WHEN YOU THOUGHT HE WAS WOKE BUT...

I WAS SOME DADDY, A SCENE FROM SOUTH CENTRAL

A repost

Actor: Carl Lumbly
of "South Central"

The clip below reminded me, somewhat, of my brother with my father. For a long time I've thought that we, as black people, think often about being too lax with children but not enough about being too harsh. 

I don't know that our community, generally speaking, reflects enough on how being over-controlling,

- due to fears of what white people will do to children -- even post slavery, even without cops present,
- due to fears of a child not "being manly enough" or "not being feminine enough" in a traditional, hard gender role sense, play in bad parental decision making. 


In this scene, a man reflects on how 
his own rigidity 
mistaken for true love 
had had consequences for his son. 

DANCING AT THE HOUSE PARTY, A SLICE OF BLACK CULTURE

Reminds me of one of the best
house parties I ever went to

Music from back when music was fun,
made you wanna stop whereEVER you were
and DANCE!!!

They killed it here!

ON FAILING AT COPYING WHAT WE WORSHIP

Feeling Rebloggy
"I also understand that most people are not upset when [Li'l] Kim and people like her take drastic steps to look like the light. bright beauty queens we worship at the expense of dark-skinned black women, but that, in all of their efforts to look exactly as we wish them too look, that they failed.

Shave off the sides of your nose, but not so much that you look unnatural.

Lighten your skin, but avoid all of the harmful side effects of chemical skin lightening and make sure you get a Rihanna skin tone, because if you fuck up and end up with the Vybz Kartel we’ll never let you live it down.

Add mountains of weave, but only if it mimics the hair of a mixed race woman, not a eastern European one because that’s going ‘too far.’

Add and subtract body parts, but don’t be too drastic so that we might be able to pretend it’s natural.

Wouldn’t want to be greedy in your conformity to white supremacist beauty standards, right?

We are more upset with the limits of modern plastic surgery procedures than anything else."

Saidah Green  on the rigorous and exacting viciousness of white supremacist and patriarchal brainwashing. ~From Son Of Baldwin Read More: https://www.facebook.com/sonofbaldwinfb/posts/10153681676097862?comment_id=10153681928617862&comment_tracking={%22tn%22%3A%22R0%22}

Sooo,
if Lil Kim had been born in 1984 instead of 1974
putting her at 18 years of age
in 1992 when plastic surgery, weaves, and lace wigs were becoming 

more and more advanced, 

she'd be closer to the acceptable zone?

FINALLY, A SIGNIFICANT CHANGE IN THE FREDDIE GRAY CASE

A Baltimore judge on Wednesday ordered Officer Garrett E. Miller to testify at the trials of two fellow police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray.

In a brief hearing, Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams granted prosecutors' motion to compel Miller to testify at the trials of Officer Edward M. Nero, which is scheduled to begin May 10, and Lt. Brian W. Rice, scheduled for July 5. Miller's testimony can't be used against him in his own case.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-ci-nero-pretrial-motions-hearing-20160420-story.html


Translation: The prosecutor is finally headed in the direction of the people who did the actual beating of Freddie Gray. 

I hope  this means that Mosley is off her cowardly "The Van Did It" theory. * * * * *

Read More About 

"The Van Did It" vs "The Beating Did It" 

and the Baltimore Uprising

SIX BALTIMORE POLICE ARRESTED
AND SIX EXCUSES
Original Post: May 2015http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2015/05/six-baltimore-police-arrested-six.html

LOSING MY RELIGION

"I'm losing my religion
Thank God
I prayed about my decision
How odd
For the man with the mic
To be the man all his life
While Christ-like stipes did with REM
Rev up the RPMs
How do I begin to try to paint this sin, of rules?
That divides God's people in two

In the beginning, religion created a mask
The reformation helped but soon the patch didn't last
I don't tell, you don't ask
So we created a lie
And for generations, church was where we went to go hide
Or we no longer tried
Because rules read our relationship was empty inside
Leaves you bitter, dry
Swift to cut like a razor
Swift to call you a traitor
Cause you're swift to love Taylor
Now we got bad blood with our neighbor

Who's wrong, who's right
Every Sunday we're divided
Who's black, who's white, C'mon
Now the man in the mirror never gets race right
He'll never be Christ-like
Never receive good pay
So your faith never rises above minimum wage
So when it's time to save the world
You don't know what to say
To your brother that you love when he tells you he's gay
Do you push him away?
Judge him down till he leaves?
Give him a gospel he hears or a gospel he sees
Love wrapped in truth is the gospel he needs
There's room at the cross for everyone, even me

Well my sins are now clean
The loss now redeemed
Religion is a prison but truth sets us free
Helps us believe
That the world we're in now is not the world that will be
Terror, famine, disease
Millions in poverty
Hungry, can't sleep
With all of this religion, why these babies can't eat?
And if the middle class is gone, how can America see?
How can America breathe?
When the oxygen is gone from the American dream
And these American streets listen close as they speak
The next time you think America please include me

Help the ones that are weak
All they want is a piece
Of the pie that you keep
Is that too much to ask of those who lay the concrete?
Still laying on concrete
Pop, Pop by police
See, they the foundation of the nation
Not the 2%
Not the ones that own the building that the middle class rent
Because they make sense

Tell me how do you feel?
I'm the new Franklin and I have the new deal
I fight and do right
FDR for real
One nation under God
God, show us the way
The science of opinion
God is not a buffet
You pick what you want so no God on your plate
The preacher isn't God
Religion's first mistake
Serving stewards, shepherds, not kings
Has to die to his flesh everyday like me

One VIP
All the other seats in church are free
We're just groupies
God's the celebrity
Before 313 AD
Before Constantine
Before the council of Nacia
Before Romans and Greeks
Before Kalvin Alexander, Luther
Before let there be
Before history
To the last century
Before the death on the tree
Before the fall of man
Was a picture of me
Nailed to his heart
Right before the last three
Words he would speak
It is FINISHED

Can you believe?
I'm losing my religion
Thank God
Helping you lose yours,
Is my job"

by Kirk Franklin

LEMONADE RANGES WIDE OVER BLACKNESS

Feeling Rebloggy

Overall, Lemonade is packed with references to afro-diasporic religion, afrofuturism and southern gothic tropes. Some of the scratchy voiceover and long shots of Yoncé walking among the ruins of Fort Macombe, Louisiana give it a True Detective Season 1 feel. Not the first time the Beyonce/Jay-Z/True Detective link has been made. InLemonade, however, it’s more like True Detective meets Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Other parts feel like brooding indie films meets Knowles-family home movies. Still others are more like conventional R&B videos set on a city street where our hero smashes car windshields to what sounds like a reggae cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Maps” before driving over everything in a monster truck.

~OKAYAFRICA.COM

Read More:http://www.okayafrica.com/news/beyonce-lemonade-ibeyi-laolu-senbanjo-warsan-shire/



LEMONADE ALSO SEEMED LIKE 
IT SENT A BUNCH OF MESSAGES TO HER HUSBAND
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/24/beyonce-calls-out-jay-z-s-cheating-in-lemonade-a-stunning-celebration-of-black-girl-magic.html

ASIAN/CHINESE AMERICAN COALITION DENOUNCE'S RELEASE OF AKAI GURLEY'S MURDERER

Feeling Rebloggy

Official Joint Statement from Asian/Chinese American Organizations on the Sentencing of Former NYPD Officer Peter Liang in the Killing of Akai Gurley

Asian Americans United, Philadelphia

CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, New York City

Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED), Los Angeles

Chinese Progressive Association, San Francisco

Chinese Progressive Association, Boston

We are outraged that Peter Liang has escaped accountability for killing Akai Gurley. For more than a year, Akai Gurley’s family has been courageously speaking out to demand justice for their loved one. Judge Chun’s sentencing decision today is an insult to Akai Gurley, his family and all victims of police violence. Any amount of jail/prison time is a brief snippet of time compared to the lifetime Akai Gurley’s young daughters will have to live without their father. The sentencing sends the message that it is okay to kill innocent and precious lives, as long as it is done by a police officer.

Akai Gurley was only 28-years old when he was struck and killed by the bullet fired by Peter Liang who failed to provide necessary medical help or call the ambulance. Akai’s aunt, Hertencia Petersen, remembers Akai as a good son and nephew, who joked and smiled a lot. He provided for his younger brothers and sisters and took care of Akaila and Kamiya, his daughters. Since the killing of Akai, his family has been suffering and mourning for their loss, as well as standing strongly together with the community to demand justice.

While the Chinese media and some Chinese leaders stood behind former...

Colorlines.com

Read More:https://www.colorlines.com/articles/asian-american-coalition-issues-powerful-statement-about-peter-liangs-sentence-community

Really needed some good, hopeful, people of color unity news. I'm glad I saw this.  

THE GLAMOROUS LIFE by PRINCE for SHEILA E

Another Prince Song
That used to make me start

dancing wherever I was

I'm still looking for
"I WOULD DIE 4 U"

HARRIET TUBMAN WAS THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD LEADER, A UNION SPY, AND A SIT-IN PROTESTER TOO

HARRIET TUBMAN 

IS REPLACING 

ANDREW JACKSON 

ON THE 2O DOLLAR BILL!

I swear I find out something new about this woman every year. She so deserves to be on the twenty dollar bill.
Feeling Rebloggy

 "....But even if Tubman weren't replacing Jackson, the $20 would be the perfect bill to honor her, because the sum of $20 played a significant role in her life on two separate occasions.

For one thing, $20 was the amount she earned as a monthly pension after the Civil War, for which she helped the Union as a scout and spy. It was still less than the $25 a month paid to full soldiers, but it was the result of a long legal fight to earn a soldier's pension at all. (Vox's Phil Edwards wrote about this last year, when the social media campaign to put Tubman or another woman on the $20 was at its height.)

But even before that — as Yoni Appelbaum of the Atlantic pointed out on Twitter — the sum of $20 played a huge role in Tubman's efforts to rescue her own father from slavery...."

~VOX.COM

READ MORE ABOUT HARRIET'S SIT-IN. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11469736/harriet-tubman-twenty-why



HARRIET WAS AN O.B.A. FOR SURE, AN ORIGINAL BAD ASS. FEMINISTS EVERYWHERE SHOULD BOW DOWN TO THE ORIGINAL   

PRINCE: WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS

Prince,
Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

PRINCE

So heart broken

ON WHO IS AND WHO IS NOT ALLOWED TO CLAIM BLACKNESS

The other thing that's "not okay" in 2016 are the black people who are getting more and more vocal about declaring mixed-race people as "not black."

I'm not saying I believe in supporting the one-drop rule, but it ought to be obvious by now that race is not biology but a choice of identity.  One person doesn't get to tell another person what their racial identity is. Most black people are mixed race because most of us have white rapists in our families due to slavery but being black is not about having one drop of black blood.  Being black is about a culture, a shared history, shared experiences, a variety of styles, etc.

Art by Minjae Lee
http://www.grenomj.com/

Recently mixed people (one white parent and one black/POC parent for example) may not have similar oral histories in their homes. They may not be experiencing the wide ranging possibilities that is black culture in their homes. And since recently mixed people are the only ones that know what's going on inside their house, inside their hearts, and inside their heads, they get to choose their own racial identity and tell the rest of the world what that is-- just like everybody else.

Sometimes the recently mixed choose the identity of "Biracial" And that's okay. But this means that there might be one or two places where  the "Mixed Raced People Are Not Black" chanters may have a point.

Being biracial is a fact of your birth and not necessarily the same as your racial identity, unless you choose to call yourself "Bi-racial." Again, racial identity is always a choice.

However, if a biracial person chooses to identify as "biracial," because that is in line with their apparent biology of their parents, that's fine. But when the call goes out for "Black Americans" to come hither, don't answer.

Halle Berry can come when the call goes out of black actresses because she's taken her stand as a Black American. President Obama can come too when the call goes out for black people to be on an Ebony Cover, because he's taken his stand too.  But Tiger Woods cannot. Mariah Carey, who did her level best to be non-committal about her racial identity for decades, can't either in my opinion.

I don't care how dark or light you are. I don't care what race each of your parents is. It's not your biology that concerns me. Biology of race is a weak concept at best, if it exists at all. It's your choice of racial identity that concerns me.

And your choice concerns me because that's connected to your attitude and understanding of what it is to be black like me, like us.  We are not monolithic be we are connected. We get to say who that those who do not identify as "us" don't get to be treated 100% like "us."

If you don't understand what it is to be black, if you choose not to become part of  "us" or "we" because you've chosen to be bi-racial, then be in the group called "bi-racial."

There are plenty of mostly black movies and people of color movies where bi-racial people can be and should be welcomed---as "biracial." But things like that Ebony Cover? That's for black people that identify as black.

Harry Belafonte, Jesse Williams, and even Janey-Come-Lately, Ever-Lip-Curling Zendaya deserves to be on the cover of a historically black magazine cover --- just not all at once AS IF they are representative of all black people.

But somebody like Zoe Saldana does not deserve a place on our historically black magazine covers.

My opinion is not set in stone, but I strongly feel that Zoe Saldana's choice to identify as bi-racial or something other than Black, Black American, or African American is Zoe telling us a truth about herself. I'm thinking this whole Nina Simone movie scandal is Saldana communicating to us that

1) She has not experienced much black culture in her home.

2) She has not had black oral history passed down to her in her home.  

3) She has not had the news, movies, and television interpreted for her through the lens of black culture, black history, and black experience by a black adult

This almost has to be why Saldana thinks it's okay for a white actor to play a Native American, a white women to play Cleopatra, and a Laurence Olivier to play Othello in black face -- unlike 99.5% of the black people I've ever met. 

Zoe Saldana has been, in essence, telling us that she is not black AND that the the sociologists are correct, that race is a social construct, and that she is not constructed in such a way that she should play Nina Simone EVEN IF she had come out of the uterine oven darker with West African facial features.   

Black people should be upset if somebody who does not identify as black shows up on the cover of Ebony, Essence, Jet etc unless the main story being done involves all people of color or the main story is about another ethnic group with issues parallel to our own, one of those other ethnic(?) groups being the "bi-racial" ethnic group. 

DENIAL OF PRIVILEGE, IT ISN'T JUST FOR WHITE FOLK ANYMORE

AND IT NEVER WAS

Continued From Part 1

Racism Is Not Illogical Neither is Colorism

http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2016/04/racism-is-not-illogical-neither-is.html

Did you know that if you ask men if women are discriminated against, and are victims of oppression that a lot of men, not all, will acknowledge things like women getting paid less and say "Yes, women are oppressed"

But if you ask the same men if men are privileged because men are oppressors of women, have more opportunities at leadership, and get paid more than women, the same men will disagree. They will say, "Men are not privileged."

These two same statements, stated different ways, are the same. Men will acknowledge that things are vaguely unfair for women. But they will not acknowledge that they have more than their fair share and they are sharing in the benefits of men, as a group, taking more than their fair share of power, money, etc.

I thought that was really interesting when I heard it. It's one of those things you don't know you already know until somebody puts it in sentences and paragraphs and presents it to you, ya know?

And then I realized, long before I read Patricia Hills Collins, that we all do this. We all grab hold of our sites of oppression and use them to deny that our sites of privilege exist.

When you add race and colorism into that mix, things get real ugly, really quick.

White women are oppressed by white men but can't see their privilege over black people and also cannot see that their refusal to see their privilege is part of their being oppressive.

Black men are oppressed by white people (men and women) but can't see their privilege over women, especially over black women, and also cannot see that their refusal to see their privilege is part of their being oppressive. 

Light women are oppressed by white people (men and women) but can't see their privilege over darker-skinned women and also cannot see that their refusal to see their privilege is part of their being oppressive.

Dark-skinned Christian women are oppressed by White Christian women but can't see their privilege over atheist people and also cannot see that their refusal to see their privilege is part of their being oppressive.

White atheists are oppressed by Christians (black, white, latinx, asians, and others) but cannot see that their white privilege trumps damn near everything in this country and that most of their resentment probably stems from the perceived loss of absolute white power and privilege. 

I keep hearing that light men are aware of and speak of their privilege easily. And that may be so --as far as talking goes. But the movie captioned below is the second time I've seen Jesse Williams show up in a questionable setting.



I don't think it was magic that Uncle Lee Daniels picked Jesse Williams, Lenny Kravitz, and Cuba Gooding Junior to be supporting actors in "The Butler." That's too many mixed race people in one spot for it to have been happenstance -- especially after seeing Daniel's color stuck casting of Precious (and probably "Empire" too)
But here we are again with this Ebony Magazine Cover. Two mixed race black men and one mixed race black woman being put forth as representative-- and Jesse Williams is right there again.

Jesse Williams may admit his privilege readily. I don't read everything he writes. But it seems to be within his character to admit light-privilege readily. But he's not stepping back from that privilege when he can profit from it so far.

Still, I can't put Jesse down too much.  Know why?




Because as hard as I am trying to pay attention to colorism in the black community, I did not notice that these people on the Ebony Cover were all mixed race. My learning to ignore color is bone deep. And one decision or repeated decisions to pay attention isn't going to cure it for me

The thing that disturbed me even more
than my  own failure to notice
that there were three mixed race people
put forth as entirely representative on a FUBU magazine,
--but a white run magazine,
run by white people who often cannot see black beauty
unless it is watered down by whiteness --
was that some of the black people who saw this magazine cover
were actually proud of themselves for not noticing.

This black tendency to be proud to not notice skin differences (which is the same as not noticing colorism effects on darker brothers and sisters) isn't any different from white colorblind ideology. 

Black people who pride themselves on not seeing color are nearly exactly the same as white people who don't see color. In fact, they're worse. How can some of us reproduce something so very much like the colorblind version of white supremacy and not notice it?

When I was a kid, I lived in an environment with a lot of different races then went to school in predominantly white environment with those same children. I figure that's why I missed team light-skinned against team dark-skinned battles altogether while in school.  There were too few of us, as people of color, to really separate into different color camps. The white people were hostile and violent with us encroaching on what they felt was their territory during the latter half of the 20th century.  (Nowadays? Schools are pretty close to being as segregated as we were in 1969)

The boys preference for light-skinned, longer haired girls did come up somewhat routinely once we hit puberty. Most of us were trained to not notice it for as long as possible, though. When some dark-skinned girl eventually accused a light-skinned girl of "you think you're better than us!" the light girl denied it. And her friends of various shades defended her because it was true, she did not think she was better than us....when we were young.

By the time I hit college, however, there was an entire sorority of light-skinned girls who thought they knew that they were better than everyone else--- exactly like the movie "School Daze" by Spike Lee.

Dark-skinned jealousy is real because there are real things to be hurt and jealous about.

And light-skinned superiority becomes as real as white superiority when light-skinned people claim they do not see light-skinned preference....then have the audacity to brag about not noticing (along side some dark-skinned people who hate talking color as much as white people hate talking race)

No, I did not grow up with team-darkskinned and team-lightskinned but I am catching up on the resentments fast.

Some light-skinned, especially mixed race women, spend their large chunks of their lives trying to prove that they are black too and are so focused on this that they can't see anybody else's pain but their own. I understand that because there's usually a very real somebody somewhere telling them their black experiences are not legitimately black

So I kinda get that but it's still not okay to deny your privilege exists--- no more than it is for white people.

TOMORROW
"On Who Is And Is Not Allowed To Claim Blackness" 

RACISM IS NOT ILLOGICAL, NEITHER IS COLORISM

AND THEY NEVER WERE


We weren't allowed to talk about light-skinned and dark-skinned in my family for the most part. Actually, the message I really got was that I wasn't even supposed to see it much less acknowledge it.

That has to sound awfully familiar to a lot of black people if they're paying attention to the subtle workings of their own mind. I hear black people make noise about "We're all black" nearly every single time the subject of light-skinned and dark-skinned comes up.

Just stop talking about it and it'll go away. We'll be united if we pretend

1) Light-skinned people and dark skinned people are having the very same experience AND

2) Black women and black men are having the very same racial experience, AND

3) Black people of different classes are all having a homogenous experience of race in this country,

OR IF ALL ELSE FAILS

4) Each experience of being black is completely individualistic, so there's no point in trying to figure out patterns and different pains and triumphs that various groupings of black people might be experiencing. 

These deny-ers, the black people who want to scream "We're All Black. We're All THE SAME!" sound just like white people who claim "There's one race, the human race! If you stop talking about race, it'll go away!"

Well, all of the above is a lie. White people who hate talking about race and the black people who hate talking about color are so very, very alike but hate another

Bele and Lokai, guest characters in the Original Star Trek
"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"

The image above is from an episode of the original "Star Trek" The two characters hate each other because they are different in appearance. When the stars of the show, the"good" characters,  can't see how they are different. Each of the black and white men essentially point out that they are black and white on different sides. The left side blacks have been at war with the right side blacks forever.

Like most metaphors about race endorsed by white people, this Star Trek episode simplistically dismissed the logic and advantage of racism. A lot of people want to think that racism (and colorism) is a silly disagreement about skin color. But it's not.

Racism is about
- a group of people looking around and seeing there are limited resources or limited sources of power then...

- deciding that "I can have a larger share of the resources/power if  I don't have to split the resources/power as many ways, then....

- looking around then saying my group (a grouping based on some observable difference) is better and deserves a larger share. This enables one to say,  'It's fair that members of the other group get less or nothing' without feeling ashamed, feeling greedy, or feeling that principles have been compromised.

That is, racism precedes race.

Identifying the members of the other group as significantly different than you, finding an observable characteristic, then calling one group "the white race" and that group "the black race" or "the red race" then saying "those people" deserve less is a way of grabbing more without guilt. When you follow up by creating fake science to say that there's more to the observable difference, that those people of a different skin color really are bigger brained but dumber or smaller brained and dumber, have less hormonal control, etc. Once your fake science is in place, you can tell yourself you have been bestowed with "more" because it's "natural" and "fair"

This is how racism (a form of greed for resources, money, or power) creates race. 

In this original Star Trek episode the point is made that the guy on the left represents a group that got to the resources, power, and authority first (representing white people) and that the guy on the right was in the group being stomped on (representing black and brown people). But the overall message of the episode was still crammed, by the end of the episode, into that white cookie-cutter mold that shapes racism as just a minor physical difference that stupid people battle over when racism is as logical as it gets.  

Prior to The Civil War, during what I call "Slavery Part 1" the one-percenters were, in actuality, the white 5 to 10 percenters. I've read various articles that say 5 to 10 percent of white people ever  owned slaves. What most of those books don't say is that the white  5 to 10 percent couldn't control slaves on their own so they convinced most of  the rest of white people that they were better human beings just because they were white.  They convinced the non-slave owning white people that they would get a larger share of everything because they deserved it --even when they were probably eating more poorly than the black slaves the white massa was trying to keep picking his crops. 

White status claims, with promises of getting-more-than-those-n-words, is why most poor white people --some of them so poor that they were eating grass off the front lawn for breakfast, lunch, and dinner-- would report catching a glimpse of a runaway slave even when there was no financial reward for having captured him or her.

The poor white person's elevated status above non-white people was all the payment he or she needed.

During "Slavery Part 2," a slavery created by the black codes and Jim Crow, the poor and middle class white people took over the lead in policing, fencing in, and abusing of black people.

Slave masters of old, who owned black people were afraid of losing their investment if they were but so harsh with a slave. They were trying to keep black slaves intimidated but alive, healthy, and working in most areas. And during Slavery Part 2, the white 1-to-10-percenter was forced to turn to things like sharecropping and made black people debt-slaves.

And it was the poor and emerging middle class white that put black people in prison for loitering for the fun and status off it. Then the same rich white 5 to 10 percent was able commandeer prisoners during crop picking season  --another way the white rich commanded practically free labor with the help of the white poor.

When the white poor wasn't helping the white rich stay rich, they were looking to get a feeling back-- and they were more dangerous to black and brown people than the rich white people ever were. The white poor and white emerging middle class wanted their higher status back once official slavery was done. And creating the KKK, the black codes, and Jim Crow laws did just that.

 Racism is as logical as it gets. It always has been. And there are tons of white people trying to re-write history in such a way that whiteness, all whiteness, is not privileged. There are tons of white people who say, "My family was poor and didn't own slaves" in order to deny white privilege.

You tell these white deny-ers of privilege for me that, unless their parents worked along the Underground Railroad, their ancestors were slavery enablers that were twice as vicious and deadly as the richer slave masters and sharecropping plantation owners through the 1960s. 

So the central problem of this old Star Trek episode, which is very symbolic of white racial attitudes to this day, is that it attempts to make equal

those with the habit of sneering superiority,  domination, and destruction of lives

AND 

those with the habit of resenting those with powerful one that has a boot over your neck 24/7.


Making both parties, the oppressed and the oppressor, equally responsible and equally damaged in a racism, sexism, homophobia battle is why so many individual people cannot see the areas where they live comfortably as an oppressor among other oppressors.

Again, the oppression is made invisible to the oppressor doing the oppressing so they can feel good about themselves as they acquire more than their fair share of money, resources, power, recognition, etc.

When the oppressor makes his or her own membership 
in an oppressive group 
invisible to themselves, 
they can tell themselves, 
"I worked for every single thing I have. Nobody gave me a thing."

I wish I could say that it is only white people that have this habit of denying privilege and their sites of oppression. But that's not true. All of us do it. White people, especially white males, are just the ones doing it most effectively as far as taking more than their fair share.   


To be continued in

"DENIAL OF PRIVILEGE, IT'S NOT JUST FOR WHITE PEOPLE ANYMORE"

http://blackchickrocked.blogspot.com/2016/04/denial-of-privilege-it-isnt-just-for.html

WHITE TWITTER IN AN UPROAR OVER SNL DRUG ABUSE SKETCH

"SNL TRIED TO JOKE ABOUT THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC IN AMERICA. NOT ALL OF AMERICA LAUGHED"

~Washington Post Headline

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/04/17/snl-tried-to-joke-about-the-heroin-epidemic-in-america-america-didnt-laugh/?tid=sm_fb

Now that we've seen the video of the Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit, let's do a new headline on this story

SNL JOKES ABOUT WHITE DRUG ABUSE AND WHITE AMERICA SAYS,
"Hey that's about US dying of drug abuse.
That sh*t ain't funny!"

SNL's "Heroine A.M." skit hit too close to home with middle class white surburbanites.

It took me about 10 seconds to guess that this skit was about white people. I hadn't even seen it yet.

If drug abuse isn't funny to SNL's mostly white audience, then the drug abuse skit must NOT be about black and brown people.  

The word "epidemic" in the headline was the second clue. When black and brown folks are dying of drug abuse the words used are "lazy" and "irresponsible" and "lacking in self control" and  "stupid."

There's no drug abuse "epidemic" as if drug abuse is a disease when black and brown are concerned.

When I read a twitter comment that said that the people in Northern Kentucky were unlikely to think this was funny, I knew that this was a white folks thing.

Newsflash: Nothing that contains mocking white people or killing white people is funny.

The recent white twitter uproar over Bomani Jones t-shirt taught us that, yet again.

So now it's our turn to say, "Why are you so sensitive about everything? Why do we all have to be so politically correct? "


Do you remember when Whitney Houston and Phillip Seymour Hoffman died?

Whitney's death, in many white run mainstream news outlets was treated like "Oh what a shame she did this to herself." 

Hoffman's death was treated like, "Oh my gawd, who killed him. Who gave him those drugs. When is the murder investigation going to begin." Hoffman was a known drug abuser too. 

And now that meth and heroine have a serious hold on a certain segment of the white population, all of a sudden there the calls to treat drug abuse like a disease instead of a crime --like it used to be when white people were leading drug abusers back in the days of a drug called "laudanum."

Somebody call up White America and tell him that we can read between the lines just fine. Somebody tell White America that we see him, we hear him, and that the hypocrisy is getting tiring. 

Read More on

How White Users Made Heroin a Public-Health Problem

at the link belowhttp://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-heroin-and-race/401015/