NO GOLDEN GLOBE FOR BLACK PANTHER AS WHITE RACIAL FANTASIES WIN AGAIN

And as much as I was panting for BLACK PANTHER to win at the Golden Globes, I knew a superhero movie was a long shot --especially since the stars are all black folk. But GREEN BOOK winning instead?

Yet one more white redemption movie winning over the blackest movie I've seen in a while is just like the Hollywood White Elite choosing DRIVING MISS DAISY over DO THE RIGHT THING.
* * * * *

headline

How 'Driving Miss Daisy' Became One of the Most Scorned Best Picture Winners Ever

“When Driving Miss Motherf—-ing Daisy won Best Picture, that hurt,” director Spike Lee told New York Magazine in 2008. “[But] no one’s talking about Driving Miss Daisy now.” 

The filmmaker is hardly alone in his disdain for Bruce Beresford’s 1989 Oscar-winning adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play. And in fact, the few discussions that Daisy inspires nowadays often begin — or end — with a question: Was this the worst Best Picture selection ever made?

The choice caused controversy and skepticism even at the time, with the New York Times asking if the film had a “subtext that summons up a longing for the good old days before the civil rights movement.” And in the 25 years since it was released on Dec. 13, 1989, Daisy’s reputation has hardly improved. So how did the divisive little movie manage to win the most prestigious prize in cinema? And does it deserve the scorn it continues to attract today? 

...In fairness, it has its moments of complexity, most notably in the film’s best scene, as Hoke attacks his employer’s hypocrisy over not inviting him to attend a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. But on the whole, it’s a soft-focus, mostly unchallenging Stanley Kramer-esque take on...

race relations with a simplistic and rose-tinted view of the past...

I've said this about a number of movies and television shows. I'm going to say it again. If GREEN BOOK had come out in 1981, maybe this movie could be seen as a progressive race relations movie. But this came out in 2018. 

All GREEN BOOK reveals about our real world in the United States is how stuck white Americans are on re-shaping their racist past. That has to be what plucking the most rosy stories they can find about race relations are about.

It's not that all movies about race relations have to end in hopelessness. It's just that movies about white racists and regular black folk (not watered down, superstar-black folks like GREEN BOOK's Don Shirley) have to show racism being as ugly as it is. 

If you had blinked slowly three to four times during GREEN BOOK you'd miss the fact that Viggo Mortensen was playing a racist at all. And I think that's what white audiences loved about it.

I wound up watching this film with what seemed like all white senior citizens. The theater was packed too...in the late afternoon, when the gray hairs usually show up in force at the first matinee.  

That said, except for a few strongly cringy moments, it was entertaining --even to me. 
The whiten-folk of the gray hairs clapped at the screen when it was over, and did so for a long time -- which probably makes them representative of the same people who voted for DRIVING MISS DAISY and DRIVING MR DON SHIRLEY (GREEN BOOK) for best picture.  

And you know what?

Now that I think about Mortensen's very peacefully racist role -- especially considering he was kind-of a hood rat in the movie-- I'm going to say I was wrong. This movie would not have worked as a progressive race movie even in 1981.

That said, except for a few strongly cringe-worthy moments, it was very light and entertaining.  And if I didn't know what a Green Book was and how it came to be a life saving tool for blacks in the south (it didn't just save black folks embarrassment and mean-talk from racists like it did in the movie) I wouldn't have been angry when I left the theater. 

Yet I could have enjoyed the movie more 

if I both a) didn't know what the Green Book was 

and had also b) taken 3 or 4 long blinks, as described above. In this way, I'd have missed Viggo Mortensen being a racist altogether and everything would have been coming up disney for me too  -- just like it did for the white audience. 

And that's why this white redemption movie won the Golden Globe for Best Picture. 

But whiteness through rose colored glasses is never a good thing for white audiences. Never. And this is important, because it is white people who have a white supremacy problem to recover from -- and movies like GREEN BOOK drag white folks, as a group, backward instead of forward.

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

ELLEN DEGENERES ATTEMPT TO REDEEM KEVIN HART

In case you've been living under a rock: Kevin Hart was supposed to be hosting the Oscars. But then a hateful joke about LGBTQ folks was found, one where he joked about violence against gays...which are about as funny as lynching jokes.  Hart stepped down (essentially fired) from the Oscars gig.

Kevin Hart Steps Down as Host of the Academy Awards Moments After Refusing to Apologize

https://people.com/movies/kevin-hart-refuses-to-apologize-after-the-academy-asks-even-gets-fired/

The headline above is from December 6, 2018. Lately, Ellen Degeneres has decided to ride to Hart's rescue, minimizing what Hart said.

feeling rebloggy

“Moreover, the joke that is continuously brought up — a 2012 tweet in which he wrote, 

• "if my son comes home & try's 2 play with my daughter's doll house I'm going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice 'stop that's gay,'" 

— isn't merely a joke. It's making light of the real violence that affects black LGBTQ youth. There seems to be some misconception that the LGBTQ people upset at Hart were all white people, trying to bring a black man down and keep him from being the fourth black person to ever host the Oscars. 

This line of thinking imagines a world where there isn't a black LGBTQ community that is tired of heterosexual black men crying "racism" whenever something homophobic slips from their mouth...”

~hollywood reporter

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ellen-degeneres-kevin-hart-interview-was-an-insult-black-lgbtq-community-1173419?

It's rather ironic, that at the PEOPLE link above, the white hosts in the video clip suggest Degeneres should host the Oscars. Um...after this debacle, I think not.

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

Black Child Falsely Accused Of Grabbing 'Cornerstore Caroline' Says: I DON'T FORGIVE THIS WOMAN

Feeling Rebloggy 

Teresa Klein issued an apology after viewing surveillance video of Jeremiah's backpack brushing her backside as he passed her in the store. The video clearly shows Jeremiah's hands were in front of him as he passed her.

With tears streaming down his cheeks, a 9-year-old black child spoke out at a community meeting in New York about being wrongly accused of grabbing a white woman's backside in a corner store -- an incident disproved by security-camera footage. 

With his mother standing beside him, Jeremiah Harvey delivered a simple message at the community meeting: "Friendship is really the key." 

Jeremiah's emotional response came six days after Teresa Klein called the police and claimed the boy had grabbed her butt in a Brooklyn corner store Wednesday. 

~ABC NEWS

https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-woman-apologizes-alleging-black-child-assaulted-york/story?id=58505763

Good for him. She tried to Emmett Till this boy. 

We also know when someone actually wants forgiveness versus when someone is just seeking to throw kitty litter to cover up their crap. 

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

WHEN WHITE SUPREMACY BOTHERS THE MENTALLY LAZY WHITE PERSON

THIS IS WHAT YOU GET

This is billboard is really saying race isn't real which in turn means racism isn't real. This is saying what you see displayed as the r-word is just stupidity -- with no connection the power differential inherent in white supremacy

The real goal is stop all unpleasant talk around race. If you stop talking about race and admitting race exists, it won't exist. This is why countries like France and eventually Sweden stopped taking census and counting how many people there are in each ethnic group. 

If you don't count people, if you don't track what's happening by race then the fact that all dark beige people from middle eastern country X, who happen to be Muslim are mostly poor and taking of 70% of the cots in prison despite only being 1% or 2% of 7%  (WHO KNOWS what percentage) of the total population. 

The white perspective that says, "There's only one race the human race" is designed to get rid of the ability to see racism clearly, which in turn ought to stop those seen as non-white from being able to complain about racism.

That's why sociologists have identified this ideation as "Colorblind Racism" for more than a decade now.

...even though (mostly) white people who think they are allies to people of color can engage in this as fully as the alt-Right jack@$$ playing at semantics. 

Furthermore, it's also primarily white people who think getting rid of differences instead of learning to RESPECT them is a good thing.

This billboard represents the laziest white interpretation of "Race is a social construct" that there is. 

And it is a white privilege to believe this -- even if some non-whites are silly enough to believe in it too. Because it's only white people who will NOT lose their livelihood or literally die due to identifying and dealing with racism inadequately.


BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

*- a lot of white folks hate the sound of the word "racism" so much, they don't use it unless they see a person in a white pillowcase hood struggling to carry a two stories high cross on fire. That's why so many have been shocked by what's been obvious in Orange Chump since the 1980s. 

ON BEING BLACK WHILE PRACTICING WHITE PRIVILEGE

 REPOST FROM 2016

I've come to the conclusion that the word that best describes "white privilege" is "obliviousness."

White privilege is the ability to walk around oblivious to the fact that you are white because you're only around other white people 97% of the time seeing white images 98% of the time which is impossible for most of rest of us.  When you don't get to feel like a racial-other sometimes, you don't get to feel your race. You feel "normal" instead and like white is not a social construct as real as gendered behavior with very real social consequences like poverty, like stereotypes that kill you, or like stereotypes that your group uses to kill others, etc.  

The best part of white privilege is being oblivious to the fact that you can just walk around being you and never stop to think about your surroundings and how you are being judged just by walking around being you.

White people do not think of themselves as living in segregated neighborhoods, oblivious as they are of the fact that only 1 or 2 out of every 100 families is something other than white in their neighborhoods. So they are also oblivious to the fact that I might not want to water the plants in their home while they are on vacation, even though they don't live that far away, because I don't want to be shot on my way into the house or on my way out because their white neighbors know I don't belong there with my black self.


"White privilege" is the ability to be oblivious to the benefits of being treated like a normal person just because you are white.


So I decided to see what it's like to be white with regards to the Dallas Shootings of multiple police officers.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers

To be specific, I practiced white privilege by deciding to just watch the headlines about these shootings go by and not investigate or read much beyond the initial shooting.  

This means I saw things on television or heard stories on the radio in passing said "tsk-tsk" to myself and thought "that's a pity about their families." I might have had mental blip and a corresponding feeling regarding "thoughts and prayers going out to the families" of the slain. But, I can't quite remember. 

I just acknowledged that the shooting of the Dallas Police Officers was bad. But I did not spend one second listening to President Obama talk about how terrible the shooting was. I did not read one article about one officer. 

• I don't know if they were in their 20s or in their 50s. 
• I don't know if the cops killed were single, married, or bigamists. 
• I don't know if they had kids, were planning to have kids, or childless. 
• I don't even know if the funerals have taken place yet. 
• I don't know one of their names* 

(*= still don't know anything, not even now that I've reposted this in 2018)

Therefore, I don't have any nagging feelings about how stressed the families of the dead are. The families of the dead are nothing more than abstract concepts to me, not real people.

And, I don't have to care about abstract concepts.

So is this feeling of oh-well-violence-happens the way the white privileged person feels when it bypasses and overlooks racism to the point that he or she doesn't bother to notice the pattern in the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald, Miriam Carey, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tarika Wilson, Walter Scott, Natasha McKenna, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Alesia Thomas, Yvette Smith, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile? 

I know it takes an effort to seek out your own privilege, to find the benefits you receive in life just by belonging to a certain group.  I mean, why would you investigate what you perceive as "normal?"

And oppressed groups (demographics) use their oppression to refuse to look into their own privileged positions. I observe this in my own groups all the time.

• White feminists don't look for their white privilege because they know as women they are oppressed. 
• Black men don't look for male privilege because they know as black people they are oppressed. 
• White gay male people --overtly racist as hell I've discovered and sexist too--  don't investigate their white privilege or their male privilege because they are oppressed due to being gay. 
• Black women don't look for Christian privilege because they are oppressed as black people and oppressed as women. 
• White men don't look for their white privilege, their male privilege, or their Christian privilege because every political and non-political decision was made among them for centuries and now they can't even call the shots as to who will be president. 

Even though I could only practice a small section of white privilege, I must say I can see its benefits. Life feels a lot more peaceful when you are only looking at one side of a problem, your own side. The thing I can't make-shift-experience is the belief that there is only one side, the white side that you don't acknowledge as being "the white side" because you kinda-sorta don't believe race exists anyway

--because race doesn't really exist for YOU personally--because you don't experience being a racial-other by being surrounded by people not-white--because you don't have close relationships with people of other races where you'd go their home and become aware of differences you'd have to RESPECT

While I tried to experience white privilege by choosing to be oblivious, I think what I really did was refuse to engage, what W.E.B. DuBois called, my double consciousness as a black person.  

That is, I didn't engage the part of my brain that is on the outside of blackness looking in.  

I decide to only have an awareness of black people's feelings from the inside, I only had awareness of being overwhelmed by the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. 

By choosing to be oblivious, I did not have to think about how white people looking at Dallas felt about Black Lives Matter, how white people probably feel unfairly targeted since they are pretty much OBLIVIOUS to the patterns of black deaths at the hands of mostly white police.

Whatever my little experiment was or was not, being oblivious felt a lot better than "being woke."

So I guess my next question is this: 

How do we make obliviousness more painful than being woke for the white privileged?

I think maybe Donald Trump may be part of the answer. He is causing a lot of psychological pain for some white people, but not enough pain and not enough white people are being affected. A lot of white people are still able to make themselves believe, SOMEHOW, that Donald Trump just sprang up out of the ground without any contribution from the white population at large. 

I think it's true that some of racism can be solved by radical love, as Sadie Smith said in an interview once. I believe this. I've seen this. 

I've seen white women, white mothers to black children wake up to racism when they start noticing the obvious about how black people are treated. Maybe you have to love to care, you have to love to desire to look. But a white mother loving her children doesn't always work.

Some white mothers of black children are more dedicated to protecting their whiteness and the privilege and their rosy cheeked world view than they are their children --because they think they can just bestow (what they have not identified as) whiteness on their children --and SOMETIMES these white mothers do so, with the encouragement of a black male spouse that married her for the status of her white skin more than love.  

But I think radical pain is the other solution, maybe the bigger part of the solution. 

So how do we make obliviousness radically more painful than being woke for the white privileged?

This is the question we must work on. Donald Trump is providing an ugly mirror and psychological pain for white people-- that they are still running from. I think the other part of the pain comes from hitting white Americans in their pocket at every opportunity. That's the pain that counts in this country. We just have to figure out a variety of ways to do it.

As far as getting white cops and white-wanna-bes who are cops off us, I really think making sure that police union goes broke trying to pay off victim's families is the first place we should go. 

Someone suggested police having to have liability to "practice" police work. That's a good idea. That's the method through which you can break the police union which negotiates that the city pay victim's families instead of the police union making payment itself. By making the police union pay for liability insurance, the more they screw up (murder unjustly) the more they pay. And that will break the police union and remove its ability to hire an expensive lawyer that gets these murderers with badges off.

Ultimately, we need to find ways to follow the money and get it out of the racists pockets. 

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

DID DINO THE DOORMAN GET HUSH MONEY TO COVER TRUMP BABY MAMA DRAMA?

From THE NEW YORKER 

"Late in 2015, a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin met with a reporter from American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.

A few weeks earlier, Sajudin had signed a contract with A.M.I., agreeing to become a source and to accept thirty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to information he had been told: that 

A few weeks earlier, Sajudin had signed a contract with A.M.I., agreeing to become a source and to accept thirty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to information he had been told: that Donald Trump, who had launched his Presidential campaign five months earlier, may have fathered a child with a former employee in the late nineteen-eighties. 

Sajudin declined to comment for this story. However, six current and former A.M.I. employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared legal retaliation by the company, said that Sajudin had told A.M.I. the names of the alleged mistress and child..."

Read More: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-national-enquirer-a-donald-trump-rumor-and-another-secret-payment-to-buy-silence-dino-sajudin-david-pecker

Are you keeping score?

1. Stormy Daniels, the porn star got $130,000 to shut up about sleeping with Trump
2. Karen McDougal, the playboy bunny side piece got paid more indirectly for her story, which was squashed
3. Maybe there was a baby. Maybe there was an abortion. Who knows. But now we have Dino the Doorman who appears to have gotten $30,000 in "hush money" through the National Enquire's parent company AMI
Cheetolini is likely too rich to ever see the inside of a jail cell no matter what he's done. But does some of this constitute bank fraud for Cohen, Trump's lawyer? They're thinking he probably lied about why he needed a home loan. He probably didn't say I need the money to pay hush money to a porn star. 

And does paying multiple people hush money break campaign finance laws?


More importantly, who else has Cohen paid to shut up and about what?

I mean, how likely is it that Cohen is the Trump lawyer strictly in charge of paying off people that have to do with Trump's wandering limp lizard? 

I guess we know why Cohen was raided by the FBI, don't we? 

 * * * * *

ON A SIDE NOTE...

Do you know how fast President Obama would have been impeached if 1/10th of this kind of crap had come out about him? 

Trust me, white democrats would have been in line to hang him too. They'd have made sad faces while doing it, but they would have found it impossible to defend him. 

If you don't see this as white privilege in industrial strength action, you just don't want to see it.
BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM

ON JEMELE HILL'S LESS THAN TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO ESPN

Like most black folk, I don't think Jemele Hill deserved a two week suspension over two tweets ESPN didn't like on her twitter account.  

First of all, ESPN tagged her for a "second offense" when the first tweet about Trump was 

1) True. He is a white supremacist2) and within her rights as a free human being who lives in this country, no matter WHO she works for, no matter what she signed.

Trump is attacking black and brown people left and right. And those aren't so much political issues as they are personal, moral, and ethical issues... when you're on the receiving end. 

And, just like she said, in the second tweet ESPN objected to, I do think we should boycott the Cowboys after the owner quasi-unclearly-threatened to suspend players for protesting the national anthem. 

However, her getting so close to saying Boycott Football
Team X on her twitter account while working for ESPN? That was a step too far.

Hill's contacts and proximity to various football teams like the Cowboys came from her job. And her proximity to these teams and the industry gives her opinion weight. 

If I was in charge at ESPN, I would have called her on the carpet too -- for that all by itself. In my case, however, it because it was a first offense, not the second offense. Therefore, I wouldn't have given her a two week suspension. That's outrageous.  Maybe I'd give her a warning. Or maybe I'd giver her a one or two day suspension. 

Now some black folk want to stomp her for saying "I deserved it" and going back to work. Some are saying she copped out. 

Well, I too wish she'd have shut her mouth. She could have and should have gone back to ESPN silently -- especially since two entire weeks is unjustified. But I can't fault her for going back to her job. She wasn't 100% clean on this. And she has to pay bills like the rest of us.

WHITE PRIVILEGE IS...

...not walking by statues, school names, and monuments 
built to honor those who wanted your ancestors enslaved, tortured into submission, or dead 
on a daily basis 
pretending not to notice 
until you don't notice.

...is not having to train your face 
to not to respond even if something makes you re-notice 
a statue meant to honor someone that would revel at the very thought of the thought of your soul's destruction

....is telling a black or brown friend that you think confederate statues are no big deal and "just a piece of history" and feeling victorious when they silently nod or even agree with you because they're too deep in their denial to be honest.

...is not even hearing the bricks you're stacking, forming a wall between yourself and the rest of the non-white world because "I have a black friend."

History, good and bad, goes in books and museum. And when the evil are mentioned in books and museums their deeds are spelled out so that nobody mistakes them for a hero. 

As Takiyah Thompson said, we need to smash the symbols that give white supremacists power.

Those confederate statues need to be destroyed as do the confederate names on schools --where white supremacy is often taught in the classroom whether or not that school has a confederate zero's name on it.

That HBO series that wants the same white writers who have already made shabby use o brown people in GAME OF THRONES needs to be scrapped because they've already provided enough ambient white supremacy for Alt-Right Nazi's to thrive.

I wouldn't be surprised if GAME OF THRONES has just enough imagery presented in just the right way that it can be twisted into a white supremacists wet dream. 

#NoConfederate

BLACKCHICKROCKED.BLOGSPOT.COM




u

Y'ALL QAEDA FOUND NOT GUILTY OF FEDERAL CHARGES

And in more 
must be nice to be white news, 
this just came in...

Feeling Rebloggy

In a stunning loss for federal prosecutors, the leaders of a 41-day armed standoff at a national wildlife refuge in Oregon last year were acquitted of federal charges Thursday...

• The Malheur occupation began as a protest of the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers who had been convicted of setting fire to federal land. The occupation eventually drew right-wing anti-government protesters from across the U.S. to protest the federal government’s control of public land across the West. 
• The occupation, which starkly divided members of the rural towns outside the refuge, was eventually ended after federal and state law enforcement arrested the protesters’ leaders on a nearby highway. One of the occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, was shot and killed after he tried to escape law enforcement and reached for a gun, officials said.

Brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy and five others had been charged with conspiracy to prevent federal employees from doing their jobs by occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon’s sparsely populated high desert early this year.

I think the jury saw through this and saw these were well-meaning, well-intentioned individuals," occupier David Fry's attorney...

Read More About The White Privilege That Keeps On Givinghttp://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-oregon-standoff-jury-acquits-20161027-story.html 

MEANWHILE IN BLACK AMERICA...

Black Man is Arrested After Punching Child Molester on a Bus

"In a video that has gone viral, a New York City bus rider was arrested after defending a 15-year-old girl against a molester on a bus. Although the man’s name isn’t known, you can see him in the video above he punched the sexual predator. Apparently the man not only touched the girls neck, but also tried to kiss on her...

Read More, See Videohttp://www.clutchmagonline.com/2016/10/black-man-is-arrested-after-punching-child-molester-on-a-bus/

A MOTHER ON WHEN RACISM AND HER OWN PROTECTIVE WHITENESS BECAME REAL

As a white mother of two black children, three white children, who all have a white father, I have something to say.

Racism exists.

It is real and tangible.

And it is everywhere, all the time.

When I brought my boys home they were the cutest, sweetest babies ever. Wherever we went, people greeted us with charm and enthusiasm.

Well, not all people and not everywhere. But, to me, they were the “wacko” exceptions. I thought to myself, “Get over it.”  Now my boys look like teenagers. Black teenagers. They are 13.

Let me ask you these questions:

Do store personnel follow your children when they are picking out their Gatorade flavors? They didn’t follow my white kids.

Do coffee shop employees interrogate your children about the credit card they are using to pay while you are in the bathroom? They didn’t interrogate my white kids.

When your kids trick-or-treat in, dressed as a Ninja and a Clown, do they get asked who they are with and where they live, door after door? My white kids didn’t get asked.

Do your kids get pulled out of the TSA line time and again for additional screening? My white kids didn’t.

Do your kids get treated one way when they are standing alone but get treated a completely different way when you walk up? I mean a completely different way. My white kids didn’t.

Do shoe sales people ask if your kids’ feet are clean before sizing them for shoes? No one asked me that with my white kids.

Do complete strangers ask to touch your child’s hair?

Or ask about their penis size?

Or ask if they are “from druggies”?

No one did this with my white kids.


Did you tell your kids not to fight back because they will seen as aggressive if they stand up for themselves?

Have you had to honestly discuss with your husband whether you should take your children to the police station to introduce them to the officers so they would know your children are legitimate members of your community?

Have you had to talk to your children about EXACTLY what to say and not to say to an officer?

Have you had to tell your children that the objective of any encounter with police, or security in any form, is to stay alive?


It never occurred to me to have these conversations with my white children. In fact, it never occurred to me for myself either.

There is no question that my boys have been cloaked in my protection when they were small. What I did not realize until now is that the cloak I was offering them was identification with my whiteness.

As they grow independent, they step out from my cloak and lose that protection. The world sees “them” differently. It is sweet when they are adopted little black boys so graciously taken in by this nice white family. But when they are real people? Well, it is not the same. And they still look like little boys. What happens to them when they look like the strong, proud black men I am raising?

The reason why the phrase All Lives Matter is offensive to black people is because it isn’t true. Right now, in America, my black children are treated differently than my white children. So when you say All Lives Matter as a response to the phrase Black Lives Matter you are completely dismissing the near daily experience of racism for those with pigment in their skin, curl in their hair and broadness of their nose.

I am posting this so you can see the reality I have witnessed and experienced, because, frankly, I didn’t believe it was true until I saw it up close, directed at two souls I love, over and over again.

So, please, use this post as a pair of glasses to see the racism that surrounds you. Then we can actually make progress toward all lives being valued and cherished.

~By Kate Riffle Roper

TO WHITE PARENTS WITH BROWN BABIES, A POEM

I've always wondered what people of color do when they have a white parent that claims to be colorblind or willfully misinterprets "race is a social construct" into "race does not exist or it wouldn't if you'd just ignore it."

This poem, sort of, answers the question.

It is damn difficult to deal with white supremacy coming at you from every direction in society. I can't even imagine it coming at you from inside your own family. 

I tend to think Zoe Saldana making "Nina" is what you get when the kid doesn't recognize what these girls have recognized.
Of course, there are lots of ways a family can be dysfunctional, some having nothing to do with race. But in the case of a white parent (or a black parent for that matter) reproducing white supremacy inside your own home, that is a triple whammy, isn't it? For example, I could escape the family dysfunction by leaving the house.  If white white privilege and/or white supremacy is the family dysfunction, then leaving the house just puts you into a different version of the very same thing, doesn't it? 

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/