Category Archives: Racism

Life Exceeds Art, in Terms of Racist Absurdity, at CPAC

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ST-slaves

I have no idea what conservatives think would have happened without slavery.

I’m having a hard time believing that this guy, who went on a bizarre rant in defense of slavery and only went downhill from there, is for real.

A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.

The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.

ThinkProgress generally seems to have good reporting, so let’s assume for argument’s sake that its reporting on this story is accurate. Because that’s not all, folks:

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Look, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on comedy, satire, or political subterfuge, but I’ve done a reasonable amount of comedy-related writing and performing in my life, such that I know a thing or two about creating a caricature of an opinion or attitude that you want to mock. The trick to creating a character who expresses or embodies a position that you want to lampoon is that you have to make that character over-the-top and believable at the same time. Have the character express opinions that might represent an absurd yet realistic extension of an actual opinion. The character has to be someone who could exist in our world.

At the moment, I am having a hard time believing that Scott Terry exists in our world.

By this, I mean that several possibilities occur to me:

  • Terry is an earnest, if catastrophically misguided, young man, but the depths of his depraved beliefs make me wonder how he was able to hold these beliefs, wake up and get dressed in the morning, eat food with utensils, and get to the meeting hall, all without somehow hurting himself. You know, by walking directly into a brick wall because he thought it might be a special doorway reserved for white people or something.
  • Terry is a James O’Keefe-caliber troll sent to make conservatives look like epic doucherockets. For the record, my opinion of James O’Keefe, based on what I have seen and read, rests somewhere around the level of inorganic material intertwined with forest undergrowth—no one really wants to come into contact with either it or the organic undergrowth, and unlike the organic stuff, it doesn’t even help trees grow. My point being, this is not meant to be a compliment for Mr. Terry.

I’m pretty sure this guy was for real, as much as it pains me to think that people younger than me think this way and are able to function in society. CPAC, after all, is the place where two white guys did a rap number last year and dropped an almost-N-bomb for comedic effect. The Republican Party boasts among their 2012 candidates a guy who thinks slavery was good for Africans because it meant that their descendants could live in the U.S. and not, you know, Africa. So yeah, I guess it’s plausible that a CPAC attendee would actually believe all the things that guy said.

Anyway, if an actual liberal wanted to smear conservatives by infiltrating and posing as a racist idiot, it would have been far more clever than this.

Photo credit: See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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A beloved ’80s cartoon turns out to be racist. Who knew?

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Carbombya_Marker

Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the dead, desiccated husk of my childhood idealism blowing away on a warm desert wind…

Not too long ago, I tried to watch the pilot episode of the original Transformers cartoon on Netflix Instant. You know how some children’s cartoons actually operate on multiple levels, so that adults can find something entertaining in them, too? This was not one of those cartoons. This was an unrepentant 1980’s toy commercial stretched out over about 22 minutes without the actual commercials.

In an unrelated incident, my random wanderings through Wikipedia in the cause of avoiding anything productive or income-generating led me to some recaps of the old series, now known as Transformers: Generation 1 to distinguish it from all the subsequent canon-destroying cartoons and live-action sludge that followed. I stopped watching the Transformers cartoon after the second season in 1986, not coincidentally the same year I started junior high school. Therefore, I missed a rather, ahem, colorful character they added in season 3. I Googled this extensively because I refused to believe the description of a new human character, “the dictator Abdul Fakkadi of the desert nation of Carbombya.”

I dare say I need to repeat that for incredulity: “the dictator Abdul Fakkadi of the desert nation of Carbombya.”

TFWiki.net describes this fictional nation as follows:

The Socialist Democratic Federated Republic of Carbombya is a kingdom located in the Sahara Desert region of the continent of Africa on the planet Earth. It has a coastline, with foreign ships that venture too close to it often being fired upon. This intensely xenophobic state is ruled by Abdul Fakkadi, and apparently derives most of its wealth from particularly fine oil. The people are often heard swearing on the lives of their mother’s camels and so forth. This is of course hilarious offensively stereotypical.

Its city of Carbombya City, population 4,000 (and 10,000 camels), is presumably the capital.

(See also Transformers Wiki at wikia.com.)

It’s a kingdom with a socialist, federal republic system? With a dictator? Um, got it…..

The symbolism is pretty obvious. Clumsy, even. This was 1986, of course, when American esteem for Arab nations was certainly even lower than it is now. I can totally picture the writer who conceived of this character and country, who I am certain has never even seen a book on political science. I’m sure he laughed at his own cleverness as he spilled Cheeto dust onto his anti-Gaddafi t-shirt.

daffy

Yeah, something like this.

Photo credit: ‘Carbombya Marker’ © 1986 Sunbow Productions, Marvel Productions, and Hasbro, via tfwiki.net; ‘Khadaffy Duck’ by vintageretrowear, via defunkd.com. You had best believe I’m claiming fair use on this bullshit.

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We have quite a bit of post-apocalyptic or dystopian SF about the U.S., but what about everyone else?

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1153288_52572910I came across this brief post as I was scrolling through Tumblr entitled “I still wonder what happened to the rest of the world in The Hunger Games”:

Do they still have meetings and stuff?
France: Anyone heard from America lately?
Mexico: Same old, same old. They’re still sending out children to fight to the death in a reality show.
UK: Shouldn’t we do something about that?
China: Just leave them, at least they’re not annoying us.

We have a rather extensive set of post-apocalyptic or dystopian speculative fiction set within the boundaries of the United States or North America, but not much looking at such an America from the outside. Speculative fiction, by offering a view of a possible future, is often the best vehicle for commenting on or criticizing today’s political, economic, or social realities. Think of how much social commentary the original Star Trek was able to accomplish by setting its stories in a quasi-utopian future humanity. I too wonder what a post-disaster U.S. would look like from a non-U.S. perspective, particularly one from the “developing world.”

In terms of post-apocalyptic or dystopian future Americas, aside from The Hunger Games, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comes to mind, along with alternate history works like Harry Turtledove’s “Timeline-191” series and about half the episodes of the TV show Sliders. Then there are TV shows like Jericho, which portrayed a modern-day nuclear attack, and Terra Nova, which was set 85 million years ago but centered around a dangerously polluted 22nd-century America. The new ABC show Last Resort, about which I will probably write more later, depicts a potentially dystopian contemporary or near-future United States. These all focus on America itself, though.

Robert Silverberg’s Time of the Great Freeze takes place during a future Ice Age, where ice sheets have covered much of North America. The protagonists leave their underground city in North America after picking up a radio signal from the London area, intending to cross the ice sheet over the Atlantic. The book mentions that, with much of Europe, North America, and East Asia covered in ice, the equatorial nations of South America, Africa, and Asia have become dominant world powers. It still doesn’t tell us anything about life in those places.

The Brits Seem to Have No Problem Blowing Us Up in Fiction

The best examples I can think of, that deal with the rest of the world, should the United States go all post-apocalyptic or dystopian, come from Great Britain or other English-speaking countries. The films V for Vendetta and Children of Men both came out around the same time in 2005 or 2006. Both are set in the relatively-near future: V for Vendatta mentions the year 2015 as the not-too-distant past, and Clive Owen’s character in Children of Men wears an extremely ratty London 2012 Olympics sweatshirt for much of the film. Both films reference events in “the former United States,” and both depict a UK turned to dictatorship in one form or another. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, set in Australia, shows a U.S. devastated by nuclear war. Continue reading →

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This Week in WTF, August 24, 2012

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320px-Gerber_Machete

Definitely not baby food. I now profusely apologize for any mockery and ask that you please not lacerate me.

– A recent recall announcement from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reads: “Gerber Recalls Machetes Due to Laceration Hazard.” As it turns out, this is not Gerber, the well-known manufacturer of baby food. It is Gerber Legendary Blades, of Portland, Oregon, the company that makes machetes that might cut you. I’m just glad they caught that in time. (To be fair, it sounds like a pretty serious potential hazard: “A weakness in the area where the handle meets the blade can cause the handle or the blade to break during use, posing a laceration hazard.”)

– A strip club owner in Tampa, Florida does not expect the upcoming Republican National Convention, less than six miles from his club, to bring him much business. Time will tell.

– Speaking of Tampa, Rush Limbaugh thinks that President Obama instructed the National Hurricane Center to announce the risk of Tropical Storm Isaac possibly hitting Tampa around the time of the convention. He also said something about turning the convention into a FEMA camp, and then I think an Alien larva burst out of his chest and offered a more sensible take on the news. (NOTE: I might have imagined that last part. The comments about the tropical storm actually happened.)

– A reporter, formerly of the Houston Chronicle, is complaining to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of sex discrimination. The newspaper fired her in March, allegedly because she neglected to tell them of her other job as a stripper. In what I am certain is a total coincidence, Gloria Allred represents her.

– A casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey neglected to check a shipment of playing cards to confirm that they had been shuffled. They had not been shuffled. Gamblers caught on and won $1.5 million, give or take. The casino is suing the card company, but they’re also suing the winning gamblers for violating the “house always wins” clause.

– A so-bad-he’s-really-bad comedian launches into an absurdly racist routine in front of a young Asian couple and gets (justifiably) knocked out:

Photo credit: ‘Gerber Machete’ by Dana60Cummins (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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A quick thought on privilege

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(This was a comment a made on a Facebook thread centered around this article, to which someone added this video, which ended up bringing in race, religion, and LGBTQ issues–in other words, a normal Friday morning for me. I figured I’d cut and paste my comments here for an inexpensive blog update! This is all verbatim what I wrote, except that I corrected a few spelling and grammar errors inherent to the Facebook commenting format.)

This will be a condensed treatment of the concept of privilege, but here goes: I’m a white, heterosexual, educated, affluent, originally-raised-Episcopalian, reasonably attractive and healthy American male. In other words, I am about as high up on the privilege ladder as you can get. About the only “minority” status I have is that of atheist, and people who don’t know me can’t exactly tell that just from looking at me. If I may borrow Stephanie for a second, if I were to tell Stephanie that sexism does not exist in America because I have never experienced it, or because her own stories of encountering sexism just don’t make sense to me, Stephanie would be within her rights to give me an epic rhetorical beatdown. As a guy, I have privilege in this society to ignore some pretty pervasive sexism. If I don’t want to see it or deal with it, it can be invisible to me. The same can be true for me about LGBTQ issues (no one has yet complained that, by advertising my engagement on my FB page, I am rubbing my sexuality in their faces. LGBTQ people don’t get that kind of deference from the whole freaking world). Christians can claim “persecution” when in reality they are just having to share the public sphere with others. Guys can claim unfair advantages for women when women haven’t even achieved parity. My actual point, though, is about the “race card.” When a person of color “plays the race card,” it is pretty much assumed that the sole purpose is to be divisive or to distract from something else, and that is a load of crap. There is racism all around us all the time, but most white (or white-identified) people do not have to deal with it as a daily fact of life. Just one example: I drove by four police cars yesterday, and in two instances I was going about 5 miles over the speed limit, but no one pulled me over. I have never been pulled over without verifiable evidence of speeding or making an illegal right turn on red, and I have never had my car searched for drugs “just in case.” For many if not most people of color in America, though, the simple act of driving a car down the street requires taking on more risk than my privileged ass can comprehend. I’m not claiming any greater knowledge of the reality of life in America, just that I get that there is much of daily life for others that I do not “get.” Claiming that a context-free allegation of racism is playing the “race card” is a cowardly refusal to even consider that the person might be correct. Note also that privilege is not limited specifically to white heterosexual males. The default setting of society is “white heterosexual male,” so nearly anything that unthinkingly falls into one of those categories can have the effect of propping up privilege, without awareness of how it might hurt others.

None of this means that I don’t get to have a say in issues pertaining to other groups. It just means that I need to listen for a change. It is really amazing how little privileged people actually listen to people without their same privilege. Google “mansplaining” if you want to have a sad chuckle.

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This Week in WTF, August 3, 2012

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Russia_stamp_no._1030_-_2012_Summer_Olympics_bid– Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron disses presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

– So does London Mayor Boris Johnson.

– Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) likens the Obamacare contraception mandate to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. No really, this happened.

– A former Chick-fil-A employee is suing the company because of reasons:

Former Chick-fil-A employee Brenda Honeycutt is suing the company for gender discrimination, alleging that owner and operator of Duluth, Georgia’s Chick-fil-As, Jeff Howard, fired her so that she could be a “stay home mother” despite her “satisfactory-to-above-satisfactory employment history with the company.

“During the Plaintiff’s employment, Defendant Howard routinely made comments to the Plaintiff suggesting that as a mother she should stay home with her children,” the lawsuit states.

– A church in Mississippi, one of the states composing our allegedly post-racial nation, refused to marry a couple because they are black:

A black couple in Crystal Springs, Mississippi says that a predominantly white Baptist church refused to let them get married because of their race.

Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson told WLBT that the day before they were to be married, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs informed them the ceremony would have to be moved due to the reaction of some white church members — even though the couple had attended the church regularly.

“The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if [the pastor] went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church,” Charles Wilson explained.

We have to respect the delicate feelings of “some white church members,” amirite? I can’t wait to hear if there’s a non-discriminatory explanation.

– A small airplane towing a banner with a marriage proposal crashed in Rhode Island, after the pilot had to ditch. The pilot was found uninjured, after his apparently genius 8 year-old son helped the Coast Guard locate him. No word on whether the intended recipient of the proposal said yes.

– A puppeteer on a Christian-themed children’s show in Florida is arrested for conspiracy to kidnap children and, uh, other stuff. It sounds like police have evidence of some pretty heinous stuff, but it is not clear exactly what he actually did regarding the kidnapping conspiracy charge, versus what he just talked about doing. Technically, “extensive Internet chats about eating children” are not illegal in and of themselves without taking a furher step……you know, I don’t really want to talk about this.

– Some Breitbartian named John Nolte thinks that a new Skittles ad promotes bestiality or something. In other words don’t chase your Chick-fil-A sandwich with Skittles. Or Oreos. I’ll have to get back to you on which candies and cookies have the Almighty’s stamp of approval.

Photo credit: ‘Russia stamp no. 1030 – 2012 Summer Olympics bid’ by Russian Post/Beltyukov V., painter [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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If you’re going to insist on sticking your nose into other people’s relationships that do not concern you, you will have to do it without any Oreos

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Oreos, those eminently awesome chocolate and cream cookies, burst onto the national stage yesterday due to an act of basic human decency. Of course, some people simply cannot let that sort of thing go unpunished. In a fit of diversity and inclusiveness, Oreo posted a rainbow cookie to its Facebook page, garnering hundreds of thousands of “likes” and more than twenty thousand comments. Some comments are supportive, and some are a permanent part of the internet, whose comments will hopefully come back to haunt the authors some day.

Now we know it’s getting real, because Fox Nation’s readers have the story, and they are offended!!!

gay-oreo

I was hoping to collect a few choice quotes, but (a) Fox Nation commenters are cowards who don’t use their real names; and (b) I made it through one page and got sick to my stomach, in part because of the unabashed bigotry, but also because of the sheer number of people who think “lol u r stupd” is a good response to someone raising cogent, albeit “librul” points of contention.

Anyway, it only took about two seconds before I came across a racist jab at the president, courtesy of woodsman1st:

gay-oreo1

After four years of obummer, I believe I want nothing but vanilla cookies with white frosting.

This guy probably takes immense pride at being able to type out “obummer” correctly. If you don’t think this comment is racist to the core, then I have now identified an argument to which “lol u r stupd” is the best response, except that it might have too many big words for you.

Next (and this is as far as I made it), we have libssukkalot, whose handle doesn’t even merit ridicule:

gay-oreo2

First time in my life that I’ve ever seen a gay cookie, but then again it has been three and a half years of a lot of firsts too! I’ve never seen this many stupid people in charge of a country, and I’ve also never seen a “Dictator” for president of the United States until Obama!

With no way of knowing how old this person is, or anything else about the person’s background, it is impossible to say exactly how dumb this comment is above a baseline level of dumb.

That’s as far as I got. I don’t get why people think what others do in their own private romantic lives is any concern of theirs. As for the argument that gay people rub their sexuality in people’s faces, maybe you should stop thinking about penises so much whenever you see two dudes holding hands. Just sayin’.

Maybe it’s just that you haven’t had the proper introduction. Here’s a link to some excellent gay porn. Maybe you’ll end up liking it…

…Click the link…….I dare you…..

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Beauty and Bad Journalism (UPDATED)

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'Florence Colgate' [Fair use], via Facebook and GawkerMeet Florence Colgate. She is an 18 year-old resident of Deal, Kent, England, the equivalent of a high school senior. She might be the most beautiful woman in the world, according to both “science” and Gawker editor Neetzan Zimmerman.

Zimmerman made this declaration because, apparently, Zimmerman does not know how to read. “Science” may have been misquoted, as it was probably too busy with things like the Large Hadron Collider to worry about who is the fairest of them all.

Now, Colgate is a phenomenally attractive young woman. Almost into the realm of otherworldliness, if photographs are to be believed. I’m also sure she is a very nice person. She’s getting hate on her Facebook page that she doesn’t deserve. But really, the whole world? Doesn’t picking a blond, blue-eyed, English girl as the most beautiful woman on all of planet Earth seem a bit convenient?

I’ll set aside the questions of the various racial and gender implications of this selection, because others can undoubtedly address those issues with greater knowledge than I ever could. I would instead like to address the undue violence that this story has done to the concepts of journalism and science. Continue reading →

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My racist high school – UPDATED

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Alamo Heights Mule (Fair Use applies)I am part of the Alamo Heights High School Class of 1993. It’s a relatively small school in its own little school district a few miles north of downtown San Antonio, Texas. I got a great education there and had some amazing friends. Overall, I am very glad to have gone to school there, and to be from there. It opened up countless doors to opportunities many others have not had.

I was not always so happy, of course, while I actually went to school there. Alamo Heights is something of a bubble of wealth and privilege, where residents frequently appear in newspaper and magazine “Society” pages, and nearly everyone got a car on their 16th birthday. It is full of good people but it can brim with white racist bullcrap in a predominantly-Hispanic city.

There is very little overt racism, but anyone who actually understands racism knows that you do not have to physically harass or assault members of a different race to be racist. Racism is also not simply a matter of not liking members of another race. I have come to be a strong believer in the “privilege + power” definition, which holds that racism consists of both disdain for another race and the power to do something about it. I did not always understand that, but I am also a white male, so I have no experience whatsoever of what it is to be on the receiving end of racism, sexism, or pretty much any other kind of systemic oppression. All I can say for certain is that I get that I do not get it.

I had planned a more in-depth post to further explore issues like this. Really, the bottom line is that I do not have much of value to say about race, because I have no lived experience of it (same goes for gender, sexual orientation, even religion for most of my life). All I can really do is listen to others as they share their experiences, and reflect on what I may have done in the past and what I can do differently.

That is really all there is to say (by me) on the matter.

Of course, my high school had to go and spur me to action, so I’m writing this post off the cuff, without great deal of preparation. But this is not about my inconvenience. This is me confronting the racism of my hometown.

I’m a fairweather fan of Alamo Heights sports, in that I only tend to pay attention when they do well, and that’s only because hey cool! My high school won something!

I was excited to learn that the Mules (yes, that’s our mascot) basketball team has made it to the state finals tournament. That’s the first time this has happened since 1991 (when I was a sophomore and recent basketball team dropout). Also, the new coach is a guy I went to high school with. It’s the way the fans reacted to the latest big win that is (or should be) embarrassing to all of us.

Edison High School is only a few miles away from Alamo Heights, but it could be on a different planet. It is in a much less affluent part of town (although it does include one very well-to-do area), and the students are mostly Hispanic. When the Mules beat them the other night, securing a place in the state tournament, well, here’s what happened:

A local school district is apologizing after an apparent incident of racism at a boys high school basketball game this past weekend.

When the final whistle blew Saturday, Alamo Heights celebrated a convincing victory over San Antonio Edison.

Alamo Heights Head Coach Andrew Brewer said he was proud of his team.

“Tremendously proud,” Brewer said. “Tremendously. It’s the best group of kids.”

But it was just after the trophy presentation when the coach was not proud of the chant coming from Alamo Heights fans.

“USA, USA, USA,” they chanted.

San Antonio Independent School District officials took the chant as a racial insult to a school with all minority players from a school with mostly white ones.

I can already anticipate the reactions from Alamo Heights students and parents: something to the effect that the kids didn’t mean anything racist by it, that they were just celebrating, that it never occurred to them that this would be offensive, and that Edison’s players and others are being too sensitive. I feel fairly confident that the response (i.e. excuses) will fall into one of those areas.

The first thing to understand, drawing from the racism definition above, is that white people don’t get to decide when someone else should be offended. Second, if it did not occur to people that a predominantly-Hispanic group would be offended by predominantly white, affluent, mostly-Republican students chanting “USA,” then there is a problem, but the problem is not occurring in the Edison neighborhood. Alamo Heights has an image problem, and it has since long before I was a student there. This is Exhibit “A” as to why.

According to KSAT News, the students who have been identified as participating in the chant have to apologize to Edison and are banned from the remaining playoff games. If that seems harsh, keep in mind that kids in Alamo Heights tend to get whatever they want. Call it tough love.

UPDATE, March 6, 2012: Edison’s school district administration has filed a complaint with the University Interscholastic League:

The San Antonio Independent School District filed a complaint with the UIL on Tuesday regarding a chant by Alamo Heights students after a boys basketball game against Edison High School on Saturday.

***

SAISD athletic director Gil Garza filed the complaint with the University Interscholastic League, the governing body for Texas public schools. It was the second year in a row that a complaint about racially motivated chants was filed after the Region IV-4A basketball tournament.

A similar incident occurred last year in a game between Cedar Park and Lanier high schools.

“A bunch of kids made a poor decision, but we can’t ignore it,” Garza said. “Our community is fed up.”

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