I'LL BE HERE WHEN THEY COME FOR ME

Feeling Rebloggy
Can I step into my vulnerability for a minute? 

In the struggle to fight for the freedom of all, I must admit that I get scared.

I get scared that [many] white folks will never understand, thus they will never do, speak or listen better. I get scared that many black men will continue to march for each other, stepping on black women’s mouths and backs in the process. I get scared that many of my people will forever remain complacent. I get scared that for every person committed to learning and doing better, there’s more people committed to not caring at all and bashing those who do. I get scared that feminism will run people away when it’s meant to bring everyone together....

Fear hemmed me up when I learned of an Afghan family forcing their daughter to marry her rapist and father of her children. I felt the scratch of its callous-ridden hands around my neck again when only a spoonful of people showed up to the vigil held for Rekia Boyd, the black girl killed when a police detective let off 5 shots into a group.

~ The Color Lilac

READ MORE

http://thecolorlilac.com/2015/06/03/when-they-come-for-me-afraid/

WHITE IGNORANCE MATTERS

LINKING WHITEWASHED TEXTBOOKS
AND WHITE VIOLENCE
This is what is being taught in a Texas School in 2015. And since most school textbooks in U.S. come out of Texas, it might be in one of your children's textbooks too.

Slaves are identified in a section on "immigration" as "workers" that appeared in the U.S. to work on plantations.

But I submit to you that it is of limited importance that this is being taught to black children.


If you as a parent of black child have any sense at all, your black child knows better. But this book pours gasoline on white-on-black violence. This book and thousands of books just like it help to create the situation we have now.


There are actually white people who actually believe that Irish indentured servants and black slaves were treated equally.  Some of these same white people brag about their Irish ancestor's ability to overcome...as if their ability to be absorbed into whiteness had nothing to do with the current success of the Irish.

Identifying the white indentured servant and black slave as social equals who received equal oppression is colorblindness at its most foul.

More importantly, it is ignorance like this that produces a white base from which white extremists like Dylann Roof can mentally feed.  





The ignorance in books like the textbook shown above produces a percentage of population that watches a "Fox and Friends" segment about how Black Lives Matters is all about black folk out-victiming everybody else which makes the Black Lives Matters Textbook something that undermines the black community INSTEAD OF something that is educational and desperately needed by the white community.


Bottom line is this: White Ignorance Matters because White-On-Black Crime Is Rampant Yet Not Being Identified As Crime.


Ben Affleck lying about his slave owning heirs is part of that perpetuation of ignorance.  Henry Louis Gates Jr failing to be a gatekeeper may not be the bigger part of perpetuating white willful ignorance, but Gates' betrayal was the most galling to me. We, as black people, cannot afford to help white people maintain their ignorance of their own history.

The truth being kept twenty steps removed from white children explains a lot about how white adults can claim such astounding amounts of racial ignorance in the face of the deaths of so many black people at the hands of police.  To some of the white and willfully ignorant, black deaths at the hands of police are simply coming out of nowhere....instead of being a 400 year continuation of the same-ole-same-ole.  




BUT ONLINE PROTEST WORKS

McGraw-Hill, the publisher of the textbook said the following: 

"This week, we became aware of a concern regarding a caption reference to slavery on a map in one of our world geography programs. This program addresses slavery in the world in several lessons and meets the learning objectives of the course. However, we conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.

We believe we can do better. To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor. These changes will be reflected in the digital version of the program immediately and will be included in the program’s next print run.

McGraw-Hill Education is committed to developing the highest quality educational materials and upholding the academic integrity of our products. We value the insight the public brings to discussions of our content"

https://www.facebook.com/McGrawHillEducation/posts/1056963857671901


Clearly, this statement should be considered back-pedaling UNTIL WE FOLLOW THROUGH on making sure that McGraw-Hill actually follows through on making changes to their textbooks.

Question is, how do we do it? How do we follow up and follow through on applying pressure to McGraw-Hill? To tell the truth, I'm wondering if we can move Textbook creating out of Texas altogether.  Texas and Florida have a certain reputation with people of color and it's an ugly one. 

Texas Approved History Books

In case you didn't know, most of our nations textbooks are made in and influenced by Texas

Read More On The Texas Textbook Problemhttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/

RACISM DISGUISED AS ADMIRATION, THE MODEL MINORITY MYTH

"Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?" 

White people like LUUUV asking this question. It's been asked and answered again and again for DECADES, ever since the term "Model Minority" was created to reference Asians supposed rise sans any white racist interference (<--not true).  And Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times asked this question yet again on October 10, 2015, which just happened to be on the same day as THE JUSTICE OR ELSE MARCH in Washington D.C.


But before we go on, a definition: 
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minority-myth/ 



Now, let me write the question that these gutless I'm-not-a-racist posers really want to ask and answer for themselves in public, as often as possible: 

"If we white people are so racist in this country 

and holding non-whites back, non-whites like 

Blacks, 

Latinos, 

Native Americans, 

Pacific Islanders 

(pssst---and darker-skinned Asians) 

then why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

My question back at Kristof is this:

If Asian American are so successful (and white racism so non-existent a barrier) then why, according to a EEOC website, are Asians sometimes 1) complaining about discrimination at a rate higher than black people? Have double digit poverty rates? Have their kids grades drop to "normal levels" once they are three or four generations removed from the people who did the immigrating( <--from my personal experience as an aide at a highly rated high school)?

1) 

"In a survey conducted by the Gallup Organization which sampled employees’ perceptions of discrimination at work and the effect those perceptions had on performance and retention. The data showed that while much progress has been made in fulfilling the promise of equal opportunity, more remains to be done. The survey data (released in December 2005) indicated that 15% of all workers perceived that they had been subjected to some sort of discriminatory or unfair treatment. When broken down into sub-groups, 31% of Asians surveyed reported incidents of discrimination, the largest percentage of any ethnic group, with African Americans constituting the second largest group at 26%."  http://www.eeoc.gov/federal/reports/aapi.html

I can't find the graphic, but less than a decade ago Asians filed more EEO Complaints than any other ethnic group. The stereotypes that white people love about Asians --non-confrontational, non-assertive-- etc keep them doing the drudge, repetitive labor (since they won't complain) and from being put in charge of anything (since they aren't leadership material)

2)
And whenever you hear about Asians and their low poverty rate, most of the time they must be averaging these numbers across the country instead of looking at poverty rates where Asians actually live in large numbers after entering the country. When I spoke to an Asian Charity representative a couple of years ago, she told me the poverty rate for the Los Angeles area  was 19%. (I thought it was single digits. Guess I bought into the myth too--despite riding through poor Asian neighborhoods regularly) This article with poverty rates adjusted for geography, says the nationwide rate is upwards of 16%

Once adjusted for household size and geography, the poverty numbers shift considerably. 16.1% of Asian Americans live in poverty as opposed to 10.4% of whites. And the numbers are growing fast. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/data-shows-duality-asian-america-high-income-high-poverty-n190031

3)

It isn't just poverty rates that are growing fast. Average type grades are coming on them fast too because it isn't just Asians that have stars in school when their family first gets to the United States. Lots of new immigrants have star pupils in school when they first get here. Work hard and win are what immigrants are told you must do to achieve the American Dream, especially as an outsider.  It's not until they've been here a few generations that they are just as dumb as every other American. But it does not take a few generations for them to figure out they are going to have to work hard AND file complaints about discrimination in order to be promoted as fast as the white guy in the next cubicle over. (See the EEOC link above)


That is, white supremacy is affecting Asians negatively too. That Model Minority Myth itself is holding them back.  But Kristof's that Asians are unaffected are based on the usual garbage--

"It's because of Asian culture!" - LLAG

And this white man, Kristof, is reaching for these claims for the usual colorblind, non-race-based reasons too, as *Love Life Of An Asian Guy* explains below: 

"See, this is the sh*t that perpetuates the white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Don't believe me?

Check it out:

Claiming that Asian affluence is attributed to Asian CULTURE indirectly implies that Black CULTURE is also the reason for Black oppression. This line of thinking was THE EXACT REASON why the model minority myth was created. It wasn't created to make Asians look good, America created it during the Cold War to excuse anti-Blackness. America was being criticized HEAVILY for their mistreatment of Black folks and in return, they said, 'But, our Asians are doing just fine! Trust me, it's just a Black thing.' "

- LOVE LIFE OF AN ASIAN GUY

READ THE ENTIRE LIST
https://www.facebook.com/theLLAG/posts/915602888531191

RECIPE FOR EXTREME VIOLENCE: WHITE HISTORY, ROSE-COLORED GLASSES, AND TONS OF GUNS

I grew up with guns. Country guns. Shotguns. .45s and .38s and beer cans on fence posts. That was back before public gun violence became a daily routine. If somebody got shot, it was a drug deal or domestic violence. There were guns all around me, practically under my pillow, and nobody got hurt. No one I know ever threatened another person with a gun. The few violent men I knew fought with their fists. Pulling a gun to settle a score wouldn't be worth the shame. Guns were for targets and critters. It seems like some kind of mythical world now.

From my experience traveling in northern Europe consistently the past few years, I offer a theory that is beginning to take shape in my mind. I'm in the UK now; their gun laws are famously rigid. The Olympic pistol team had to leave the country to practice. Intentional homicide rate is maybe a third to a quarter of the U.S., but I don't think the stringent gun laws are entirely responsible.
More interesting to this essay are other countries I've been to regularly: The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland. Canada is notably similar in that there are a lot of guns, but not much gun violence compared to the U.S. Almost every grown man in Switzerland has an assault rifle issued by the military. They have gun festivals with shooting competitions for the kids.
All these countries also take care of their citizens. You can go to school, see a doctor, or take a year off work and have a baby without worrying about losing your home or other financial catastrophes. Taxes are high, of course. Gotta pay for that stuff. Canada is closer on the scale to the U.S.: lower taxes and less social spending than most of northern Europe, but more than the U.S.
In the U.S. you are mostly on your own. If you have a strong family and/or community, you're set. If you don't you're screwed. 50% of foster kids become homeless when they turn 18. Three million U.S. citizens are homeless. That's one percent of us, sleeping on the ground, going to jail to get a decent night's sleep and breakfast. College? You know how that goes. I have friends in their forties who are finally paying off their student loans. Need mental health care? That's not covered. The ACA is not a national health care plan. It's a way to force everyone to pay for the same miserable shit that was available before. Very few people are better off with it. I'm one of them and I can still see it's a bad deal for the country. If you lose your job in the U.S., it can be life-threatening. How would you react to a life-threatening situation?
When millions of people live close to the bone in a country that doesn't seem to care about them, and the most effective weapons in the world are widely available, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to paint the resulting picture. It's not much harder to own a gun in Germany than it is to own one here. We have laws that prohibit convicted felons, the mentally ill, and non-citizens from owning guns. There are loopholes, but that's also true elsewhere. For instance, self-defense is not an acceptable reason to own a gun in the Netherlands, but being a member of a shooting club is. If you want a gun for self defense, you join a shooting club. Duh.
The availability of guns seems to be a problem in our country, but not a problem in others. As always, extreme viewpoints are suspect- "Guns are the problem" is just as extreme as "I should be able to openly carry an assault rifle into a department store." We do have laws. Colorado, one of the most gun-lovin', property-rights-conservative states in the union, passed a great piece of legislation after the school shooting in Columbine, legislation that was successful largely because part of its focus was to protect the rights of gun owners.
I appreciate everyone's passion on the issue. Sharing links from far-left and far-right sources is not likely to generate a productive discussion. Real people don't think that way. Real conversations don't happen in platitudes and memes.
Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms. Elected officials have a directive to ensure public safety. Humans have a responsibility to take care of each other. We're not all keeping our end of the bargain. I think socialism and the second amendment ought to meet and work things out. Education, health care, and a living wage might make guns fun again.
I'm not a political guy but it seems important to talk about this national crisis- a spiritual crisis, really. Does this sound foolish to anyone? Does it feel like a new way of looking at it? Did anybody else have a time in their lives when guns were kind of innocent and fun?
*************
Please no yelling, name-calling, or other horseshit on my Facebook page. Imagine we're all gathered around after a funeral. Because we kind of are. Just share and let share. Thanks.

J B

This reportedly southern white man is saying the same things a more "woke" northeastern white man, Michael Moore, has said already if you take all of his documentaries combined.

Unlike Michael Moore, this white man doesn't appear to understand that you can remove the guns from U.S. citizens a lot more easily than you can remove the American-ness from U.S. citizens.

Guns are THE PROBLEM until you somehow change the influence of 400 years of history that shaped this individualistic, turn a blind eye to everything that doesn't affect you-and-yours culture into what it is.

As a white man he may think all this self-centeredness, spiritual deficiency, unrelenting competitiveness, raging entitlement, and aggression is recent in those that have plenty. But as a black woman I can assure you that all of this has been present in since the first European set foot on this land now called the United States.


A friend of mine, a white woman from Scotland, thinks that the most aggressive of the aggressive came to this land from Europe and Britain in the first place. And may be that IS the difference between Europe and here.

Or maybe predominantly white Europe has done so much killing of one another (England, France, Germany, Spain wars over centuries) that they have a different cultural maturity (for lack of a better phrase) regarding violence. And more recently, experiencing white-on-white violence in the form of the Nazi's in person may have chilled most of them most of the way out.


But these cultural violence theories explain the difference between Europe/Britain and the United States. But these theories do not explain the difference between Canada and here. Canada actually has more guns and much fewer shooting deaths and mass shootings. I'd have to know more than a thimble full of information about Canada to even be able to guess. But this guy has not found the answer. He's taken his rose colored glasses off about the present but not the past.


This exactly what happens when you only know history from a white perspective When the fact that that this country was founded on genocide and slavery slips your mind (especially in the South - damn), you can think the world was wonderful just a short time ago. 

We don't even have to talk about the current, fake drug war and the imprisonment of black people. When you white wash history you grow up thinking white people didn't find ways to extend slavery, almost exactly as it was, via prisons like Parchment Farm and convict leasing through 1970s. When you white wash history you erase the same desperation, poverty, hopelessness, and lawlessness that white people executed and experienced when they first landed here in 1600s, 1700s...1800s (There wasn't a bunch of kumbaya sentiment between the various groups white folks when they first got here. They fought, robbed, and murdered--- tried to do it to those that didn't look like them. But they weren't always successful. Furthermore, they counted people like the Irish as non-white until they couldn't separate them out as easily) 

And if cannot see this country's history as it really was then you will refuse to see the culture that history built. And this culture combined with access to millions and millions of guns and bullets leads to high numbers of deaths by guns.

When gun deaths are seen as primarily among black people in poor neighborhoods, then white news outlets say black culture is defective instead of gun deaths being caused by the desperation and hopelessness that comes with extreme poverty. But when the shooting deaths are among white middle class who have enough, if not everything they need, you can't see that this predominantly white culture is defective -- not even knowing that this predominantly white culture was built, relatively recently, on genocide and slavery?

* * * * *

Let's make the gun problem smaller.  Let's use smaller numbers to make the problem more accessible and the personal threat more real. When there's only 1000 people for murderers, mass shooters, and the mentally ill to pick from, you know that  you or somebody you care about will eventually be shot to death.

Example:  If a fifth grader wanted to stop shooting deaths among a population of 1000 that she herself lived in --even after seeing ten other populations of 1000 people in them not-experience  anywhere near the same  number shooting deaths-- she would know to remove the easy access to guns and figure out why her 1000 people are different from the other groups of 1000 later. 

A fifth grader should be able to figure out that cops and military need rapid access to guns. The rest of us can wait to be screened, registered, and insured. And there's no need for anybody, outside of the military and cops, to have access to more than x bullets outside of a shooting range.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE DAY instead of COLUMBUS DAY come to SEATTLE

Feeling Rebloggy

Rehashing all of his crimes would require a much longer article, not least because evaluating the claims of contemporary primary sources is a somewhat tricky historiographical enterprise. Philadelphia Magazine's Michael Coard has a good survey here; Howard Zinn's work on this is controversial but you can find a good excerpt at Jacobin, and an illustrated version at the Oatmeal. 

Here are just a handful of specific cases, mostly culled from Laurence Bergreen's recent biography, Columbus: The Four Voyages, of almost unimaginable cruelty inflicted by Columbus and his crew during their time in the Caribbean.

D Matthews At VOX.COM

9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel

Read it for yourself:  http://bit.ly/1v3Ew5j


AND


More On Seattle's Decision
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/10/12/354274630/seattle-swaps-columbus-day-for-indigenous-peoples-day

PROSECUTOR MANAGES TO GET TWO REPORTS SAYING SHOOTING A 12 YEAR OLD OKAY

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said a grand jury will decide whether Officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback, will face charges.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/10/us/tamir-rice-shooting-reports/




But McGinty has collected two reports that defend the police officers actions...in his own mind.




To me this means a regular jury is going to have a hard time to deciding, based on common sense, that the officers actions were not reasonable.  That is, even if we get past the grand jury stage, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys are going walk into court believing the same thing: The officers responded appropriately. 


Why did the prosecutor publish reports he got? If the objective was to find out how hard his case would be to prosecute and it's still a grand jury decision to indict, then why publish the reports? What kind of transparency deliberately taints the grand jury or a regular jury? This should have been a defense attorney maneuver not a prosecutor's 


I've said it before. I'll say it again. The prosecutors, who work hand in hand with police most of the time, should NOT BE the ones to prosecute their buddies on the police force when things go wrong.  

As tragic as Tamir Rice's death is, I am genuinely having a hard time imagining him running around with a toy gun or understanding how real or not real it looked. But I STILL want a real prosecutor to prosecute a real case and make a real effort with a real jury of our real peers (a significantly black jury) so I can find out exactly what happened. 

As far as I'm concerned the prosecutor just old me the Tamir Rice case is all but done. The prosecutor has all but said the cops are innocent.   That means that there is nobody motivated to advocate for justice on this boy's behalf. 

And let's get real here. These cops shot their gun(s) within two seconds after arrival. In my mind, that means they shot without thinking at all. If it actually turned out the result was justified you STILL can't say their actions were. There was no thinking involved in this shooting.  

REVIEW
- The police got there.

- They saw dark skin and a gun (not realizing it's a toy gun) 

- They shot within 2 seconds. 


And keep in mind, one of the cops had been forced to resign from another police force http://abcnews.go.com/US/cleveland-cop-toy-gun-killing-resigned-previous-job/story?id=27352626

As I understand it, the police illegally drove onto the playground, closing the distance, and creating the danger they were supposedly afraid of. They fired their guns, as a result, within two seconds.  I cannot imagine these little white girls being shot in the same manner if they had real guns.

From Does 2nd Amendment Apply To White People Only
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-boykin/does-the-second-amendment_b_5676447.html

There are pictures of white grown folk walking around in stores with guns exercising their 2nd amendment rights. They are very occasionally arrested in states without open carry laws, but for the most part they have not been shot. We hear about innocent whites being shot over and over and over again. When Seymour Phillip Hoffman accidentally killed himself with a drug overdose, the predominantly white press was looking for someone to blame for weeks.

The Tamir Rice Case deserves a real prosecution effort too. And as of now, it doesn't look like we're going to get one. The Cleveland Police Department already responded to a lawsuit saying Tamir Rice caused his own death ---inside 2 seconds of arrival of the police. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-tamir-rice-lawsuit-blame-cleveland-20150302-story.html

At the very least, McGinty has damaged the jury pools so badly that I think we're all but done here.  We might go through the motions, but it looks like Tamir Rice is going to be found guilty of causing his death. The prosecutor has taken 3 out of 5 steps in that direction by publishing the reports that defend the officers' actions.  



We better stand up and hollar if we want to change the direction of this case.

TAMIR DEATH VIDEO - http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2014/nov/26/cleveland-video-tamir-rice-shooting-police

JUSTICE OR ELSE 10-10-2015

from Ebony Facebook --  Original Million Man March? - https://www.facebook.com/ebonymag/photos/a.108173732536210.11898.107831749237075/1013461228674118/?type=3&theater

Feeling Very Rebloggy

Thousands of African Americans gathered Saturday at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March amid calls for reforms to the flawed criminal justice system, and changes within the black community itself to help stem the tide of violence. Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, who launched the first march, is slated to lead the anniversary event called "Justice or Else." In many ways, the event served as a continuation of the National Black Family Reunions started Dr. Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women.

Read More http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/10/_million_man_march_20th_anniversary_images.html

Minister Louis Farrakhan delivered remarks on civil rights and race relations at the “Justice Or Else!” gathering, which was held on the National Mall to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?328654-1/millions-justice-march

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/10/us/million-man-march/

Thousands pack D.C. for 20th anniversary of Million Man March Part 1 

Multiple Videos

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/10/washington-dc-million-man-march-20th-anniversary/73728720/

Thousands pack D.C. for 20th anniversary of Million Man March Part 2 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/10/09/million-man-march-part-2-anniversary/73557688/

ELAINE BROWN EXCORIATES THE NEW BLACK PANTHER DOCUMENTARY

Minimizing the role of Huey Newton, founder of the Party, along with Bobby Seale, Nelson elevates the role in the Party of Eldridge Cleaver—who individually did more to try to destroy the Party than the U.S. government. This elevation of Cleaver is a clue to the point of Nelson’s “documentary”—to produce a piece of provocative propaganda worthy of the FBI itself. Though Cleaver was but a fleeting darling of the establishment press who was in the Party for no more than a year or so before being expelled, footage of Cleaver and “Cleaverites” overwhelms almost half of Nelson’s two-hour film.

While referencing the COINTELPRO operations of the FBI, which has been well-documented to have had the goal of discrediting, disrupting or destroying the Black Panther Party, Nelson reduces the massive, brutal effort by the U.S. government to destroy the Party to the story of traitor William O’Neal, who infiltrated the Illinois Chapter of the Party as an agent of the FBI. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/03/ex-black-panther-leader-elaine-brown-slams-stanley-nelson-s-condemnable-documentary.html

REPORTING WHITE NEWS WITH TENDER LOVING CARE

Maybe a decade back, I remember reading this story about how two rival "groups of teens" from two different high schools have had "run ins" before. I started reading the story in the middle of the newspaper for whatever reason. Something must have caught my eye.

So I'm reading about this tragedy of misguided youth. Then I finally read that one of these "kids" has been stabbed to death.

You know I had to run, get another paper with a photo, just to confirm with my own eyes that these "teens" that have "run ins" and are now stabbing one another to death are white, right?  And once I confirmed all this tender loving concern for the stabber and the stab-ee was about whiteness, I scanned each article thoroughly for the word "gang."  I did not find it.

So here we go again.
This time there was a "cocaine apartment"? (What in the entire hell is a "cocaine apartment?") Whatever.  In this latest version of "SAVE THE WHITE PEOPLE" there's a "cocaine apartment" instead of "drug den" full of "high society members" instead of "drug dealing thugs."

words and photo from the Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/05/doctor-overdoses-at-high-society-nyc-cocaine-apartment.html

And look at the description of the person that O.D.ed:  “A beautiful Long Island dermatologist and mother of three died after a night out partying."  If that doesn't scream "WHITE" at you, nothing ever will.

And a police source said, " Word is she likes to use drugs” instead of saying anything that might imply "It's a shame that this irresponsible crack ho died but think about what she won't be able to expose her children to anymore."

Do you remember when the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman ("Hunger Games") died? Not only were there calls to arrest the drug dealer for Hoffman's MURDER, there was all this concern that heroine addiction was just too available and out of control. The more realistic folk were like he was an O D just waiting to happen, but the white outrage was louder.  I was actually waiting for charities and kick-heroine specific halfway houses to be constructed in every neighborhood there for a minute.


Compare!!!

When Whitney Houston died x months earlier than Hoffman, the newspapers essentially opined, "What a shame she did that to herself?" and  'Here! Look at the ugliest pictures of her we could find over the last year of her life. look Look LOOOOOK!!!!!'  And when Houston's family was looking to blame someone else for her giving the the drugs she wanted that day, there was complete silence and/or pity from news outlets INSTEAD OF an escalating echo of their outrage in larger and larger news outlets. 


Did you know that when drug addiction was white it was looked upon as an illness instead of a character flaw?

One of the more famous drug addiction epidemics made it's way through white women during 1800s. Laudanum (opium) was a popular treatment for all kinds of fictitious white female ailments. And there was great concern that white women would be lured  (and "outraged") in "Chinese Opium Dens."

https://www.cnsproductions.com/pdf/Aldrich.pdf

From the Victorian Era now, the theme has always been the same "WE MUST SAVE THE WHITE PEOPLE"  And every mistake, failure, or crime is a matter of misunderstanding and illness rather than character.
You know what I'm thinking?


I'm thinking that treating drug addiction as a serious illness and a social disease that must be eradicated in order to save us white folk reduced that particular drug addiction epidemic, especially among white women.  So now I'm wondering how many black people would have survived the 1980s and 90s had crack addiction been treated like an illness and a social disease with the potential to affect us all instead of a character flaw that's somehow an expression something on the DNA of the entire black race? (Of course, you also would have to have found a way to break the link between crack sales and our apparent funding the Contras in Nicaragua but that's a story for another time. https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/a)

 And if a modern mechanism had put in place to deal with waves of drug addiction epidemics, wouldn't there be fewer dead white meth addicts too? Wouldn't dealing with crack in the black neighborhoods have prepared all us Americans together for whatever comes next? There's always a next? And whatever it is that comes to get us always comes to get white people.

Always.

There was an attitude of containment, as far as drug addiction goes, as early as the 1950s and 1960s when it looked like only black people were dying. Then when little white Johnnie died of an overdose in Wisconsin all of us sudden Nancy Reagan was trotted out with "Just Say No" to drugs...while the sales of crack cocaine in black neighborhoods were funding  "Freedom Fighters" in Nicaragua.

GROWING UP BLACK IN NEGROLAND

"NEGROLAND, A MEMOIR" BY MARGO JEFFERSON IS ABOUT 1950s CHICAGO.  AND THE HISTORY OF THAT TIME AND PLACE IS SOMETHING WITH WHICH I'VE RECENTLY BECOME FAMILIAR.
Between the lines of the Ida B Wells biography "Sword Among Lions", the self-creation of the black elite in Chicago can be seen fairly easily. I'm guessing that Margo Jefferson's parents would have been teens or young adults during the time of Ida B. Wells and the Black Women's Club Movement. 

 Class is touched on from time to time in the biography about Ida B Wells.  However, Ida B's  "respectability politics" falls away more and more as she gets older...while it does not fall away for others.


Yet class, respectability politics, and colorism is not dealt with a directly as it seems "Negroland" will.  Again, colorism is touched on in "Sword Among Lions,"  but not in a significant enough way for me to expect to find the  pictures I found at the center of the book.


 I was shocked to see that most of movers and shakers of the black women's club movement (Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, Josephine Bruce) were all pretty close to Margo's shade. And preference for whiteness wasn't just about skin shade in the late 1800 and early 1900s (just like now).  The black women, unlike black men, were so white-featured that black and white photographs made it extremely difficult to tell which women were white and which were black.

And the author's tendency to not mention the race, in some spots, made it difficult to figure out who was firmly for the progression of the black race and...

1) who was a well-intentioned white ally OR
2) a self-serving white ally OR
3) a black respectability politician gone rogue.


But it was quite interesting, once I'd seen the pictures, to understand how a black woman possessing white beauty aesthetics could translate to marrying well which could then translate to power within the Black Women's Club Movement and Black Women's Suffrage.  And according to Margo's interview below, this pattern continued for decades.

On the beauty standards Jefferson held herself to as a child.

I'm measuring my shade of brown. I'm measuring the width of my nose. I'm measuring the size of my lips. I'm doing the usual things that girl do — what shape are my eyes, are they big, are my features well-proportioned ... and I have an exact series of grades for hair as well as shades of skin. And [these standards] extended beyond my world — they really hovered over and imposed themselves on all Negros, black people, African-Americans. It was ruthless, it was mean-spirited, it was bigoted.

We were brain-washed into one standard, not just beauty, but acceptability. There is a terrible kind of anthropological "othering" and disdain in those kinds of judgments.

~NPR

I don't think it's just a strange coincidence that I just finished reading a fictional book about a boy, barely a teenager, becoming a Nazi in WWII Germany. It seems God arranged that I just read about how the Nazi's measured every aspect of a soldier's body to confirm the biological "reality" of race and also racial supremacy. They measured arms, legs, and penises and also foreheads, nose length, and nose angle. 

That sounds so crazy, doesn't it? 

Actually taking a ruler to body parts makes the Nazi's sound like they were insanely evil.  But when I was a young kid in school I heard white people say they could tell "Jews" by their "hook noses."  I never could see it. And I looked. I looked hard. I couldn't really tell the difference between Jewish and Italian noses (the other big white ethnic group where I grew up).  

But we all have the ability to do the similar measurements with our eyes and not acknowledge that we're doing it.


We also have the ability to treat people differently according to class while not "seeing" that we are doing so.

I'm going to read this book and see what else is passing right under my nose without me noticing. 




A link to her book is here:

Listen to her interview here http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/09/08/438536006/privilege-and-pressure-a-memoir-of-growing-up-black-and-elite-in-negroland