Living with hateful symbols.

Well we know that Donald Trump has the support of at least one family here in Pistolvania.

"The place: East Huntingdon Township, Pennsylvania. The problem: A Confederate flag display with a black baby doll hanging from a noose with a knife in its back.

Rachel Szolek was driving through West Overton Village when she saw the racially offensive display on a fence near on someone’s property.

“We actually turned around because we had passed the house,” Szolek told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4.  “And there it was, and the first thing was shock.”

Szolek took a photo of the display with her cell phone and posted the image to Facebook.

Action News 4 reporter Beau Berman got wind of the story and tracked down East Huntingdon Township’s supervisor Paul Hodgkiss.

Hodgkiss said that he was “definitely against anything like that in our township.”

Officials in a nearby community admitted that they have been hearing about the display for months but could not do anything about it because the area was outside their jurisdiction.

The display was eventually taken down minutes after Berman knocked on the homeowner’s door to ask questions. "{Story with video}

Not sure why this racist family took down their display. In truth, they have every right to have it there. I mean it is, after all, on their property.   

The fact of the matter is 70% of Donald's supporters in South Carolina want their confederate flags to fly freely, and they are hoping that electing the trumpster will free them from this PC world we live in.

I guess if trump was president that family in  East Huntingdon, Pennsylvania would not have to worry about being shamed into removing their display of bigotry and intolerance.

Look, I know a lot of racists believe it's cool show their confederate pride, but you can't just throw that symbol of slavery and oppression in our faces and expect us to be cool with it.

This poor family enjoying a Mardi Gras parade in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, did not deserve to be harassed by some racist while they tried to just have a good time. (*See pic)  And neither did some folks down in Georgia trying to celebrate a child's birthday. 

This kind of behavior will invariably lead to backlash:

"JACKSON, Mich. — An 18-year-old man has been found guilty of threatening several people riding in a pickup truck that was displaying a Confederate flag.

The Jackson Citizen Patriot reports Monday that a jury convicted Kantpreet Singh on Friday of felonious assault and weapons charges.

Jackson County Assistant Prosecutor Steven Idema says the 17-year-old driver of the pickup, a 13-year-old boy and a female were stopped at an intersection on July 24, 2015 when another motorist pulled alongside. The other driver brandished a handgun and verbally threatened the people in the pickup.

Idema says the 17-year-old driver had moved to Michigan from Alabama and “was showing his southern pride and his southern heritage” with the Confederate flag. A U.S. flag also was displayed on the truck." [Source]

Not cool young man. You have to control your anger. I know it's frustrating, but you can't go breaking the law because you get angry at ignorant people. Just go out and vote and make sure that you do your best to keep the kind of people out of office that would make it cool to display offensive symbols.

*Pic from facebook.





 

When your college tour turns ugly.

  Imagine, if you will, you are a hardworking high school senior, and you are looking forward to your college tour and possibly being admitted to the school of your dreams in the fall.

Imagine going to said school only to have the following happen to you:

"Texas A&M University officials are expressing the requisite shock and disappointment after a group of white students reportedly yelled racial slurs at a group of black high school students visiting from Dallas’ Uplift Hampton Preparatory. A woman wearing Confederate flag earrings also reportedly approached two high school girls on the tour to ask if they liked them.

 

About 60 Uplift students were touring A&M’s College Station campus, which in 2014 was 62 percent white among undergrads. One of the Uplift students, 16-year-old Terquarie Wilson, told CBS DFW the incident began with a stupid sports rivalry and escalated hideously: an A&M student spotted one of Wilson’s friends carrying a University of Texas-branded bag. They yelled “Go back where you came from!” The Uplift student responded something to the effect of, “You do realize we’re all black, right?” and walked away; faculty supervisors say they heard the A&M students use a racial slur as the group walked away. The woman with the Confederate flag earrings approached a few minutes later." [Source]

One of the scary things about this whole incident is that when it was reported to the proper authorities on campus, the students were told that the A&M kids were just exercising their First Amendment rights. 

I wonder if Kevin Sumlin, A&M's high profile African American football coach, will address this issue or speak openly about it.

It would be nice, but I won't hold my breath.

Finally, just when you thought that the GOP candidates for president couldn't be more bizarre, comes the following story.

"During a radio interview, Mrs. Cruz went all in when she promised that the Cruz campaign will show America “the face of God.”

Talking with South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley Wednesday, Cruz noted that even if she weren’t married to the man, his political and faith-based credentials would be reason enough for her to work for his campaign anyway:

“We are at a cultural crossroads in our country, and if we can be in this race to show this country the face of the God that we serve — this Christian God that we serve is the foundation of our country, our country was built on Judeo-Christian values, we are a nation of freedom of religion, but the God of Christianity is the God of freedom, of individual liberty, of choice and of consequence.” [Source]

Heaven help us! If Ted Cruz is actually "the face of god", the reservations for hell just went way up. 

Anyway, I bet you all thought that I was referring to that crazy debate Saturday night , the one where Donald trump became totally unhinged and blew his cover with republicans by telling them how he really feels about them. (My man was right about W and 9/11.) And where the two Hispanics in the race continued with their attacks on each other. At one point they even went at each other in Spanish. (Oh the irony.) Can you imagine Mr. and Mrs. Bubba watching the debate from their double- wide in Georgia?  "Honey, did dem two Heeespanic candidates just talk in Spanish? What da hell? This is America. Speak English, damn it! They just lost my vote."   

I hope that we can all get through this election cycle with our sanity intact. Lord knows it won't be easy. The candidates seem to have already lost their minds.

  

Teaching Dylann's history.

I have a lot of love for the Color Of Change folks, and I think that they do important work by keeping us focused on issues that matter.

They recently sent me an e-mail which I am going to share with you because the s**t is that serious.

  "Dear Wayne, 

Schools should be a place for learning, not spreading racist ideology. But not in Texas. This fall, five million children across Texas were given textbooks that profess the same toxic and distorted view of history professed by Dylann Roof and defenders of the Confederate Flag.

These textbooks omit, sanitize, and downplay how horrible slavery was and glorify historical figures who defended slavery. All because the Texas State Board of Education has an agenda to promote a neo-Confederate ideology.  

And if the Texas State Board of Education has their way, future textbooks could be even worse than they are right now.¹ Future textbooks could remove altogether any references to Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Codes- the foundation for modern day prison labor exploitation. The half-truths and omissions in these educational materials will teach a new generation of children a deliberately distorted view of American history and the story of race in our country.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we put factual and accurate educational materials about Black history in school libraries across Texas, we can give countless students access to the resources they need to learn the truth. Join the fight to get books about Black history directly into the hands of children across Texas.

The harm that these textbooks do is real. Not only are these whitewashed textbooks inaccurate and racially damaging, they even hurt the academic performance of both Black and white students. Studies have shown that both Black and white students who are exposed to negative racial stereotypes about Black people perform significantly worse on standardized tests.²³

The intentional whitewashing of the story of the Civil War happens as early as grade school and not just in the books you read. Right now there are 29 schools in Texas named after generals like Robert E. Lee. There are textbooks and educational videos that glorify politicians like John C. Calhoun, who believed that owning, abusing and exploiting Black humans was key to achieving the American dream and was the architect behind the enforcement of the Indian Removal Act. Too often, the stories and truths of all the Black and Brown folks that built this country are either censored or completely left out of the books we consume from early on in life."

I don't usually do this kind of thing, but... OK, I will go ahead and give the COC folks some love. 

 Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU. 

 

Pic courtesy of Martin/Flickr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Burn notice."

While America is busy patting herself on the back for recognizing that the flag of the traitors who fought for the confederacy is an abomination to people of conscience, I would like to remind everyone that at least six African American churches have been burned since that horrific tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina.

Maybe our enemies are putting us on some kind of notice: This war is just beginning.

'“What's the church doing on fire?'

Jeanette Dudley, the associate pastor of God's Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, got a call a little after 5 a.m. on Wednesday, she told a local TV news station. Her tiny church of about a dozen members had been burned, probably beyond repair. The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco got called in, which has been the standard procedure for church fires since the late 1960s. Investigators say they’ve ruled out possible causes like an electrical malfunction; most likely, this was arson.

The very same night, many miles away in North Carolina, another church burned: Briar Creek Road Baptist Church, which was set on fire some time around 1 a.m. Investigators have ruled it an act of arson, the AP reports; according to The Charlotte Observer, they haven’t yet determined whether it might be a hate crime.

Two other predominantly black churches have been the target of possible arson this week:  Glover Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Warrenville, South Carolina, which caught fire on Friday, and College Hill Seventh Day Adventist, which burned on Monday in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Investigators in Knoxville told a local news station they believed it was an act of vandalism, although they aren’t investigating the incident as a hate crime. (There have also been at least three other cases of fires at churches this week. At Fruitland Presbyterian Church in Gibson County, Tennessee, and the Greater Miracle Temple Apostolic Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Florida. Officials suspect the blazes were caused by lightning and electrical wires, respectively, but investigations are still ongoing. A church that is not predominantly black—College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio—was burned on Saturday morning. The fire appears to have been started in the sanctuary, and WKYC reports that the cause is still under investigation. The town’s fire and police departments did not immediately return calls for confirmation on Sunday.*)

These fires join the murder of nine people at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as major acts of violence perpetrated against predominantly black churches in the last fortnight. Churches are burning again in the United States, and the symbolism of that is powerful. Even though many instances of arson have happened at white churches, the crime is often association with racial violence: a highly visible attack on a core institution of the black community, often done at night, and often motivated by hate.'' [Source]

OK, so maybe these churches are all burning by accident and this is all purely coincidental.
Just one of those freaky things that go down in bunches.

Sure, and Lauren London keeps blowing up my phone to sneak off with her to Paris, but I have to pass on her invitation  because I am happily married.  Riiight.

Anyway, racists in America will not go down without a fight. All this talk about the confederate flag coming down but as I write this; there it flies, bolder and brighter than ever on the capitol grounds of South Carolina. And, depending on what the state's lawmakers do, it might never come down. In fact, had it not been for the actions of one brave soul and her accomplice, that racist symbol of tyranny would continue to fly uninterrupted in spite of all the hue and cry from different voices in the country.

"The hate filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. Those South Carolinians view the flag as a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty. They also see it as a memorial, a way to honor ancestors who came to the service of their state during time of conflict. That is not hate, nor is it racism.

At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and a loser here. We respect freedom of expression, and that for those who wish to show their respect for the flag on their private property, no one will stand in your way.

But the statehouse is different and the events of this past week call upon us to look at this in a different way. Fifteen years ago, after much contentious debate, South Carolina came together in a bipartisan way to move the flag from atop the Capitol dome. Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will, to say it’s time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds."

We will believe it when we see it.

*Pic courtesy of 3chicspolitico.com
 



 

 

Amazing week.

Little known fact about my family: My daddy actually taught homiletics to university level theological students at one time in his career. He loved to talk about preachers and preaching styles, and, as a result, I learned a thing or two about the art of preaching.

So having said that, I will give O's mini sermon today  four out of five possible stars. His spontaneous rendition of Amazing Grace could  have used a little work, but I am not going to quibble. The church was with him, and that's all that  matters.

"As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we've been blind," Obama said. "He's given us the chance, where we've been lost, to find our best selves."

He might have given "us the chance", but unfortunately a lot of us are not taking it.

Quite a few of our so called leaders still do not realize that they have been blind, and it has taken them a hell of a long time to  find their "best selves."

I am thinking of people like Clarence Thomas. A man who has found himself on the wrong side of history because of his ignorant and misguided dissent in today's historic (and long overdue) decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, a case that has given same sex couples the same rights and protections under the Constitution as heterosexual couples.

"The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

 

Thomas went on to write that one's liberty and dignity should be shielded from the government — not provided by it.

"Today’s decision casts that truth aside. In its haste to reach a desired result, the majority misapplies a clause focused on 'due process' to afford substantive rights, disregards the most plausible understanding of the 'liberty' protected by that clause, and distorts the principles on which this Nation was founded. Its decision will have inestimable consequences for our Constitution and our society."

See, this is the problem with this man: He thinks that slaves should have been "Dignified". Sorry, it's kind of hard to maintain your "dignity" when you are being stripped and beaten and sold like cattle. But I digress.

This twisted and sick dissent thinks that majority decision by the court will have a "inestimable consequences for our Constitution. "  Huh????

He is wrong. Had he and his right- wing buddies had their way, that would have had a devastating affect on our Constitution. And, as a result, our country would have taken two steps backwards instead of moving forward into the 21st Century.

So in one eventful week the country wakes up and starts to denounce a symbol of hate that has long been ignored, and we legalize the  the rights of our fellow Gay citizens to legally marry each other.

Amazing Grace indeed.  


Pic by Getty images from themirror.com 




  












 

Stars and scars.

Man these right-wingnuts needed this confederate flag flap like they needed a hole in their heads.

It's been interesting to see all the twisting and "pretzel-logic" going on as they try to avoid calling that despicable symbol of hatred for fear of turning off their base. I mean Mitt, bless his Wonder Bread heart, came out against the flag. But then he is no longer running for president. The others...well, not so much. Although Nikki Haley played the good party soldier by finally coming out against the flag and giving the republican candidates for president some cover.

And before we start treating what Haley did as if it was some profile in courage, let's not forget where she stood on this subject not too long ago. I guess there is nothing like a little pressure from the business community to make some of these governors all of a sudden find moral clarity.

"Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will to say it is time to remove the flag from our capitol grounds," Haley, the state's first non-white governor, said. "This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state."'

 

Why just a little over a year ago the governor said this:

 

"What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state,” Haley said. “I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”

 

Maybe it took a conversation with a CEO or two to help her see the light.   

 

 

This is all very interesting. It's not only governor Haley. Republican politicians have been all trying to prove to the rest of us that many their supporters are not racist. (Good luck with that.)

 

We learned today that Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum gave back money that was given to them by the same racist organization that inspired Roof to kill those nine innocent people last Wednesday night.  

 

"The campaigns of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rick Santorum said they would donate the money received from Holt to a fund set up by Charleston's mayor to assist the victims' families.

"I abhor the sentiments Mr. Holt has expressed," Santorum said in a statement. "These statements and sentiments are unacceptable. Period. End of sentence"

 

Let me translate that for you: Now that the rest of America knows what I  have suspected all along, that this man and his organization are racists, I cannot take this money from him without being exposed as a possible racist myself.

 

It's been funny to see George Will and the folks over at FOX VIEWS throw themselves into a tizzy over the president saying Nigger (whoops, sorry, I meant n-word) in a candid moment while doing a popular podcast.

 

You have to wonder why some folks get  upset when folks who have a license to use that word do just that. It's almost as if they are angry that they can't say it  themselves.

"George Will was troubled by Obama’s comment about how the legacy of slavery and racism is “still part of our DNA that’s passed on; we’re not cured of it.”  

Will said race relations can’t possibly be getting better if that’s the case, calling it a “most unfortunate rhetorical reach” by Obama.

And if his point is, Will concluded, that America is “by nature racist,” “'it’s an unfortunate indictment of the nation and he should take it back.'”

What the president really said:

"I always tell young people, in particular, do not say that nothing has changed when it comes to race in America, unless you've lived through being a black man in the 1950s or '60s or '70s. It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours," Obama said."

You know what's worse than being a racist? Being a liar and a racist.

*Pic from theatlantic.com








 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our monster.

So now that he has been caught, Americans will focus on their latest outcast and "monster".

Dylann Roof will be the face of evil for the next few weeks, and his vile actions in that church on Wednesday night will bring scornful howls of condemnation from a nation that wants to distance itself as far away as possible from his despicable act.

But can it?

I know that we are all outraged now, but let's remember this important fact: Dylann Roof was not created in a vacuum. And let's be honest with ourselves, there are a lot of Dylann Roofs living among us right now. We see their postings on the Internet, and we hear and see their angry rhetoric on talk radio programs and in chat rooms and websites where like minded people spew their hatred for the people who they perceive as a threat to their way of life.

It's hard to believe that Roof could have so much hatred in his heart after only 21 years of life, but I am sure that he has had a lot of practice and indoctrination.

The Judge in the case today called his family "victims". (In all my years in a courtroom, I have never heard a Judge refer to the defendant's family as victims in such a manner. But hey, we are in South Carolina, and I am digressing.) This was stunning. I guess it never occurred to the "good ole boy" sitting on the bench that maybe, just maybe, they were the ones who actually taught Dylann Roof to hate. (Oh, did I mention that this same Judge was reprimanded for using the n-word in open court?)

But it's not only his family, it's his country as well.

Roof made it clear that he wanted to kill black people , and yet some of the candidates for president of our country refuse to call what happened Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina what it really was: a hate crime. 

"It really is OK to say that the massacre of nine African Americans in their church was a racially motivated hate crime. How do we know? Because Dylann Roof, the confessed murderer, said so. There’s no need to speculate about what, besides race, might have motivated him to join a Bible study group for an hour, at the historical Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night, and then shoot almost everyone dead, gladly leaving a survivor to tell the world what he’d done and why. Race is the answer, according to the guy who did it. Asked and answered, the end.

 

Unless you are Jeb Bush, and you are easily confused by super simple questions to which there is only one very obvious answer:

 

This was after Bush addressed the Faith and Freedom Coalition summit Friday morning, where he declared that Roof’s motivation remained a real mystery:

“I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes,” Bush said in his remarks. “But I do know what was in the heart of the victims.”

How Bush knows what was in the “heart” (the one shared heart, we guess?) of the victims, but not the heart of their murderer, is a real mystery to us. He told Huffington Post reporter Laura Bassett that he

“doesn’t know what the background of it is,” so obviously he cannot conclude that it’s a racially motivated hate crime. You gotta judge that for yourself, based on the flimsy circumstantial evidence that people who know him have said he is a fan of segregation, and his car has Confederate flag plates, and he wore the white supremacist flag of Rhodesia on his jacket — and oh yeah, he told law enforcement officials he wanted to kill black people to start a race war." [Source]

One of my twitter friends said this and it's apropos: "The new racism in America is denying that racism exists in the first place. "

 

 

 

 

   

"Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era."

The Field Negro education series continues.

Tonight we will learn about the angry white male.

"Who are the white supremacists? There has been no formal survey, for obvious reasons, but there are several noticeable patterns. Geographically, they come from America’s heartland—small towns, rural cities, swelling suburban sprawl outside larger Sunbelt cities. These aren’t the prosperous towns, but the single-story working-class exurbs that stretch for what feels like forever in the corridor between Long Beach and San Diego (not the San Fernando Valley), or along the southern tier of Pennsylvania, or spread all through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the vast high plains of eastern Washington and Oregon, through Idaho and Montana. There are plenty in the declining cities of the Rust Belt, in Dearborn and Flint, Buffalo and Milwaukee, in the bars that remain in the shadows of the hulking deserted factories that once were America’s manufacturing centers. And that doesn’t even touch the former states of the Confederacy, where flying the Confederate flag is a culturally approved symbol of “southern pride”—in the same way that wearing a swastika would be a symbol of German “heritage” (except it’s illegal in Germany to wear a swastika).

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.

In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s.

Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”

A large proportion of the extreme right wing are military veterans. Several leaders served in Vietnam and were shocked at the national disgust that greeted them as they returned home after that debacle. “America’s failure to win that war was a truly profound blow,” writes William J. Gibson. “If Americans were no longer winners, then who were they?” Some veterans believed they were sold out by the government, caving in to effeminate cowardly protesters; they can no longer trust the government to fight for what is right. Bo Gritz, a former Green Beret in Vietnam, returned to Southeast Asia several times in clandestine missions to search for prisoners of war and was the real-life basis for the film Rambo. He uses his military heroism to increase his credibility among potential recruits; one brochure describes him as “this country’s most decorated Vietnam veteran” who “killed some 400 Communists in his illustrious military career.” In 1993 Gritz began a traveling SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events) training program, a rigorous survival course in paramilitary techniques.

Many of the younger guys are veterans of the first Gulf War, a war that they came to believe was fought for no moral principles at all, but simply to make America’s oil supply safer and to protect Israel from possible Arab attack. They feel they’ve been used, pawns in a larger political game, serving their country honorably only to be spit out and stepped on when they returned home to slashed veteran benefits, bureaucratic indifference to post-traumatic stress disorder, and general social contempt for having fought in the war in the first place. They believed they were entitled to be hailed as heroes, as had earlier generations of American veterans, not to be scorned as outcasts. Now a guy like Bo Gritz symbolizes “true” warrior-style masculinity, and reclaiming their manhood is the reward for signing up with the Far Right.

THE CLASS ORIGINS OF RACIAL POLITICS

Perhaps what binds them all together, though, is class. Rural or small town, urban or suburban, the extreme Right is populated by downwardly mobile, lower-middle-class white men. All of the men I interviewed—all—fitted this class profile. When I compared with other ethnographies and other surveys, they all had the same profile as well.

In the United States, class is often a proxy for race. When politicians speak of the “urban poor,” we know it’s a code for black people. When they talk about “welfare queens,” we know the race of that woman driving the late-model Cadillac. In polite society, racism remains hidden behind a screen spelled CLASS.

On the extreme Right, by contrast, race is a proxy for class. Among the white supremacists, when they speak of race consciousness, defending white people, protesting for equal rights for white people, they actually don’t mean all white people. They don’t mean Wall Street bankers and lawyers, though they are pretty much entirely white and male. They don’t mean white male doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or even engineers. They don’t mean the legions of young white hipster guys, or computer geeks flocking to the Silicon Valley, or the legions of white preppies in their boat shoes and seersucker jackets “interning” at white-shoe law firms in major cities. Not at all. They mean middle-and working-class white people. Race consciousness is actually class consciousness without actually having to “see” class. “Race blindness” leads working-class people to turn right; if they did see class, they’d turn left and make common cause with different races in the same economic class.


That’s certainly what I found among them. Most are in their mid-thirties to early forties, educated at least through high school and often beyond. (The average age of the guys I talked with was thirty-six.) They are the sons of skilled workers in industries like textiles and tobacco, the sons of the owners of small farms, shops, and grocery stores. Buffeted by global political and economic forces, the sons have inherited little of their fathers’ legacies. The family farms have been lost to foreclosure, the small shops squeezed out by Walmarts and malls. These young men face a spiral of downward mobility and economic uncertainty. They complain that they are squeezed between the omnivorous jaws of global capital concentration and a federal bureaucracy that is at best indifferent to their plight and at worst complicit in their demise.

And they’re right. It is the lower middle class—that strata of independent farmers, small shopkeepers, craft and highly skilled workers, and small-scale entrepreneurs—that has been hit hardest by globalization. “Western industry has displaced traditional crafts—female as well as male—and large-scale multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the independent farmer to the status of hired hand,” writes journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. This has resulted in massive male displacement—migration, downward mobility. It has been felt the most not by the adult men who were the tradesmen, shopkeepers, and skilled workers, but by their sons, by the young men whose inheritance has been seemingly stolen from them. They feel entitled and deprived—and furious. These angry young men are the foot soldiers of the armies of rage that have sprung up around the world.

What’s important to note is that they are literally the sons. It was their fathers who closed the family store, who lost the family farm. Some are men who have worked all their adult lives, hoping to pass on the family farm to their sons and retire comfortably. They believed that if they worked hard, their legacy would be ensured, but they leave their sons little but a legacy of foreclosures, economic insecurity, and debt.

It was their status next to their father’s and grandfather’s names on the cabinetmaking storefront that said “Jones and Sons.” These were businesses that came not only with the ability to make a living, but came with dignity, with a sense of craft pride, a sense that you owned your own store or farm, owned and controlled your own labor—even employed some other people—and that this economic autonomy had been a source of great pride in the family for generations. In a near-throwaway footnote in his classic study of identity development, “Childhood and Society” (1950), Erik Erikson locates the origins of young men’s anger in a multigenerational story:

In psychoanalytic patients the overwhelming importance of the grandfather is often apparent. He may have been a blacksmith of the old world or a railroad builder of the new, and as yet proud Jew or an unreconstructed Southerner. What these grandfathers have in common is that fact that they were the last representatives of a more homogeneous world, masterly and cruel with good conscience, disciplined and pious without loss of self-esteem. Their world invented bigger and better machinery like gigantic playthings which were not expected to challenge the social values of the men who made them. Their mastery persists in their grandsons as a stubborn, an angry sense of superiority. Overtly inhibited, they yet can accept others only on terms of prearranged privilege.

“It wasn’t my daddy’s farm,” said Andy, “it was my granddaddy’s, and his daddy’s, and his daddy’s. Five generations of Hoosier farmers.” Generations of Hoosier men, who worked the farm, supported a family, made a living with dignity. They proved their masculinity in that most time-honored way in America: as family providers. And it was their fathers who lost it all, squandered their birthright. Instead of getting angry at their fathers, Andy and his comrades claim the mantle of the grandfathers, displace their rage outward, onto an impermeable and unfeeling government bureaucracy that didn’t offer help, onto soulless corporations that squeezed them mercilessly. By displacing their anger onto those enormous faceless entities, the sons justify their political rage and rescue their own fathers from their anger.

Some can’t do it. Some of the sons—and the fathers—turn their rage inward. We have already discussed the wave of suicides that rippled across the American heartland in the 1980s and 1990s—spawning widespread concern and a series of Farm Aid concerts to raise awareness. The number of suicides in America’s Midwest was higher in the 1990s than during the Great Depression; suicide was the leading cause of agricultural fatalities for two decades—by far. Men were five times more likely to kill themselves than die by accident. “To fail several generations of relatives (both backwards and forwards into those unborn descendants who will now not be able to farm), to see yourself as the one weak link in a strong chain that spans more than a century, is a terrible, and for some, an unbearable burden,” writes Osha Gray Davidson. “When a fellow in a steel mill loses his job, he has basically lost his paycheck,” a physician at the University of Iowa explained. “When an Iowa farmer loses his farm, he’s lost the guts of his life.”....

....So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. They’re every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America’s small towns who can’t make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

They’re America’s Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill.

WALKING THE PATRIOTIC CAPITALIST TIGHTROPE

You might think that the political ideology of the white supremacist movement is as simple as their list of enemies: put down minorities, expel immigrants, push the women out of the workplace, and round up and execute the gays and the Jews. But it’s not nearly so simple. Actually, they have to navigate some treacherous ideological waters and reconcile seemingly contradictory ideological visions with their emotions.

There are three parts to their ideological vision. For one thing, they are ferociously procapitalist. They are firm believers in the free market and free enterprise. They just don’t like what it’s brought. They like capitalism; they just hate corporations. They identify, often, as the vast middle class of office workers and white-collar employees, even though that is hardly their class background. (They’ve a fungible understanding of class warfare.) “For generations, white middle class men defined themselves by their careers, believing that loyalty to employers would be rewarded by job security and, therefore, the ability to provide for their families” is the way one issue of Racial Loyalty (a racist skinhead magazine) puts it. “But the past decade—marked by an epidemic of takeovers, mergers, downsizings and consolidations—has shattered that illusion.”

Aryans support capitalist enterprise and entrepreneurship, even those who make it rich, but especially the virtues of the small proprietor, but are vehemently antiurban, anticosmopolitan, and anticorporate. In their eyes, Wall Street is ruled by Jewish-influenced corporate plutocrats who hate “real” Americans. Theirs is the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of producers—not financiers, not bankers, and not those other “masters of the universe” whose entire careers consist of cutting the cake ever more finely and living on the crumbs. It’s Andrew Jackson’s producerist attack on the “parasitic” bankers. It is “the desire to own small property, to produce crops and foodstuffs, to control local affairs, to be served but never coerced by a representative government, and to have traditional ways of life and labor respected,” writes historian Catherine Stock.

White supremacists see themselves as squeezed between global capital and an emasculated state that supports voracious global profiteering. In the song “No Crime Being White,” Day of the Sword, a popular racist skinhead band, confronts the greedy class:

The birthplace is the death of our race.
Our brothers being laid off is a truth we have to face.
Take my job, it’s equal opportunity
The least I can do, you were so oppressed by me
I’ve only put in twenty years now.
Suddenly my country favors gooks and spicks and queers.
Fuck you, then, boy I hope you’re happy when your new employees are the reason why your business ends.

Second, the extreme Right is extremely patriotic. They love their country, their flag, and everything it stands for. These are the guys who get teary at the playing of the national anthem, who choke up when they hear the word America. They have bumper stickers on their pick ups that show the flag with the slogan “These colors don’t run.”

The problem is that the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live. They love America—but they hate its government. They believe that the government has become so un-American that it has joined in global institutions that undermine and threaten the American way of life. Many fuse critiques of international organizations such as the United Nations with protectionism and neoisolationism, arguing that all internationalisms are part of a larger Zionist conspiracy. Some embrace a grand imperial vision of American (and other Aryan) domination and the final subjugation of “inferior races.” [More]

It's a long article, but it is worth reading. I suspect that your perception of the article will depend on your race, your gender, and your political affiliation.

In other words, a lot of you won't like it. But that's fine. This is what makes America great: the ability to debate various issues, no matter how sensitive or complex.

Most of us can live with that. Most of us. There are some who, as the author articulated above, are having a hard time adjusting.

*Pic from salon.com

The majority revolution.

I thought that the republican party was the party of Lincoln.  If it is, why were they carrying the confederate flag at that wingnut gathering in Washington, today?

Of course Sarah Palin was there, and so was the de facto leader of the republican party, Ted Cruz.

Sarah and Ted had some Harsh words for this administration. And Sarah, still the genius, wanted to know why there were barricades around the veteran's memorial in Washington. Pssst, Sarah, it's called a shutdown. The park is supposed to be closed. You can't pick and choose what you want to remain open when there is a government shutdown that you and your party initiated.

Larry Klayman, of a group laughably named Freedom Watch, was even tougher on the government than Sarah and Ted were:

"I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up,”

There is a lot of talk of revolution these days. Mostly from poor uneducated white folks. These are the people who were told their entire lives that just being white was good enough. Now, though, they look around and see that the most powerful man in their country doesn't look like they do. Maybe, just maybe, the privileges that they thought they were afforded throughout their lives might not be there after all. Heck that would scare me too. (I see you "Joe the Plumber".)

Finally, I was at a legal conference recently, and while there I struck up a conversation with a gentleman who happens to be an African American Judge in our fine city.

We got to talking about crime and things such as stop and frisk, and he let me know in no uncertain terms that he was not immune from racial profiling.

"Hey man, when those cops pull me over they don't know that I am a sitting Judge. All they see is another black man in a nice car."

And it's not just a black man sitting in a car that has to worry about overly aggressive police officers, sadly, profiling can take many forms.

Anyway, I thought about that conversation when I read two stories from my local paper last week.

"NO ONE GOT PUNCHED in the face - this time - but YouTube has given the Philadelphia Police Department another black eye, proving once again that smartphones are a bully cop's worst nightmare.

Let's just hope that Officer Philip Nace doesn't land in the city's tourism department when the dust settles.

"Don't come to f---ing Philadelphia. Stay in Jersey."

That's one of Nace's rage-induced zingers that were recorded in a disturbing 16-minute YouTube video of a recent stop and frisk.
 

The video, dated Sept. 27, shows Nace, 46, and another police officer from North Philly's 25th District stopping two unidentified men, apparently after they said hello to a third man on the street.

"You don't say 'Hi' to strangers," Nace said as he confronts the two pedestrians. "Not in this neighborhood," his partner added.

The cops then push one of the men against their cruiser. The second man, who is videotaping the incident and starts to walk away, is ordered to put his phone in his pocket and get against the car for a frisk. The phone, however, continues recording, apparently on the hood of the car.

"Don't f---ing fight . . . we'll kick your ass, too," Nace said. He threatened the other man, saying he would "split your wig open."

Nace called one of the men a "f---ing dirty ass." When they protest that they haven't done anything wrong, he shouted: "Why don't you shut the f--- up! Everyone thinks they're a f---ing lawyer, and they don't know jack s---."
"You're jaywalking, by the way," the second officer later added, apparently in an attempt to justify the stop.

At one point, Nace told one of the men: "We don't want you here, anyway. All you do is weaken the f---ing country."

"How do I weaken the country? By working?" the man asked.
"No, freeloading," Nace said.

When the man said he's a server at a country club, Nace responded, "Server. Serving weed?"

The video is titled "Police unlawful harassment and racial profiling," but the race of the two pedestrians is unclear. Nace and his partner are white." [Source]

And then there was this poor guy:

"HERBERT Spellman gave nearly 20 years of his life to the Philadelphia Police Department, retiring in 2008 after a driver rear-ended his police cruiser, knocking him unconscious and sending him to the emergency room.

His body still hurts as a result of the injuries sustained in the crash. But Spellman's pride took a beating more recently.

On Sept. 10, walking to a bus stop in West Oak Lane, Spellman found himself on the other side of the police department's controversial stop-and-frisk policy, he said.

"Demeaning," "nasty," "ridiculous" and "illegal" are the words that come to his mind when he recounts the incident. They weren't police tactics he recognized from his time on the force.
 

"I'm walking, and the cops come up on an angle. Two officers jump out of the car and grab me by my shirt and pants," Spellman said. "I asked them why they stopped me, and the driver said, 'Why did you look at us and turn and walk away?' "

Spellman, 50, a married father of four, said the officers went through his wallet without his permission, forcefully frisked him and put him in the back of the police cruiser. He said they asked why he was "so far from home," accused him of being on drugs and told him to "shut the f--- up" when he asked why he was being stopped. His cellphone screen was shattered in the process.

"It demeans you. It made me feel like I was a piece of meat," Spellman said. "This is new to me: someone on you, manhandling you. Don't tell me to 'shut the f--- up.' The whole thing shouldn't have happened. I'm a grown man trying to catch the bus."

Spellman was not charged with a crime. He said he had left the ACT Academy Cyber Charter School, where his son was taking a computer class, so he could let his wife into their home in Olney. She had forgotten her key. He said he showed the officers his retired police ID, but it didn't help.

"I don't know what's going on with this police department, but it's terrible," he said.

Lt. Thomas Fournier of Internal Affairs confirmed that Spellman had filed a complaint with his office, but said he couldn't comment on the case.
The experience made Spellman realize what can happen to innocent civilians when they become suspects in the eyes of cops. Spellman, who is black, still doesn't know why he was targeted, but he couldn't help but notice that the two cops who stopped him and the four or five backup officers who arrived were white.

"I don't want to turn it into a racial issue, but that's what it felt like," Spellman said of racial profiling. "When my son leaves the house, I'm going to tell him to be more careful of cops than crooks. Me, being an injured officer with ID, and they're giving me that much trouble? I can't imagine someone without credentials." [Source]

Just keep those confederate flags off of our police cars.
 

  


 

The chase continues. Because the Big R doesn't know what "post- racial" means.

I see that the Big R has been in training while I was paying attention to other things. Now he has me chasing his ass all the way to upstate New York:

"One of the most hated racial slurs that an African-American can hear is bringing attention to the Kenmore East High School girls varsity basketball team of Tonawanda, NY near Buffalo. More than a dozen girls from the high school team have been suspended and face other sanctions for chanting the n-word in a regular pregame locker room chant.

Sophomore Tyra Batts recently told The Buffalo News that her teammates would hold hands before the game, say a prayer and then shout "One, two, three ni**ers!"

According to The Buffalo News, the use of the word came to light after Batts was suspended for getting into a fight about the use of racial slur during practice.

Although Batts was alarmed by the chant, she told The Buffalo News that she was outnumbered and that the use of the slur had been justified as a team tradition.

"I said, 'You're not allowed to say that word because I don't like that word,' and they said, 'You know we're not racist, Tyra. It's just a word, not a label,'" she told the paper. "I was outnumbered."

The 15-year-old eventually exploded after a practice when a teammate called her a "black piece of (expletive)." She says she got into a fight with the girl later in school.

"It was a buildup of anger and frustration at being singled out of the whole team," she further explained.

Batts then erupted and started fighting with one of the team members. Both girls were immediately given out of school suspensions for the physical altercation, but after district administrators began to speak to each member of the team -- individually and in groups -- they discovered Batts struck her teammate in response to a racial slur. Following this revelation the entire team was suspended but Batts was allowed to return to school, according to a statement released by the school district..." [Source]

The Big R is very slick; he has actually gotten to an entire basketball team of young impressionable lily white girls, and they probably don't even realize it. (Or, maybe they do. Who knows?) I wonder what in the word Nigger made these youngsters think that they could play better just by saying it? I am guessing that that they have spent a tad bit more time listening to gangster rap than learning their play book.

So using the "n- word" is a tradition with the basketball team.Nice. What's their nick name, the Fighting Niggers? What a country.

"In fact, in regards to the explanation of current team members that using the n-world [sic] is a tradition, some of the team's former players who took to Twitter to deny that any "tradition" of racial chants exists."You (racist) b*tch," a 2010 graduate tweeted. "Glad I'm out of there."

Don't be so glad just yet Ms. 2010 graduate; the Big R can get to you wherever you go.

Consider another case down in South Carolina. This time the Big R actually got to a Negro down there and has him hating himself. Now that takes some doing, but he did it.

"Byron Thomas is a 19-year-old student at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. He had a Confederate battle flag hanging in the window of his dormitory room on campus where it could be seen by people walking through campus. Just before Thanksgiving, university officials told him to remove the flag. After he posted a video online at CNN explaining his views, officials relented and told him he could display the flag.

In an email to the campus community, a university spokesperson stated that officials had asked Thomas to remove the flag “out of respect for his fellow students’ concerns.” But the email went on to state that the university had a firm regard for the First Amendment right of free speech and that “the university cannot and will not prohibit these flags or other symbols that our students choose to display.”

By the way, Thomas is an African American." [Source]

 h/t to David for sending me the link to this story.

Poor Byron says that when he sees the flag he doesn't see racism; he sees southern pride. And he does not see the big deal with proudly displaying it in his dorm room, window. Byron sees the flag as a symbol, and as a sign of respect. Check out the link and click on Byron's video to see more of where Byron is coming from.

I actually considered giving up blogging a few months ago, but now I know that I have to hang in there a little longer; you Negroes need me. The Big R is way too powerful for you. He can get into your minds and do crazy things to your psyche.

But hang on Byron, it's not too late. If any of you reading this post know Byron Thomas please tell him to holla at the field. I will be waiting for him, and I have some brand new track shoes that I think might be just his size.

Sometimes it's not enough to chase the Big R, sometimes you have to run away from him as well. Clearly Byron hasn't been running fast enough.