Tag Archives: Race

November 21, 2011 · 7:16 pm

Rush Limbaugh: Michelle Obama Guilty Of ‘Uppity-ism’

You can tell it’s the beginning of the Holiday Season….

All the GOP idiots are trying to get all their meanness and pettiness out now so they can either go on vacation or get busy with their next agenda items:  stealing Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa like the pathetic little grinch men they are….

Since they are a thankless crew, they are skipping Thanksgiving….

I, mean, Newt wants to put children back in sweatshops and now Rush Limbaugh is going back to the sixties to channel his new role model George Wallace….

Personally, I think both Newt and Rush are uppity and ought to be forced to work in sweatshops for less than the minimum wage they loath.  Maybe they will in their next lives- they surely will have a lot to atone for….

What a nasty little group…..and I mean not only these jerks,  but also the ones who follow them.

I wonder if they thought Laura Bush or Pat Nixon were uppity?

From the Huffington Post:

Rush Limbaugh accused Michelle Obama of “uppity-ism” during his Monday show.

Limbaugh was speaking about the First Lady’s recent reception at a NASCAR event, where both she and Jill Biden were booed by the crowd. He said it was not surprising that she was booed, because the crowd at NASCAR resented her healthy eating initiatives and her husband’s policies.

“What the hell is there to cheer for?” Limbaugh asked. He said that people also didn’t like “paying millions of dollars” for Obama’s vacations. “They understand it’s a little bit of a waste,” he said. “They understand it’s a little bit of uppity-ism.”

via Rush Limbaugh: Michelle Obama Guilty Of ‘Uppity-ism’ (AUDIO).

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November 9, 2011 · 5:05 pm

National Review: Cain Is More “Authentically Black” Than Obama

I knew it was only a matter of time before the GOP started this…

They are so proud to have a Black Republican they just don’t know what to do….

All I can think of is Bernice on “Designing Women” when here dementia acts up and she starts singing “Black Man, Black Man”…..

From a great Mother Jones article critiquing this idiotic article in the National Review:

The comparison between Cain and Obama isn’t so much “volatile” as it is flattering to conservatives who, having latched onto Cain as a racial alibi, an explanation for the fact that the party of Lincoln hasn’t broken 20 percent of the black vote since Richard Nixon, desperately need a symbolic figure of racial absolution. The only time conservatives aren’t using trite arguments about black authenticity as an explanation for ongoing racial disparities is when they’re relying on them to show everyone how well they understand the soul of the Negro. Hanson doesn’t bother to explain how it is that the overwhelming majority of black people haven’t discerned that Barack Obama is a fraud and that Herman Cain is the second coming of Marcus Garvey, but that’s because their “brainwashed” opinions don’t actually matter. The sole purpose of establishing Cain’s racial authenticity, premised as it is on Hanson’s rather limited view of what constitutes “the black experience,” is for Hanson to flatter himself and his ideological allies as racially enlightened.

Link to full Story:   National Review: Cain Is More “Authentically Black” Than Obama | Mother Jones.

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October 3, 2011 · 10:30 pm

New Evidence Could Clear 14-year-old Executed by South Carolina

This is one of the saddest cases I’ve ever read about….and that’s saying a lot.

This case, alone, should make people realize how unjust the Death Penalty is and how we will never be able to separate it from racism.

And another word to my Republican “Friends”, you can’t be “pro-life” and “pro-death penalty”.  It’s a contradiction in terms….

From RawStory.com:

Over 67 years after 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. was put to death by the state of South Carolina, he may soon be cleared of the crime that people familiar with the case say he never could have committed.

A lawyer and an activist both told Raw Story recently that new evidence will show that the black boy could not have possibly murdered two white girls, 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and seven-year-old Mary Emma Thames.

Stinney, the youngest person to receive the death penalty in the last 100 years, was executed on June 16, 1944. At five feet one inch and only 95 pounds, the straps of the electric chair did not fit the boy. His feet could not touch the floor. As he was hit with the first 2,400-volt surge of electricity, the mask covering his face slipped off, “revealing his wide-open, tearful eyes and saliva coming from his mouth,” according to author Joy James.

After two more jolts of electricity, the boy was dead.

MORE:   New evidence could clear 14-year-old executed by South Carolina | The Raw Story.

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September 26, 2011 · 7:45 pm

Obama’s Preaching Doesn’t Reach

Interesting article from Anthea Butler at Religion Dispatches.

For the record, she is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania and an African-American woman.

While I continue to support President Obama, I have my concerns as well.

He’s been much friendlier to Wall Street than Main Street…

He doesn’t seem to “dance with the ones who brought him” too well.  Sometimes, it’s almost like he’s ashamed to be seen with us.  He had to be pushed and pushed to take action on Gay issues, but he did take action.

Now he’s pushing some buttons with another core constituency.

I hope he’s had a true realization- on the Road to Damascus, so to speak- and this isn’t just fear driven based on recent polls.

If he had pushed the agenda he was elected to pursue, instead of tilting at the windmills of compromise with the GOP, we wouldn’t be having this dialogue…

Here is an excerpt from Dr Butler’s column and a link to the full version:

Obama’s performance of black preaching may play well to church folks who love him no matter what, but to those critical of his policies that have placed African Americans at the highest unemployment rates, the president’s fake whooping rings hollow. Why is it that every time the president speaks to a predominately black audience, he goes into a preacher’s cadence, and starts to speak as though he were at a pulpit? Why is it that he never gets “righteously angry” with the white folks as often as he does at the black folks?

If you think I am harsh, consider a segment of the president’s 2010 CBC speech: “I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods to go back to your workplaces, to go to churches and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops, and tell them we’ve got more work to do.”

Damn. I think most black people I know do more than just work, go to church, and get their hair done.

Let me say it more bluntly. The president said at the end of his CBC speech: “[I] expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on.”

That was the moment that the president turned into a jackleg preacher. A jackleg preacher is an untrained preacher who relies on tried and true tropes to get his audience to respond to preaching. If a jackleg is really good, he or she can get the money or whatever else they want by hitting the sweet spot, that emotional place where the congregation always responds well, because they recognize the feelings and emotions the jackleg preacher wants to evoke. Referring to taking off the slippers and putting on marching shoes is a tired racist trope, and besides, isn’t Snooki the person who wears her slippers in public? I don’t think she’s African American.

There is a history with Obama’s speeches to predominantly black audiences that either try to use respectability or shame to change steroetypical behavior. Obama’s 2008 speech excoriating absent black fathers at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, and his comments on the campaign trail in 2008 in Beaumont, Texas urging black parents “not to feed their kids cold Popeye’s chicken for breakfast,” are just two examples of how Obama deploys this racially-coded rhetorical strategy. The president’s behavior since taking office towards the African American community has been either to tell black folks to get in line and get to work, or gee, I love ya’ll, but I need your vote. If only he would speak to Republicans and Tea Partiers in the same harsh manner.

MORE:   Obama’s Preaching Doesn’t Reach | Religion Dispatches.

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September 23, 2011 · 8:32 pm

Why Does the South Execute More People?

Fascinating story from the Institute for Southern Studies about racism, the death penalty and it’s roots in Slavery….

 

The regional disparity is striking. Since the Supreme Court lifted a ban on death sentences in 1976, 1,264 people have been executed in the U.S. And 921 of those executions — or 73 percent of the total — took place in 13 Southern states.

Its true that Texas — and what some call its death machine — skew the numbers: Its 474 executions account for nearly 38 percent of the U.S. total. But the fact remains: Of the many things you can call the death penalty, one fitting adjective is that its largely Southern.

What has made the South the home base of capital punishment? As you might suspect, executions have their roots in the history of slavery. As noted in A Short History of the American Death Penalty [pdf]:

“In contrast to capital punishment in the northern states, capital punishment in the South was not limited primarily to common law felonies. Rather, the death penalty was a powerful tool for keeping the slave population in submission. Crimes that interfered with the ownership of slaves were punished by death. In 1837, North Carolina, which lacked a penitentiary, had about 26 capital crimes including slave-stealing, concealing a slave with intent to free him, second conviction of inciting slaves to insurrection, and second conviction of circulating seditious literature among slaves.”

This racially-influenced law-and-order mentality spilled over into other crimes: In North Carolina, stealing bank notes, “crimes against nature” “buggery, sodomy, bestiality” and a second offense of forgery and statutory rape came to be considered capital offenses.

Racial disparity was literally written into the law with the Southern death penalty. After the Civil War, Black Codes created more crimes punishable by death for African-Americans than whites. In the 1830s, Virginia had five capital crimes for whites but an estimated 70 such crimes for black slaves.

Today, the well-documented racial disparity in death sentences has become one of the central arguments among opponents for ending capital punishment.

But less discussed is the racial divide in how people view the death penalty. For example, underneath the polls showing widespread support is one of the most well-documented facts in death penalty research: that it enjoys much higher support among whites than other racial groups, especially African-Americans.

For example, a 2005 Gallup poll was typical in finding that, while there was little difference in death penalty support among different age groups, and only a moderate 12-point gap between men and women, there was a 27-point difference between white 71% and black 44% support.

MORE:   ISS – Why does the South execute more people?.

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August 24, 2011 · 8:01 pm

The Help Takes the Box Office, Becomes Second Viable Best Picture Contender of 2011

I loved the book and I loved the movie…

I’m glad to see the film of “The Help” getting such a great response and Oscar talk- especially for Viola Davis.

I really don’t quite get the criticism.  I don’t see how it glorifies Jim Crow or racism.  Quite the opposite.  One of the points is that the only way these black women’s stories could be told in the South in 1963, was anonymously and if a white women helped tell them.  The risks they took in just speaking to her were pretty clear to me.  As was the racism and danger of the times.

If anything, “The Help” shows the evils of racism and Jim Crow – and the Junior League.  Just kidding about the League.  Kind of…this does really show how it enforced conformity…

I was around in the South in 1963.  I think some of the people who criticize this film/book either weren’t there or are looking at the situation through a 2011 lens without the appropriate filters….

And the critic, who tweated her opinions on Twitter in a running stream while she watched the film, has no validity.  Anyone who texts during a movie is obviously not taking the time to absorb it or pay attention to the arch of the story.  And has no damn manners….

If Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey support it, that’s good enough for me….

From Sasha Stone at AwardsDaily.com:

Be it controversial or not there is no denying the power of The Help so much so that it is lighting up the box office through word of mouth.  The publicity has been off the hook as well, perhaps not playing to the blogerati but hitting right at the heart of white audiences, right smack dab in the middle of Blind Side territory.

I was sitting at a dinner with about six women (white, upper middle class) and the first thing that was brought up was “have you seen The Help? Wasn’t that so good?”  The conversation then checked in with who hadn’t yet seen it.  After it died down I brought up the subject of race.  Needless to say it didn’t go over well.  What did come out of the conversation was how timely the film was in terms of Hispanic nannies (do we say Hispanic or Latina?) and how there should be some rumination on this idea of what determines family and what doesn’t.

You can’t tell people who responded emotionally to a film like this that they shouldn’t like it because it isn’t politically correct, or that it’s offensive to African Americans and that any response to that is an endorsement of said repression and the perpetuating of the Jim Crow racism that has and continues to oppress multitudes.  I’m not even saying I disagree.  But I am acknowledging the emotional power of the film, just as I’m now acknowledging that a movie that does this well at the box office, has this kind of emotional heat, plays to women the way it does, has a very very good chance at winding up in the number 1 spot on AMPAS ballots.  Like last year’s winner proved, the heart wants what it wants. No matter if it was a stuttering King or not – the emotional response is real.

What makes an accidental Best Picture nominee today? It’s usually a movie that somehow slips under or over the blogerati, and/or critics (mind you, The Help received many good reviews, most notably from Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleibermann) to become a hit and a strong awards contender DESPITE the shunning by the elite (this theory was offered up on our podcast recording this morning by Jeff Wells).  In other words, a good movie is a good movie is a good movie.

When you have a screening at the White House by Michelle Obama and a very public endorsement by Ms. Oprah Winfrey herself, you can pretty much forget any sort of pubic shaming of the film; it has now been deemed perfect acceptable by two of the country’s strongest and most powerful black women.

It is also important to remember that voting is done privately and anonymously.  That keeps it fairly honest so that no one is necessarily going to vote for what they SHOULD vote for – not for the best film, but the film they liked the most, starring characters they cared about the most.  When it gets right down to it, the heart is the most influential organ when it comes to Oscar voting.

Therefore, I see The Help clocking in as 2011′s second truly strong and formidable Oscar contender (plus, when you get a load of the publicity team behind it you will see it can’t be beat).  I count the first as Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, another film that is receiving strong word of mouth, is Woody Allen’s biggest money maker to date and feels more timely than ever, as its message is about looking to the future and not trying to live in the past.

via The Help Takes the Box Office, Becomes Second Viable Best Picture Contender of 2011 | Awards Daily.

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June 24, 2011 · 8:51 pm

Chapter 56: Integration-Part 2: Negroes, Lesbians and Yankees, Oh My! | My Southern Gothic Life

New Post up on my other Blog…

Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the full post:

Once integration happened, it was really no big deal to most of us.  Some of our parents, however, never recovered.

The South in those days, at least in small towns like ours, was built a lot of unbendable, undefinable, unpublished, unspoken but completely understood rules.  The two biggest one were as follows:

Thou shalt only consort with people just like you.

Never offend the neighbors.

My parents swore by those rules.  My father’s main concern was not pissing off anybody for business reasons.  He really didn’t give a damn about anything else.

My Mother lived for The Rules and to judge others by them.  In her mind, if she had not known someone and their entire family for her entire life- and preferably their family background for several preceding generations-they really weren’t worth knowing.

She also assumed everyone else played by the same rules.  Therefore, she assumed all Black people knew each other and later, all Gay people knew each other.  I’ll never forget the time she said to me:  ”I hope you are running around in public with that Harvey Fierstein person.  I saw him on television and he’s just awful.  I really don’t want to have to try to explain that to my friends.”  It took me a while to figure that out, but then I realized she assumed, just because we were both Gay, we had to know each other and be fast friends.  I wish…I have been in the same New York bar as Harvey, but that was many years later and does not prove her point…

Anyway…

MORE:  Chapter 56: Integration-Part 2: Negroes, Lesbians and Yankees, Oh My! | My Southern Gothic Life.

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May 12, 2011 · 10:00 pm

Rand Paul: ‘Right to Health Care’ is Slavery

I still can’t believe this man is a U.S. Senator….

He’s a pompous, self-important, ignorant jackass- so that may mean he is qualified to be a Senator in today’s Senate…

Still, I somehow don’t find it funny for a rich white man to compare himself to a slave…

A hearing of the Senate HELP Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging looked at emergency room use and took an odd turn Wednesday when Sen. Rand Paul compared the “right to health care” to slavery.

“With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses. … You are basically saying you believe in slavery,” said Paul (R-Ky.), who is an ophthalmologist.

Paul, who is the subcommittee ranking member, said he believed that the notion of expanding federally funded community health centers to ensure that everyone had a “right” to care was not constitutional and would enslave doctors. Doctors, he said, should care for patients because of their own moral code.

“Our founding documents said you have a right to pursue happiness, but there’s no guarantee about physical comfort. When you say you have a ‘right’ to something there is an implication of force. … I will always treat people who come into the ER because that is what we always have done and because I believe in the Hippocratic Oath.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who chairs the subcommittee turned to one of the hearing witnesses, Dr. Dana Kraus and asked her if she believed she was a slave working at a federally qualified health center.

“I love my job. I do not feel like a slave,” Kraus said.

via Rand Paul: ‘Right to health care’ is slavery – Kate Nocera – POLITICO.com.

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May 9, 2011 · 11:30 pm

Leonard Pitts: How two busloads of kids changed America

I’m really looking forward to this documentary…

As usual, a great column from Leonard Pitts:

WASHINGTON — Fifty years later.

This morning, if all goes according to plan, a group of college students will board a bus here, bound for New Orleans. The young people in the group represent diverse heritages — a Mexican-American guy born in Yucatan, a white girl from Santa Monica, a black girl studying journalism in Tallahassee. The fact of them traveling together will be unremarkable.

Fifty years ago.

A group of college students boarded two buses here, bound for New Orleans. They were joined by members of the African-American press, and officials of the Congress of Racial Equality, including its national director, James Farmer, who had organized the journey. Six of the riders were white, 12, black. The fact of their traveling together would prove incendiary.

Fifty years later.

There will be 40 students on this commemorative ride, chosen from more than a thousand applicants. They will spend a little over a week rolling across an America vastly different from the America of 1961. In the new America, mom ‘n’ pop have gone out of business, driven into retirement by Subway and Wal-Mart, telephones are portable, computers are ubiquitous and the son of an African from Kenya is president of the United States.

The students are traveling in part to publicize Freedom Riders, a documentary that will air on PBS’ American Experience program beginning May 16. They will go where a bus was burned, people were beaten and the guilty imprisoned the innocent. They will share the journey with many of the original Freedom Riders, men and women now well into their 70s and 80s, and absorb lessons in the nonviolent tactics and philosophies that helped make the old America into the new.

You wonder what that will be like. It is always difficult for young people to imagine old people young, to look upon aged faces and experienced eyes and glimpse there any kinship of spirit or reflection of themselves. It is perhaps more difficult, having come of age in the new America, to envision the old, to gaze upon a landscape of Subways and Wal-Marts and see just beneath it the ghost of the Eat-A-Bite diner or Hardwick’s Hardware, and the metal sign creaking gently in the Dixie breeze, an arrow pointing to the back of the building, beneath the single damning word, Colored.

MORE:   Leonard Pitts: How two busloads of kids changed America – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com.

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April 21, 2011 · 10:40 pm

Tyler Perry To Spike Lee: ‘Go Straight To Hell’

This is an interesting dynamic….

All I’ll say is that I tried to watch the first Tyler Perry Madea movie on HBO and thought it was just awful.  I couldn’t believe the stereotypical characters and the bad acting and writing….

I couldn’t watch the whole thing it was so bad….

But this isn’t my fight…

From The Huffington Post:

The long-simmering war of words between Tyler Perry and Spike Lee is heating up again.

Perry, in both a message on his website and a press conference to promote “Madea’s Big Happy Family,” hit out against Lee, who in 2009 said, among other things, that Perry’s films “harken back to ‘Amos n’ Andy’.” While Perry’s website message was vague and resilient, defending his work as both spiritually uplifting and fun, his words for Lee were blunt and harsh in the press conference.

“I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee,” Perry said during the press conference (via Box Office Magazine). “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, ‘this is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘you vote by what you see,’ as if black people don’t know what they want to see.”

Perry’s films are consistent high performers at the box office; all independently financed, they’ve taken in over $520 million in ticket receipts over the past six years. He recently extended his deal with distributor Lionsgate, with whom he has worked since 2005. Lee was critical in spite of that success.

“Each artist should be allowed to pursue their artistic endeavors, but I still think there is a lot of stuff out today that is coonery and buffoonery,” he said in ’09. “I know it’s making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better. … I am a huge basketball fan, and when I watch the games on TNT, I see these two ads for these two shows (Tyler Perry’s ‘Meet the Browns’ and ‘House of Payne’), and I am scratching my head. We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?”

via Tyler Perry To Spike Lee: ‘Go Straight To Hell’.

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