Category Archives: Racism

Exactly How Racist Is America?

This racist.

Marc Anthony sang God Bless America at the baseball All Star game earlier this week.  What followed was a bunch of racist assholes complaining about having a Mexican singing God Bless America.  Here’s the thing.  Marc Anthony is an American citizen.  People just assumed that he wasn’t because of the color of his skin.  So they’re not just racist assholes, they’re clueless racist assholes. The saddest thing is some of them were called on the fact that Marc Anthony was American and some just doubled down and said that he didn’t look American.  That means he wasn’t white.

Anytime you hear anyone talking about Real America, you can be assured that they’re pining for the days when only white people had rights.  Real America is a dog whistle cry to all the racists out there.  And they respond to it in droves.

In other news, people still watch the All Star Game.  Who knew?

What If George Zimmerman Was The One That Was Killed?

Imagine you’re walking home from the store after picking up some snacks.  You notice a man following you in his car.  You go and cut through the yard where a car can’t go and the man gets out of his car and starts following you through the yard.  You’re talking to someone on the phone and telling them that this creepy guy is following you.  It’s really starting to freak you out.  What does this man intend to do to you?  Luckily, this is Florida so you turn around and confront the man who may intend to do you severe physical harm.  The man continues to approach so you stand your ground and attack the man.  The man pulls a gun but you bash his head against the sidewalk killing him before he can use it.

The above is a scenario that follows Florida’s stand your ground law and fits all of the facts presented in the case with the exception of who ends up dead at the end.  If it happened like this, do you think Trayvon Martin would not have been arrested immediately?  Do you think Trayvon Martin would not have been charged with murder soon after?  Do you think Trayvon Martin would have been found not guilty of murder?  How about if he used a gun to kill Zimmerman instead?

The scales of justice are stacked against black men in particular and minorities in general in so many ways.  Injustices are thrown at them on an almost daily basis.  How could you not be angry if it were happening to you?  And yet we live in a world where white people threaten revolution because their imaginary freedoms are pretend being taken away and where minorities rioting over actual freedoms being taken away are looked upon as misguided at best and less than human at worst.  Ta-Nehisi Coates says it best:

It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn’t come back from twenty-four down.

To paraphrase a great man: We are what our record says we are. How can we sensibly expect different?

Make No Mistake About It, Trayvon Martin Is Dead Because He Is Black

Yes, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the killing of Trayvon Martin.  Yes, sadly, George Zimmerman should have been acquitted of the killing of Trayvon Martin given Florida’s ridiculous Stand Your Ground laws.  None of this gets around the fact that Trayvon Martin would be alive today if he were white.  George Zimmerman had black kids up to mischief on his mind when he followed Trayvon Martin.  All evidence points to this being true.

When I first heard about the call to pursue a Federal Civil Rights case against George Zimmerman, I balked at the idea.  There is no doubt in my mind that George Zimmerman is a soft racist, just like some of my family, just like some of my friends (and boy does it baffle me that they don’t realize they’re racist).  That, in and of itself, is not a good reason to pursue Federal charges.  The more I thought about it, though, the more it makes sense.

George Zimmerman is not your average soft racist.  He is a soft racist with a gun.  He used that gun to kill a black kid.  A black kid that he was following because he was black and “something’s wrong with him”.  This, despite the fact that he was told not to follow the black kid.  Why?  Because “these assholes always get away”.

George Zimmerman put himself into a position that allowed him to kill Trayvon Martin.  Florida law allows you to put yourself into a position to kill another human being.  The combination of the two led to Trayvon Martin’s death.  We have a racist man using a racist law to kill a black kid.  This seems to me to be exactly what Federal Civil Rights trials are meant for.

And I know it’s besides the point, but boy does George Zimmerman make it difficult for to like him or feel sorry for him even a little bit.  He thinks the killing of Trayvon Martin was “God’s plan”.  Defense attorneys were wise to keep him off the stand.  A sympathetic figure he is not.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Pokes The Obamas With A Stick

I think I have figured out my man-crush on Ta-Nehisi Coates.  He reminds me of Amy Gardner from “The West Wing”.  There is this scene where Josh is complaining to Amy that she’s supposed to be on their side and she responds: “First of all, I’m crazy about the President, Josh. I’ve been crazy about him for longer than you’ve known who he was. And I’ll keep poking him with a stick. That’s how I show my love.” That’s exactly what Coates is doing here where he’s talking about the Obamas and race:

I think the stature of the Obama family — the most visible black family in American history — is a great blow in the war against racism. I am filled with pride whenever I see them: there is simply no other way to say that. I think Barack Obama, specifically, is a remarkable human being — wise, self-aware, genuinely curious and patient. It takes a man of particular vision to know, as Obama did, that the country really was ready to send an African American to the White House.

But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. They will match his rhetoric of individual responsibility, with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed  in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.)They wil weigh the rhetoric against an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men and their families. In all of this, those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk.

I think the president owes black people more than this. In the 2012 election, the black community voted at a higher rate than any other ethnic community in the country. Their vote went almost entirely to Barack Obama. They did this despite of an effort to keep them from voting, and they deserve more than a sermon. Perhaps they cannot  practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.

Read the whole thing.  It’s a wonderful poking of of the stick at someone Ta-Nehisi Coates loves.

Doing Science While Black

Most of you are probably familiar with driving while black; being pulled over not because you did something wrong but because of the color of your skin.  Here may be the first case of doing science while black.

A 16 year old black girl, Kiera Wilmot,  performed a simple science experiment (mixing toilet bowl cleaner with strips of aluminum foil) that caused a small noise and a bit of smoke and was expelled from school.  School administrators issued a statement saying that Kiera needed to learn that actions have consequences.  Not only that, she has been charged by the district attorney with a felony as an adult for performing this incredibly common experiment.  Talk about a gross overreaction!

The same district attorney recently declined to press charges against a white boy who deliberately pointed a BB gun at his brother and pulled the trigger killing his brother.  The boy thought the BB gun wasn’t loaded.  This, in the mind of the DA was just a tragic accident.  Which it certainly was.  That boy is going to have to live with the fact that he killed his brother for the rest of his life.  Not filing charges was absolutely the correct call.

But why the disparity?  Why charge a 16 year old black girl with a felony when no one was injured when a 13 year old white boy actually killed someone and was not charged?  Is a three years difference in age grounds for handling these two cases differently?  If he did the same thing when he was 16 would he have been charged with murder?

Was Kiera’s experiment dangerous?  Very mildly.  Should she have performed this experiment without supervision?  Definitely not.  But now she’s going to be scarred for life for the simple act of having a bit of inquisitiveness.

Lesson learned?  Experimenting bad!  Doing exactly as you’re told at all times and draconian results if you don’t, good!

Kids do stupid things.  This is a feature, not a bug.  Overreacting to their stupidness dulls their curiosity.  Show me a kid that isn’t allowed to do stupid things and I’ll show you a boring adult.

Voter Fraud: It’s Real And It’s Rampant

Oh, wait, no it’s not.  Hamilton County in Ohio filed charges of voter fraud against three people who voted illegally in this past election.  Three.  Out of 800,000 residents.  Two filled out absentee ballots for recently departed acquaintances (one was actually a nun!) and the third was a poll worker who voted on behalf of relatives.  There are an undisclosed  handful of others that have yet to be charged.

Please note: Exactly zero of these nefarious individuals would have been caught by voter ID laws.  I find it transcendentally funny that the same people who argue for a smaller government are usually the ones that scream for laws to be enacted for a problem that there is no proof actually exists.

Stating The Obvious To the Oblivious

What happens when you come to a conclusion even a child can understand it?  You get subjected to the vilest racist and sexist attacks, of course.

Q: Shouldn’t women be able to carry guns to protect themselves from being raped?

A: You shouldn’t put the onus on women to protect themselves any more than you should tell women to dress a certain way or look a certain way to prevent rape.  You should focus more on the rape culture.

That’s the gist of the conversation.  For that, Zerlina Maxwell was subject to an enormous amount of harassment.  But god forbid you suggest that guns aren’t the answer.

What’s annoying is that, like every argument for guns I’ve ever heard, it’s a stupid question.  First off, women usually know their rapist.  Thus, their guard is already down and the gun is likely not even on their person (unless, I guess, they’re gun fetishists).  Second, strangers don’t go running up to women screaming, “I’m going to rape you!”  Guns require some sort of distance to be effective.  But maybe women should just assume everyone is a rapist and pull their gun on anyone that makes them nervous?  Third, wouldn’t pepper spray or a knife be just as effective and not as deadly a deterrent?

The Great Migration And The Voting Rights Act

During oral arguments for the case conservatives hope will overturn key enforcement sections of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John Roberts asked if the South was more racist than the North.  This, along with Scalia’s racial entitlement idiocy, shows how completely out of touch a bunch of elite old white men can be.

The South still has a much bigger problem with racism than the North.  That things are infinitely better in the South than they were in the mid 1900s there can be no doubt.  But to think that all the problems that the Voting Rights Act was enacted to prevent have been solved takes a willful disregard to both history and the human condition.

The Great Migration was a mass exodus of blacks from the South to places North and West.  The reasons for it are many and varied, but it can be boiled down to institutional racism.  It happened in fits and starts from the 1910s to the 1970s.  When it was over, around 11 million blacks had left the South.

Think about that.  The Great Migration didn’t end until the early 1970s.  Jim Crow laws were passed as late as 1965.  Lynchings occurred as late as 1964.

This all ended just before I was born.  Many of the people who are responsible for the conditions that caused institutional racism are still alive.  Their children, who were fed that hate on a daily basis are still in power.  Every single person on the bench of the Supreme Court is old enough to remember schools being desegregated.  All of this history is their history.

How quickly history can be forgotten.

Ah, Those Blacks And Their Racial Entitlement

Really crappy decision week continues at the Supreme Court.  This time, it’s the Voting Rights Act.  During oral arguments, Justice Scalia had the gall to say:

Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

Yes, that’s what the Voting Rights Act was designed for, racial entitlement.  You know, being allowed to vote and stuff.  Entitlement.  And once they have that entitlement, it’s so hard to take it away from them later.  Then you get black people being president and stuff.

My favorite part is “It’s been written about.”  So have unicorns.  Doesn’t make it real.  Plus, where has it been written about?  Stormfront?

The writing’s on the wall.  The Voting Rights Act is all but dead.  Post-racial America will soon be getting more post-racialer.

Goodbye Voting Rights

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case challenging a key component of the Voting Rights Act next week.  Given the current makeup of the Court, his does not bode well for free elections.

At issue is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is the section that gives muscle to the Act.  There are certain states and certain counties in those states which shall remain nameless (*cough* The South *cough*) which have an unfortunate history of disenfranchising people who, shall we say, are a shade darker than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.  Section 5 requires those states/counties to seek Federal approval (preclearance) before making changes to election laws.  This can, at times, be a significant burden.  Simple things like changing polling places to across the street requires Federal approval.  But because of the counties’ history of changing polling places to across the county, these things need to be done.

There are recent examples of state laws being rejected because of Voting Rights Act violations.  South Carolina’s Voter ID law for instance.  The number of rejects has certainly dropped significantly since enactment, though.  But that isn’t the point.  The entire Voting Rights Act has been deemed Constitutional in the past.  The current Court, though, is only in favor of precedent if it fits within their narrow world view.  And their narrow world view is likely to ignore Constitutionality and precedent and say to the world that things are better now and those states and counties no longer have to seek preclearance.

I am somewhat sympathetic to complaints that it is unfair to single out certain states and counties for preclearance.  Can their past sins ever be legislatively forgiven?  If we lived in a fair world, the answer would be yes.  But this is far from a fair world which is why we need the Voting Rights Act in the first place.

This past election cycle has shown that preclearance is still a good idea.  I think the ideal outcome would be to rule preclearance Constitutional, but the singling out of certain states and counties Unconstitutional.  The result would be to force all states to request preclearance before changing voting laws.  This would certainly be unwieldy at first.  That could be fixed by a 21st Century Voting Rights Act that deals away with the bothersome portions of preclearance like moving a polling place across the street.