Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
Recent Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demostration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
13, 2003
Racism
and Poverty in Ford City, PA, 1959
Minstrel
Show
By MICHAEL D. YATES
The high point of my first year in high school
was a minstrel show. The year began in the Fall of 1959. That
great decade, the sixties, was soon to begin, but it was still
the fifties in my home town, the boring, conservative, celebrate-America
fifties. The racist fifties. Just five years before, Emmett Till
had been murdered in Mississippi, dumped into the Tallahatchie
river with his head bashed in and a seventy pound exhaust fan
tied around his neck with barbed wire. Just three years before,
during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, United States
Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi had this to say about
Black people:
In every stage of the bus boycott we
have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy,
unbearably stinking niggers . . . African flesh-eaters. When
in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish
the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are
guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives . . . . All whites
are created equal with certain rights, among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.
Neither I nor my classmates in Ford City,
Pennsylvania, a small industrial town forty miles north of Pittsburgh,
knew anything about such matters.
I was apprehensive about high school.
I had spent the past six years in a small Catholic school, and,
although I did not like the nuns and their regimentation, at
least I had known all my classmates. The sisters did their best
to make conformists out of us: teachers had to be obeyed, and
priests, and parents. Independent thinking was dangerous, the
work of the devil. Our eighth grade teacher, Sister Herman Joseph,
made memorization the basis of all our learning. We would write
down terms on the left-hand side of our notebook pages, and she
would dictate the appropriate definitions for us to write on
the right-hand side. Then we would stand around the room, and
she would read out a definition. If you got it right, you kept
standing; if you missed, you sat down. Grades were based on how
many rounds you remained standing. She had me keep the grade
records, so I got to sit down at all times, and I also always
got the first question. I had a good memory, so even if I had
not studied, I could memorize all the answers by the time it
was my turn again. So getting a good grade was simple for me.
Learning anything worthwhile was another matter. Sister's definition
for the radical, Tom Paine, was "As great an infidel as
Voltaire." Not that I learned anything about Tom Paine (or
Voltaire) in high school. I did not, and only reflected back
on the utterly incredible and reactionary definition in my notebook
after I did learn something relevant in college. Not one teacher
at any level thought it worthwhile to teach us about Emmett Till
or Senator Eastland. A biology professor in college, a Catholic
priest, told us that if a white woman had a black baby, you knew
that there was a "nigger in the wood pile."
At least Herman Joseph didn't beat us
when we got the wrong answer. I still wince when I think of how
her predecessor had banged a girl's head against the blackboard
because she confused inches, feet, and yards. Perhaps this was
teacher's way of preparing her to obey her husband; learn what
he wanted or you'll get the thrashing you deserve. In any event,
I had the highest grade average in the school, but Sister would
not allow me to get the traditional award medal. She said that
I learned too easily. Rewards went only to those who endured
the appropriate suffering.
On my first day in high school, my home
room teacher, who also taught Latin, called out the role, and
when she got to me, yelled out "Melvin Yapp." This
set my classmates into howls of laughter. She had glanced down
at the last name on another roster, but some of my friends called
me "Melvin" for quite awhile. Then there was science
class, taught by a heavy set farmer (he really did have a farm)
with a beet red face and a penchant for looking up girls' dresses.
I hated this class, especially after the teacher knocked one
of the students clear out of his seat for talking. I feared mightily
that this would happen to me. Two older students, repeating the
class after failing it the year before, sat beside and behind
me. They were always making fun of me. They would ask, "Getting
any?"(meaning sex), but I was so naive that for a long time
I thought that they were saying, "Git ninny," which
made no sense at all. When I looked at them dumbfounded, they
would almost fall down laughing. The teacher was always picking
on them, mocking their inability or unwillingness to learn the
material. If I so much as smiled when this happened, both of
them would hit me when the teacher's back was turned. Then for
at least a month, the two of them would grab me in the hall after
class and drag me in the opposite direction of my next class,
punching my arms and twisting my wrists. Since they were bigger
than I and there were two of them, physical confrontation seemed
out of the question. So I hit upon an alternative strategy, one
which I used successfully throughout high school.
I was always academically bright. My
mother encouraged me to read a lot, and I did, everything from
encyclopedias to novels to comic books. But being smart is not
an unalloyed virtue in a place in which most young people are
going to be factory workers or otherwise employed in jobs which
do not require much formal education. If you stand out too much
intellectually, you run the risk of social isolation and physical
and verbal abuse. Luckily I was good at sports, too, especially
baseball, which my father had me playing with much older kids
by the age of six. He coached a youth team for boys nine through
twelve, and he would bring me to the practices. I would take
my turn at bat, and he would throw the ball pretty hard. If it
hit me, I'd be too ashamed to cry; it wouldn't be the manly thing
to do. Sports helped me then to develop strength and a little
toughness. Nothing was more admired among men than sports ability
and fighting prowess, and at least I had the former. I had an
absolute aversion to fighting, and, most remarkably, I made it
through high school without getting into a single fight. I did
this by making special efforts to befriend the toughest boys.
In the science class, I began to let the two bullies copy from
me on the weekly quizzes. This helped them to pass and showed
them that I had some courage. Soon the punches and the hallway
abductions stopped; by the end of the year, the three of us were
almost buddies.
I perfected this strategy over my years
in high school. I walked to high school, and I arrived long before
classes started. I would wait in one of the stairwells for the
kids who hung out there, guys from the shop classes, guys who
smoked cigarettes and were not afraid to fight. We'd talk about
sports or about teachers or I'd just listen. After awhile they'd
think of me as a friendly and harmless person, but one who might
help them out if they needed it. In my sophomore math class,
I helped some of the basketball players get through algebra.
I didn't like science classes, so later I enrolled in the regular
physics class instead of the college prep course. This worked
out well; I found the work easy but I helped a lot of the other
students. That way no one would think that I considered myself
better than them because I was smarter. Unfortunately the teacher
forced me to transfer into the more advanced class. Outside school,
besides baseball, I learned how to bowl and to shoot pool with
some skill; all of these sports helped me to be a regular guy
even if I did get good grades. Another trick I learned was to
prepare for each class during the one before. That way I never
had to do any homework, showing my disdain for school and impressing
my classmates.
The ninth grade students were divided
into seven sections. Students were placed into the sections according
to performance on standardized tests and perhaps (although I
have no personal knowledge of this) upon the demands of the more
aggressive parents. These tests were culturally biased and in
no way measured our potential abilities. So it is no wonder that
no black boys or girls were placed in the first three sections,
the ones in which the students presumably had some chance of
furthering their educations. There was a small black population
in the town, segregated entirely at the south or "lower"
end. About five to ten percent of my class was black, and it
was in high school that I had my first encounters with black
people. Not in my classes, because I was in the first section
and this was lily-white, and as I think back on it now, comprised
disproportionately of children from more middle class (i.e. not
factory worker) families. Most of the black families in town
were poor, although a few men worked in the town's large glass
and pottery factories. As I got to know my black classmates,
it seemed to me that they were as smart as anyone else, but somehow
they often had problems with their studies and, in general, the
students and the teachers did not think that they were capable
of good work. When a black student did excel in school, people
would wonder in amazement how this could have happened.
Racism was such a fact of life that it
was taken for granted. I never remember saying anything derogatory
about any black person just because he or she was black. But
in this I was probably exceptional, because guys were always
commenting on the "niggers" or "coons" or
"jungle bunnies." It was inconceivable that a white
girl would date a black boy, and if she did, she would for ever
after be dismissed as a slut. "She fucks niggers" was
pretty much the same as "She has the plague" or "She
has sex with animals." The boy would have to watch his back,
because this was a reason for violence. And even if I did not
use racial epithets, I still never missed an episode of "Amos
and Andy" on television. We were forever talking about this
show, much the way people talk about "Seinfeld" today.
Except that we would laugh about the outrageously stereotyped
behavior of the show's characters, implicitly accepting the idea
that this was the way black people really did act. We would imitate
the voices of the gullible "Andy," the con man "Kingfish,"
and the slow-witted janitor, "Lightin'." We would memorize
lines, and I can remember some of them still.
The clear implication of all this was
that we considered black people as a kind of exotic species;
they were not like us. They existed to make us laugh and to thrill
us with their athletic prowess. Black women were thought of as
over-sexed. People would say "You're not a man until you've
split the black oak" (had sex with a black woman). No one
ever challenged this kind of talk; to do so would mark you as
a "nigger lover." Yet it was not necessarily bad to
have black friends, as long as you understood that you were white.
We suffered amazing delusions about the feelings of black persons.
One of my good friends worked in his father's combination convenience
store and gas station, located at the "lower end" of
town. He was our expert on black life; he knew nearly every black
person in town. We'd listen intently as he'd tell us about black
folks, about the big fat whore who lived at the "Blue Goose"
hotel, about the foolishness of the slow-witted "Dewey,"
about the strange antics of the sickly brother of the town's
best basketball player. He said in a tone of superiority that
he could call our black classmates "niggers" because
he knew them so well. A few years later, I was drinking with
a friend in a bar in a rough neighborhood. We had just bought
a milkshake glass full of gin for a woman who said that it was
her birthday. We were the only white persons in the place, and
my companion, a very fat ex-sailor, started to talk about "niggers."
I told him to shut up; that kind of talk could get us killed.
He said, "Don't worry; they know me here."
I disliked all of my ninth grade classes
except one, English. Latin was difficult and boring. Fortunately
our teacher was often sick, and the substitute knew nothing about
languages, living or dead. Civics was taught by an old woman
who really believed that it was important for us to know every
detail of the mechanics of every level of government. Maybe she
was right, but this material was as dry as dust to me. I've already
mentioned the science class. I don't know which was worse, the
teacher's brutality or the way he'd say, "Please you people,"
when we got on his nerves. I didn't mind algebra. It was taught
by one of the school's legendary basketball players, and he made
it interesting, telling us little tidbits like the Arabic root
of the word "algebra." But my favorite class was English,
which was taught by our favorite teacher, Mr. Conlon or "Skinny"
for short.
Skinny was one of those teachers who
seems like "one of the guys" to the students. He'd
tell us jokes and let us in on some of the gossip of the school,
the things that went on between the teachers and between them
and the staff. This was an extraordinary thing in those days
when the gap between student and teacher was a lot wider than
it is today. He had us do unusual assignments, such as spontaneous
speeches on a subject he'd name on the spot. We were his "best"
students, but he had to teach many of the other sections as well.
That year he had to teach the Section 7 class; these students
were deemed hopeless by the school, which was why they were put
there in the first place. Skinny let it be known that these kids
were too dumb to learn, so he had devised alternative education
for them. One of his tactics was to conduct arm wrestling contests
among the boys in the class, among whom were some of the ninth
grade's strongest. We thought that this was great stuff. Why
waste your time on those who were impervious to learning, whose
skulls were too thick to permeate? Better to prepare them for
the hard manual labor that they were no doubt going to do for
the rest of their lives. Quite a few of them were black.
Since we were his star pupils, Skinny
gave us a special task, one which we took to with great enthusiasm.
He organized us to perform a minstrel show for the entire school.
Only boys would actually act out the parts on stage, but the
girls would do the rest of the work. I don't know where he got
the "script," but minstrel shows were still performed
by some civic organizations, so maybe he was a member of the
Kiwanis Club or some other do-gooder organization and he got
it from there. At any rate, we auditioned, were assigned roles,
and began to rehearse. I remember that one of our section's science
brains, a nice guy but a bit of a sissy, was chosen to play the
straight man or "Interlocuter." The rest of us were
given a variety of stock minstrel roles with standard minstrel
names like "Rastus." We rehearsed diligently, learning
a large number of lines. The main idea was that the Interlocutor
would ask each of us questions, and we would answer in our best
imitation of what we thought was southern black speech, tripping
over the words and twisting them around nonsensically so that
we would get a laugh out of the audience. Some of us also did
skits, again with the idea of illustrating the natural stupidity
and childishness of black folks.
The minstrel show was a great success;
not a single teacher or administrator criticized it. We were
all proud of our budding acting talents. We had enjoyed putting
on black face and dressing in outlandish costumes. Best of all,
we had relished being allowed to talk in front of a large audience
the way the actors on "Amos and Andy" talked. We were
assured that what we had done was good when my friend, the "expert,"
told us that he had talked to a black girl in our grade, and
she had told him that she had not been offended.
I can say now that I do not think that
I have ever done something which has shamed me more than the
minstrel show. I do not remember that it bothered me then, but
it has bothered me a good deal since. The grossness of it, the
inhumanity of it, the way in which it degraded not just my black
classmates but all black people, the completely casual way in
which Skinny assigned it and we did it, all of these things make
me sick now. The sad thing is the knowledge that so many of my
teachers, people who should have known better, in 1960, than
to have allowed this to happen, enjoyed it, committing themselves
to the same racism which filled up the tree limbs with dead black
bodies.
White people like to say that things
have really improved for black men and women. A lot of whites
complain that blacks keep bitching and moaning about what happened
to them in the past, when what they should be doing is getting
on with their lives. It is true that not many people dress up
in blackface these days, although it is not unknown in college
fraternities. And lynching is no longer a fact of life in the
South. There are thousands of black office holders, a significant
Black middle class, even Black billionaires and CEOs. Black styles
and Black music dominate youth culture. So, why rehash the past?
We don't need to belabor the past. Just
look at the present. Four decades after the passage of the landmark
Civil Rights Acts (and forty years since I graduated from high
school), more than half of all prisoners in the United States
are Black, half of more than two million people. At least 65
percent of all prisoners are Black in Maryland, Louisiana, Mississippi,
South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Illinois, New Jersey,
North Carolina, and the District of Columbia (96 Percent Black).
Researcher Richard Vogel reports that, "In 1997, the U.S.
Department of Justice developed a statistical model that predicted
that an African American male who was 16 years old in 1996 had
a 28.5 percent chance of spending time in prison over his lifetime.
If the Department of Justice differentiated incarceration rates
between poor and non-poor, there is little doubt that we would
see that poor African Americans in contemporary society actually
face 'the inevitability of prison'."
I could go on and talk about poverty
and unemployment rates, life expectancies, infant mortality,
access to medical care and the like. But enough said. How are
we to explain these appalling disparities except as consequences
of the same racism that killed Emmett Till and encouraged us
to put on our minstrel show?
Michael D. Yates
can be reached at: mikedjyates@msn.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
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