Thursday, June 30, 2016

Women Are “Brainwashed” Into Constantly Feeling Judged


Feeling Rebloggy


"Before I started my new album, I wrote a list of all the things that I was sick of," the 35-year-old explained. "And one was how much women are brainwashed into feeling like we have to be skinny, or sexy, or desirable, or perfect."


She continued:
One of the many things I was tired of was the constant judgment of women. The constant stereotyping through every medium that makes us feel like being a normal size is not normal, and heaven forbid if you're plus-size. Or the constant message that being sexy means being naked. All of it is so frustrating and so freakin' impossible.

Read More:

Monday, June 27, 2016

KING OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE PRAISES WILLIAMS BET SPEECH

AND GETS DRAGGED BY BLACK TWITTER


Williams’s wide-ranging speech paid respect to the black women “who have spent their lives nurturing everyone before themselves—we can and will do better for you”; name-checked those whose lives were lost in the struggle for racial equality, from Tamir Rice and Eric Garner to Rekia Boyd and Sandra Bland; and it took on how “this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil—black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”

Enter Justin Timberlake, he of “SexyBack” fame, who tweeted the following:


READ MORE:
Black Twitter had to inform Justin Timberlake that Jesse Williams was complaining about him among many white people who steal from us and give back nothing, not even much of a peep from him on Black Lives Matter. Most of us haven't forgotten the cowardice he showed during Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" either. 

First, Timberlake tried to be sarcastic when black twitter started going after him. Then he realized it was snowballing and tried to apologize. But even his apology tweet sound like "All Lives Matter" and "We're All One Race The Human Race" between the lines.






Is it just me or do the last four words mean "WHITE LIVES MATTER TOO" as if  white male lives don't matter first, middle, last, and always. Why didn't he stop this tweet four words sooner? Not that this would have compensated for decades worth of taking sans an ounce of giving. But, the wording is so awkward, it almost has to have some specialized meaning. I can't help but think he's one of those people who hears "Black Lives Matter" and thinks

"But what about us? The history books, the movies, the people who run our government looking 90% like me isn't enough. What about white people?"

Justin Timberlake probably just a simple-minded entertainer that was lucky to graduate high school. But I'm glad those who steal from us get handed their heads nowadays. It's the only way they will learn.

And if Timberlake does more than apologize, if he gets up off his imitation - of - black - life ass, admits he capitalized off black music ala Eminem, and consistently does something for Black Lives Matter from now until the day he dies of old age, maybe we can call what he did to rise to the top of the music world "cultural exchange" instead of calling it the "straight cultural theft" that it is for now.


JESSE WILLIAMS TRANSCRIPT: JUST BECAUSE WE'RE MAGIC DOESN'T MEAN WE AREN'T REAL





Jesse Williams won THE HUMANITARIAN AWARD at BET AWARDS yesterday for his tireless dedication to the Black Lives Matter Movement. And he made a powerful speech on race that is difficult to find on the internet -- for any length of time 


So please find the transcript of the speech below


This award; this is not for me, this is for the real organizers all over the country – the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. It’s kind of basic mathematics: the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now this is also in particular for the Black women in particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.

Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data, and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill White people everyday. So what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna have equal rights and justice in our country or we will restructure their function and ours.



Tamir Rice
Yesterday would have been a young Tamir Rice’s birthday so I don’t wanna hear any more about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then go on home to make a sandwich.

Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712.

  • Tell that to Eric Garner. 
  • Tell that to Sandra Bland. 
  • Tell that to Darrien Hunt.


Sandra Bland
Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money; that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone brand on our body, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies? There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front line of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s no tax they haven’t levied against us, and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here.

"You’re free," 
they keep telling us, 

but she would have been alive 
if she hadn’t acted so… 
free.



Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.

And let’s get a couple things straight, and this is a little sidenote: the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander, that’s not our job. Stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance,  then you better have an establish record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest in equal rights for Black people, then do not make suggestions for those who do. Sit down.



We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries. And we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations, and stealing them; gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.

The thing is 
just because we’re magic 
doesn’t mean we’re not real.



As the link below mentions, BET Awards are being seen by a wider and wider audience nowadays. This speech has gone viral already. That means the message of The Black Lives Matter Movement is still moving and growing. Do not under estimate the value of spreading the word on the movement.

Congratulations to Jesse Williams! 


http://uproxx.com/smokingsection/jessie-williams-speech-bet-awards/


HOW TO GET A BIKINI BODY FOR SUMMER

Feeling Rebloggy


My writeous bae and I recently went to Virginia and hubs wanted to spend a day at Virginia Beach. Initially, I balked at the idea. The past several months have been insanely busy for me and thus I haven't been able to exercise regularly. My eating habits have taken a turn for the worse, too, due to all the stress I've been under. So, needless to say, I've packed on a few extra pounds.

And to my mind this meant I didn't deserve a day at the beach. To my mind my body wasn't fit for swimwear.

Basically, I'm telling you I was being a bad feminist and a hypocrite.
Writeous Babe

Read More: http://www.writeousbabe.com/2016/06/how-to-get-great-beach-body.html

Sunday, June 26, 2016

MASS STABBING AT NEO-NAZI RECRUITMENT RALLY IN CALIFORNIA

Feeling Rebloggy 
At least five people were stabbed, with some injured critically, during clashes between rallying neo-Nazis  (Traditional Worker's Party) and counter-protesters at the Capitol in Sacramento on Sunday, fire officials said.



Five patients were transported to local hospitals with stab wounds, said Chris Harvey, public information officer for the Sacramento Fire Department. Several other people suffered cuts, scrapes and bruises but were not taken to the hospital, Harvey said.

~LA TIMES


So far, none of the victims is listed as being in critical condition. Now, we can compare the deadliness of a mass shooting and a mass stabbing and explain the obvious to those who still think "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is a  legitimate reason to not get assault weapons off the street. 
 



Matthew Heimbach, Traditional Worker's Party, recalls pushing a black woman at Trump Rally



Video Source: https://twitter.com/ABC10Frances

WHITE MAN SET FREE AFTER RAPING TWO WOMEN


A former Indiana University student will only serve one year’s probation, pleading guilty to misdemeanor battery after initially being charged with rape [and leaving a laceration of one of the women's genitals.]

John Enochs, from suburban Chicago, was charged last September with raping two women, with one alleged attack occurring at the Bloomington school's Delta Tau Delta fraternity house.


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/indiana-student-accused-raping-women-probation-article-1.2687426



Saturday, June 25, 2016

HEALING TOXIC MASCULINITY IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY





Masculinity is not inherently a bad thing, but when it’s about power & strength over everything else…it becomes toxic. Society allows toxic masculinity to run rampant, which feeds into misogynistic feelings towards women and a sexual assault epidemic.


How exactly does toxic masculinity 
feed rape culture?

And what can we do to detox? 




Friday, June 24, 2016

THE VAN DID IT THEORY SETS A THIRD FREDDIE GRAY DEFENDANT FREE

Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. a black man, is the third person to be acquitted of Freddie Gray's murder. And, as I recall, he had some of the most serious charges against him. It also seemed like he had the most damning witnesses lined up against him. I don't even know how to feel. But The Van Did It? That was a stupid approach from the start. I'll never be sure Marilyn Mosby didn't say what she needed to say to get the Baltimore Uprising to stop. She said the seat belt was the issue (twice during that famous press conference) when we saw Gray was BROKEN BEFORE THE VAN. And then she posted a field of 6 black and white faces together to seal the deal, to get those Black Lives Matter protesters to stop protesting, the same ones the then Black Baltimore Mayor, Stephanie Rawlings - Black, called thugs.


Black Faces In High Places


DO NOT MAKE US SAFE

We have to watch those black folks in place within the white supremacist system, which means we have to watch EVERY police department and prosecutor's office in the land. We didn't watch Mosby. And this case is falling apart in Chocolate City.

She may have had an impossible task. Maybe Mosby did the best she could, did the blackest and most devoted things she could. Maybe.
The answer
to this picture
is ALL I'm interested in
for now
Maybe I just think her case is idiotic but it was an innocent idiotic mistake. But i
f a white prosecutor had jumped up and said that the lack of a seatbelt broke Gray's neck so bad his neck felt like a bag of rocks, the van did it, and then produced some new black people we've never seen before AFTER watching Gray be dragged to the van, unable to walk, his head lolling off the side, there would STILL BE people marching in Baltimore to THIS DAY.


Even if Goodson turns out to be Uncle Ruckus come to life, the white officers who put Freddie Gray in the condition shown below should have been the ones with the most serious charges. There's no way a judge should have let one of the people who set this whole thing in motion walk away -- without a jury trial in Chocolate City. I don't even know what to think. I can't figure out how the police in charge of and driving the van would differentiate somebody who is drunk or high --which the that police van must pick up every other day-- from somebody who was beaten so badly the police van should have become an ambulance.
Only the people who beat Gray before putting him in the van would know that.


How was this case going to go any other way than the way it's going?


The judge for Goodson's trial said there were 5 plausible scenarios, based on what conflicting experts said, as to how Gray died. I also heard that prosecutors and the medical examiner argued about whether Gray's death was an accident or murder.

The thing that caused Gray's death, in my mind, was the illegal arrest. The top charge probably should have been some sort of manslaughter since I doubt anybody was going to be able to prove pre-meditation based on racism.
I'm so glad I wasn't on that jury. What a mess.
The only hope now is for "The Van Did It" prosecution to go away so she can focus on Gray's beating. Read More: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-ci-goodson-verdict-20160623-story.html * * * * * One or more of the white officers that made the arrest is still in line to go to court. However, I'm not sure either of them can be forced to sit before a jury. I'm not sure, but I think the cop gets to decide whether he wants a bench trial (judge only) or a jury trial in Baltimore. I have to find out.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

MAGNIFICENT MELANIN SOAKED WOMEN ARE EVERYWHERE!!!

Feeling Rebloggy
CLAP BACK IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL
SO GIVE THIS A READ

HA!




21 THINGS DARK SKINNED DESI WOMEN ARE TIRED OF HEARING


  •  “Make-up only suits fair skin, to be honest.”




Could you repeat that? Couldn’t hear you over the sound of my flawless eyeliner wings flapping.

  • “Don’t wear gold. It doesn’t complement your skin colour.”



I was expecting a “thank you” for letting you absorb my princessly radiance, so I’m a bit taken aback right now.

  • “You should try bleaching your skin. It totally works.”



Are you not getting that I’m reeeally comfortable in my skin?


One of the things I've come to realize: Women get bashed over the head with colorism in every community and in every country. So far, every country that has information out there on the net saying they don't have a racism or colorism problem (for women) is later found to be LYING.

If you're a dark skinned woman and you don't know what to say when the white person or the light person walks up on you, maybe the link below will give you a few more ideas
Read more here:  (Skip it if cussing the people who need to be cussed out, in style, bothers you)
https://www.buzzfeed.com/imaansheikh/dont-recommend-fair-and-lovely-thanks?utm_term=.yaKqyBqn9#.dfn5P65yL

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

SUPREME COURT: CT AND THE WHITE BOYS GUT THE 4th AMENDMENT

BAD NEWS FROM THE SUPREME COURT DESPITE BEING 
BALANCED

4 PROGRESSIVE APPOINTEES
TO
4 CONSERVATIVE APPOINTEES




This wasn't supposed to happen. Everything I read said the white republican senate refusing to interview President Obama's Supreme Court Nominee wasn't going to make a real difference because the court is balanced 4 progressive appointees to 4 conservatives appointees.

It wasn't supposed to matter because President Obama has been stacking the lower courts with progressive appointees. This was supposed to mean that any Supreme Court decision that resulted in a tie, 4 to 4, was supposed to result in one of those progressive courts getting to make the final decision.


And that's what should have happened in this case.

To be specific, a lower court decided in a Utah case that a cop's illegal search made the evidence he collected no good. The Supreme Court's decision should have been tied, 4 to 4, allowing that lower court's decision to stand.


But Justice Stephen Breyer, supposedly a progressive white male judge, aligned himself with CT and white male conservative justices and decided that police officers can use evidence they obtained without the of a benefit of a legal search and seizure -- because white males don't get searched and beaten illegally during routine stops in cars or on the street? 

Breyer  joined the 4 conservatives voted to gut the 4 amendment. The final supreme court vote was 5 to 3 instead of 4 to 4. 

Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government.  It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrantsstop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment

"[I]n a thundering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor....“The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights,” she wrote, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong.”
Later, writing only for herself, Sotomayor also added
"By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but."






IN OTHER WORDS, 
BLACK AND BROWN LIVES MATTER 
TOO!


Warning: Extreme Sarcasm


I'm no legal scholar but I think this means that the legality of Freddie Gray's initial stop is now moot. Well....the legality of stopping Gray was already a moot point thanks to the prosecutors "The Van Did It" argument. But now I'm wondering if the cops having no legal right to stop Gray is even an arguable point for the trials anymore. That bad arrest was the beginning of the end of Gray's life.



Whether or not the knife in Gray's pocket, that the police didn't see due to lack of x-ray vision, was a "legal" or "illegal" knife makes no difference at all now, right?


So now, I guess it's a good thing the prosecutor said "The Van Did It" (in order to stop the Baltimore Uprising with an even mixture of black and white defendants?) Her putting the people responsible for Gray's death in jail is now independent of the bad arrest based on a bad search, isn't it?

By the way -- If anybody does any jail time at all for Freddie Gray's death, it's probably going to be one of the black people who did not beat up(?) then drag Gray's already broken body to the police van.

 

The other silver lining is this:

Now that a cop can just keep stopping  you over and over again, several times a week, for no reason at all until they find something on you --that they can make up a story around-- they should be satisfied with just putting us in jail instead of shooting us while unarmed.

People who can convict a Black Lives Matter activist trying to stop what she considered an ill conceived arrest FOR LYNCHING can do whatever the hell they please.


rant complete 

* * * * *

Sonia Sotomayor is one of my feminist heroes. She wrote a separate piece on the injustice of this decision and made it clear that this bad decision, despite affecting a white male in this particular case, was going to target black and brown people the most. She quoted James Baldwin, Michelle Alexander (who wrote The New Jim Crow) and  Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote "Between The World And Me" lately) 

One by one, she ran through instances of a Supreme Court all too willing to grant police more power to detain, arrest and search citizens — based on pretextual reasons, the way they look, or even suspicion that they had broken a law that doesn’t exist. 

She underscored that all bets are off once a person is caught in this system.

“Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the ‘civil death’ of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check,” Sotomayor wrote.
What happened here is making me wonder about President Obama's choice for the Supreme Court.

Merrick Garland is supposed to be palatable to the republicans because he's worked with democratic and republican administrations. I don't know what Breyer's record looked like by comparison, but the lack of empathy and foresight demonstrated by Breyer, as a heterosexual white male that probably feels immune to the outcome of this horrible decision, makes me nervous. And if the republicans can't hold up a nominee forever, then why not keep presenting judges as far left as you want until they have to choose one? Why take a chance on putting another Breyer on the Supreme Court....for life!!!


Garland's record probably doesn't matter to republicans anyway. I suspect that the only thing that matters is that our president is black. They can't possibly believe Hillary will lost to Trump. And even if some do, the republicans want Trump to pick the next Supreme Court Justice? Really?  Even they can't be that crazy, can they? Or maybe they think they can make Trump implode before their convention and put somebody else on the ticket?

In any case, I want to see if our first black president turns out to be the first one in history to have a Supreme Court Nominee ignored and ignored for so long. President Obama nominated Merrick in mid-March of 2016. Here we are more than 3 months later, and from here it looks like there's been zero movement in the republican side of our government to restore the highest court in the land to full functionality.

Seems to me we're being told on all sides Black and Brown lives do not matter one bit to conservatives and Stephen Breyer.








Tuesday, June 21, 2016

JASMINE RICHARDS FREED AFTER CONVICTION FOR FELONY LYNCHING CASE

Feeling Rebloggy
"In California, Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Richards, whose conviction on a charge known up until recently as "felony lynching" sparked protests around the country, has been freed. Police had accused Richards of trying to de-arrest someone during a peace march. She was released Saturday, less than two weeks after being sentenced to 90 days in jail, minus time served. She is due back in court next month for pretrial hearings in two other cases."



http://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/20/headlines/black_lives_matter_activist_jasmine_richards_freed_from_jail_in_felony_lynching_case

Monday, June 20, 2016

DISAFFECTED WHITE PEOPLE ELECTION 2016



After reading and reading and reading the craziness surrounding the election, I've come to the conclusion that this presidential race is, for the white majority, about their disaffected-ness.





The words "racism" and "racist" are carefully written about by about half the non-professional white people pontificating about Trump in online magazines and articles. The rest of the white people writing on Trump avoid talking the racism of his followers altogether by using the words "disaffected voters" a lot.

I am trying to figure out what white people have to be disaffected about but I find it fascinating to watch whiteness protect itself from consciousness when Trump is such a blatant racist. Even white republicans are having to say thing that essentially mean, "Yeah he's a racist but he's better than Hillary." White republicans never admit anything having to do with race -- like ever.

t
So if you want to watch white people talk about "disaffected voters" without mentioning "white people," "whiteness," "racism," and also racist speech as a sign of  a lack-of-political-correctness, personal freedom, and bravery, then go check out any social media page that is pro-Donald Trump. That's where the racists-that-don't-know-they-are-racists pump one another up. 
You can also read the more centrist white liberals doing their version of the same thing in regards to Trump.

Even I have been amazed at how whiteness is protecting itself this election season. The levels of denial are beyond anything I could have imagined. I'm wondering if Nixon and Ronald Reagan are looking up here at Donald Trump right now wondering why they bothered being subtle with "Southern Strategy." 

A couple of months back there were white people sitting on the political fence right now trying to decide between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders -- not between Hillary and Bernie, that wasn't a typo-- The "disaffected white people" were trying to decide if their final presidential vote should be for Trump or Sanders. 


 I know. I know. I know. I thought this was insane too. 

White people thought that the choice between these two white men was a choice between two white men who 'refuse to play the same ole Washington game.'  

To a bunch of the political "Independents" who think belonging to the group called "Independents" makes them "independent" thinkers, Trump is just anti-political correctness. His racism is not real in their minds or doesn't matter. I don't know. I can't begin to figure out how a mind like that works. And I've been living around white people for a long, long time. So that's saying something.

White the young wanting to follow Sanders, may be multi-ethnic (though I heard very few to none of his entourage in California was non-white at one stop), a lot of the counties in New York and California that Sanders won during the primaries are pretty close to pure white, almost as white as the state of Vermont, which he moved to in 1968 after his stint in the Civil Rights movement.


And when Bernie says something that indicates paternalism is his form of negative race based thinking (racism), he is "tone deaf" while his followers are also "disaffected." 


This mural is not "real" but that's not the point.
The point is why this mural was photoshopped this into existence

This is an example of "paternalism" -- a word that needs to be brought back into favor.
All well-meaning white people need to understand it thoroughly.  

If reality was reigning in the minds of most voters and the really wanted change, somebody about halfway between Hillary and Bernie would be wound up running on the left. And someone between Trump and an orangutan wold be running on the right. 

Sanders and Trump are too far outside the current system to have any effect on it at all unless you put all the congressman all the lobbiests and all the CEOs paying the lobbyists on a spaceship designed to crash and explode on Mars. I don't care how much I like Bernie's ideas, 80% of them are unworkable without an interim step and an ability to shut up about the an end game that's unpalatable to the rich.

That is, if you're going to make college free by taxing the rich, you'd damn well better not announce it ahead of time. You'd have to hide that and find some other way to appeal to a young base.
Somebody half way between Hillary and Bernie would have been smart enough to articulate an interim steps on Sanders various ideas, 50% of which would have taken less than 4 years complete which requires some sort of buy in from Congress.  The way Bernie has shot his mouth off at the people that pay Congress people to run, he'd be lucky to get 1/3 of Democrats to follow him.

Bernie has been making campaign promises that indicate he thought he was running for King instead of President.

Hillary may be lying but she knows she's lying, therefore her lies are smaller, and she'll throw us, her constituents, just enough bones to hold us all together.  We're going to get less out of her than President Obama but more than we would have out of Bernie, in my opinion. 


I say this because Sanders couldn't even get the political big shots in his own state to follow him. They supported Hillary instead. To me that means his potential effectiveness was always close to zero

I hope Bernie has at least softened the ground for the next democratic presidential hopeful. If Elizabeth Warren or Michelle Obama (let me dream) run for president one day, they now know what is popular. They can add the idealistic to what is pragmatic and make some real changes, not that we have to wait for the president to change. We can change congress by voting too. In fact, that's probably slightly more important -- for so long as Trump isn't elected president.



So I'm back to wondering what white people have to feel disaffected about.

Yeah, President Obama didn't put the banksters in jail. I knew they weren't going. They have more power than us and will continue to have more power than us until we find a way to break their hold on our congressman.
(I almost think the left and the right would have to agree to come together for a season and vote all the incumbents out at once)

But President Obama got Universal Healthcare put together, such as it is, avoided a second depression 7 years ago, the economy is currently good by comparison, and he put the Fair Sentencing Act in place as well as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

So what have white people got to feel so disaffected about? 

Maybe seeing black faces in the White House for 8 years straight has made some white folks realize that their normal (unacknowledged white privilege) is disappearing?  

I truly tend to think that this is where most of the disaffected feeling is coming from in white people. 

Usually, white people are fairly content if their money isn't funny. And it's not right now. Our money, the economy is supposedly on track. And they aren't the ones being mowed down in the street while unarmed, by police officers. They aren't being arrested for lynching without a knife, a gun, or even a fist in sight. 

So where is this disaffected-ness coming from? A disaffected-ness so intense it makes Trump look reasonable and not racist? 

I can't help thinking that Oscars-So-White (years 1 and 2), The Tea Party, Donald Trump, and even the paternalistic Bernie Sanders are all coming from the same disaffected white place in white folks's  hearts.

But maybe that's just me.

I don't do coincidences too much. And too many things, all leaning in the same direction, have happened over same eight year time period.


MAY THE FORCE BE WITH US ALL THROUGH THE END OF  THIS ELECTION

Saturday, June 18, 2016

HONORING THE DEAD AFTER THE CHARLESTON BIBLE STUDY MASSACRE


The Charlie Hebdo Mass Shooting in France was called a "massacre" on some news sites. At the time, I wondered why since "only" 17 people were killed. I wondered because I thought "massacre"  required massive numbers of people to die.  So, I looked up the definition of "massacre."  






MASSACRE  - . 1 : the act or an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings  under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty (Miriam-Webster Dictionary)

What Dylann Roof did was massacre people. And I hope he is punished accordingly. He walked into a church with the people pictured above. He was invited to join their bible study. Then he stood up and murdered them.

The hate that grew Dylann Roof to manhood has yet to be addressed. But one of the outcomes of the Dylann Roof shooting was that some white people decided to stop pretending that the KKK's favorite flag isn't a symbol of hate and desire to wage war against all American ideals, and Black American people specifically.  Some southern states removed the symbol of hate from their state buildings. Bree Newsome became famous for taking down a hate flag in South Carolina 

Last week, even the very white Southern Baptist Convention took a vote and decided that their churches should not fly the KKK flag on their grounds anymore -- which falls squarely in the middle of the **better late than never** category.

These silver linings may seem small. But a review of history should reveal to most that taking the enemy's flag, removing and destroying your enemy's symbol is part of wounding the heart of your enemy, which is part of eventually defeating your enemy.

But now we should look for something bigger to honor our dead. 

THE VICTIMS
  • Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd (54) – Bible study member and manager for the Charleston County Public Library system; sister of Malcolm Graham.
  • Susie Jackson (87) – a Bible study and church choir member.
  • Ethel Lee Lance (70) – the church's sexton.
  • Depayne Middleton-Doctor (49) – a pastor who was also employed as a school administrator and admissions coordinator at Southern Wesleyan University.
  • Clementa C. Pinckney (41) – the church's pastor and a South Carolina state senator.
  • Tywanza Sanders (26) – a Bible study member; grandnephew of Susie Jackson.
  • Daniel Simmons (74) – a pastor who also served at Greater Zion AME Church in Awendaw.
  • Sharonda Coleman-Singleton (45) – a pastor; also a speech therapist and track coach at Goose Creek High School.
  • Myra Thompson (59) – a Bible study teacher. 

In light of the latest mass shooting, courtesy of Omar Mateen, we should look to getting a more realistic gun control law passed

I am hardly alone in thinking this. And to that end, someone wrote an article asking "What Will It Take To Scare America Into Gun Control"  The author, a black man and a gun owner, wondered if every black man from the age of 18 to 35 joining the NRA would change gun control legislation.


I immediately concluded that the author of the article -

1) doesn't know white people "ain't" thinking about us, what black people do or don't do,  they are only ever thinking about themselves
2) is looking at the wrong end of the gun.
Years and years ago, Farai Chideya wrote the book "Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans" Within this book she made the case that it is not the nature of the perpetrator that determines the time served in jail for a crime. It is the race, gender, and age of the victim that determines sentencing. 

That is, it is the social worth of the human being that's been harmed that determines sentencing. And I propose to you that it is the social worth of the human being that determines almost everything in this country -- and that includes the future passage of some sort of realistic gun control.


Prior to warehousing black people for crack, I'd say that Chideya's claim was true, that the race, gender, and age of the victim was the determining factors of social worth and therefore sentencing after a crime in the United States. And I'd say her hypothesis remains true when you talk about a person's crimes against other people.

Think about it:
If a black person shoots a black person, that person may be out of jail in a relatively short period of time. But if somebody shoots and kills a white man, if ANYBODY shoots and kills a white man, that person may never see the light of day again. 
Compare Other Demographics:
The Brock Turner and Bill Cosby cases, both, should have already told you that white women are not important. A white male police officer raped a (white?) woman while arresting her in Alabama and his proposed sentence was 6 months last I heard (Samuel H. McHenry, look him up) .


Brock Turner getting 6 month sentence should tell you that white men are very important; his father wrote in that his son shouldn't go to jail very long over "20 minutes of action" and the white male judge agreed. Turner ought to be out in 3 months with good behavior. The number of white male mass shooters that white male police were able to take custody of alive should also tell you white men are important as well.


I was shocked when Chideya said, in her book, that you can tell that children are almost worthless in our society too. She said you can tell by looking at the jail time people get for abusing them and killing them.

Unless there is a lot of news coverage on a certain child abuse or child murder case, I'd estimate she is absolutely correct. Do you know that as many as 6 men turned a blind eye to Jerry Sandusky sexually abusing young boys?


If Adam Lanza had lived after the Sandy Hook shooting, he probably would have stayed in jail forever due to large number of white children he killed generating outrage due to high profile news coverage.  However, even though Lanza died, you can still see that white children are worth virtually nothing when you look at the Sandy Hook case. Changes to gun control laws were still successfully blocked by the NRA and gun lobby, again.

Do you know what all this means?

Let me tell you what it means: 



Children are nothing. 
White men are everything.  


I thought I believed Chideya's stats and her conclusion that it is the victim's status, the victim's social value that determines sentencing after a crime. But I didn't REALLY believe how completely valueless everybody is in the United States, except for white men, until Sandy Hook came and went, two dozen (mostly) white children were dead, and there wasn't a dramatic change to gun control legislation.

So the answer to the question "What Will Scare America Into Real Gun Control" is not changing who has access to guns because...


White men ain't thinking about black men. 

They are thinking about themselves 

As usual  


If black men bought guns in huge numbers and followed up by joining the NRA, the white powers that be would simply change the  laws in such a way that black men went to jail in disparate numbers while white people did not despite having done the similar crimes -- same as they did for drug users of (black folk's) crack versus (white folk's) powder cocaine.

So, if I'm reading Chideya correctly, we have to look at the other end of the gun, the part where the bullets come out.


Conclusion: The thing that will scare America into gun control is about two dozen white men lying dead as the result of two or three mass shootings where white males were specifically targeted. 

Now that I think of it, there has to be a white male on the other side of the gun too. If a black, brown, or Muslim person targets and shoots of a group of white males, the NRA, the gun lobby, and those of Donald Trump's ilk will explain the shooting away using some ethnoracist / religious stereotype.


Revised Conclusion:  The thing that will scare America into gun control is a bunch of heterosexual white men dead at the hands of a few Adam Lanzas and Dylann Roofs but not Omar Mateens

If the right and new atheists successfully put this lastest mass shooting off onto Mateen's being Muslim, the fire of outrage over easy access to guns is going to go out.

Don't let it happen


We don't really want to wait for another shooting.  And we don't have to wait for that. We can vote and write letters and sign online protests demanding that our legislators get some sort of national gun control in place. It should be at least as hard to get a gun as it is to drive a car. Licensing, insurance, and also some sort of two week to one month waiting period so that we can truly research who it is that's buying a gun. And anybody who needs more than a handful of bullets outside a shooting range ought to live on a farm or something.

Let's get moving. Sign a petition. Go to a protest. Find a way to apply pressure on our congress. 



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