have heard me say or write that I would very much prefer to deal with the straight-up racist than have to play the guessing game. This is why. This collapses my decision tree quite efficiently. If I had to deal with a John Derbyshire in my day-to-day life (and blessedly it’s been a while since I’ve had to be burdened with one) I would want to make our interactions as quick, efficient and rare as possible. What makes Derbyshire so odious, outside of his views, is that he openly calls for the kind of maddening gentility that makes dealing with his lot so incredibly tiring. You have this vague sense that you’re being looked down on, not taken seriously, dismissed as not possibly being as smart, educated, urbane or well-read as you actually are. Yet, the person is being civil and one thing I picked up early on from my parents is that my life will be considerably enhanced if I don’t immediately jump to ‘racism’ as the first and most convenient explanation for disappointments that happen in my life. There will be enough of them that will come along, they taught me, so there’s no need to go searching for them, they’ll find me.
Derbyshire also illustrates something else that my friends have heard me say and it is this; I think that, for the most part, Americans know they are not supposed to be bigots–of any sort–but I don’t know that many Americans know why they aren’t supposed to be bigots. I don’t know how many Americans, of any political stripe, could give a cogent account of why bigotry is an odious character trait and one that has to be resisted. We all have the temptations to bigotry. I think it is an unfortunate evolutionary hangover because xenophobia, in our original environment of adaptation, had way too much survival value *not* to have evolved. But we do not have to be victims of our evolutionary history. We have the power to make choices because of other artifacts of that same history. I want Americans to be taught, by the culture–that means the schools, the families, the religious institutions–why bigotry is wrong.
Quoting King saying, “I have a dream…one day we’ll be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin” isn’t an answer to bigotry and while it is, as much of what he wrote was, evocative and poetic the way that phrase is trotted out is too pat by half. I have a link to the full Derbyshire article below. If you can stomach the whole thing, do a little thought experiment. Imagine that John Derbyshire is interviewing me for a position. How many of you think I’m going to get a fair interview out of that man? If I have to work next to him do you think I’ll be treated as an equal even if I surpass his performance in every way? Am I really supposed to believe that a man who believes such things about the likes of me based solely upon some phenotypic traits is going to give me a fair shake? And I’m supposed to believe that this will happen without any kind of laws to spur our employer to have a highly vested interest in making sure that he can’t make his bigotry my problem?
My driven, Type-A personality was molded being an impressionable child during a period of American culture when most of what Mr. Derbyshire said was still uttered in public in polite company. If you were born before about 1975 chances are you heard some versions of this kind of talk. If you integrated the neighborhood you grew up in, as I did, you heard this kind of thing a lot. I was going to be taken seriously and I have tried, over the course of the last four decades, to hone my mind into the mental equivalent of a classically constructed katana. Fast, beautiful and devastatingly sharp.

http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire/page_2#axzz1rPDyAV9r

The Deaths of Trayvon Martin and ‘Rue’ from “The Hunger Games” (Spoiler alert!)

My wife and I saw “The Hunger Games” over the weekend. Through a large part of the movie, I wondered how they were going to handle the death of Rue, this sweet little girl with beautiful black curls. Rue dies when another contestant throws a knife meant for the heroine, Katness, and misses. It’s a touching scene, one of the most powerful in a very powerful movie.

Well, Facebook has been on fire today with screen captures of racist tweets. The worst of them (and that is saying quite a bit) was one where someone admitted–sense they were obvious pretty proud about it–that the death of Rue didn’t seem so bad because, wait for it, she was a little black girl. No, you didn’t read that wrong.

This got me to thinking about Trayvon Martin. His death likely doesn’t seem ‘that big of a deal’ because he was just a black boy. Imagine, for a moment, that Trayvon Martin had been a white girl of the same age. Imagine that a black man had chased her down and then shot her in cold blood. The country would have come to a complete halt! But Martin was a black kid and so even if this was a simple open-and-shut case (and it may be just that) his death is just not that sad to some portion of the American public.

Listen to his screams

I am glad my parents aren’t alive to see this. I had not listened to the 911 tape of the murder of Trayvon Martin until tonight. I had intentionally avoided it. I couldn’t take it. My son could have been Trayvon Martin. My father could have been Trayvon Martin. My sister’s boys could be Trayvon Martin. My ‘nephew’, Jayvin, could be Trayvon Martin.

It’s the screams. Listen to them. Really listen to them. The terror reaches out through the speakers and grips you by the heart. If you have the least bit of empathy, your mind will be inexorably drawn to imagining the last few terrified moments of this kid’s life as he pleaded to be allowed to live.

When I heard it, all I could think of was my son’s face, his eyes wide with fright, pleading for his life and hoping that someone anyone will come to his rescue. Then the gun shot. Then the second gun shot. Even if one were trying to be ‘fair-minded’ (i.e. pretend that this might not be about race) the second gun shot makes it clear that Zimmerman meant to get himself a trophy. He was going to be the hero who saved the gated community from the young black man. It is bad enough that cops kill black people in the course of routine traffic stops and walk away without even a slap on the wrist. Now, it appears that–at least in Florida–we’ve taken a gigantic step backward and civilians can also kill a black man who is carrying Skittles-of-mass-destruction in his hand.

Imagine that you are there. You’re Trayvon Martin. You are walking home from the corner store with Skittles in your hand and suddenly you face every black parent’s nightmare. Yes, every black parent’s nightmare. For now, right now, I don’t really want to hear white people jumping up with their story of how their neighbors’ brothers’ best friend
knew this guy who was neighbors with this woman, who had a third cousin thrice removed, whose former neighbors’ son went to school with a guy who was randomly shot by a black guy. It’s a genre of ‘karmic balancing act’ tossed into American discussions of race. You are probably more familiar with the genre wherein the storyline is this, “When I was right out of high school, I tried to get a job as Attorney General of the United States and they gave it to some black guy named Eric Holder because they needed to fill a quota.” Never mind that the story teller hadn’t gone to law school. When the subject is job discrimination based upon race there will inevitably be some story where a white person didn’t get a job because ‘they’ had to ‘give it to a minority’. It is inconceivable that a black person might actually be the most qualified candidate for the job. Oh no! If a white person and a black person compete for the same job and the black person gets hired it must be because a quota had to be filled so any ongoing job discrimination is just karmic just desserts for blacks taking so many jobs we aren’t qualified to do in order to fill a quota.

There’s a difference between this hypothetical story and what actually happened. There are no municipalities where a black man could run down and shoot a random white kid, have the police show up and that black man just go on about his idle business. If Trayvon Martin had been white kid, and George Zimmerman a black man I guarantee you that Zimmerman would, even now, be sitting in jail awaiting trial. But since Martin was black and Zimmerman white, the latter gets to go on with his life. I wouldn’t put a $10 bet (much less a $10,000 dollar bet, Mittens) on Zimmerman doing any time whatsoever. IF it goes to trial and IF he is convicted, I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Zimmerman got off with time served in county jail. This guy Zimmerman, against the advice of 911, followed this young black man and killed him thinking he would be thought a hero. He’s not far off wrong.

Oh, he won’t be praised on Red State or anywhere else, at least not immediately. But the fact that he was carrying a gun and is defending himself under the ‘Stand your ground’ law is instructive. Apparently, the men I listed at the head of this piece (and all the one’s I left out) are so deadly that one has to stand one’s ground while following him down the street when he is armed with a pack of Skittles. At some point some conservative commentator or another is going to make a statement to the effect that Zimmerman reacted properly because how was he to know that a black kid walking with candy and an iced tea wasn’t a threat.

The 911 tapes are here (opens new window). Listen to them as many times as it takes for you to internalize this fact; Trayvon Martin is dead because he was black and a male over the age of 8. George Zimmerman is free because Trayvon Martin was black. Listen to his screams. Imagine him backing away from Zimmerman. Listen to the gun shot. Imagine the bullet striking his young body. See him falling to the ground. See Zimmerman taking another shot. You will have entered into the nightmare of every black parent in America.

And I still don’t want to hear any tales or statements of the ‘that could have been anyone’ variety. The shade of Billy the Kid or John Dillinger could walk down the street carrying a suitcase nuke and a AK-47 while wearing a tee-shirt reading, “Ask me about my plans to pillage and kill” and not be seen as ‘suspicious’ while a black kid with Skittles is a mortal threat.

We call you Uncle Tom, Mr. Cain, because it’s accurate

Desperate for another few minutes of that sweet, sweet media attention Herman Cain decided to defend Pete Hoekstra’s sublimely racist ad and near the end he gripes at how he’s called an Uncle Tom. Like the Haagen-Daas black walnut ice cream he compared himself to, Herman Cain has been pulled off the shelves because people just didn’t want him anymore. There are two drugs that make coke addiction look like a mild fondness for eating too many Ruffles in comparison–media attention and that sweet, seductive, decadent sensation of the persecution complex. People will willingly quit doing coke. Just try to convince some person–say an unreconstructed racist–that he’s not the actual victim. Ten minutes after you point out it out to him, he’ll be right there bugging you and saying “oh c’mon, man! Just a little taste! I’ve always been good to you!” and then start crawling around on the carpet so that he can claim you’re looking down on him. Herman Cain has started crawling around the carpet of the American body politic looking for just one more little nugget of sweet Miss P so he can ride the high just a little further down the road. Thus his defense of the Pete Hoekstra ad.
See, people are going to call him an Uncle Tom because he’s carrying the water for white racists. Hoekstra’s ad was vintage xenophobia. Somewhere in some land on the far side of the outer darkness, the ghosts of the Know-Nothings saw the ad and said to one another, “oh what glorious things we could have done if only we had television!” He invoked the ‘yellow peril’ which got pulled out and pushed around in a wheelchair looking venerable for one last tour. Cain defends the ad claiming that he ‘loved it’. The problem with this is that–fairly or unfairly (hint: it’s the latter), rightly or wrongly (hint: it’s the latter again)–black Americans are repeatedly pressed into service to make whites–even whites of goodwill–more comfortable about a racial matter than might be deserved.
My friend June calls it the “Black Friend To The Rescue” and it has its right-wing and left-wing varieties. The left-wing variety is when one or two black people show up to the queer event in Portland and people start patting themselves on the back for how ‘diverse’ the event is. The right-wing variety is of the “I have a black friend and she totally agrees with me that blacks in the South were enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy.” It’s bad enough when whites use their black friends this way but there’s something just unseemly when a black person steps up and volunteers for the task. Herman Cain doesn’t have to do this but for another 36 hours he’ll be a ‘get’ on some of the FOX shows. He’ll probably be Olbermann’s worst person in the world tonight and he’ll probably be O’Donnell’s ‘rewrite’ for the evening. But sweetest of all, the thing that will make that polluted feeling he’s going to wake up to in the middle of the night, will be that one more hit on that persecution pipe. He’ll think about all those folks calling him an Uncle Tom, that weird, slow, lecherous smile will creep across his face and he’ll go back to sleep with his whole body tingling with the electric sensation of knowing that he’s being done hard by liberals. How sweet it is!

No, Virginia, there are no living wooly mammoths

To the surprise of absolutely no one who thought this through for more than about two minutes, it turns out that the wooly mammoth video is a hoax. I know, shocking!

It appears that a story last week about a hairy, woolly mammoth seen walking across a Siberian river is a hoax.
In the opening frame of the blurry video that went viral, an animal is seen moving through the Kitoy River. Superimposed over the video are the words: Siberian Mammoth, Copyright Michael Cohen/Barcroft Media
That’s where the controversy and accusations began to fly.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/13/woolly-mammoth-hoax-confirmed_n_1273952.html

RIP Etta James

Died today at 73. And our world is made just a tiny bit less bright as her light goes out.

Gay rights and the corporate, capitalist world

Andrew Sullivan, over at Daily Dish, makes the point–and one would be hard pressed to say he’s wrong in this instance–that the recent news that all of the companies on the Fortune Best 100 Companies to Work For list have anti-discrimination clauses that protects queer people is a triumph of the market. None of these companies are pandering or catering to a queer audience and they aren’t doing it for any particularly noble motive. Rather, they want the best talent they can get and do not want to lose that talent because someone is queer. Given that we’ve been waiting for ENDA for the better part of a quarter century but this change has happened right under our noses, I’m hard pressed to say that the market didn’t work.
A story from my way-back days in tech will be illustrative here. I used to work for a start-up in Oakland. This was my third job in the computer industry. I came in the door as employee thirteen. When I started, the company did not cover domestic partner benefits. As I was doing all of my paperwork on day one, the office manager came to me and said, “Don’t fill out your insurance forms yet. We don’t cover DP because it never came up before but now it has so I just have to call Aetna and it’ll take a few days to get it all sorted.” At the time I was only dating some woman, we’d had all of two dates and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t have a domestic partner.
That said, the next three hires were queer and so they benefitted from it. I was kicked out of the military for being queer. I never lost my job for being queer and in all the time I’ve worked in the field (since 1994) I can only think of one time that my being queer was the likely cause I didn’t get a job and that was because the organization was an arm of the Lutheran church. Since 1994, I’ve worked for two non-profits (including the YWCA), two start-ups and two multinationals. I’ve been treated fairly and equitably and been a valued member of the teams I was on.
I will give the last word to Sullivan.

This is not because they are somehow being noble. It is because they are serving their shareholders by employing the absolutely best people for the jobs they have and do not want to miss someone’s talents because of something irrelevant like sexual orientation.
Hence capitalism enables equality. And the last entity to get with the program is the government.

David Frum – The Daily Beast

I saw this the other day at Frum Forum and then read the whole article at Prospect magazine

And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity – high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system – and diversity – equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life. The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.

This may be something that we on the left will have to face sooner or later and, for my money, I would have it sooner. Neither the American left or right seems to truly grasp that the very nature of politics is trade-offs. The left, admirably pursuing diversity, has become blind to the fact that in doing so we may have fractured the social bonds that tie us together as Americans. Unlike, say, the Japanese who have a–more or less–common ancestry, history and heritage we Americans are tied together solely through commitment to an ideal and a history that may have some of us placed in the role of outsider or the target to whom the history happened. So like the British but unlike, say, the Germans part of the challenge for us as Americans is to figure out how to see the national story as being our story. Currently, those on the American left are likely to see our national story and ideals as something deeply and profoundly alien to us even though it may be the only story we know well. Instead of seeing the founding of America as the start of something great and good, we see it as the beginning of an unending string of horrors visited upon blacks, Native Americans, mestizos, Japanese and Chinese immigrants, etc. While there is historical accuracy to this portrait, it is not the whole of the story nor is it necessarily where we should want our focus to be.
It is difficult enough for a nation as diverse as ours to hold itself together. It is even more of a challenge when we do not feel that our national story has anything to offer minority populations outside of a long list of grievances and broken promises. What’s more, the more we emphasize that which makes us different and hold that up as far more important and noble than that which makes us similar, we will have a very difficult time convincing our fellow citizens that we need a stronger social safety net.

Ron Paul loves straw men

Listening to Ron Paul’s speech this evening it was interesting his enthusiastic use of straw men:

• “All these bleeding hearts who said we can just give everyone a free house and they can borrow off the equity…”

You can’t look back at the utter debacle of the housing market and say, with a straight face, that the problem was that people got ‘free houses’ that they then took loans against the equity. At least you can’t say that without worrying that some great cosmic force turns you into charcoal briquette on the spot.

test of MacJournal logins and the keychain

just a test to see if MacJournal is preserving logins.