Day Eighteen: Bailing Out Buffoons

One space for me. One space for my asshole.

Today as I was making my approximately 47 minute commute home from work - most of which was spent crawling at 19 miles per hour behind a Cadillac Escalade - it occurred to me that I don't necessarily feel that it's fair to pay for the US auto industry's mistakes.

Of course, by now, anyone with access to a radio or television should be familiar with all of the arguments supporting an economic bailout for the "Big Three." According to economic experts, "Higher car prices, the end of incentives and vehicle shortages could occur if GM and other Big Three automakers don't get bailout.." I understand this and also realize the human toll - an estimated loss of 2.5 million jobs by those who are paid directly or indirectly by a robust auto industry. But, like many others, I also see a great deal of stupidity linked to the current situation in Detroit.

For years now, the Big Three have ignored calls to discontinue their love affair with the tacky, gluttonous, gas-guzzling SUVs and big dumb trucks that currently clog up American roadways. In the 1980s and 90s, US automakers were concerned primarily with manufacturing cars (remember them?) Since the late 90s, however, they've been more and more obsessed with hoisting inefficient behemoths upon the American public. In fact, in 2006, 70 to 75% of Ford's production was SUVs and trucks. Anyone with half a brain could have seen that this couldn't sustain itself. High gasoline prices are and will be the death knell of the SUV culture. But instead of gradually weaning us off of these monsters, the Big Three greedily squeezed as much blood from the stone as they could.

Further, American cars have had a justifiably bad reputation for decades now. I don't know about you but I certainly don't buy American-made automobiles, and when my faithful, gently-used Camry finally gives up on me, I intend to replace with with another Toyota Camry. Foreign, specifically Japanese, automakers have been running circles around American brands with regard to dependability and owner loyalty since the mid 80s. If one thinks of a lemon, one almost invariably thinks of an American car. Instead of choosing to address this head on, and making cars that matter, the Big Three, in their self-satisfied conceit, continued to churn out an inferior product. They figured that Americans wouldn't choose foreign products over their own. They were wrong.

Many critics are blaming unions for this mess. They feel that auto companies have been capitulating to unreasonable union demands over the years, leading to complacency and bloated contracts. While this may help explain why the Big Three can't dramatically cut production costs, it doesn't explain why such shitty ideas and products keep rolling down from the top. Unions aren't responsible for the creative and productive missteps that Ford, Chrysler and GM have taken for the last decade. This is more of an issue of poor management than it is of union bullying.

So here we sit. On the verge of a depression. Stuck between the almost equally terrible decisions to bail out the imbecilic US auto companies or to allow them to collapse under the weight of their own horrible judgment. My feeling is that no matter the decision, we're all going to end up getting the raw end of the deal. Given the current state of the economy, and my own precarious employment, I find it somewhat ironic that these thoughts came to mind during a commute that I might no longer have to take.

Blaxplanation Disclaimer: We - the American consumer - are to blame as well. I read recently that with gas prices on the decline, sales for SUVs and trucks are back on the rise. We've learned nothing, and part of me believes that we deserve what we're going to get.

Day Nine: Prop 8 and The Black/Gay Divide

There's Nothing New about Homophobia

OK. After having 24 hours to process Dan Savage's wrongheaded, finger-pointing column, reading infinitely more intelligent analysis about homophobia in the "black community," and organizing my own thoughts about the matter, I've finally decided to post my position on the Proposition 8 fallout.

As I mentioned yesterday, exit poll data broken down by race has shown that some 70% of African-American voters in California voted yes to Prop 8, a bigoted proposal to amend the California state constitution so that marriage is strictly defined as a union between a man and a woman. Gay whites, and supporters of gay rights, still reeling from the blow, of course began taking black folks to task across the blogosphere - some in patently racist terms - for our ironic complicity in this (given that, on the same day we realized our dream of electing an African-American president.) I have a few things to say about all of this:

1. Proposition 8 and the entire family of anti-gay legislation that seeks to "protect" marriage is an outright assault on the principles that African-Americans helped establish during the Civil Rights movement.
   
2. Just as I am pro gay rights, I am also inflexibly opposed to ANY form of blanket, legislated discrimination. I stood against Proposition 8, just as I stood and voted against Texas' Proposition 2 in 2005. Unfortunately for angry gay whites, African-American Texans couldn't be scapegoated then, as every single Texas county except one pushed it through.
3. I find it interesting that suddenly African-Americans, roughly 13% of the US population, and less than 7% in CA, have become the targets of gay white contempt. Suddenly, it has come to light that our homophobia has gummed up the machinery of gay equality. This, of course, is bullshit given that organized homophobia in the US almost always has whites at the forefront.
4. Thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act, same-sex marriage is not federally recognized. There are only two states in which gays have a legal right to get married. Same sex marriage restriction amendments have been developed and passed in 41 states, including now, California. African-Americans aren't responsible for this.
5. Thanks to the hard work that African-Americans and others have put in for well over a hundred years, the path to gay equality is infinitely shorter. Despite awful setbacks like Proposition 8, gay rights are crystallizing a whole hell of a lot faster than it took for African-Americans to realize SOME of ours. Like it or not, it would appear that black homophobes have already done a great deal of the heavy lifting.
6. Whites don't have a monopoly on gayness. There are gay minorities also.
7. Just as bigotry is bigotry, irresponsible journalism is irresponsible journalism. Savage's column got a lot of people riled up. This anger and disappointment quickly boiled over into unapologetic racism. After the shit hit the fan, Savage, having successfully let off steam, disappointingly ran for the same refuge in which bigoted pundits have been securing themselves for centuries: ignorance. From Savage: "Of course I don’t endorse any of the hostile, racist comments posted here. I stopped reading this thread, though, early yesterday afternoon; I couldn’t keep up." This, instead of writing another column which defused the situation, or even making his disdain for racism perfectly clear. Guess what, Dan? You are responsible for the tone of the comments left in response to your angry column. Just as you're responsible for helping to clean up the mess.
   
8. Clueless, arrogant whites like Dan Savage seem to believe that African-Americans secured our rights by begging white people for them. Memo to Savage and his ilk: There was a whole hell of a lot more fighting, dying, demonstrating, petitioning, and sitting in than there was pleading. I'd thank you all to keep that in mind when you stupidly utter phrases like the following: "To the African-American community, my only recommendation is to remove the mote of bigotry in your own eye before you squawk too much about the oppression you experience by virtue of race." Those of you possessed of any amount of intelligence ought not to identify our multi-generational struggle for equality as squawking.
9. I feel the need to say this: gay whites never struck me as seeming to have much of a need for black folks. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Prop 8 would engender in so many of them such hostility toward African-Americans. What I do find surprising is the willingness with which so many of them would fall for Divide and Conquer. While I do understand their anger, I find it regrettable that it manifests itself against us instead of the real enemy.
10. Finally, it occurred to me that folks like Dan Savage aren't as concerned about exploring the overstated black/gay divide as they are using it as focal point from which to broadcast their hurt feelings. Yes, it's unconscionable that so many black voters supported Prop 8. It's ridiculous and it's ugly. However, it's just as unfortunate that white folks like Dan, instead of recognizing the complexity of the African-American community, view it as a simple ignorant monolith.
    

Day Four: If Not For The Generosity of the Powerful..

White America's Message to Itself

Today, one of the directors at my job presented an article to me that she thought I might like. Entitled, "The Election that LBJ Won," it links Obama's probable victory to LBJ's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This is, in and of itself, not terribly problematic. But the author, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, actually takes it quite a few steps further and uses the occasion of Barack's impending triumph as cause to celebrate LBJ's progressiveness - even going so far as to include the following sentence: An Obama win would complete a journey begun 40 years ago.

Here we go again. During the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton (who, as I've written, almost certainly cast her vote for John McCain this morning) placed former President Johnson's importance to the Civil Rights struggle above that of Martin Luther King Jr. This bit of stupidity, in part, cost her a great deal of African-American support. I'm sure Hillary and Cohen are expressing what millions of white liberals assume to be true, but here's the problem: Apart from being tacky, arrogant and oblivious, the idea that LBJ is primarily responsible for the 1964 Voting Rights Act is just plain wrong.

One important truism that the self-congratulating Clintons and Cohens of the world don't seem to get is a basic axiom that Frederick Douglass realized over a century and a half ago, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Any form of Civil rights legislation that has been passed in this country, or around the world, is the direct result of a ceaseless barage of activist agitation. You're not working a 40-hour week because the aristocrats who owned the means of production suddenly decided to lighten up on your forebears some 70 years ago. Union organization made that possible. Women all across the country aren't voting today because Woodrow Wilson woke up one morning and decided that the 19th amendment just had to be ratified. That was the direct result of the suffering of suffragists. The same is true of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson didn't hand over the South to the Republicans with the stroke of a pen because he was feeling charitable. He signed because he recognized that the writing was already on the wall.

Of course, by now, anyone paying attention should come to expect this kind of clueless arrogance. Those who, for whatever reason, feel a kinship with the powerful will often attribute kindness to them when history doesn't. You see this when white Southerners pat themselves on the backs for ending slavery, or when men congratulate themselves for deigning to allow women to enter the workplace. Recently, I received an email from a good friend. He'd shared one of my blog entries with a white person. This white person wanted my friend to remind me that "if it wasn't for white people, Obama wouldn't be where he is today." So there it is. Whites, having created and long benefited from this country's still-functional system of racial injustice would like to receive credit when a black person manages to successfully navigate it.

At any rate, despite what Richard Cohen and people of his ilk may wish to believe, the journey to African-American freedom and equality began a great deal more than 40 years ago, and, even with a Obama victory, it is FAR from complete. Further, it did not start at the behest of powerful men like Lyndon Baines Johnson. If Mr. Cohen, stricken, as he appears to be, by liberal, 60's nostalgia, is feeling the urge to thank those responsible, he need only take a drive down I-95 and visit the final resting spots of those who paid the ultimate price for equality.

Blaxplanation Disclaimer: A friend introduced to me the possibility that, when I write critically of white America, what I'm really doing is railing against the powerful. I quickly reminded him that in this country, to have white skin is to automatically enjoy advantages that non-whites don't have. This white privilege, as it has been labled, is nothing if not power.

Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished, That Is!

The Next Logical Step In The Evolution Of The Brand

I’d like to begin by saying that this is one of those topics that I generally try to avoid. Not because I think it’s completely unimportant. It’s just that I assume it should be obvious to everyone that white folks who don’t want to be mistaken for Klan members or neo-Nazis should avoid using the term nigger – or any of its derivatives – like they avoid E. Lynn Harris novels. Of course, by now, I should know better than to assume. I received this little gem in my email inbox a few days ago.

Now, I can almost hear some of my brethren saying, “See!?!?!? If WE didn’t use the term so liberally, then white folks wouldn’t have any excuse!” I’ve heard a few white people make this claim myself. After all, nigger is one of the few words that many of them still dare not say in mixed company. For well-meaning whites, it’s become taboo. So, when they hear some black people using it without forethought, they feel, somehow, cheated. They think that if it’s OK for us to use, it should be OK for them. Fair is fair.

Forgive me for saying so, but this is simply bullshit. White people have never needed any rationale for applying the term nigger to those of us with dark skin. Even if every loudmouth knucklehead and Post-Tupac MC on the planet placed a moratorium on the usage of the word, many white folks would still (some amongst themselves, some not) gleefully refer to black folks as niggers.

Fundamentally, I think that many of them are simply fascinated by the word and the power that they have, when they use it, to disrupt the equilibrium of black folks and others who might be offended by it. The word nigger, in the mouth of a white person, is a grenade. I don’t know of any black person who wouldn’t react to it, to one degree or another, if he or she overheard a white person saying it. Even those of us who haven’t the words to articulate it inherently know that when a white person says “nigger” he or she is affirming kidnapping, The Middle Passage, slavery, rape, murder, castration, branding, mutilation, lynching, eugenics, Jim Crow, white supremacy, segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson, Poll Taxes, dogs, hoses, profiling, etc. In short, whenever a white person, no matter how thoughtlessly, uses the term, they are shouting, “WHITE POWER,” loudly and decisively.

I have the feeling that this teacher who casually called his student a “nigga” knew exactly what he was doing. Even if he heard thousands of his black students inquire of each other, “Can a nigga borrow a pencil?” he should have known that this didn’t give him any unwritten permission to invoke the term. He was simply doing what whites have done for hundreds of years. It’s just too bad that he’ll probably get away with it.

The Latest From The World's Ugliest Sex Symbol

I can't take credit for the title. This description is from my man, Harold M. Clemens, the prolific blogger of the brilliant and angry ghettouprising. It just so happens that I agree with his assessment of Ann Coulter. I realize that white folks and black folks generally have different ideas about what constitutes beauty - after all, whites have celebrated Calista Flockhart, Princess Di and JFK for their good looks - but they should be able to do better than this. I mean, check out the neck.

In any event, her physical appearance isn't her only ugly feature. She's made quite a name for herself as a right-wing hatchetwoman on the front line of the culture wars. Her sole purpose seems to be to give a voice to the most ignorant, racist, petulant elements of the Republican party. So here's how it usually goes: Fox News, or some other cog in the Republican noise machine, invites her on. She's lobbed some rhetorical question about current events. She sees how much offensive fiction she can fit into a 2 or 3 minute time span. Then the host, barely containing his/her glee, "attempts" to get her to lighten up on the hyperbole. For me, it's gotten old pretty quickly. Of course, her more intelligent defenders would argue that many of her comments are delivered with tongue placed firmly in cheek. The more brainless ones don't see anything wrong at all.

There is, however, some value in this horseshit. As I argued in my last post, it lets us (minorities, the poor, the struggling) know EXACTLY what they think of us. Here's her latest appraisal of the complicated immigration issue: hire illegal immigrants to build a border wall then send them packing. Mediamatters.org noticed that she echoed the sentiments of a character on a Saturday Night Live sketch.

The Enduring Assumption of Black Servitude

Recently, my friend John and I were discussing a problem that we keep having. We both have extremely busy schedules Monday through Friday so we find ourselves confined to running around shopping and doing errands on the weekends. From time to time, we’ll venture into Sam’s Club or Costco to pick some things up. Without fail, whether we’re by ourselves or with our families, someone will approach us and ask us if we work there. This might sound somewhat innocuous if not two things: we’re both black and every single person who’s asked us the question is white.

Before you accuse me of playing the oft-referred to “race card” (and I’ll be submitting a lengthy commentary regarding whites who disingenuously accuse blacks of doing just that in a future post) keep in mind that neither John nor I were wearing blue or red vests, name tags or any other identification that might lead one to believe we were employed by these companies. Neither were we assisting any other customers or giving anyone directions. Generally, we were wearing some standard combination of blue jeans and a shirt and, dutifully playing the role of consumers ourselves when we’ve been approached.

I’ve come up with two reasons why this continues to happen.

1) It is the result of an assumption of dominance – on the part of the white people who ask this question – or, at the very least, the belief that a customer/servant relationship automatically exists between whites and blacks and/or

2) Of the roughly 37 million black people living in this country, the only ones with whom these whites generally interact are usually operating in a service capacity.

I simply can’t explain it any other way. I cannot imagine a scenario in which a clean-cut, middle class, thirty-something white man and his equally middle-class white buddy walk into a Costco, occasionally with family in tow, and repeatedly have someone ask for their help finding the diapers or the plasma televisions. The postulation of supremacy is so clear in this that it has progressed from being slightly amusing to annoying to downright insulting. John and I are both reasonable men. But when someone asks us to help them with a purchase what we’re beginning to hear now is, “Pardon me, boy. Since you can’t possibly be here to make a purchase would you be so kind as to do your job and help me out?”

Of course, not many whites would equate the assumptions that lead to these retail interactions with racism. The overwhelming majority of white people with whom I’ve interacted not only do not grasp the concept of institutionalized racism, they apparently can not acknowledge the presence of racism at all outside of a white sheet and hood (more on this later also). But like it or not, racism is exactly what this amounts to. Consider this. These help-seekers unknowingly concede that in this country there exists a permanent black underclass whose continued presence they not only benefit from, but seek to exploit. After all, it’s convenient to have a Negro around to help with the bags or take your order or shine your shoes. And since we’re generally viewed as a collective “other” rather than as individuals, it makes perfect sense for them to randomly assign this status to any black person beside whom they happen to be standing when they’re doing their weekend shopping.

As for John and I, we’re considering wearing t-shirts that read, “Believe it or not, we’re actually here to buy some shit!”

Who Paved Glory Road?

Imagine a Hollywood movie that attempts to tell the story of Jackie Robinson’s introduction to Major League Baseball through the eyes of Branch Rickey – the MLB executive who signed Jackie to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The story would begin in Rickey’s birthplace, Flat, Ohio. It would follow Rickey’s short, embarrassing MLB career as a catcher – one that consists of earning the record for most bases stolen while he was “guarding” the plate. Next we’d see a quick reference to Rickey having been in the Armed Forces (to sell him as dutiful and patriotic) and move on to him establishing himself in minor league baseball. Rickey, we would learn, was one of the first people to successfully groom minor league players for the majors. We’d then see how Rickey became manager of the Cardinals during their championship-form heyday throughout the 1930s and early ‘40s. Finally, the coup de grace: Rickey thumbing his nose at tradition and signing Jackie Robinson. To be sure, such a movie would have to make mention of Robinson’s struggles against racist resistance. But these problems would be muted in favor of romanticizing the courageous white visionary who would go on to challenge Major League Baseball’s status quo and ultimately destroy the color barrier. After all, it wouldn’t be about Jackie. This story would be bigger than Jackie Robinson. It would be about Rickey saving the Soul of Baseball! Actually, now that I think about it, I’m surprised that it hasn’t already been made.

Sound ridiculous? Then consider the recently released Glory Road. This movie tells the story of the 1966 NCAA basketball champion Texas Miners through the eyes of their white coach, Don Haskins. Haskins is the protagonist. The movie centers on how he prepares his players, not only for the championship game, but for life afterwards. We all know the story. It relies on the same tired recipe as most of these post-civil rights era cinematic and televised walks in the park. Take a noble white guy struggling for redemption, meaning or cash (or some combination thereof). Mix in some black sass, give them a common adversary and goal and voila: a tepid pseudo-examination of race and brotherhood that lacks meaning or value.

What needs to be noted is that the story of the five black men who won that basketball championship in 1966 is not considered significant unless it can be tied to the courage of their white coach. By fixating on Haskins, the makers of this film turn the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship into an episode of The White Shadow instead of the direct slap to the face of Jim Crow that it was.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not questioning the decency of Haskin’s historic all-black-starting-five act. I’m not dismissing his commitment to his black players. I’m certainly not pooh-poohing the significance of the Miner’s victory in the history of American sport. The question I ask is this: why does the courage of the five black players on the front line have to take a back seat to Haskin’s act? After all, it was they who had to deal with the direct racist animosity of screaming, belligerent, hostile fans. It was they who put the ball in the hoop more times than the Kentucky squad. And it was they who would have to live in America with black skin long after the ball stopped bouncing.