Black Lives Matter

I haven't posted in ages. And I'm posting now, not because I have something profound to say, and not because others have not articulated this better or more thoroughly, but because I feel like if I don't post something, I'll explode.

I ache to see these men (mostly) being executed based on racism and fear alone. But I feel so helpless to stop it. What can I do? Someone tell me, because all the letters and vigils and blog posts don't seem to be helping.I want this FIXED. NOW. I want to DO SOMETHING to make it stop. Philando Castile was killed in front of a child! For NO REASON. Just railing against the world seems so futile. 

I used these words last night before I went to bed. Then I woke up to news that five police officers were murdered while providing security for Black Lives Matter protests in Dallas. That is NOT the "DO SOMETHING" I had in mind. Violence begets more violence. Always. And it is an infinitely sadder world that we live in because of it.
The institutionalized racism in America needs to be addressed in a massive nationwide education campaign that will teach all of us (especially white men in positions of power) to see it. Because there are too many Americans who are unwilling to accept that the system is still rigged against people of color. It is. And we need to be told. Over and over again until we finally understand that poverty and racism are linked. And prisons and racism are linked. And extrajudicial murders and racism are linked. And the whole chain is holding all of America prisoner.

Yes, it is about race

Last night a grand jury announced the decision NOT to indict two police officers in the execution death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice citing that in the bizarroworld in which they live, it is "reasonable" that a couple of ostensibly trained, purportedly mature police officers were "justified" in driving a police car into a park, leaping from the vehicle, and shooting a boy sitting and playing with a toy.
The "justification" comes from the fact that the toy was a gun that appeared to be real from a distance. And that a 12-year-old black boy appears to be an adult to white cops.
The "reasonable" choice in a situation in which an unknown black male of undetermined (young) age appears to have a gun in a public place in a state where it is legal to carry a gun, is to shoot first. And render no first aid once the black male is incapacitated.

The shame and horror I have in being a Clevelander right now is reasonable and justified.

Black Lives Matter

Between the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump (and friends) and the disturbingly regular deaths of minorities at the hands of police, you would have to live in a wealthy insular exurb to not be aware of the fact that racism in America is alive and a serious issue. For all of us. (Even the white ones.)
Sure, being white comes with the privilege of not having to be outraged at the excessive violence in our country when its victims have skin that is browner than spaghetti. But the fact that we share this country, this planet, with people who live under the oppression of racism which carries with it -as we have seen- the real threat of injury and death, means that as human beings we live under the same oppression. We just don't recognize it from where we're sitting: On top of the oppressed.

Piss poor

We drove out to the East side (Cleveland Heights, specifically) for a special dinner tonight and took Superior from MLK. This is not the scenic route. Sadly, it goes through some decidedly bad neighborhoods.
And as the Punkinhead noted during the drive, as a Clevelander, as an American, it's embarrassing that we allow -in most cases, force- our fellow human beings to live in squalor. There is literally no excuse for our apathy. We should be ashamed of ourselves, America.

Does the KKK have a tumblr?

The problem with social media is the same thing that makes it awesome. It give us the ability, no matter how remote we might be -physically or emotionally- to connect with other people who have the same frame of reference, or opinion, or illness, or issue, or favorite music, or hobby, or... .
This is great for mom's who like to make crafts for their kids or kids questioning their sexuality.
The downside is that it also makes the wackos who think that all Mexicans are rapists and all blacks deserve to be killed by the police on the side of the road believe that they are in a majority.

Please tell me they are not a majority.

Convieniently self-identifing racists

The wonderful (and awful) thing about Freedom of Speech, is that it allows us to identify the crazies. Anyone who can honestly argue that the confederate battle flag is not racist, is deliberately hiding his head in the sand. Maybe a few photos from the KKK rally might help. This one, in particular give you a good view of their faces so you know who the assholes are.

trash

Two things

Took a couple days off. Because.
Now I'm back. Two things:
1. Changing my avatar on Facebook to a rainbowed thing, is not an insult to LGBT people. Some hard-core activists are throwing shade at the rainbow avatars because they feel all the allies who are posting them aren't "invested" enough and don't deserve the right to rainbow. These whiners fail to understand that most of us are just celebrating the recognition that gay and lesbian people have *gasp* the same fundamental rights as every other American. As a hard-core feminist, I celebrate whenever human rights are validated. Yes, I am not gay. Yes, I have not ever filed an amicus brief with the court on behalf of LGBT rights. Yes, I recognize that we have a way to go. But for some to call the celebration "slacktivism" misses the whole point of the rainbows.
2. When the media spends nearly no time reporting on the arsons of historic black churches in the South, the point of whether there were 5 churches burned down by arsonists or 3 churches burned down by arsonists loses the thread. Outrage that there is ONE black church destroyed by arson is appropriate. Reporting that focuses on the two that were "likely" electrical or lightning, is just a palliative to our white guilt. We will cling to the two church fires that weren't arson, so we don't have to confront the truth of systemic racism and work to counter its effects.
That's it for now. Thanks.

Empathy

Thanks to my White Privilege, I don't know what it's like to lose a child  or a friend or a parent to police brutality. But I think we can all get a sense for the anger in the pocket of Baltimore that is home to our fellow Americans no matter how "thuggish" or poor. The problems arise when all the White Privileged news anchors pontificate on the evils of Thug Life and the wanton destruction of property without stepping back and realizing/understanding/acknowledging/reporting that this violent anger is not about one man's broken back, but about a system that has betrayed a large portion of its citizens.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates said, "When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community."

This makes the horrible vandalism in Baltimore, less unexpected. 

Strange Fruit

by Abel Meeropol
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

This poem about lynching was written only 78 years ago. You and I know people older than that. Unfortunately, lynchings are still happening. Just ask the mothers of Tamir Rice and Michael Brown.

Yes to both? No?

We all tend to exaggerate the characteristics (good and bad) of our lives, so it's no surprise that we consider ourselves to be living in a horrifically divided America, more so than at any time since the Civil War. (Civil war is hard to beat in terms of divisiveness.)
This leads me to wonder:
1. Are things really that bad?
and 2. Are we just too apathetic to ever venture into war with ourselves.

The difference is black and white

I am thankful I have never had to have a talk like this with Punkinhead.

“They’ve even been stopped because they ‘don’t look like they live in our neighborhood,' stopped because their music was too loud. Stopped because someone robbed a store nearby, and they ‘fit the description.’ They know the deal.”
The phrase, “fit the description” rang true with other mothers on the panel, and many in the audience. While black mothers nodded their heads in agreement, white mothers looked shocked.
“We teach them to be afraid of ‘the system,’” Blackmon said. “I would like to say that if you’re stopped by a black cop, you’re safe, but that’s not the truth.
“Every policeman is not bad,” she added. “But if it is your child, you can’t take that risk. You have to have ‘the talk,’ because they have to stay alive.”

The next time you want to be outraged that Darren Wilson is being pilloried in the court of public opinion (at least outside of the tea-bag world) remember that Michael Brown's mom had this talk with him and ask yourself if a young man who was about to start college and who had grown up hearing "the talk" would have instigated a fight with a white armed police officer.

Just a bit of perspective.

Yes, the police have difficult jobs. Yes, they need to make split-second life-or-death decisions. But the resulting death is RARELY that of the police officer. According to FBI reports, 27 cops were killed in the line of duty last year. (Right, 27 too many, but 27 is a really low number for men and women who are supposedly under threat from every black teenager in America.)
Statistics are a little harder to come by in the category of civilians killed by cops, but "Federal officials allow the nation’s more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies to self-report officer shootings." That figure... hovers around 400 'justifiable homicides' by law enforcement each year." (hint: they are always "justified.")
And just in you're convinced that militarizing the police is a good idea for their own safety, in a rundown of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America, it doesn't even make it onto the list.
Perhaps if we spent less time telling them how threatening the world is to them and that all the people they meet are potential adversaries out to get them, they'd be less inclined to pull a gun every time they see a black boy playing with a BB gun.

If it were a potato...

Yesterday, during the height of the hoopla surrounding the U.S. Patent Office refusal to renew the patent on the racist NFL name of Washington, D.C.'s hometown team, one of the media (Fox's Lisa Kennedy Montgomery aka Kennedy of MTV fame) argued that the term "redskins" isn't as offensive as the "n-word" and that by comparing the two, you are "minimizing" the impact of the latter.
Bullshit.
First of all, who the hell are you to decide which racial slur is less offensive? And secondly, as Josh Marshall points out, "this sort of mascotization comes out of a history of domination, dehumanization, and romanticization." The name dehumanizes, as all racial slurs are intended to. Those who continue to lobby for these teams perpetuate the oppression. 

Post-racial

"Donald Sterling is 81. You know what will cure this type of racism? The flu." ~Bill Maher

You can't teach old people not to be racist. You can just make it uncomfortable enough for them that when they are, they'll shut up about it and not pass that shit on to the next generation in the hopes that each succeeding generation is less bigoted and more tolerant so that by the time my great-grandchildren come along, we might actually live in a society that is post-racial.
Until that time, we have rich old white men to remind us that we're not there yet.

Plate of Shrimp

Yesterday, I had just read the news story about the asshole school administrators in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, who abruptly resigned when it was discovered that they has been texting each other offensive texts featuring the N***** word prominently. IN 2013!!! IN WRITING!!!
A friend's status update pops up with him telling of a woman referring to his rap music as "n***** music" IN 2013!!! OUT LOUD!!!
I also called up the song he was listening to (which was offensive and misogynistic and rude). It also features the N-word.
I went back to reading my book and within minutes come upon the phrase "working like n*****s" in the story. Now, in my book's defense, it was written in England in 1933, so the author's racism is slightly more understandable. (It still made me cringe.) But it was surprising, especially in light of the other cases from the day.
Bear in mind, being a middle-aged white woman in suburbia, I don't hear this word a lot, for which I am grateful. I know that four times in one day is common for some people. It's not for me, so the day felt a little off-kilter because of it. Too many threads crossing at the wrong point in the lattice of coincidence (which was part of a friend's Facebook posts on Sunday).

This white girl's take on racism

When I imagined a national dialog on race in my head, it wasn't a bunch of old white guys yelling about how black people are thugs and they should stop complaining about racists because it's not the white guys killing them (except that one time...).
The assumption of thuggery is a terrible way to perceive another human being based solely on their skin color, but we'll give these old white guys the benefit of the doubt and add the elements of youth, gender, and sartorial choices to the mix. By this definition, all young men in sagging pants, turned baseball caps, and *yes* hoodies are a threat. ("You kids get offa my lawn!! And pull your damn pants up!") Apparently we've moved from judging others based on the color of their skin to the content of their wardrobes.
The problem with this argument is that it deteriorates once the old white man implies (or proclaims outright) that the problems of (dog-whistle term) urban inner-city youth have no basis in racism. The systematic oppression of people of color for 200 years has nothing to do with the poverty and crime affecting the predominantly minority populations in larger cities? Really?
Yes, black-on-black crime is bad. Yes, inner-city violence is epidemic. But the system is and has been rigged against minorities, specifically African-Americans, for centuries.
Blacks historically receive stiffer penalties for all crimes, serve more prison time, attend schools with inadequate resources, are less likely to attend college, are less likely to become financially successful. The Civil Rights Act has tried to level a playing field that was skewed so drastically due to the generations of slavery and segregation that it will take generations to repair the damage. Generations.
Are we seeing successful African-Americans more often now than in 1980? Yes. We're seeing them buying homes in lovely suburban communities where their sons can grow up away from the dangers of the inner-city violence. Only to be shot down because no matter where they go, our unacknowledged racism still perceives a threat.