warmly embrace a racist novel (to kill a mockingbird)

(source)

I refuse to go along with this week's warm, feel-good celebrations of Harper Lee's novel (published fifty years ago today), To Kill a Mockingbird. Simply put, I think that novel is racist, and so is its undying popularity. It's also racist in a particularly insidious way, because the story and its characters instead seem to so many white people like the very model of good, heartwarming, white anti-racism.

A few days ago, NPR (National Propaganda Public Radio) aired a typically laudatory piece on the novel, voiced by reporter Lynn Neary. As usual on the soothing, soporific NPR, this piece was filtered through, and aimed toward, a well-educated white perspective. These implied people are all too happy to be reminded that racism is a thing of the past, and that things are oh so much better now. The writers of this NPR segment were careful enough to interview some black teachers and students about Lee's book, but if any offered significant criticism, their perspectives were left out.

The segment begins,

Harper Lee had the kind of success most writers only dream about. Shortly after her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, came out in the summer of 1960, it hit the bestseller lists, then it won a Pulitzer Prize, and then was made into an Oscar-winning movie. Her novel has never gone out of print.

But, in a move that's unheard of in this age of celebrity writers, Lee stepped out of the limelight and stopped doing interviews years ago -- she never wrote another book. Still, her influence has endured, as we mark the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.

NPR's print version (entitled "50 Years On, 'Mockingbird' Still Sings America's Song") goes on to say,

For the high-schoolers reading To Kill a Mockingbird today, America is a very different place than it was when Lee wrote her novel 50 years ago. Lee's story of Scout Finch and her father, Atticus -- a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man unjustly accused of rape -- came out just as the nation was fighting over school desegregation.

That's right, dear, lily-white NPR fans. Things were sooooo different back then, weren't they? Thank God racism is dead!

Actually, that right there is the first reason I think this novel is, in effect, racist -- it allows, indeed encourages, today's well-meaning white people to think that "America is a very different place" than it was when Lee wrote her novel, and thus to think that widespread and deeply entrenched racism died a long time ago.

The novel came out, you see, "just as the nation was fighting over school desegregation." Back in the bad old days, when "the nation" was "fighting"; why not say that mainstream white supremacists, with the support of most white Americans, were keeping black kids out of school while bashing in the heads of their adult parents and relatives? And come to think of it, the heads of those black kids too? But nowadays, you see, "the nation" embraces its black kids.

By way of driving home that particular, comforting implication -- "Fortunately, we all pretty much get along now!" -- Neary sets her story in a racially mixed, seemingly postracial classroom:

Today, in a 10th grade English class at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., students of many different races and ethnicities are studying the book together. Their teacher, Laurel Taylor, says that the story still resonates -- and with students of all backgrounds.

"Trying to find your identity and realizing that your society doesn't always tell you the right thing" is a particularly profound message for teens, Taylor says. "Sometimes you have to go against what everyone else says to do the right thing. All that kind of resonates no matter where you come from."

This part of Neary's segment clarifies the second problem I have with how the novel comes across to so many American readers -- its messages get read as "universal" -- "To Kill a Mockingbird can teach anyone how to be a better person!" I suppose that's a nice message, but when people claim that the novel's messages can be embraced by anyone, the realities of white supremacist violence, past and present, fade from view.

Neary carries on about the book's widespread appeal -- which somehow circles right back to white people:

"The story of Scout's initiation and maturing is the story of finding out who you are in the world," says author Mary McDonagh Murphy. "And at the same time, the novel is about finding out who we are as a country."

Murphy's new book, Scout, Atticus & Boo, is based on interviews about To Kill a Mockingbird with well-known writers, journalists, historians and artists. Murphy says the novel, narrated from a child's point of view, gave white people, especially in the South, a nonthreatening way to think about race differently.

Yes, "we" wouldn't want white people, the principle enactors of racism, to feel at all "threatened" when we try to talk to them about racism. I guess if we did, they'd just up and run away!

Anyway, I could go on dissecting the saccharine nostalgia of this NPR piece (and I should add that, to Neary's credit, she does get around to injecting some realism, especially by mentioning the horrific and iconic death of Emmett Till). But I'd rather turn to a more critical and insightful view, of both the novel and its effects on different readers.

In a 2003 academic article (published in Race and Class), Isaac Saney wrote about successful black efforts against Lee's novel in Nova Scotia, efforts undertaken because it's a racist novel. In 1996, "intense community pressure" by the African Nova Scotian population managed to remove the novel from the Department of Education's list of recommended, authorized books; in 2002, a committee consisting of parents and educators, seconded by members of the Black Educators' Association (BEA), recommended that the book "be removed from school use altogether."

A report (by the African Canadian Division of the Nova Scotia Department of Education) "laid out the community's concerns":

In this novel, African-Canadian students are presented with language that portrays all the stereotypical generalizations that demean them as a people. While the White student and the White teacher many misconstrue it as language of an ealier era or the way it was, this language is still widely used today and the book serves as tool to reinforce its usage even further. . . .

The terminology in this novel subjects students to humiliating experiences that rob them of their self-respect and the respect of their peers. The word 'Nigger' is used 48 times. . . .

There are many available books which reflect the past history of African-Canadians or Americans without subjecting African-Canadian learners to this type of degradation. . . We believe that the English Language Arts curriculum in Nova Scotia must enable all students to feel comfortable with ideas, feelings and experiences presented without fear of humiliation . . . To Kill a Mockingbird is clearly a book that no longer meets these goals and therefore must no longer be used for classroom instruction.

So aside from the multiple usages of the n-word, what exactly is it about the book that provoked such a strong black revulsion? (And I do not mean to imply with this question, of course, that I think all black readers respond to the book in just one way.)

After reviewing common white distortions in the media of this collective African-Canadian complaint,* Saney goes on to offer three primary and compelling reasons of his own for knocking To Kill a Mockingbird from its lofty perch:

1. A common reading of its central symbol (mockingbird = black people) degrades black people.

Is not the mockingbird a metaphor for the entire African American population? [The metaphor says] that Black people are useful and harmless creatures -- akin to decorous pets -- that should not be treated brutally. This is reminiscent of the thinking that pervaded certain sectors of the abolition movement against slavery, which did not extol the equality of Africans, but paralleled the propaganda of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals, arguing that just as one should not treat one's horse, ox or dog cruelly, one should not treat one's Blacks cruelly. 

By foisting this mockingbird image on African Americans, it does not challenge the insidious conception of superior versus inferior 'races', the notion of those meant to rule versus those meant to be ruled. What it attacks are the worst -- particularly violent -- excesses of the racist social order, leaving the racist social order itself intact.

2. The novel's noble, white-knight hero has no basis in reality, and the common white focus on the heroism of Atticus Finch distracts attention from the pervasiveness of 1930s white-supremacist solidarity among ordinary white people.

Central to the view that To Kill a Mockingbird is a solid and inherently anti-racist work is the role of Atticus Finch, the white lawyer who defends Tom Robinson, the Black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Atticus goes so far as to save Tom from a lynching. However, this act has no historical foundation.

The acclaimed exhibition Without Sanctuary: lynching photography in America . . . documented more than 600 incidents of lynching. This landmark exhibition and study established that 'lynchers tended to be ordinary people and respectable people, few of whom had any difficulties justifying their atrocities in the name of maintaining the social and racial order and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race'. In two years of investigation, the exhibit researchers found no evidence of intervention by a white person to stop even a single lynching.

(In sum, the noble, persistent, obstinate activism of Atticus Finch -- which garners the collective respect of the town's black people -- is a soothing white fantasy.**)

3. The novel reduces black people to passive, humble victims, thereby ignoring the realities of black agency and resistance.

Perhaps the most egregious characteristic of the novel is the denail of the historical agency of Black people. They are robbed of their role as subjects of history, reduced to mere objects who are passive hapless victims; mere spectators and bystanders in the struggle against their own oppression and exploitation.

There's the rub! The novel and its supporters deny that Black people have been the central actors in their movements for liberation and justice, from widespread African resistance to, and revolts against, slavery and colonialism to the twentieth century's mass movements challenging segregation, discrimination and imperialism. . . . The novel portrays Blacks as somnolent, awaiting someone from outside to take up and fight for the cause of justice.

It was African North Americans who took up the task of confronting and organising against racism, who through weal and woe, trial and tribulation, carried on -- and still carry on -- the battle for equal rights and dignity. Those whites who did, and do, make significant contributions gave, and give, their solidarity in response.

Yes, in response. I put those words in bold print because when I first read them, I realized just how white-centered the novel and movie are. I think that had it not been for the movie, especially Gregory Peck's depiction of Atticus Finch, the novel would not have the status it has today. Peck's Finch, in his upright disdain for racism, fully embodied a particularly white and male aspiration of liberal nobility. But he does it all on his own; it's white individualism all over again. And, ironically, non-white people are part of that portrait, but only as props, as accouterments that flesh out the portrait. Any black unrest and activism that would no doubt have inspired and aided any such white crusader is entirely erased.

Despite these faults, and others, To Kill a Mockingbird continues to be among the top three most-taught novels in American middle and high schools (another, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tends to be taught in similarly fantasized terms). Saney makes the sensible suggestion of supplanting such white-centric readings on racism with some more honest and black-affirming books, such as Ellison's Invisible Man, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved, and many others. I would add that many worthy novels were written throughout the twentieth century by other non-white writers as well.

So, what do you think? Do you have warm memories of this (white) "masterpiece," or not-so-warm memories? If you have read it, do you think your race had anything to do with your reaction to it?

Also, should teachers should stop teaching it? Or teach it differently? And do you know of other worthy replacements/successors?




* Saney writes that in the white-dominated Canadian press,

The arguments advanced by the Black community were consistently presented in a non-serious, even risible, light so as to give the impression that the Black educators and parents are ignorant of the merits of literature, mere emotional whiners and complainers, belonging to a hot-headed fringe. For example, after the decision was made to keep the books in the curriculum, the Halifax Daily News in an editorial was 'relieved cooler heads have prevailed', reproducing the racist notions of inherent Black emotionality versus the rationality of white society.

** In a New Yorker piece published last year, Malcolm Gladwell claims that Finch did resemble an actual white antiracist of sorts, Alabama Governor Jim Folsom. Even so, since Folsom was a sort of wishy-washy populist of all the people, rather than a genuinely dedicated reformer, the parallel still leaves Atticus Finch looking less than worthy of emulation. As Gladwell writes, "If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict [against Tom Robinson]. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds."

fear black men (oscar grant open thread)

Oscar Grant
(February 27, 1986 -- January 1, 2009)
(source)

I'm following Average Bro's lead here in opening up the comments to your thoughts and feelings on yesterday's Oscar Grant verdict. Given the racially disproportionate rates at which police brutality continues to occur in the U.S., there's a great chance that if you're white, your feelings are different today from those of a lot of non-white people. Especially a lot of black people, who still suffer the most from police harassment and brutality, as well as the more general American fear of black people.

At "The American Prospect," Adam Serwer made an especially good point yesterday, in a piece on common white fears of black men -- how they likely played a part in Oscar Grant's death, and how the justice system ended up ignoring, yet again, the ongoing history of America's murderous fear of black men:

Today Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer who killed Oscar Grant while he was lying face down and handcuffed in an Oakland train station, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter -- his crime, according to the jury, was negligence in not knowing the difference between his heavy black gun and his light yellow tazer. Of the possible outcomes Mehserle was facing, involuntary manslaughter was the best he could have hoped for short of acquittal. He faces a maximum sentence of four years for the original crime, possibly more for the use of a firearm.

I want to focus for a moment on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle's fear of Grant and his friends was "unreasonable." It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle's fear? That was reasonable.

Fear is at the core of questions of justice involving the deaths of black people at the hands of the authorities in the United States of America, dating back to when Toussaint L'Overture put the fear of G-d in slaveowners by revealing that their "property" might someday rise up against them. L'Overture still has that effect on some people. Following emancipation were the days when "justice" was meted out in the South by terrorists posing as vigilantes. Even then, when such atrocities were an accepted part of black life, people inside and outside the South found ways to sympathize with the anger and fear white Southerners felt towards their black neighbors -- The New York Times editorialized in the 1890s that no "reputable or respectable negro" had ever been lynched.

Even decades after the Civil Rights era, a cop shooting an unarmed black man is barely a crime -- a 2007 ColorLines investigation of police shootings in New York City found that in 12 instances when the victim was unarmed, only one officer was found criminally liable. There hasn't been a murder conviction on a police shooting in Oakland since 1983. As Kai Wright wrote in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict, "American law has been sanctioning the killing of black people to mollify white fear for centuries. . . We scare the shit out of America. And that fear excuses just about any reaction it spawns." Mehserle is profoundly unlucky to be punished at all.

Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proven to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people--it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not "unreasonable." All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes. . . . (more)

Serwer also makes this point: "What's worse is that we we don't just fear, we fear talking about it."

Will the corporate media use yesterday's verdict to talk about it?

The answer is easy -- no. But hey, look over there! Violence in the streets of Oakland! Some violence, anyway. Violence in the wake of racial injustice is what gets the attention of the white-framed media, not the injustice itself. As I write this, CNN finds the news of a basketball player's team-switch bigger news; readers have to search more carefully for a link that says, "Hundreds protest after BART verdict."

Would "thousands" have bumped the story up the page? "Hundreds of thousands"? Whatever the number, it's the protests that the white-framed corporate media focus on today as the "story" here. Not the searing injustice of yet another light sentence for the state-sponsored killer of yet another unarmed black man.

What are you thinking and feeling today? And, since this is swpd, are you seeing other common white tendencies in response to yesterday's verdict?

think of black people as hyper-aggressive and physically tough

Here's a video of police-and-citizen interaction that's been making the rounds lately. The commentary everywhere seems to center around the questions of whether the white cop here did anything wrong, and whether the two black teenagers did anything wrong (aside from their initial offense -- jaywalking).

A different question came to mind for me as I watched; it's the same question asked by M, an swpd reader who wrote to me about this incident -- "Would he have punched that blonde white woman standing in the background like that?"




Again, would this police officer have punched that blonde white woman standing in the background like that?

We can never know for sure, of course. However, as M wrote to me in his email about this officer's "lack of hesitancy in striking that black woman in the face,"

The “ingrained” white truth is that black women aren't human enough to garner the same respect a white woman would in that situation. He didn't hesitate did he? I mean, he punched her right in the face like a man. We've seen it countless times -- he would have talked to the white woman -- he would have gone out of his way not to bring harm to her delicate features. I have never seen a white police officer punch a white woman in the face, now that I think about it.

I would bet that the question of whether this police officer, and most others, would punch a white woman (or man) like that, as readily as he did a black woman, is far less likely to occur to white viewers than non-white ones. The latter tend to have more direct or indirect experience with police brutality, and they also tend to know that perceptions of race have an awful lot to do with that difference.

And again, the question I'm interested in here is not whether either party did the right thing (so no comments about that, please); instead, it's whether a white police officer would be as likely to treat white citizens this way. Actually, to me, that's not an open question -- the general racial disparity in the treatment of suspects by police is widely known (among non-white people) and widely documented.

A further factor here is the supposed toughness of black women, and the supposed delicacy of white women. I suspect this white officer threw that punch so quickly -- more quickly than he would have had the receiving face been white -- because something in him said that black women can take it. And worse, that black people often "need" to be treated like that, because "that's the only way to get through to them."

The reader who wrote to me about this video also sent this tv-show clip for comparison (the show is identified at YouTube as "Smoking Gun's World's Dumbest Partiers"). Here, a white person, labeled "Bubba" by the show's writers, does something far worse than the above black jaywalker did, and yet the police officer practices amazing restraint. I doubt that's just because he's dazed by what happens.




White people clearly tend to believe that black people, both men and women (and children), are more able to withstand physical punishment. They also tend to fear black people -- because we've been trained to perceive them as dangerous and hyper-aggressive, but also, I think, because we suspect that in a confrontation, they'd take our hits better than we'd take theirs.

As M wrote,

White men do not fear other white males to the point of shooting first and asking questions later. Do you think this white police officer would be as patient and careful with his gun if that had been a black male? He was violently attacked from behind and Bubba just kept coming. He did not use his weapon even though he was at risk. He even went on to intervene on the man's behalf, sparing his life. . . .

I think this is why so many blacks males get shot down by white officers who hail from the suburbs, and white males don’t. It is a fear of the unknown. Most don’t know black males personally/intimately, so they have learned to fear the black male, based upon anecdotal information gleaned from friends and the mainstream media. Best to shoot first and ask questions later.

POC see this all the time.

I think a good research study would be to show these two videos to "subjects" from different racial backgrounds, and then analyze their expressed reactions. I can guess what the results would be. After all, as brain research shows, white people lack empathy for people who aren't white.

pay little attention to terrorism directed against minorities

Did you hear about the mosque bombing in Florida last week?

If not, then why not?

Actually, I think I can answer that second question. Chances are that you didn't hear about this act of domestic terrorism because major newspapers and networks haven't covered it.

A bomb in Times Square failed to explode recently, and just about everyone in the U.S. heard about it. A bomb in a mosque succeeded in exploding last week, and next to no one in the U.S. has heard about it.

Why the difference? Why the double standard?

My presumption that next to no Americans have heard about the Florida mosque bombing isn't quite accurate. Many, many Muslims in the U.S. have heard about it. And many of them are expressing dismay that so few others have heard about it.

At MuslimMatters, Hesham A. Hassaballa writes,

On the evening of May 10, there was a small explosion and fire outside a Jacksonville, FL mosque. According to a fire department investigation and officials of the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida, worshipers heard a loud noise outside the mosque, and there was a small fire that was extinguished. The damage was described as “very minimal” by a Jacksonville Fire and Rescue spokesperson. Thank God, no one was injured in the attack.

According to the Council on American Islamic Relations, mosque officials reported that an unknown white man in his 40s entered the mosque on April 4 and shouted “Stop this blaspheming.” He was chased away by worshipers, but he reportedly said, “I will be back.” Now, it has been determined that the explosion was due to a pipe bomb, and it is being investigated as a possible act of domestic terrorism. “It was a dangerous device, and had anybody been around it they could have been seriously injured or killed,” says Special Agent James Casey.

Yet, you would not be faulted for not knowing that it even occurred. Most of the news coverage has been local in Florida. There has not been nearly the same amount of coverage at the failed bombing in Times Square.

Now, of course, the size of this pipe bomb is nothing compared to the size of the truck bomb allegedly placed by Faisal Shahzad. The mosque bombing was perpetrated by one individual, and it increasingly looks like the Taliban in Pakistan were behind the attempted bombing in Times Square. Obviously, an attack on Times Square in the middle of a tourist/theater district is much more of a story than an attack on a mosque in Florida.

But just as the Times Square bomb could have really done harm, the pipe bomb could have also done a lot of harm. FBI officials noted that the blast radius could have been 100 feet. In addition, The FBI Special Agent in Florida, James Casey, had added: “We want to sort of emphasize the seriousness of the thing and not let people believe that this was just a match and a little bit of gasoline that was spread around.” The attempted attack on Times Square was rightly called an act of terrorism. But, as this news report says: “The FBI is looking at this case as a possible hate crime, and now they’re analyzing it as a possible act of domestic terrorism.”

A pipe bomb that explodes outside a mosque causing a fire a possible act of domestic terrorism? What if a pipe bomb exploded in Times Square? Or outside a church? Would this be called terrorism? Of course it would. . . and it should. So should this attack on the Jacksonville, FL mosque.

At examiner.com, J. Samia Mair entitled her article on this double standard with my post's opening question (which I borrowed from her title): "Did you hear about the mosque bombing in Florida last week?"

Mair notes that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced a $5,000 reward for information regarding this act of terrorism, and she also notes that CAIR has

“questioned the silence of public officials and national media about a bomb attack.” CAIR reported that “media coverage has for the most part been restricted to Florida and that there have been no public condemnations of the bombing at the national level.”

Like Mair, and like most of us, I haven't seen or read any national news regarding this terrorist bombing of a mosque. I suspect this silence is a symptom of the white-framed corporate media's rigidly limited narrative for "terrorism," which conceptualizes it as a "Muslim" thing, as well as an "Arabic" thing.

The racist result of this limited framing is that acts of terrorism inflicted on non-white spaces and people don't receive the attention they deserve. And in turn, one result of that lack of attention is that the perpetrators -- like the one in this Florida bombing -- often elude identification and arrest, sometimes for far longer than the people who perpetrate, or even plan to perpetrate, more stereotypical forms of terrorism.

I'll leave the last words on this xenophobic and racist double standard to J. Samia Mair:

I don’t recall seeing anything [about the Florida mosque bombing] on the national news. Surely, if the FBI considers this incident possibly "domestic terrorism" it should garner some attention. I can’t help but to wonder that if a church or synagogue had been bombed -- no matter how small the explosion -- there would have been some sort of national coverage.


[My thanks for info on the Florida bombing to swpd reader Katie]

blame their crimes on phantom people of color

This is a guest post by  Melissa McEwan, who blogs at Shakesville, where this post originally appeared.


Bonnie Sweeten, Ashley Todd, Jennifer Wilbanks, Susan Smith, and Charles Stuart are a few of the more well-known names in a long history of "racial hoaxes," in which a white person hurts themselves or someone else (usually a family member) and blames an imaginary person of color (most frequently a black man) for their crime, hoping that institutional racism, its narratives and stereotypes, their own privilege, and the prejudices of other whites will allow them to successfully deflect suspicion onto a nonspecific person of color. In the worst-case scenarios, real people matching conjured police sketches are detained -- and innocent people have been punished because of these elaborate, racist lies.

It's bad enough when it's just some random asshole pulling this shit. It's even worse when it's a cop.




Thank Maude he was stupid enough to get caught. I hope the department will immediately launch a comprehensive review of his cases -- complainants should be contacted to see if they were helped as they should have been; suspects should be interviewed to see if they were mistreated; especially black complainants and suspects -- because any white cop who's fucked up enough to shoot himself and blame it on a black man should strongly be suspected of having scapegoated or in other ways inappropriately targeted and/or unfairly treated people of color on the job.


[Transcript]

Randi Kaye, CNN Correspondent (in voiceover): It was 4 in the morning when Philadelphia when the radio call came in: cop shot. A white police sergeant said he'd been shot by a black man. Officers responded in force—an all-out search of the African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia's 19th Precinct, where Sergeant Robert Ralston said it all went down.

Kaye (on camera): The sergeant told the story this way: He'd come across two black men along the railroad tracks on the morning of April 5. One ran away, he said; the other pointed a silver revolver at his head. He knocked it away, he said, but it fired anyway, and the bullet grazed his left shoulder. He also said he fired one shot, but wasn't sure if he'd struck the suspect.

Kaye (in voiceover): Police gave thanks their man had survived. Tragedy averted, they said. The white cop described the shooter this way: Dark skin, braided hair, and a tattoo next to his eye. But police never found the black shooter or anyone matching that description. And now, more than a month later, we know why. The real story? The two black men the cop said he encountered never existed. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey says Sergeant Ralston made the whole thing up.

Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Police Commissioner: It was clear to us soon after it took place that this simply was just not true. Just the evidence just didn't support the story he was giving.

Kaye (in voiceover): But wait: what about the sergeant's shoulder wound? The commissioner says Sergeant Ralston actually shot himself, which may be why, he said, he got off one shot at the suspect—an explanation as to why his gun had been fired.

Ramsey: A test was run on his shirt. The powder on the shirt matched the same kind of ammunition we use in the department.

Kaye (in voiceover): That's right—the gunpowder on the sergeant's shirt was the same kind his own weapon used. And there's more. The angle at which the bullet struck him didn't square with his story either, says the commissioner. We tried to ask Sergeant Ralston to explain, but, outside his home, he dodged our cameras and ducked inside.
 
Unidentified male (offscreen, as Ralston walks by into his house): Can you tell us why you did that, sir?

Kaye (in voiceover): Neighbors called the sergeant's actions a sad statement.

Brawly Joseph, neighbor: I can't believe he would really do something like that. That's really uncalled for. He—ever since I've been living here, he's really been, like, antisocial around this area.

Kaye (on camera): What's still unclear is why Sergeant Ralston, a 21-year veteran of the force, would make up such a wild tale. Only after hours of interrogation, police said, did he finally admit he shot himself on purpose. The police commissioner says he may have done it for a job transfer or maybe for attention, but that the sergeant didn't give a reason.

Kaye (in voiceover) The police commissioner calls this a, quote, "terrible and embarrassing chapter in the department's history."

Ramsey: The fact that he stated that two African-Americans were involved in this, again, just, I think, inflames tensions in our community—something that we certainly do not need.

Kaye (in voiceover): Sergeant Ralston has been suspended with pay. The commissioner says he will be fired. He was given immunity in exchange for his confession, so he doesn't face criminal charges. But he'll have to pay for the massive manhunt to find his phantom suspects. Cops are still adding up the cost. The days of calling Sergeant Robert Ralston a hero and crediting his quick actions for saving his own life, long gone. Randi Kaye, CNN, New York.

quotation of the week (noam chomsky)

From "Noam Chomsky Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This,'" by Chris Hedges (@ truthdig):

Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

"The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen," Chomsky went on. "Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.

"What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election."

"I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime," Chomsky added. "I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies."

"I listen to talk radio," Chomsky said. "I don't want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. 'What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.'"

You can read the rest of this article here

fail to see wolves in white sheep's clothing

Keith Knight

A reader sent the following email, which includes thoughts on the murderous biology professor, Amy Bishop, that resemble my own. How often do white criminals slip past the detection of other whites, simply by being white? How much are white people in general harming themselves and others that way?


Dear Macon,

Over the last few days, I've been reading about “Amy Bishop” and her shooting rampage at Alabama University. As the press continues to release more information surrounding Bishop’s past, it becomes obvious that this woman had a history of instability. Bishop was responsible for the 1986 shooting death of her brother, and she was also a suspect in an unsuccessful 1993 bombing threat against a Harvard professor.

I cannot help but wonder whether white privilege played a role in allowing Bishop to continuously slip through the cracks without even a mere slap on the wrist. Or whether it was white privilege that groomed Bishop to feel so entitled that her challenged mind deemed it necessary to kill when she felt wronged or denied.

I've always considered circumstances like the Bishop case to be one of the grim realities resulting from white privilege. I do so, because if one would envision Bishop as a black woman while adding on statistics, a separate outcome emerges.

Had Bishop been a woman of color, would she have so easily re-absorbed back into society while having such a history? Or would she be still be imprisoned after the first offense? Was it whiteness that intervened against justice, and took away from Bishop from suffering consequences? Did a pass given due to whiteness cultivate a threat to society, creating a monster?

Now, the tragic reality is that she has left more carnage in her midst. If skin is to remain so powerful that it fails to recognize wolves as long as they're dressed in white-sheepish clothing, then aren't we all victims of this system of white privilege?

obstinately support the racist death penalty

Robin is a twenty-something white female who spends most of her time writing, and occasionally guest-blogging at swpd and elsewhere; her website: robinwolfe.com. She hopes someday to stop showing her privileged butt on a regular basis, and in the meantime, she continually struggles to accept that she's very much a work in progress.


[Disclaimers: Let me make something clear at the outset: this space is not for debating what I call the death penalty in theory. I don't care whether someone is for or against the idea of killing killers. I'm here to discuss white support for the death penalty in practice -- that is, how the death penalty is currently used in real life in America. I'm going to discuss only its use in America, because I don't know anything about how/if the death penalty is used in racist ways elsewhere. (If anyone more educated about the death penalty elsewhere wants to discuss that, please do.) And now, on to the post.]


Among the different racial groups in the U.S., which most supports the death penalty, and why? Which suffers the most from the death penalty, and why?

The most recent data I could find was the Pew Forum's report from 2007  as to the proportion of Americans (both white and PoC) who support the death penalty. [1] In those polls it was 62%, although that number fluctuates a bit from year to year. [2] There is a division along political party lines [3], but here’s the more important division: when it comes to racial support, a fair bit less than half of blacks (40%) support the death penalty, along with just under half of Hispanics (48%), and 49% of those considered "other" (not white, black, or Hispanic). As for whites? Well, a whopping 68% of whites express support for the death penalty. I'd say when more than two in three American whites support something, it’s a pretty clear example of Stuff White People Do.

And what is it they're doing in this case? They're supporting a system of capital punishment that is inherently racist.

In terms of racism, the most common complaint against the capital punishment system is that its implementation is highly disproportionate -- the percentage of blacks in prison is far higher than their percentage of the population. [4] While the overrepresentation = racism equation is a common complaint, it's actually not a valid one; as Tim Wise puts it, it's "a point that means nothing, since incarceration would logically mirror crime rates, not population demographics." [5] So let's look at the crime rates instead. In 2006 in the U.S., of those incarcerated for murder and non-negligent manslaughter, the percentage of blacks was 51%. [6] The question then becomes: why are blacks under-represented among those executed? Why are they only a third of those who are executed [4b], if they have been convicted of committing [7] over half of the murders? The answer to that question reveals the true racism in this system: whether someone is executed has to do with the race of the victim.

The death penalty is primarily used to punish people, especially people of color, for their crimes against white people -- not for their crimes against people of color. From 1976 to Dec 2009, in terms of interracial murders, only 15 executions involved a white murderer and a black victim. [8] Yet there were 245 executions for black murderers with white victims. (Cases that involved multiple victims of different races were not included in those counts.) This is despite the fact that murders are overwhelmingly intra-racial; 93% of black homicides are against other blacks, and 85% of white homicides are against whites. [9]

A number of studies (including one from the non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office) conclude that "holding all other factors constant, the single most reliable predictor of whether someone will be sentenced to death is the race of the victim." [10] A recent Yale University study concluded that "black defendants receive death sentences at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims were white, and minorities who kill whites receive death sentences at higher rates than minorities who kill minorities." [11] A black person who killed another black person just doesn't hold the same interest for America’s white-framed judicial system as a white person who killed a white person. [12]

So let’s retreat from statistics for a moment of speculation: maybe the justice system doesn't care about non-white victims because people of color are seen are expendable. When people of color are considered merely a faceless mass, then one of them dying doesn't seem to matter in the grand scheme of things. White people, on the other hand, are seen as individuals, and so the death of each one of us (assuming those whites fall into the appropriate social classes [13]) is considered more important.

Racism also plays a role in getting a black person from the point of being arrested (whether or not they committed the crime) to being on Death Row. Aside from the issue of potential racial bias and profiling by police and/or victims, there's the problem that District Attorneys (who make the decision to pursue the death penalty or not) are overwhelmingly white. [14] The juries are often racially stacked against black defendants -- in one particularly egregious example, an attorney who had been an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia was caught making a training tape for other attorneys, advising them that "young black women are very bad [on juries],” and "You know, in selecting blacks, you don't want the real educated ones." [15] Another study found that attorneys in Georgia used 83% of their “strikes” to get African-Americans off juries. [14]

A look at exonerations from Death Row also reveals an insidiously racist system. From 1973 to 2009, 139 people have been discovered to be innocent after being convicted of murder and put on Death Row. [16] Of those 139, 71 were black. Black people comprise 51% of those later found innocent, despite being only 42% of those on Death Row. [17]

Lest anyone think I'm writing this because I have some sort of anti-death-penalty axe to grind, I don't. I actually support the death penalty in theory. But it's difficult to understand how anyone can support the death penalty as it's currently practiced, unless they’re being willfully ignorant to the existence and effects of racism. Actually, a quick scan of the pro-death penalty resources shows that to be exactly the case -- people, white people in particular, generally are willfully ignorant to the effects of racism on the Death Penalty.

As one clear example, the primary pro-death-penalty site on the Internet has an "Issues" section. [18] They cover these topics: innocence, life without parole, appeals, juveniles, deterrence, and recidivism. Do you see "racism" on that list? No, I don't either. Also feel free to scan their "Articles of Interest" section -- it's full of articles with titles like:

Wesley Baker is on death row today for the actions of Wesley Baker. "Racial disparity" had nothing to do with it.

A response to an editorial in which Bob Herbert defends a murderer in the name of the race card.

Is there no African-American miscreant whose misdeeds are so vile and contemptible that he cannot become a cause célèbre in black America?

All of which raises a question: how can someone educated be aware of these statistics and still support the system in practice? Well, it's pretty straightforward: they refuse to accept the meaning of the statistics. [19][20] They begin with the same analysis I've done here, and then they throw it out the window as irrelevant; as a writer for the conservative National Review opined, “The proper comparison is not the race of the defendants versus the general population but rather the race of those for whom the death penalty is sought versus those who are death penalty eligible.” [20] Then they typically go further, by making it appear that whites are actually the injured parties in this equation; As another NR writer put it, “capital charges were actually brought less frequently against blacks (79 percent of the time) and Hispanics (56 percent of the time) than against whites (81 percent of the time)”. [19] In other words, they conveniently ignore the fact that the race of the victim is the major reason why the death penalty is pursued or not pursued.

(And as if that wasn't enough, they sometimes go just a little farther and spin it as not just not racist, but actually beneficial to black people! “Finally, it must be noted that, even if a disproportionate number of African Americans are executed, the beneficiaries of the executions are likely to be disproportionately black, too.” [19])

Prosecutors seek the death penalty far less often in cases where the victims are people of color, and far more often in cases where the victims are white. I'd say that the devaluation of the lives of people of color, and the use of capital punishment to disproportionately punish people of color for killing whites, is quite clearly racist. As well, racism clearly infects every level of the justice system, and black people on Death Row are statistically more likely to be later found innocent than whites.

Nevertheless, a majority of white people continue to support this system in practice. I have to wonder if that’s because they don't know these facts, or if it’s because they don't want to know these facts?

Citations:

[1] http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=272 . The stats found there agreed with what I found in Gallup polls from 2005 ( http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/gallup-poll-who-supports-death-penalty ) - while I am unsure about the Pew Forum's potential bias (it claims to be a "non-partisan, non-advocacy organization"), Gallup is generally considered fairly reputable.

[2] Both Gallup and the Pew Forum confirm that since 2001, support for the death penalty has fluctuated between 62% to 69%, but has been stable within that range for almost a decade. In other words, it’s safe to say in any given recent year, roughly two out of three Americans agree with the death penalty.

[3] According to the Gallup report, 80% of Republicans (commonly considered the "conservatives") support it, along with 65% of Independents. It may or may not surprise you that over half (58%) of Democrats (commonly considered the "liberals") also supported it. When the questioning is changed to self-described "conservative"/"liberal", 74% of conservatives support it and 54% of liberals.

[4] The over-representation argument works something like this: Of those 37 inmates actually executed nationwide in 2008 [4a], twenty were white and seventeen were black. Counting all inmates that have been executed from 1976 until December 2009 [4b], 57% of those were white; 34% were black; 7% were Hispanic; 2% were other. That may look at first glance like more white people are being executed than black people -- and that is true, on a purely numbers level. However, as of the most recent Census (2000), blacks make up only 12.3% of the U.S. population [4c]. Yet they account for a third of those who receive capital punishment. (Of course this is part of a much larger discussion, which is that the U.S. incarceration system itself is inherently racist, but that's a subject of enough depth to merit its own post.) 75% of Americans consider themselves white according to that Census, but whites account for only 57% of executions.

[4a] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1757
[4b] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/race-death-row-inmates-executed-1976
[4c] http://factfinder.census.gov/ (Data sets with quick tables --> national --> "Race and Hispanic or Latino")

[5] http://www.blackcommentator.com/139/139_wise_2.html

[6] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/fssc06st.pdf
[7] I say "convicted of committing" rather than "committed", because while the conviction rate is 51%, we don't know how many of those are actually guilty. The facts are that there's a long historical context for arresting blacks for crimes they didn't commit, mistakes in reporting, mistakes on the part of eyewitnesses, racial bias on the part of police, etc.
[8] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/race-death-row-inmates-executed-1976
[9] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/bvvc.pdf
[10] http://www.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-race/page.do?id=1101091
[11] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/studies-news-and-developments-2007
[12] http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Feb04/Death.row.demo.lm.html
[13] Obviously the deaths of, for example, street-level sex workers (for one example) aren't taken seriously, regardless of their race. Class issues also come into play as well.
[14] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-penalty-black-and-white-who-lives-who-dies-who-decides
[15] http://www.counterpunch.org/dunham1.html
[16] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty
[17] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/deathpenalty.html
[18] http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/issues.htm / Note that I call it the "primary pro-death penalty site" because it's the first listing that comes up under a Google search for "pro death penalty." which leads me to believe it's the most linked-to site on the topic, as well as being the first pro-death penalty site that comes up when doing a more general Google for "death penalty information."
[19] http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/clegg061101.shtml
[20] http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment091800a.shtml

secretly fear that one day, the tables will be turned

A valued reader recently sent me this photo. I'd seen it before, but I can't remember where. Nor do I know the story behind it.

Does anyone here know about it?

That's one of those thousand-word pictures, isn't it? Words of my own can never do it justice. Actually, "poetic justice" are two words that do seem to fit, until I look more closely, and see that the black hospital staff are trying to save this Klansman, rather than hasten his demise.

The title of this blog post suggests what I see evoked by that image, and also by the one below, which was left on a wall by the British artist, Banksy. Both of these images look to me like fragments from a fevered white dream. Or maybe, from some Surrealist's effort to represent the depths of the collective white American psyche.

I don't think it's just the KKK and their ilk that have that fear -- a fear that some day, the white race will get its just deserts. I also don't think all that many white individuals are walking around with that fear, at least consciously. I do think, though, that a more collective white racial fear of that sort exists, however it is that things like that work.

But that's just what comes to mind for me when I ponder these images. I'm sure that if they represent anything to other viewers, they represent differently, depending on the person.

Banksy left this artwork on the wall of a gas station, just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. The image on the left is his; the image on the right is what was left of it, after some locals took offense.

I imagine that the people who spray-painted over Banksy's art were white, but I can't be sure of that.

I wonder what they felt when they saw it? What drove them to blacken it so thoroughly?

Apparently, some locals actually did like Banksy's image. The African American man who owns the gas station that Banksy chose, for instance.

What are some of the thousand words evoked for you by either or both of these images?

And/or, if you'd like to address it -- do you think there's such a thing as a collective white psyche (or consciousness, or unconscious)?

If so, what do you suppose is in there?



Update: As several readers pointed out, the first image is from an old ad campaign: http://www.snopes.com/photos/medical/klaner.asp.

slip past security more easily

Last week, two of these people did the seemingly impossible. They apparently walked into an exclusive party at the White House, without having been invited.

That's Tareq and Michaele Salahi, posing at the party with Vice President Biden. That same night, they also got just as close to President Obama.

I like to think that I've become more aware than the average white American of all things racially "white." And yet, it wasn't until I read some observations of these two gate-crashers by non-white writers that I even thought about the significance of the whiteness of the Salahis. Now it seems obvious -- if entering a White House event without being invited was a crime, then that crime was simply easier for the Salahis to commit because they're white.

American media outlets are now giving voice to a lot of concern about how this "security breach" could have possibly happened -- how could two people just waltz right into the White House and right up to the president like that? Again, here's one answer that I'm not hearing much at all: one way they did it was by wearing "white" skin.

At examiner.com, a black writer named Rose Conley asks a series of interesting questions about the Salahi debacle. She then ties it to "Balloon Boy," another recent, publicity-seeking event/crime, involving a boy whose parents pretended he was trapped in a runaway balloon. Conley asks, "Some say only 'white people' would have the audacity to pull off either one of these stunts. Would you agree?"

I have no idea how to answer that question. Conley did get me thinking, though, about the whiteness of the Salahis. (Update: as some readers of this post note in the comments, the whiteness of Tareq Salahi, a Palestinian American, is complicated.)

"Oh," I suddenly thought. "Of course. Surely what the Salahis did was easier to do, just because they're white."

I think that because I too am white, it took me awhile to realize that. In fact, it took someone non-white to point out their whiteness for me to even realize that at all.

And then, a few Google-minutes later, I happened across Comedian Margaret Cho's brief blog entry on the Salahis, and on her own, non-white experience with White House security:

I am convinced those people got into that white house state dinner because they are white. I attended a state dinner during the Clinton administration and they did such a thorough background check before I was even allowed to RSVP that I was coming I thought they were going to ask me for a stool sample -- we are talking DEEP BACKGROUND -- and I am fucking famous. And I was fucking famous then. White people always look more INVITED than non white people.

Yes, white people look "more invited" to such an event. What a great way to put it.

By the way, for anyone who might somehow be unacquainted with the famous Margaret Cho, she's a Korean American. I think it's fair to say that that racial status, and the lifetime of race-related moments it causes, gives her more insight into how race works in America than most white Americans have.

At any rate, I also think that Cho must be right about this White House security breach. We may never know for certain, but surely the Salahis would have had more trouble slipping past security if they didn't looked the part of "invited White House guest." Looking that part means dressing and acting properly, of course, but it also means looking "white," no matter how many non-white people also visit the White House. No matter how black the current residents of the White House themselves are.

Simply put, it seems self-evident that security personnel often perceive non-white skin as a security threat, and that they probably never perceive white skin that way.

It's also worth pointing out that ordinary white people perceive differently colored skin that way too, and furthermore, that they often respond by functioning as de facto security personnel. For any doubters of the presence, and the destructive power, of the incredible disparities between common white surveillance of white versus non-white criminality, here's some convincing evidence.

The following two videos, from ABC's program "20/20," take about thirteen minutes to watch, but they're well worth it. This "20/20" segment demonstrate so much about the unconscious associations deeply embedded within most white Americans, associations and messages about the supposed threat of black skin, and the supposed non-threat of white skin.

Here's the basic set-up: in a suburban New Jersey park, three young white male actors openly vandalize a car. Few white people passing by bother to intervene, and only one of them calls the police. Later, three black male actors do the same thing -- you can probably imagine how different the response is from the white users of this park. Even black teenagers merely sleeping in a car provoke more 911 calls than the three white teenagers beating the crap out of someone else's car.

Watching this contrast, and thinking about what it says about common American perceptions of a "criminal" profile, should be instructive for most white people. On the other hand, I don't imagine it reveals much of anything new at all for most black people.

As a person who's classified as "white" in America, I sometimes forget how much easier that makes my life. For one thing, I never have to worry that my race alone marks me as a potential criminal; that makes moving throughout my daily life a lot less stressful, and a lot less dangerous.

I also sometimes forget, as I did with the gate-crashing Salahis, that being white can make it much easier for white criminals to commit their crimes. Not only do white people overestimate the criminal threat from black and other non-white people; they also underestimate, to their potential detriment, injury, and even death, the criminal threat from white people.








h/t: Jessie Daniels @ Racism Review

fear backlash

Some white Americans fear that as population changes gradually turn them into a minority, members of other races will do bad things to them. Some also fear a numerical decline and even erasure of the "white race."

"Make more babies!" some of them shout at their fellow white people. "Fear the demographic winter!" others shout in a more apocalyptic mode, worried about a supposed global threat to Western (i.e., "white") Civilization, because of declining "white" birth rates.

As for me, that's not the kind of backlash I fear, in part because I don't think the "white race" ever really existed -- racial "whiteness" is just a fictional and elastic notion that's been applied to disparate groups of people who happen to appear similar to each other. I also see no evidence supporting common white fears that racial minorities who have suffered from the ongoing reign of white supremacy are going to start collectively hurting and killing white people in order to hasten its demise, and to wreak revenge.

The word "backlash" comes to mind for me instead when I hear about incidents like yesterday's shootings at Fort Hood. Before Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went on a rampage, he allegedly yelled "Allahu Akbar!" That, and his name, and his attire, and thus his supposedly being "un-American," will surely stoke the racist flames of white-minded reactionaries. So while I grieve for those whom Hasan injured and killed, what I fear is that because of the "profile" that Hasan matches, people who somehow look "Arab" and/or "Muslim" to other Americans are going to get hurt, and maybe killed.

If you're an Arab American and/or a Muslim in America, I'm guessing that you're feeling more tense today. And if you're not an Arab American and/or a Muslim, and if you care about a racist, xenophobic backlash against such people, maybe you can prepare yourself for the possibility that you'll actually see it happen.

The backlash can come in many forms, and it can arise in many situations, even the most mundane. One of those situations happens often enough that it might even have a name now -- "Shopping While Arab." For me, watching staged incidents, as in the following video, can help. Thanks to the makers of this television program, I can better decide beforehand, more clearly and firmly, that I won't be an idle bystander. I won't cower and fade into silent complicity.

In this experiment, 13 people stood up against overt anti-Muslim hatred; 6 stood up in support of such actions; and 22 said and did nothing.

Watch for the two heroic young women near the end of this clip. How nice it is -- how hope-inspiring -- that they're young.

try to speed up hispanic assimilation

Isn't it something how America still takes pride in being a "melting pot," a nation that draws strength from having such a diverse population? And yet at the same, paradoxical time, how it also still insists that immigrants assimilate as quickly as possible into a set of deracinated, bleached-out standards?

A couple of recent news items (described below) demonstrate how that assimilationist pressure gets applied to Latinos. For one thing, they're constantly told, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, "Speak English!"

What is up with that, anyway? And why, especially, the vitriol that accompanies it? What's that anger all about, that it would even drive people to wear t-shirts like the one above? Surely someone else's struggles with the English language don't cramp the ordinary white person's life all that much, do they?

Actually, I think a lot of this white anger isn't really about annoyance with someone else's struggle with English. I think it's more about the browning of America, and the supposed threat that demographic change represents to some nostalgic white notion of a fading "real America."

It used to be that white people were more firmly in control of things, and didn't have to share center stage politically and culturally with darker people. But now that so many darker Americans seem insistent about intruding on white America, insisting that it live up to its own expressed ideals and all, a lot of white Americans are basically insisting in return that even though those intruders don't look white, they should at least act white.

A lot of white people complain about people who "can't speak English" because they're really kind of wondering whatever happened to immigrants who were more than eager to assimilate. How come they're not so anxious anymore to become just like us?

Exhibit A: It's recently come to the nation's attention that police in Dallas, Texas have been giving dozens of tickets (and a $204 fine) to certain drivers, for the horrendous crime of not speaking English especially well.





Yes, it is true that the police officers may have been confused about a law that applies instead to commercial drivers, and thus wrongly applied it to people driving cars. Nevertheless, what message do these tickets send to Latin Americans who live in Dallas?

Brenda Reyes, a political consultant and member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, puts her outrage this way: "It's the principle of the matter that there are police officers out there representing our city who actually think that it's a crime not to speak English."

It also seems to me that this injunction -- "Speak English! And since you don't speak it well yet, here's a hefty fine!" -- again has more baggage and emotion behind it than a mere concern or annoyance with linguistic ability. It also carries the weight of all that anti-immigrant sentiment that gets unjustly leveled at Latin Americans.

"Speak English!" also means "Stop speaking Spanish!" And so it's one of many ways of saying, "Stop being Hispanic." In that way, I imagine that this English-only thing can feel like the tip of a knife. Or in cases where authority is involved, as in the ticketing in Dallas, more like the tap of a police baton, which barely precedes threats of the taser, the handcuffs, and the gun. We'd prefer you leave, but if you're going to stay, then hurry up and assimilate, right now.

Exhibit B is an example of something I've written about before, the common white aversion to unfamiliar names. This aversion sometimes goes as far as the demand for different, "easier" names.

"Hotel owner tells Hispanic workers to change names":

Larry Whitten marched into this northern New Mexico town [Taos] in late July on a mission: resurrect a failing hotel.

The tough-talking former Marine immediately laid down some new rules. Among them, he forbade the Hispanic workers at the run-down, Southwestern adobe-style hotel from speaking Spanish in his presence (he thought they'd be talking about him), and ordered some to Anglicize their names.

No more Martin (Mahr-TEEN). It was plain-old Martin. No more Marcos. Now it would be Mark.

Oh the ironies. This story is full of them, isn't it? (Actually, I think it could make a great movie.)

And that hotel owner said something else I've heard white people say several times before -- I just haven't gotten around to a blog post on it yet. Something like, "suspect that speakers of foreign languages are talking about them." What is up with that? It reminds me of yet another post I haven't done yet, something about how a lot of white people "get paranoid when they're around non-white people."

Fortunately, Larry Whitten's militant style has been countered with organized protests, and he's thinking about selling the place and leaving:

Former workers, their relatives and some town residents picketed across the street from the hotel.

"I do feel he's a racist, but he's a racist out of ignorance. He doesn't know that what he's doing is wrong," says protester Juanito Burns Jr., who identified himself as prime minister of an activist group called Los Brown Berets de Nuevo Mexico.

 (The Taos News)

It's a little strange that this story took so long to get national attention, since the Taos News wrote about racial problems at the Whitten Inn over a month ago, as well as earlier protests:

Among chants of, “Boycott,” and, “We won’t stand for racism,” protesters of all ages carried signs and shared their feelings about Whitten and his policies. . . . most people in town are supportive of the protesters, and even white people in town have been bringing them food and water and honking in support.

Two Latinos specifically addressed Whitten's arrogant, paternalistic insistence on renaming his employees:

Emilio Sánchez, 12, said he stands behind the protest and wants to see Whitten leave town; he said he wouldn’t consider working under the conditions Whitten imposed. “My name is not Timmy or Tom or anything,” Sánchez said.

Martin Gutierrez, a fired employee, "says he felt disrespected when he was told to use the unaccented Martin as his name":

He says he told Whitten that Spanish was spoken in New Mexico before English. "He told me he didn't care what I thought because this was his business," Gutierrez says.

"I don't have to change my name and language or heritage," he says. "I'm professional the way I am."

Isn't that the problem, right there, with this "Speak English!" thing that white people do?

Again, it's not so much about annoyance with someone's English skills (which is an ironic, rather ridiculous annoyance, given that it almost always comes from people who can only speak one language). It's more about denigrating that person's heritage, and so ultimately, it's about denigrating who that person is as a person, as a human being. It's about implying that they're less of a human being than we are.

These two recent examples of assimilationist pressure are extreme, but they help to clarifly what many white Americans believe -- that Latin American people just don't belong here, and if they are here, then they should stop shoving in our faces that which makes them Latin Americans. We basically want them to suppress and deny themselves, all for our own convenience, and so that we can feel more comfortable and safe around them.

And I also think that at its worst, it's as if we're saying to them, even with a simple complaint about their English skills or their unfamiliar names, "Look, if we're ever going to accept you, you must become like us. But then, good luck with that. See, when you get right down to it, we are superior, and you are inferior."

still ask that old camouflaging question, "but what about the children?"

Update: video of Keith Bardwell being interviewed added below


Yesterday's news from Louisiana -- about the denial of a marriage license to an interracial couple -- reminds me of a scenario that I've encountered several times in real life, and also many times in movies and TV shows (but I can't remember any particular example of the latter -- can you?).

A black and white couple want to get married, but the parents and others object. Especially the white parents. But of course, they won't admit to the racism that's motivating their objection. Maybe not even to themselves.

So instead of saying something like, "I just don't want you marrying someone who's black," they often say instead, "But, but . . . what about the children? They'll have so much trouble, feeling, you know, accepted and all."

I'm guessing that by now, most readers of this blog have already heard about Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward, in Louisiania. Bardwell is entrusted by the people of his parish with the official task of issuing marriage licenses; when Beth Humphrey (who's white) and Terence McKay (who's black) approached him for one, he refused. And, of course, like just about every other white person these days who commits an act of blatant racism, Bardwell said he's not a racist -- he has higher concerns in mind:

I'm not a racist. I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children.

Bardwell has thought about these things, you see -- long. And hard. (And deep. Repeatedly, in and out, in and out -- I hope you catch the um, thrust, of what I think he's also thinking about.)

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

Well, how thoroughly magnanimous of you, Justice Bardwell. Not to mention, intrusively paternalistic.

Speaking of Bardwell's house, which I'm sure is just overrun with joyous hordes of black and white children carousing together, he also had this to say:

I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.

Ah yes, black friends too, piles of them. Right there, in his bathroom!

Bardwell's incredibly retrograde actions, and his obviously diversionary concern for the children, have already lit up the Internet -- seems like every blog and news site I read is excited about it. My favorite response so far comes from blackgirlinmaine:

[All] the news accounts I have read about Bardwell state that he is not a racist, hell he even lets Negroes use his toilet. Nice to know should I ever darken his doorstep with a hot case of the runs, he will let a sista use his can . . . mighty nice of him. I wonder if I could drink from his cups too?

Mighty white of him too, I'd say.

And to think that Bardwell could express such doubts about the future acceptance of the children produced by interracial unions right when the preeminent counterexample, President Barack Obama, was addressing a town hall meeting in the same state, Louisiana. Oh, the sad, bitter ironies wrought by blinkered white oblivion!

I think it's easy enough to mock and dismiss Bardwell's Jim Crow-era sentiments (and actions -- he says he's turned away other interracial couples as well), as those of a mere, isolated individual. But then, as I wrote above, isn't his camouflaging concern for the children of such unions -- a concern that probably masks his more genuine distaste for what happens in the private lives of such couples, and for the supposed dangers of "race-mixing" -- aren't all those "concerns" still fairly common? Maybe the ongoing familiarity of Bardwell's diversionary attention to hypothetical children is one reason his actions still strike a collective nerve.

Anyway, I think someone should sit Keith Bardwell down in front of a TV and watch an old movie with him. In fact, I'm pretty tempted to watch it again myself, and to make it my weekend movie rec. Here's a brief review of that movie by Jonathan Kim, posted at YouTube right after Obama's inauguration:




[For anyone who can't watch the review, here's the movie you should watch. My thanks to the many swpd readers who sent me alarmed and aghast emails about this racist travesty.]

UPDATE: Keith Bardwell explains himself, and adds that he doesn't "see what the problem is," now that the couple in question has married with someone else's help: