The Lazarus Woman

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Barbara B. Lazarus, Barbara Lazarus, Brandie Weston, Carl Zimring, Death, Friendship, Graduate School, Harold Meltzer, Joe Trotter, John Hinshaw, Life and Death, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Mentoring, Politics of Academia, Politics of Graduate School, Sarai Washington, Susan McElroy

Barbara B. Lazarus, obituary picture, July 17, 2003. (http://cmu.edu).

Now that my book’s been out for a couple of months (between two and four months, depending on the e-book platform, actually), I’ve found that my thoughts sometimes drift toward those that are no longer around to read it.

Not so much my family or nemeses, though. Sarai, my only sister, who died in July ’10, would likely have never read a word of Boy @ The Window — it would be too honest an assessment of life at 616 for her. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was already unhappy with my numerous posts about his borderline personality issues and constant psychological and physical abuse of me and family when I picked up the phone one day that same week my sister passed.

As for my former classmate Brandie Weston — to whom I’ve dedicated my memoir (actually, a co-dedication that includes my son) — maybe, if she had been well enough. My favorite teacher, the late Harold Meltzer, though, would’ve begun reading Boy @ The Window five minutes after it had gone live on Amazon.com!

But of all of those folks who are no longer a part of this corporeal world (or who have gone into some state of seclusion from it), one other person stands out today. My dear friend and mentor from my Carnegie Mellon years (and the six years after I finished), Barbara Lazarus. I’ve discussed her here before, but not lately. Probably because I do tear up sometimes when thinking about her support of me specifically and her work at CMU in general. Barbara helped make my otherwise rough and dehumanizing experience at CMU manageable and even career-affirming.

As I wrote about Barbara for the memorial service at CMU in September ’03:

I want to communicate to you that I am in complete solidarity with everyone who attends the gathering at CMU on October 17. For me, Barbara’s work was more than about women’s equity in the engineering and science fields. She was about ensuring that all (regardless of gender or race, and regardless of the degree) who attempted the grand enterprise of competing for a degree actually made it through the process … Barbara was a dear friend and mentor who truly believed in me, even in spite of myself. I loved her, and I will surely miss her, as I am sure you will also.

That only approximated how much she meant to me during and after my four years of doctoral success and failures at CMU. The months immediately before my advisor Joe Trotter and my committee approved my dissertation were the worst, as is well documented on this blog. Barbara convinced me to not become hot-headed and drop-out of the program with a completed first-draft of my dissertation under my belt. She also managed to keep me from requesting a change of advisors so close to the finish line. She did offer to “step in” as her duties as Associate Provost would’ve allowed, but warned me that this political solution would delay my graduation. My connection with Barbara kept me from meeting Trotter in one of CMU’s parking lots late at night wearing a ski mask and dark leather gloves!

She became my best reference professionally and otherwise after those dark days ended with the end of ’96. She read my articles and my first book before they went to print. We swapped stories about family and life and religion. We stayed in touch even after I moved to Silver Spring, Maryland in ’99. Barbara died on July 14, ’03, just sixteen days before my son Noah was born. It’s been a decade, a month and eight days since she passed, nearly as long as I actually knew Barbara (roughly between October ’92 and July ’03). Boy, I wish I could’ve shared my first photos of my son with her!

There were a few people like Barbara at CMU during those years. Susan McElroy (now at UT-Dallas), John Hinshaw (at least prior to my Spencer Fellowship), Carl Zimring (before the O.J. verdict), the Gants and the other Black doctoral students I’d met there (all fourteen of us) were my CMU lifeline beyond multiculturalism and Trotter tired sense of migration studies.

But Barbara Lazarus and I had a friendship that went well beyond academia and career, and went undamaged by petty jealousies or sudden bursts of outrage from jury verdicts. I’d been to her home, met her husband and her kids, learned something about her as a person, and in the process, managed to be my better self even in the worst of circumstances. That is being a good mentor, friend and person. I just hope that I was the same to her, and that Boy @ The Window proves to be the same to others.

“The Negro Problem,” “The Jewish Question,” & “Closing the Achievement Gap”

10 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Anti-Union, Booker T. Washington, Closing the Achievement Gap, Corporatized Education Reform, Crisis in Education, Education Reform, Eugenicists, Eugenics Movement, Frederick Hoffman, High-Stakes Testing, Jewish Question, Negro Problem, Parallels, Private Foundations, Teacher Effectiveness, Teachers Unions, Technocrats, W. E. B. Du Bois

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, May 9, 2005. (Fastfission via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What do these three disparate phrases have in common? This came up during my recent lunch with my friend Andrew at Lebanese Taverna a little more than a week ago. Among other things, we were lamenting the dominant theme of education reform as union-busting and the supplanting of teachers with high-stakes tests and Teach for America substitutes.

As we discussed Andrew’s second book on the 1990s culture wars and their roots in the 1960s conservative movement, it occurred to me that what both of us have thought of as recent or new really wasn’t. The efforts over the past decade to “close the achievement gap,” an actual problem really, are based in the nineteen and twentieth-century eugenics movement more than it is in a real sincere effort to confront the barriers to high academic achievement for students in poverty and for students of color.

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

“How does it feel to be a problem?,” W. E. B. Du Bois asked numerous times and wrote in numerous ways in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The Negro problem for White scholars and politicians at the turn of the twentieth century varied from Frederick Hoffman’s 1896 statistical eugenics argument that predicted the “extinction of the Negro” to the much more common struggle of how to educate the Negro (but not educate them too well). Hoffman’s White supremacy argument was a bit outside the mainstream even for his Whites-are-always-right era. The more mainstream problem of Negro education became one of “practical” vocational (or, as it was called at the time, industrial) education as advocated by accommodationist Booker T. Washington versus Du Bois’ higher education and leadership preparation for the Black Talented Tenth.

We’re here again, in the early twenty-first century, with the technocrats in government and White paternalists in the private foundation world sounding the alarm that there’s an achievement gap between the affluent and the poor, as well as between Whites, Blacks and Latinos. Except that this achievement gap’s been around for a half-century. Except that the biggest single factor in raising student achievement rates is family income and occupation(s), not more testing or a theory of change to assess teacher effectiveness. Except that schools in the districts in which the achievement gap is the most obvious — segregated, mostly poor and of color — are underfunded when accounting for inflation and other factors (e.g., age of school buildings, teacher-student ratios).

So too with the “Jewish question” in comparison to this crisis in education. One of the worst kept secrets in the first half of the twentieth century was that the Jewish question wasn’t just a Nazi German one, but an American one as well. The real Jewish question for American educators was how to explain Jewish overrepresentation as high achievers in public education and as the best and brightest in higher education. That despite the work of eugenicists — the technocrats of their day — to tweak IQ tests and entrance tests in favor of affluent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

They couldn’t answer their Jewish question in higher education, except to limit the number of Jews accepted in elite institutions like Harvard, Yale and Princeton (in the latter case, to the point of exclusion). But we know how Nazi Germans decided to address their Jewish question — exclusion, discrimination, persecution, and the Final Solution. All to the detriment of advanced science and technology programs, not to mention the German economy. Vast resources went to a deadly and ultimately useless cause, all in the name of racial purity and betterment for “Nordic Aryans.”

“Mind The Gap” warning in London Underground, Victoria Station, November 27, 2011. (Reinhard Dietrich via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

In a very limited sense, the same is occurring with the education reform movement these days. Educators and politicians all pulling billions of dollars that could otherwise go to free breakfast and lunch programs, psychological services, physical education and arts programs for an eugenics-light agenda. No one from this movement has suggested a final solution as such, but they do believe that teachers unions, bad teachers and not enough STEM programs are the problem. Note that though the goal here is to “close the achievement gap,” the actual things that occur at schools in which most of the high-achieving Whites and Asian Americans (many of whom attend private and parochial schools) aren’t on the table at all.

Ultimately, the problem with the fear-mongering crowd on the “problem,” the “question” and the “gap” is that their perspective is one of the all-knowing, all-seeing White paternalist. One whose ideas about a situation or a group comes out of thin air, in some strange attempt to help said situation or group. In the case of today’s version of education reform, the only end-game is to destroy public education while exacting a profit in the process. Closing the achievement gap? Yeah, if “closing the gap” is defined by closing schools, killing unions and leaving most of America’s poor and of color students with no alternative for a better future.

WWMLKD (What Would Martin Luther King Do) – and Say Now?

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"I Have A Dream" speech, "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech, "Return of the King" (2006), Aaron McGruder, Activism, Black Elite, Black Gen Xers, Civil Rights, Civil Rights Generation, Civil Rights Leadership, Civil Rights Movement, Elitism, Institutional Racism, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Memphis Sanitation Worker's Strike, MLK, MLK Assassination, Post-Civil Rights Generation, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Socioeconomic Status, The Boondocks, WWJD

“Return of the King” screenshot, Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, originally aired, January 15, 2006. (Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to picture’s low resolution and direct subject of this blog post.

Perhaps the most famous episode of Aaron’s McGruder’s award-winning series The Boondocks was his “Return of the King,” which originally aired on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in ’06. In it, King survived his ’68 assassination and came out of a coma into an early twenty-first century America and Black America in which his style of activism was no longer in vogue.

Instead, in McGruder’s vision, King came to realize how generations of younger Blacks have become lost in their overt materialism, as symbolized by ass-shaking, hip-hop and rap culture, the constant use of “nigga” in public, and the self-aggrandizement of Black televangelists and other purveyors of the cult of prosperity. In response, McGruder’s King said, “I’ve seen what’s around the corner, I’ve seen what’s over the horizon, and I promise you, you niggas have nothing to celebrate! And no, I won’t get there with you. I’m going to Canada!”

McGruder’s attempt to address the generational and socioeconomic divide between the Civil Rights generation and the post-civil rights generations that have followed was a limited one. It certainly represented well the views of a Black elite nurtured at the altar of the Civil Rights Movement. But despite the hilarity and the double-meanings, I don’t think that The Boondocks‘ “Return of the King” episode is even close to a decent representative of what King would’ve been like had he lived to see the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Extrapolating from King’s last years:

The best and easiest guess in thinking about what King would’ve said or done in the years between that dreaded first Thursday in April ’68 and today would be to look at what King was doing in the last months of his life. Openly protesting the Vietnam War and the oppression of the poor and of color in the US and abroad. Breaking with other civil rights leaders on the Vietnam War and issue of addressing the collusion between institutional racism, income inequality and anti-union efforts in Memphis, in Chicago and in other places in the US.

Memphis sanitation workers’ strike/march under “I Am A Man” picket signs, Memphis, TN, March 29, 1968. (Ernest C. Withers via http://workers.org).

Alienating a president in Lyndon Baines Johnson — the most radical supporter of civil rights and anti-poverty efforts of any president ever — was what King did in expanding his words and deeds beyond “I Have A Dream” and “We Shall Overcome” mobilizations to end segregation and overt racial discrimination. Moving beyond the grassroots movement paradigm of respectable Negroes (i.e., traditional church-going, middle and some working-class Blacks) to include Black men and women who weren’t relatively well-educated and in good jobs — like the sanitation workers in Memphis — was where King had already moved himself.

This is the King that would’ve evolved over the previous forty-five or so years had he lived. Based on this actual King, it would be a bit mystifying to hear him give speeches on, grant interviews for or write op-eds in which his main theme would be to eviscerate the American poor, Blacks and Latinos for buying into a material capitalistic hip-hop culture. Or to spend all of his waning moments lamenting the perpetual stereotype of teenage welfare mothers looking for a handout instead of a hand up. Or to devote his remaining energies to blaming Black males for their inability to wear waist-fitting pants and then connecting hip-hop to a criminal culture, a drug culture and general thuggery (That’s Bill Cosby’s and Don Lemon’s jobs, apparently).

Don Lemon, CNN picture, August 5, 2013. (http://cnn.com).

King would’ve probably withdrawn from public life by now, maybe even to Canada, as McGruder’s version suggests. But not before an additional two or three decades in which he would’ve boldly gone after the military-industrial complex, corporate welfare, government corruption, the War on Drugs and insufficient investment in America’s public schools and infrastructure. King would’ve seen all of them as factors that would have a negative impact on the life chances of the poor, especially poor African Americans.

Assessing blame – or not:

No doubt that King would’ve also found aspects of how Blacks have expressed themselves in pop culture and in the public sphere over the past four and half decades problematic. Yet based on the last years of his life, I think that he would’ve saved much of his ire for the aging Civil Rights generation for resting on their laurels and standing in judgment of younger Blacks, poor Blacks, or anyone else who didn’t follow directly in their now elitist footsteps. As King evolved in the four years, seven months and one week between the March on Washington and his assassination, so had his views of civil rights leadership. Well-meaning but pretentious, with the assumption that fixing the South would clear the way for Blacks of every socioeconomic stripe everywhere.

What’s most important to realize, though, is that King, had he lived, would’ve seen what most Americans regardless of race have seen in their own lives. Decline in wealth and income, a gulf of wealth between them and the top one-percent of income earners, a significant decline of well-paying union jobs replaced by minimum-wage non-union ones, rising unemployment, and expensive housing and healthcare. These are among so many other things that 240 to 270 million of us face on various levels that didn’t exist at the end of King’s life, things that disproportionately affect the poor, especially the poor and of color.

King and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement:

The movement never evolved to address such issues, King would’ve said. Individuals did. Jesse Jackson, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, did. But the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole didn’t. They assumed that eliminating all forms of deliberate and overt discrimination in public institutions would bring down barriers for all African Americans. King would’ve said they were incorrect, and knew as much by the time of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in February and March ’68.

Unlevel playing field (soccer in this case), August 5, 2013. (http://funatico.com).

Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (both of which have obviously been weakened by the Reagan Years and this year’s Supreme Court Shelby County v. Holder decision), the life chances for any Black person born into poverty haven’t improve much at all. They remain in segregated communities, despite the movement toward mixed housing. They send their kids to underfunded and overcrowded schools, despite the paternalistic efforts of the so-called education reform movement. Jobs that pay a living wage are few, and conditions that promote neighborhood stability are better but still rare.

To assume that Blacks a half-century removed from the March on Washington and King’s “I Have A Dream” speech would be eternally grateful for the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of subtle yet pervasive discrimination on the basis of both race and socioeconomic status is ludicrous. It would smack of the elitism in which those who benefited most from the movement have displayed over the years. King would’ve realized the same thing, certainly well before the turn of the twenty-first century.

That anyone poor and of color in particular can overcome such barriers to, say, earn a doctorate or write a book is something akin to a miracle. Or to become a professional athlete or a music artist, a bit more common, if stereotypical, for that matter. King would’ve seen this and brought an analysis to the legacy of civil rights that didn’t put the movement and its leaders on a pedestal or proclaim victory where defeat was obvious.

What King would’ve (maybe) done:

King wouldn’t have given speeches in the years after the height of the movement to Black Gen Xers where he would’ve said, “I’ve got mine. Now it’s time to get yours,” or blamed hip-hop culture for so-called Black-on-Black crime. Instead, King would’ve listened, learned, facilitated and spoken without accusing those most vulnerable to discrimination of being the only ones at fault, if he would’ve faulted them at all. In terms of what he would’ve done beyond the attempt to form multiracial coalitions to fight for better conditions, it’s unclear. It would’ve been better than chest-thumping and belly aching, though.

The Things Dumb Racists Say

27 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Anthea Butler, Bigotry, Ignorance, Professor Anthea Butler, Racism, Religious Studies, The American President (1995), Trolls, Tumblr, Twitter, UPenn, Willful Ignorance, Zimmerman Trial, Zimmerman Verdict

John Bauer’s illustration from Walter Stenström’s The boy and the trolls or The Adventure, in childrens’ anthology Among Pixies and Trolls (1915), November 1, 2005. (Thuresson via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I loved, I loved, I loved reading and hearing what Anthea Butler had to say in the wake of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict from two weeks ago (via her piece “The Zimmerman Verdict: America’s Racist God” and MSNBC). I love the courage and strength she’s shown over the past two weeks in standing up to the trolls in social media who’ve literally called her everything except a child of God in expressing the very racism they’ve attempted to deny.

If I’ve been reminded of nothing else in the past fortnight, it’s the fact that the US has a significant reading and writing crisis. In looking at Butler’s The Things People Say Tumblr page, it’s never been clearer to me that the average American can’t write a single sentence without a significant misspelling or grammatical error, and that angry people expressing their bigotry are even more prone to screw up the English language in any form.

UPenn Professor Anthea Butler, circa 2011. (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/religious_studies/faculty/butler).

Yet the most ignorant thing I’ve seen beyond the indirect threats, the nasty racist name-calling and the demeaning of academia for making Butler one of their “affirmative action” hires is the sheer ignorance about religion, Christianity and the ways in which this group of (mostly) White trolls has use both to justify their vitriol and racism. On one level, it’s pretty simple. How dare this [pick any expletive and add either the N-word or the C-word] say anything to point out how some Whites use Christianity and God to support their racist world views, right?

But this simplicity belies a greater truth. That not one of Butler’s post-Zimmerman trolls understood their own religion and the walk of Christianity. They haven’t a clue as to the sheer work it would take to earn any doctorate, much less one in religious studies. These folks have no idea that a PhD in religious studies doesn’t require becoming a priest or a pastor, or sounding all high-brow and polite in the face of injustice. (Heck, I’ve met religious studies professors who are agnostic or atheists!).

They are ignorant, and willfully so. My guess is, they are a small sample size of maybe 100 million Americans — mostly, but hardly exclusively White — who wallow in ignorance thinking that this will shield them from the inexorable march toward a majority of color country that the US will be well before mid-twenty-first century. The fact is, Butler’s trolls are so scared of change that they are threatened by a seventeen-year-old wearing a hoodie with cellphone, Skittles and iced tea in hand. As well as by a University of Pennsylvania professor who they see as unqualified (a bit of a contradiction to be threatened by someone they see as insignificant, but that’s racism for ya!).

I might have worded it a bit differently, though (but then again, I’m a different writer, no?). As a Christian for more than twenty-nine years, I don’t see my God as one who represents racist Whites. After all, we are commanded to “treat our neighbors as we would treat ourselves.”

Evelyn de Morgan’s The Worship of Mammon (1909), September 7, 2006. (Shell Kinney via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But since Butler’s trolls obviously do think that they worship God, let me at least say this. If you believe in corporate capitalism and the corrections of the market, then your god is money, and the love of/lust for it. If you believe in the criminality of Blacks and Black male bodies, then your god is White. If you believe it’s okay to voice your displeasure by calling Butler a “n—-r c–t,” then your god is one that subjugates women, especially Black women. These beliefs do not and cannot represent my beliefs in God, in the life of Jesus, heck, in life of anyone who has ever spoken on behalf of social justice and human rights in history.

To misquote The American President (1995):

“Professor Anthea Butler has done nothing to you, trolls….You want a character debate? You better stick with me, ‘cuz Professor Anthea Butler is way out of your league.”

Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy,” My Reality

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"Fantasy" (1978), Anger, Anger Management, Bigotry, Fear, Forgiveness, George Zimmerman, Lyrics, Police Brutality, Racism, Reality, Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman Trial

n Cover of Earth, Wind & Fire's single "Fantasy" (1978), February 29, 2008. (Columbia Records). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution and subject matter of this blog post.

Cover of Earth, Wind & Fire’s single “Fantasy” (1978), February 29, 2008. (Columbia Records). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution and subject matter of this blog post.

Below are two excerpts from Boy @ The Window about how I viewed Mount Vernon, New York and my world between the ages of ten and twelve:

“My only links to the great metropolis to the south were WNBC-TV (Channel 4), Warner Wolf – with his famous “Let’s go to the video tape!” line – doing sports on WCBS-TV (Channel 2), and WABC-AM 77 and WBLS-FM 107.5 on the radio. I found the AM station more fun to listen to, but I also liked listening to the sign-off song WBLS played at the end of the evening, Moody’s Mood for Love, with that, ‘There I go, There I go, The-ere I go…’ start. Music had been an important part of my imagination in ’79, with acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, Christopher Cross, Billy Joel and The Commodores. Not to mention Frank Sinatra, Queen, Donna Summer and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall album. The music also made me feel like I was as much a part of New York as I was a part of Mount Vernon. It left me thinking of the ozone and burnt rubber smell that I noticed as soon as I would walk down into the Subway system in Manhattan…

“Besides the occasional reminder of life outside of my world, of Mount Vernon, I was the center of my own universe. Mount Vernon was but a stage on which my life played out, a place I hoped would stay this way forever. I was an eleven-year-old who thought that my world was the world. I lived my life like Philip Bailey and Maurice White would’ve wanted me to. I came to see ‘victory in a life called fantasy’ as my own life, living as if my imagination and dreams could be made into reality. All I had to do was wish it so.”

(And yes, I know the actual lyrics are about a land called fantasy, but that’s not how I sang it back then).

There have been so many moments since then where my Earth, Wind & Fire visions have collided with the reality that life for me and people who look like me has hardly been a fantasy. I had to get over my idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse in order to even listen to Earth, Wind & Fire again, because he was a fan as well, and I didn’t want us to both like the same music. But even more than that has been the reality that there are people, places and things who’ve (and that have) come through my life and stood in between me and all the things I wanted out of life. Individuals like Joe Trotter or Ken, policies like racial profiling and redlining, institutions like Columbia University or the former Academy for Educational Development.

The Enchanted Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889), by Marie Spartali Stillman, March 7, 2006. (Charivari via Wikipedia). In public domain.

While some of these instances have been disappointing in the sense of betrayal that I felt, the disillusionment that came with these incidents of discrimination and harassment pushed me ever closer to the person and writer I wanted to be. I don’t know what to make of how I’ve been feeling about the Zimmerman trial and verdict, the response of so-called White liberals and more obviously racist and gleeful White teabaggers over the past five days. I’ve felt badly for Trayvon Martin’s family, Rachel Jeantel and for so many others who’ve been figuratively beaten down by media coverage and stereotypes over the past months.

But I didn’t think I was angry. Not until I went for a run this morning. It’s was a comparatively pedestrian 3.1-mile run after I’d done a five-miler a day and a half before. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy” started playing on my iPod as I was running uphill. All it made me think about was all the challenges that I and so many others have had to face because of individual bigotry and fear and institutional racism and indifference. I know that many things in life aren’t fair. What I realized at that moment, though, was that there really are folks in this world who wish evil and unfairness on people like me. That’s their fantasy!

That made me angry again, but not for too long. For I also knew that I had the power to ask for forgiveness, as well as the power to forgive others. It’s a power that no one can take away from me, that enables me to be honest about where I am, and clear-headed about where I want to go. That power, among others, does truly help bring my “mind to everlasting liberty.” Even in the face of the evil, indifference and ignorance that I see every day.

Richard Cohen & Rational Racism

17 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Politics, race, Youth

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Affirmative Action, Derrick Bell, Paternalism, Racial Profiling, Racism, Richard Cohen, Stop and Frisk, Ta-Nehisi Coates, White Liberals, Whiteness

Electron microscope image of a lymphocyte, (a.k.a. cancer cell), September 20, 1976. (Dr. Triche/NCI via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ response to Richard Cohen’s “Racism vs. reality” column in The Washington Post (July 15, 2013) is so spot on that I had to post something about it. “The Banality of Richard Cohen and Racist Profiling” is a must read for anyone who’s tired of those White “liberals” who remain okay with racism for the sake of perceived safety. Below was my two cents on both Coates’ piece and the sidetracking some whom commented on Coates’ piece tried to do by equating racial profiling with affirmative action:

“Richard Cohen is no different than the racist and race-baiting journalists of not too long ago. You know, the ones who’d put ‘Negro Rapes A White Girl’ on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post or New York Times, back in the days when Whites would riot and destroy Black neighborhoods upon seeing such headlines. All to sell newspapers, not to actually start a real and serious dialogue on race, racism and remedies.

And this is precisely what makes Cohen and his ill-conceived logic so dangerous. His is a piece that’s meant to make White ‘liberals’ feel okay about the denial of humanity and rights to Blacks. Especially since White ‘liberals’ must also feel that they’re protected and safe from the Black male boogieman criminal.

Don’t get caught up in a debate about affirmative action as some sort of intellectual counterbalance. It’s a false equivalency, plain and simple. More to the point, it’s a distraction from the real point. Like TNC, the late Derrick Bell wrote about this at length. The idea that we as African Americans, male and female, must embody all of the evils and stereotypes of this nation in order for Whites to feel safe. It’s so insulting, so soul-destroying, so infuriating, this immutable racism of Cohen and the millions of folk who think like him.”

Hey George

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Politics, race

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"Hey Joe" (1966/67), George Zimmerman, Injustice, Jimi Hendrix, Juror B37, Justice System, Lyrics, Murder, Trayvon Martin, Whiteness

One of 1st George Zimmerman mugshots, February 26, 2012. (http://nydailynews.com).

Cover for The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Hey Joe” single, February 28, 2010. (Kohoutek1138 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of picture’s low resolution.

I’d originally planned to use Jimi Hendrix’s version of the classic lyrics from “Hey Joe” (1966/67) to talk about my former doctoral/dissertation advisor Joe Trotter. But even Trotter wasn’t evil and emotionally disconnected enough to attempt to end my life, even though his decisions could’ve easily ended my career before it started.

In any case, below is my ode to George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s murderer, walking free because of racism and Whiteness, a racially stacked deck of law enforcement and criminal justice. Some won’t like what I did to Hendrix’s song. Others likely will. I can only imagine what Hendrix would say:

“Hey George, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand
Hey George, I said where you goin’ with that gun in your hand
I’m goin’ down to shoot that young man
You know I caught him walkin’ ’round with a different shade, man
Yeah, I’m goin’ down to shoot that young punk
You know I caught him walkin’ ’round with a different shade, man
Huh! and that ain’t cool
Huh hey George, I heard you shot your n—-r down
You shot him down now
Hey George, I heard you shot that asshole down
You shot him down in the ground yeah!
Yeah!
Yes, I did, I shot him
You know I caught him walkin’ round walkin’ round town
Huh, yes I did I shot him
You know I caught that young n—-r walkin’ ’round town
And I gave him the gun
And I shot him
Alright
Shoot him one more time again baby!
Yeah!”
….

“Hey George, I said
Where you gonna run to now, where you gonna go
I’m goin’ stay down south
Stay down in Florida way
Alright
I’m goin’ stay down South
Way down where I can be free
Ain’t no one gonna jail me
Ain’t no hang-man gonna
He ain’t gonna put a rope around me
You better believe it right now”

The saddest truth is, George Zimmerman, his brother, his family, Juror B37 and others of his racist, murdering ilk will like this rendition and see it as soul-affirming, rather than a simple but painful truth about this nation in which we live.