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. 

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How far have we come?

The Field Negro education and enlightenment series continues.

"Progress is an essential tenet of America’s civic religion. As someone born and raised in England, where “not bad” is a compliment and “could be worse” is positively upbeat, this strikes me as an endearing national characteristic. But as with any religion, when faith is pitted against experience, faith generally wins. And at that point, optimism begins to look suspiciously like delusion.

Since 1977, when Gallup started asking people if they thought they’d be better off the following year, a huge majority have said yes. A 2005 poll revealed that even though only 2 percent of Americans describe themselves as rich, 31 percent thought it very likely or somewhat likely that they would “ever be rich.” And as in most religions, those who have the least are the most devout. Despite entrenched and growing inequality, the poorer people are, the more optimistic they are likely to be about their future financial health.

The sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation, offers yet another chance to gauge the progress toward racial equality in America. During this bumper period of civil rights commemorations—the current decade presents a litany of markers, from the uprisings in Birmingham to Martin Luther King’s assassination—the official mantra rarely changes: we have come a long way, but we have further to go. “To dismiss the magnitude of this progress…dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years,” said Barack Obama, celebrating the March on Washington last year at the Lincoln Memorial. “But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete.”

Who could argue with that? Half a century ago, America was officially an apartheid state, with black people denied the basic rights of citizenship in large swaths of the country. Then the signs came down; the laws were overturned; the doors to the polling stations were prized open. The notion that the work is proceeding perpetuates the myth: America has no reverse gear—we just keep going forward.

But the awkward truth is that when it comes to the goals laid down by the civil rights movement in general and Brown in particular, America is actually going backward. Schools are resegregating, legislation is being gutted, it’s getting harder to vote, large numbers are being deprived of their basic rights through incarceration, and the economic disparities between black and white are growing. In many areas, America is becoming more separate and less equal.

According to research recently conducted by ProPublica, “black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades.” A recent Nation article illustrated how this trend is largely by design. In suburbs across the region, wealthier whites have been seceding from their inner- city school districts and setting up academic laagers of their own. The result is a concentration of race and class disadvantage in a system with far fewer resources. In a 2012 report, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project noted: “Nationwide, the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates (64%) are low-income.”

The discrepancy between black and white unemployment is the same as it was in 1963. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, between 1984 and 2007 the black-white wealth gap quadrupled. The Supreme Court is dismantling affirmative action and gutting voting rights. Meanwhile, incarceration disparities are higher than they were in the 1960s. And as Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow: “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

This is not to say that we have literally reverted to a bygone era. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” goes the proverb. “For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” We have a black president, a black attorney general and a black editor of The New York Times; there’s a growing trend to interracial relationships; suburbs are becoming more diverse. If the civil rights movement had been about getting black faces in new and high places, its work would now be done. But it wasn’t. It was about equality. And the problem is not that we still have a great deal of progress to be made or that progress is too slow—it’s that we are regressing.

This is not the first time this has happened. After the abolition of slavery, there was a brief period during Reconstruction when African-Americans made great strides, followed by a full-scale retrenchment in the South with the advent of Jim Crow. “The slave went free,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois. “Stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” In his speech, Obama acknowledged that “we’ll suffer the occasional setback.”

But there’s nothing “occasional” about this: the current reversals in the achievements of the civil rights era are akin to those after Reconstruction. That period lasted almost ninety years, and it took a mass movement to end it.

King saw this coming. After he was booed by young black men at a meeting in Chicago in 1966, he reflected, “For twelve years, I and others like me had held out radiant promises of progress, I had preached to them about my dream…. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.” [Source]

More news from "post racial" America.

Stories you will never hear on FOX VIEWS and other news outlets like it.

"James Craig Anderson sang tenor in the choir at the First Hyde Park Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. He’d worked at a car plant near Jackson for seven years, and he enjoyed gardening in his free time. Anderson’s partner of 17 years, a man named James Bradfield, was the legal guardian of a 4 year-old child, and Anderson and Bradfield were raising the child together. This child will not grow up in Anderson’s care, however, because Anderson was killed by a mob of white teenagers.

The murder of Mr. Anderson recalls Jim Crow era lynchings. On a Sunday morning shortly before dawn, a group of teenagers were drinking in the nearby town of Puckett. According to police, one of them told his friends they should leave and “go fuck with some niggers.” Two carloads of the boys then drove to Jackson, where they found Anderson in a parking lot, beat him, and then drove their pickup truck over him. During the beating, some of the teens reportedly yelled out the words “white power.”

Yet, while Anderson’s death may resemble Klan violence from another era, it is hardly a memory from a distant past. James Craig Anderson died in 2011. Three of his killers were sentenced Tuesday by a federal judge.

Judge Carlton Reeves delivered fairly substantial remarks at the sentencing hearing. His full remarks are worth reading in their entirety. In them, he laments the “toxic mix of alcohol, foolishness and unadulterated hatred” that “caused these young people to resurrect the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs from the Mississippi we long to forget,” and he lays out the brutal history of racial violence that still defines Mississippi in many people’s minds. Quoting one author’s description of the state, Judge Reeves says that “there is something different about Mississippi; something almost unspeakably primal and vicious; something savage unleashed there that has yet to come to rest.”

This history, according to Reeves, stands in tension with what the judge labels the “New Mississippi.” This is the Mississippi that has struggled to lift the state “from the abyss of moral depravity in which it once so proudly floundered in.” And the murder of James Craig Anderson “ripped off the scab of the healing scars of Mississippi . . . causing her (our Mississippi) to bleed again.”' [Source]

I know I know, we are "post racial" now. And folks like that color arousal agitator, the field Negro, is just looking for racism to chase to stir up folks.

If only that was true.

Sadly, it's not only Mississippi, it's places like Alabama as well. Where police officers can brutalize an elderly man who doesn't speak English because he is...well.. different.

The good news is that the police officer in Alabama has been arrested. And, like the animals in Mississippi, he will have to answer for his crime.

The bad news is that America continues to think that she has turned the corner on racism and ignorance.

"On Tuesday, Anderson’s family found justice. But Anderson remains dead. Mr. Bradfield, a man who cannot even call himself a widower due to another form of unconstitutional injustice, said in a statement to the court that his adopted son sleeps in his bed because “he doesn’t want those people to get me.” The United States of America has a black president. That president appointed a black judge, a black attorney general, and a black prosecutor. And none of these men have the power to restore what a small band of drunk teenagers took away from Anderson and his family.

Almost two years to the day after racism killed James Craig Anderson, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. “Things have changed in the South,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his opinion for the Court. “Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” On these points, the Chief Justice is correct. The South is different than it was in 1965. Racial minorities do enjoy high offices, including the office of President of the United States.

But it only took a few boys from a tiny town in the poorest state in the nation to re-create the age of Jim Crow lynchings.

This is what Chief Justice Roberts missed in his opinion scrapping a key provision of the Voting Rights Act on the theory that it did not reflect “current needs.” He missed the fact that racism can be an intensely individualistic crime against reason. A police force can be committed to equality, and a single cop can still fire impulsively on a black suspect. A nation can be committed to universal suffrage, and yet a single state legislature can erect obstacles to the right to vote. Lynchings are now infrequent in the South, but that does not make Anderson’s death any less tragic. And it certainly does not justify eliminating laws banning racially-motivated killings.

We are fortunate to live in a nation where most people do not commit serious violations of the law. Most employers do not act with racist intent. Most cops do not fire their guns unnecessarily. Most teenagers do not follow up a night of drinking with violence. Judge Reeves’ “New Mississippi” is slowly but consistently displacing the old one.

But that does not mean that we should make Roberts’ mistake of blurring the line between less racism and no racism. Anderson did not die due to a racist regime of state-sponsored apartheid, he died because of a small band of hateful Americans."

And because a majority of Americans choose to believe that those "small bands of hateful Americans" do not exist.








 

Certain people are fighting back.

It's close to Halloween, so I guess this explains why the legislature --and the courts--- in the state of Georgia are doing such scary things.


"Voting rights advocates are considering legal options after a Georgia judge denied their lawsuit that would have compelled the state to add 40,000 newly registered voters to the rolls.


Judge Christopher Brasher said voters whose registration applications were lost may cast provisional ballots in next week's election. But he declined to force Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and counties to ensure voting for the thousands of new voters. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the New Georgia Project, and the Georgia branch of the NAACP are weighing whether to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.


"You've got a situation that was designed to wreak havoc on the elections office if a large number of provisional ballots are cast," Julie Houk, a senior special counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights' voting rights project, told The Huffington Post Wednesday. She said provisional ballots are "not an adequate remedy" because "registered voters are entitled to cast a regular ballot."


Voting rights advocates said the judge's decision could potentially disenfranchise thousands of people, a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, and disrupt Georgia's high-profile races for U.S. Senate and governor.


The voters in question were registered during a six-month drive by the nonpartisan New Georgia Project, led by state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D). The group submitted more than 86,000 applications, a majority from young voters of color registering to vote for the first time, along with another 20,000 or so from other groups. Abrams' group alleges that 40,000 of those applications are mysteriously missing from the state's official voter rolls, and that the state has not provided an explanation. " [Source]


You Negroes better start paying attention to what is going on in America.


These new Jim Crow style tactics being carried out is serious business.


This was a long thought-out plan to reclaim the upper hand when certain people started feeling that they were losing political power in this country.  You Negroes (and brown people) coming out in full force (twice) to elect the first Negro president scared the s**t out of them, and so they decided to go to work.  


Speaking of certain people, one of them who wants to be president kind of let his real motivations for wanting that office slip out, recently.


" South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is toying with the idea of a presidential bid, joked in a private gathering this month that "white men who are in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency," according to an audio recording of his comments provided to CNN.


"I'm trying to help you with your tax status," Graham says in the recording. "I'm sorry the government's so f---ed up. If I get to be president, white men in male-only clubs are going to do great in my presidency." The crowd is then heard laughing. [Source]


Finally, an honest politician.














 

"Coming Apart"

I still can't get over my girl Whitney going out like that. I tried writing about it this morning and posted it with another publication. I didn't feel like hearing it from my resident racist trolls who like to hang in the fields, so if you want to read it you will have to go over there. (From the bad to worse department; her daughter was just rushed to the hospital.)

So anyway, this is Black History Month, and we are indeed living in an interesting time in our nation's history. In a lot of ways, we are even more segregated now than we were during the darkest days of Jim Crow. (h/t to Daniel for that article)
The rights of women are being trampled on by a few powerful people in Washington, and white scholars are openly wondering how the white working class and white bourgeoisie can unite as they were back in the days when they were clearly the the ruling class.

I guess, for Charles Murray (yes, the "Bell Curve" guy) and others like him, white power is slipping away at an alarming rate. 

But all is not lost. I wonderful woman from the majority population sent me an e-mail after reading the story I posted about that basketball team from Pistolvania. It's a letter she penned to that school official who sat by and laughed while this incident was taking place. She has given me permission to share it:

"Dear Sir,

I read with interest of your failure to intervene in the recent "banana suit" incident at the basketball game.

I'm sure you meant well, and thought this was an innocuous form of trash talk from high spirited young people.

Allow me to tell you something about myself.
I am a 60 year old white woman who was born and raised in the deep South, where I still live.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, my parents never marched or shouted, but they supported equal rights with their own quiet dignity.
Our church in Georgia split because some in the congregation voted to bar the doors to the church if black people attempted to worship with them.
My parents voted against this, and spoke up in church about what a profound ignorance of Christ was being evinced there.

After that, the KKK weekly newspaper published by J.B. Stoner (who killed the 4 little girls in Birmingham)

appeared regularly in our driveway. It was thrown there at night by someone who wanted to convince my parents of the error of their ways.
A regular feature of this paper was caricatures of ape-like black people holding bananas. It had photos of Africans with terrible diseases,
and claimed this was their normal appearance. It had pseudo-science claiming that Africans were not wholly human, but were descended from
matings between humans and monkeys. My parents didn't just throw these papers away---they burned them, but I still remember the images,
the ignorance and the hatred displayed there.

When I read of the taunting at the Brentwood ball game, I was reminded of the KKK newspaper and I was disgusted and angry at you,
the teenagers, and the entire Brentwood administration. I have since calmed down, and reminded myself that you people didn't grow up where and how I did,
so you don't know any better. However, it is now time for you to correct your embarrassing ignorance and your breach of good manners.
You and the student body need to apologize, sincerely, to the opposing team, and take measures that such a disgusting display never happens again.
Brentwood is a school? Educate yourselves!!!

Sincerely,

Dena..... "

Thank you Dena. Unfortunately, I am afraid that your wonderful letter will not do much good. But we can hope.


 

  

I want to be a good Negro!

*

"Monday, July 27, 2009 Black Female Officer Kelly King defends Sgt Crowley.I came across this video on Booker Rising. This video definitely makes Obama and Gates look very petty in their regards to invoking race into Mr. Gate's arrest. The black female officer is Kelly King of the Cambridge Police Department. I was shocked that CNN actually interviewed her. She sounded very impassioned in her support of Sgt. Crowley. Obama want to talk on about a "teachable moment", the ultimate teachable moment for people like Henry Gates, Barack Obama and others is at the 58 second mark in the video. When I see people like Gates and Obama, I see them as a representation of everything that is wrong in America regarding race relations. Kelly King represents what is right about race relations in our country. I'm not just saying this, because she said she wasn't voting for Obama again. I had to laugh at that one myself."


~posted by conservative brother at 11:28 PM~

I am not in a good mood. The house Negroes are winning. Pretty soon massa will have to build a brand new wing on that bitch to accommodate all of them. See it's like this: Here in A-merry-ca
good Negroes get to set the dialogue when it comes to race and race relations, because good Negroes never rock the boat or upset the status quo. Good Negroes always make us feel comfortable about ourselves and our beautiful country built on racial harmony. Lately, good Negroes are all the rage. Kelly King and Leon Lashley are good Negroes. They can always be counted on to dismiss the field Negroes and their racism chasing habits. Good Negroes don't worry about racism because their white friends and bosses are sooooo good to them. A good Negro will always have a job and a place in the house here in A-merry-ca. To white folks, good Negroes are like pets, and we all know how white folks feel about their pets. Good Negroes feed into all the stereotypes so that white folks don't have to worry about offending them. For instance, if you are white and you have a good Negro over to your house, do you want to be constantly worrying what Negroes eat? Or do you want to be able to say: Honey, we are having some Negroes over, do we have enough Kool-Aid and friend chicken?......let me stop.... *trying to type and get serious, trying to type and get serious*


So I am watching Tina Brown (Editor of the "Daily Beast") this morning and she was talking about her article which dissed his O ness for getting off his health care message and falling victim to ---as she said on "Morning Joe"--- this "distraction". See, for people like Tina Brown, race is just a "distraction." That's what good Negroes do for white folks, they make race a "distraction". For some of us Negroes, it's a little more than that. It's something we live with every fucking day. Even if we are considered the successful ones, or the ones who have "made" it. (Just ask Skippy Gates and his 56% white ass. I bet he is not a good Negro anymore.) Distraction? Hey, I want universal health care as much as the next bleeding heart liberal. But guess what? If every A-merry-can is guaranteed health care but poor and minority people are still treated differently when they go to have it administered, we will be right back at square one. So yes, I would say the problem of race in A-merry-ca is more than just a little "distraction."


Anyway, I don't want to spoil the party. Tomorrow it's beer for the boyz at the White House, and his O ness will throw back some brews with the liar, Jim Crow, (Thanks Rippa) and the good doctor. (Boy I would love to be a fly on the White House wall) I wonder if his O ness will tell the men that some republiklans in congress are trying to pass a bill to force him to apologize to his new beer buddy? Yes, you read right, they are trying to move a bill through the house to force O bama to apologize because they think he abused his presidential power. See, that's what happens when the man thinks you are no longer being a good Negro. He tries to force your ass to be a good Negro by passing laws and shit. Poor Obama, deep in his heart he knows that the SOB is a liar, (I bet Michelle won't be there. I don't think Michelle is a good Negro, do you?) but what can he do? He already promised to have ole Jim over to pound back some brews. He can't back out now. He told the entire country for crying out loud.


After it's over they will all go to the White House lawn, have a quick press conference, and there will be plenty I love you mans to go around.


I have to learn to be a good Negro. I wonder if there is a good Negro school somewhere?

*pic courtesy of "chubby afro.com".

"I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing...."

This has been a bad couple of weeks for the "kumbaya" set here in A-merry-ca. Black mob violence on whites in Ohio; Jim Crow revisited in Pistolvania; black and white men behaving badly while their spouses suffer. And,to top it off, a President, who happens to be black, being accused by his political enemies of lusting after an under aged girl. Not to mention a black... scratch that. An A-merry-can icon, who even in death, prompts uncomfortable discussions about race and its effect on our psyche.

Wow! It makes you wonder when we are going to end up like the folks over in the Xinjiang province of China. Still, I was going to put it all behind me and just enjoy this wonderful life that I have been blessed with. Hey life is too short, I tell myself, to stress the things I can't control. Things such as the people who will be forever ignorant and content with their cluelessness. It's Friday, I tell myself, and tomorrow I won't even think about all the nastiness of these past couple of weeks.

Well, that was until I read this story. Sadly, the story got me thinking about the ugliness of our racial history all over again. I mean the story from the link is ugly enough. --What type of human being robs graves for profit?--- But just reading the name, Emmett Till, made my mind race to places that I didn't want it to go on this beautiful Friday evening in paradise. And the more I think about it is the more amazed I am that I didn't think about it before.

I mean isn't that what this whole Barack Obama getting his peep on is about? Isn't that what this swimming pool incident is about? Isn't this what Steve McNnair and the other men behaving badly is about? (Maybe not the racial aspect, but certainly the sexual one.) I think, that in a sad way, it's fitting that Till's casket was rusting away in an old shed; yet it was amazingly in tact after all these years. In many ways the kind of racism that caused Emmett Till to die such a horrific death is rusting away, too. But unfortunately, like that casket, there are still aspects of it that is very much with us.

Yep, the last thing I needed to see tonight was a story about Emmett Till. Because that just pretty much makes it a lock that tomorrow I will be chasing racism all over again.

"The end of civil rights"?

I have been thinking about civil rights a lot lately, and how far we have come as a country from the dark days of Jim Crow and the likes of Bull Connor. I look around and there are positive signs of progress and people of conscience among us who no doubt will make whatever battles we face in the future easier to win.

I had this in my mind while I read the following article by Richard Thompson-Ford in the Boston Globe:

"America's racial problems are persistent and vexing, and since the 1960s, the nation has used a powerful weapon to fix them: the ideas developed during the civil rights movement. Courts and government agencies enforce legal prohibitions against discrimination; private businesses and universities fashion their own diversity policies based on civil-rights principles. Even private individuals think about race relations in civil-rights terms: we aspire to the ideal of "colorblindness," and condemn the evils of discrimination and bias.

For a long time this way of thinking made perfect sense. In the past, the biggest impediment to racial justice was overt discrimination, inspired by a widespread belief that blacks were inferior to whites. And in fighting this kind of outright prejudice, civil rights have been an astonishing success. Race discrimination in restaurants, theaters, and hotels was quickly and thoroughly eliminated by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Discrimination in employment - while still a problem - has been dramatically reduced and is widely and roundly condemned. Public figures who make overtly bigoted statements typically suffer widespread contempt and often lose their jobs. As a result, each successive generation is less bigoted than the preceding one. Polls suggest that racial animus today is at an all-time low, and Barack Obama's election demonstrates that race is no longer the impediment it was in the recent past.

But in dealing with the worst racial problems we now face, the civil rights approach is no longer the right tool for the job. Today's most serious racial injustices aren't caused by
bias and bigotry; instead they stem from racial segregation and the many disadvantages that follow from living in isolated, economically depressed, and crime-ridden neighborhoods. These problems are a legacy of past racism, but not, by and large, the result of ongoing discrimination. Civil rights litigation and activism have hardly made a dent in these formidable obstacles. It's tempting to believe that we just need more of the same - that we've only been too timid in enforcing civil rights laws or too conservative in interpreting them. But the real problem is inherent in the civil rights approach itself: faced with racial inequities that are not caused by discrimination, civil rights law is impotent and civil rights activism too often a distraction from the real work we need to do.

To say discrimination is not the cause of our worst racial problem is not to deny that racism is still a serious problem. Even today, too many people distrust or belittle others based on casual stereotypes; racial tensions continue to trouble social interactions in schools and workplaces, and the racial hatred and contempt that underlay the Jim Crow system is far from gone. Civil rights are an important response to these problems"

The rest of the article can be found here.

I liked what Thompson-Ford was writing here; not because I agree with everything he said, (I disagree, for instance, that "racial animus is at an all time low". Polls say it is for the very reasons the author cited: it's not cool to be a racist these days. So who is going to tell a pollster how he really feels about race?) but because his article was about solutions and ways to try and attack whatever problems we have dealing with race in A-merry-ca.

It's certainly worth discussing. At least we can learn from each other.