By The Time I Get To Arizona

28 Saturday Aug 2010

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

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Arizona, By The Time I Get To Arizona, Glenn Beck, Ground Zero Mosque, Illegal Immigrants, Immigration Reform, Latin America, Mexicans, Mexico, Public Enemy, Tea Baggers, Undocumented Immigrants

Immigrant Rights Rally, Los Angeles, May 2010. Photo credit Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.

An old high school friend of my wife’s pulled me into a debate about the Arizona immigration law (currently under appeal in federal court) the other day. Although neither of us disagreed that the US needs better policies and enforcement around undocumented people, his approach was somewhere between the old Fugitive Slave Laws of the nineteenth century and apartheid in South Africa. He all but let corporate greed, malfeasance, and economic exploitation, the root cause of this issue, off the hook.

So, in honor of Public Enemy, I’ve named this post “By The Time I Get To Arizona,” hoping that our country hasn’t gotten all the way there yet, between Arizona’s immigration law, the Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero, and Glenn Beck. But in case it has, I’m posting a combination of my responses to my wife friend about how unconstitutional, racist and fear-confirming this response is.

“In the case of the Arizona law, the only way it would work is if one were to profile a particular group in order to enforce it. The idea that anyone without papers could be arrested and potentially deported means that if the law was practiced at random, someone White, Black or otherwise a likely American citizen could be caught up in a grave law enforcement error, leading to controversies and lawsuits. But if the focus is on Mexicans, Salvadorans and Latin Americans most likely to emigrate to the US, then it would work the way in which it’s intended.

The law was made with the Mexican border in mind. It wasn’t made to stop Russians or Canadians from coming into the US – we’d have more immigration enforcement at airports, ports, and the US-Canada border if that were the case. Bottom line is, laws like this don’t get made to stop groups that aren’t of color from using services or exercise what have been presumed to be their rights once on American soil.

But beyond this point is this simple reality. Whether it’s the 14th Amendment, requiring papers for undocumented people, or denying kids financial aid for college because their parents are undocumented, the fact is that a particular group of people are having all kinds of rights denied. The law granting citizenship rights to anyone born on American soil was originally used to make 4 million freed persons and 200,000 free persons — Black folks — American citizenship. It also gave the sons and daughters of European immigrants — who weren’t illegal even though millions of them came without papers (i.e., “Wop” [without papers] Italians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, etc.) citizenship rights and a simple process for naturalization.

These laws would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to denying Latin American immigrants (legal and otherwise) and Latinos born in the US what all of us expect to take for granted, especially freedom of movement. This isn’t all that different from when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, denying the Chinese immigration rights and the Chinese that were already here citizenship and ownership rights for more than sixty years, or from Fugitive Slave laws passed between 1793 and 1850, which required free Blacks to carry their freedom papers wherever they went. If this isn’t at all about racism attached to the serious issue of immigration control but minus the issue of economic exploitation, then why the need to concentrate on supply (the undocumented) rather than demand?

Until we deal with the heart of the problem — companies exploiting desperate immigrants (legal and

Crazy Glenn Beck. Source: http://outofbounds.nbcsports.com/Glenn%20Beck.jpg

undocumented) for profit — we’ll continue to make bad and downright racist law around this. Since we think that corporations have no responsibilities in all this, they get off the hook for creating this situation, while poor people get labeled as if they’re roaches.”

One other thing. Glenn Beck’s in DC today dishonoring MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, not to mention progressives across the board. To quote Chuck D and his crew, Beck “to be a goner,” though not necessarily with the blood-wrenching screams in the middle of “By The Time I Get To Arizona.” Otherwise, Arizona will be the most liberal state in an increasingly fearful, repressive and policed nation.

The Rejection of All Things “All-American”

09 Monday Aug 2010

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

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All-American, American Identity, BBC News America, Captain America, Exclusion, Race

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America. Scanned panel from the cover to ''Captain America (vol. 4)'' # 6. Art by John Cassaday

About a week and a half ago, BBC News America brought in an American athlete for an interview, calling him a typical “all-American man” in the process. It’s not a term that Americans use nearly as much these days, but BBC America still felt comfortable in using it, assuming that all Americans would understand on some unconscious level what an all-American man, hero, boy or girl would mean. The phrase has a variety of implications, and whole groups of people who become excluded in the process.

There are racial — but not necessarily racist — implications to the “all-American” archetype. Of course, the term refers almost always to White men, heroes, boys or girls, especially those with blond hair and blue eyes. You know, like Captain America. Whether it’s been athletes like Roger Clemens, Mia Hamm, Tom Brady, Lindsay Vonn, Mark McGwire, Phil Michelson, or actors like Tom Cruise, Zack Efron, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Aniston, Renee Zellweger, or the Olson twins, all-Americans are essentially the White boy or girls next door. They are allegedly everyday people who’ve managed to become enormously rich, famous and successful individuals.

Somehow, their hard work and talent, like cream in tea or coffee, rose to the top, enabling these individuals to become the archetype all-American. Never mind that hard work for most of the remaining 310 million of us isn’t really an issue, and talent alone needs to be found, discovered, and connected to the powers that be in order for it to rise to the top. But let me not burst that all-American bubble of a myth. Luckily in the past fifteen years, there are a select few of color who may fit that “all-American” moniker, folks like Will Smith or Derek Jeter. Still, Will Smith broke in as a rapper who was anointed as one with great potential by Quincy Jones, while Jeter plays for the New York Yankees, not exactly an under the radar sports team.

Which leads to my other point about the “all-American” myth. No one who grows up a nerd, or a misfit of some sort, or just introverted, gets to be seen as an all-American boy or girl. No one who’s overweight or impoverished or considered unattractive is found by the media as “all-American as apple pie.” Everyone from Bill Gates to Bill Maher, Colin Powell to Whoppi Goldberg, would’ve never made it in this society if we waited for the media to anoint them as “all-American” heroes or success stories.

I must admit, I’ve only watched a few videos by the group The All-American Rejects, but their very name makes my point. Though the use of this term is on the decline, it’s not dying fast enough. We’re a multicultural society, whether those who think that only a select few are “all-American” boys and girls want to acknowledge this or not. Maybe BBC America, or for that matter, the news business in general, should catch up with the rest of our society before they look as if they’re waiting for the next eugenics movement.

Race, Racism and Bigotry

05 Thursday Aug 2010

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

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Bigot, Bigotry, Connecticut Shooting, FOX News, Omar S. Thornton, Prejudice, Race, Racism, Racist, Rush Limbaugh, Shirley Sherrod, Social Justice, Truth & Reconciliation Commissions

Ebony & Ivory Hands. Source: http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jscully/Race/images/aa%20hands.jpg

Seven and a half years ago, at a retreat for a gathering of social justice fellows in Northern California, a lengthy discussion of -isms occurred. The premise was the fact that every human being has prejudices, biases, can come off as a bigot.

At one point, I made the point that there’s a difference between bigotry and racism. The average bigoted person usually doesn’t have the ability to slander, libel or otherwise act on their bigotry in a way that discriminates against the person or a whole class of people who are the object of this individual’s bigotry. Afterward, a fellow insisted that all bigotry rose to the level of an -ism of some sort, no matter how little the power or influence the person harboring this bigotry possessed.

In recent weeks, between the New Black Panther Party, FOX News, Ben Jealous and the NAACP, Shirley Sherrod, the USDA, the White House, the workplace shooting in Hartford, Connecticut, the radioactive issues around race and racism have reared their ugly heads. For a society forty-five years removed from the end of Jim Crow — and 146 years removed from the end of slavery — we’re still much in need of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on race. But in order to have a real conversation on race, we need to understand that there are differences between race, racism and bigotry, that these words aren’t interchangeable.

Take the term race. As defined by so many other scholars over the past 110 years — it’s a social construction based on skin and hair-deep differences between groups of people from various parts of the world. Not to mention the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Saying that there are differences based on race between the incomes of Blacks, Whites, and Latinos, for instance, is merely a statement of fact, and not an implication that any individual or group is practicing racism. Nor does race make sense outside of cultural distinctions. Tens of millions of us are living proof that there’s only one human race, genetically speaking, that is.

The word racism involves much more than mere racial distinctions and history. It involves the embracing

Source: http://www.newsnmax.com/blog/img/Rush_limbaugh.jpg

in words and deeds ideas and systems that either deliberately or inadvertently discriminate against other groups based on their race. It’s an expression of bigotry, but not just simply to acknowledge or enlighten oneself or others. Rush Limbaugh’s spit-flying session on President Obama in the weeks before the ’08 Election — “It was all about RACE! It was all about RACE!” — is a good example of this. Limbaugh was arguing that Obama was winning the election because of racism. Specifically, reverse racism among African Americans and White guilt over racism among independents and progressives. Limbaugh all but kissed his microphone while hollering out of a rage that can only be described as racism.

Anyone can express racism or be a racist. But where should we draw the line between bigotry and racism? I’ll use my mother as an example. She’s complained for thirty years how “all the jobs been taken by West Indians and Spanish people” in Mount Vernon and other parts of Westchester County. Well, working-class jobs, anyway. There’s no doubt that this is an expression of bigotry. But does this mean that my mother’s a racist? Hardly. For whatever it’s worth, my mother has worked with, gone to church with, and broken bread with folks regardless of their race or ethnicity, and not begrudgingly. Even with the authority to hire and fire thirty years ago, my mother worked to ensure that all under her supervision weren’t discriminated against.

But while all of us have a smidgen of bigotry in our hearts and minds as occasionally expressed from our mouths, many of us aren’t racists or practicing racism. But a racist is without a doubt a bigot. So experience, intent, position in society, and race (not racism, not bigotry) are all involved in making someone’s words and deeds examples of racism, and that person a racist.

These are subjective definitions, and I could be challenged and wrong. However, they’re based on twenty years of work as a writer, scholar, historian, professor, and forty years living in post-Civil Rights America. We need to start somewhere to have a real and serious discussion of race. Maybe this is it.

An Honest & Open Conversation on Race?

26 Monday Jul 2010

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

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Conversations on Race, FOX News, John Hope Franklin, Kerner Commission, NAACP, Obama Administration, One America Initiative, President Bill Clinton, President's Initiative on Race, Prop 209, Race, Shirley Sherrod, Truth & Reconciliation Commissions, USDA, Ward Connerly

“The Chase” Screenshot from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Source: Donald Earl Collins

A few days ago, in the midst of the NAACP-Tea Party-FOX News-Shirley Sherrod-USDA-White House-Obama Administration scandals, one of my Facebook friends asked the question, “Can’t we ever have an open and honest conversation about race?” I didn’t give her a direct reply, mostly because I spent the better part of a decade attempting to answer that question through my first book Fear of a “Black” America.

But I also didn’t feel like being bothered. Though I remain hopeful, my level of optimism is nowhere near where it was in ’94, when I started work on the doctoral thesis that turned into my first book six years ago. Still, it’s an important question, to which the answer’s generally “No!,” mostly because that level of honesty is hard to come by in a nation like ours, so full of itself, so rich and imperialistic, “smiling, crying in celebrity,” as U2 would say.

About thirteen years ago, former President Bill Clinton attempted to open up an open and honest and

Staff of President Clinton’s Initiative on Race, June 1997.

bipartisan discussion of race. President Clinton’s Initiative on Race, which started with widespread media coverage of the President’s speech at the University of California, San Diego commencement on June 14, 1997, ended with a report buried in Monicagate obscurity on September 18, 1998. President Clinton stated that the Initiative on Race was about making out “of our many different strands one America — a nation at peace with itself bound together by shared values and aspirations and opportunities and real respect for our differences.”

The seven-member Advisory Board included the late trailblazing Black historian John Hope Franklin, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, former Mississippi governor William Winter, former CEO of Nissan Motor U.S.A. Robert Thomas, lawyer Angela Oh, Linda Chavez-Thompson, and Bronx, New York minister Suzan Johnson Cook. Three White men, one African American man, one African American woman, one Hispanic woman, and one Asian American woman, all born between 1915 and 1957, made up the Advisory Board that would give America the blueprint for beginning a sincere dialogue on race.

To say the least, the Advisory Board was not entirely representative of late-twentieth-century America. Despite each individual member’s prior accomplishments, there were a host of other scholars, ministers, CEOs, lawyers, union organizers, and former governors who should’ve been considered for this task. Beyond that, the Advisory Board’s lack of ideological (six liberals and one moderate) and age balance (the youngest person on the board was 41 in 1997) would make anyone wonder if they possessed broad enough perspectives to address race issues in 1968, much less during their 1997-98 tour on race.

The late John Hope Franklin, circa 2006.

The Advisory Board on Race – led by John Hope Franklin – traveled the nation in search of consensus but instead found controversy throughout their fifteen-month tenure. For example, Franklin refused to invite anti-affirmative action advocate Ward Connerly to an Advisory Board meeting regarding racial diversity on college campuses on November 20, 1997, which violated the spirit of the President’s Initiative. Franklin stated that Connerly had “nothing to contribute” to the discussion on cultural differences. Connerly, as many of you already know, was a University of California regent who campaigned in 1996 for the passage of Proposition 209, which led directly to the repeal of all affirmative action programs for the state of California.

Regardless of what people like me think of Connerly, Clinton had created this mandate “so that we can better understand the causes of racial tension” — not to increase them. Not only

Ward Connerly, circa 2006.

that. It proved that the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom Generation couldn’t find a way to do what South Africa, Chile, Spain, Australia, Liberia and so many other countries have been able to do in the past half-century. Have an open and honest dialogue — a Truth and Reconciliation Commission — on issues like apartheid, political repression, ethnic cleansing, genocide and civil war. Maybe it rests with our generations — Gens X and Y — to make this so, to “make it plain,” as Malcolm X would’ve said.

The Advisory Board asserted in its final report that in crisscrossing the country, they had “engage[d] the American people in a focused examination of how racial differences have affected our society and how to meet the racial challenges that face us.” That was a bald-faced lie, and not just obfuscation. The Commission instead reflected in subtle ways the previous three decades of racial divisive and political exploitation thereof. Not much has changed since ’97 and ’98, and as long as Whites feel they have something to lose — and Blacks merely four centuries of things to get off their chests — I’m afraid not much will either.

On Abusers and White Anxieties

22 Thursday Jul 2010

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

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Abuse, Bigotry, Domestic Violence, FOX News, NAACP, New Black Panther Party, Race, Racism, Roger Ailes, Ross Douthat, Shirley Sherrod, Tea Baggers, Tea Party, USDA

Source: http://www.fordogtrainers.com/

I realized it early on in the five years between my ex-stepfather’s beating up of my mother, my summer of abuse, and my departing for the greener pastures of the University of Pittsburgh in August ’87. It wasn’t just about being whipped with a belt so that it would leave welts. Nor was it merely about the kicks, the punches, the constant threats to take me “out of this world.”

No, my ex-stepfather wanted something more, even more than me calling him “Dad.” It was about shutting me up, about keeping me from ever speaking the truth of our calamity and of his monstrosity. It was all about making sure that I never resisted, protested, questioned or stood up to him. Fortunately for me, I did. I have the scars and chipped tooth to prove it, too.

For people like Atlantic Monthly editor and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, neo-con and true- believer Roger Ailes of FOX News, as well as entities like FOX (or Faux, or Fix) News and the so-called Tea Party, it isn’t much different. They claim reverse racism by Blacks against Whites at every turn. Come up with cockamamie versions of the truth with regard to anything involving race. And refuse to believe that any person of color experiences any instance of racial discrimination, a racial epithet or any bigotry whatsoever. It doesn’t matter if there’s an audio recording, a video stream or an affidavit, racism died with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, at least according to these folk.

The embodiment of all that ails America today, for FOX News and Tea Baggers alike, is President Barack Obama. His very name, his father’s nationality, his birth certificate, all have come under more scrutiny than the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. Somehow, POTUS 44 is a socialist, communist, biracial man who sometimes hates Whites, too thoughtful, not commanding enough, scared of the military, too hasty in his decision-making, a Hitler-mustache-wearing-Nazi, a foreigner who has usurped the presidency, among the myriad of inconsistent insults these folks have hurled, and with pride.

That’s what has made the news around the so-called New Black Panther Party on FOX News over the past week disturbing. That’s what has made the news about the response to the NAACP’s tired but accurate claim that the Tea Party supports bigoted rhetoric so unnerving. This is what’s made the news the past three days about Shirley Sherrod being fired and then re-offered a job at the USDA over something that wasn’t racial so ludicrous. All of these are efforts by racial conservatives — people who refuse to accept a multicultural society in which all things White aren’t necessarily the things that determine who is and isn’t a winner — to put White progressives, people of color and other deviants in their place.

All in the Family Screen Shot

Douthat, Ailes, FOX News and the Tea Party all want to turn back the clock, to somewhere between 1945 and 1954. To a time when few cared what anyone who wasn’t a middle-class WASP male thought about anything. To a place in which “girls were girls and men were men,” as Archie Bunker would’ve sang on All in the Family. To a world in which race, bigotry and racism didn’t exist at all, or at least, could easily be swept under the rug, and the N-word an acceptable part of the American lexicon.

That’s what they want. Let’s make sure that they never get it.

Patriot Days

03 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Sports

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Charlie Brown, foreign policy, Independence Day, July 4th, Military, Patriotism, Peanuts, Pledge of Allegiance, Social Justice

Source: Donald Earl Collins, Fear of a "Black" America Cover

Few things are more annoying or more confusing than my understanding of patriotism and how others — mostly White — perceive my patriotism and the patriotism of people of color more broadly. It’s something that I’ve struggled to grasp for more than thirty years. For those of you whose patriotism is akin to breathing, that’s your prerogative. I’ve found that something like one’s love for their country, like one’s belief in God (or not), shouldn’t be one that comes without thought or without any doubts at all. For without giving it any serious or critical thought or without any questioning or lingering doubts, most American patriotism is like being a Yankees or a Lakers fan. Patriotism in that sense is simply rooting for a team that can do no wrong, one that is expected to win in any contest simply because that’s all they’ve ever done.

My sense of patriotism began in ’79, when I started to devour history books and volumes of World Book Encyclopedia. I wasn’t completely naive, because I had also read Lerone Bennett’s/Ebony’s three-volume Black America set while learning about World War II. But I did believe that America ultimately stood for goodness and prosperity, for freedom and democracy all over the world. I fervently saluted the flag at pledge of allegiance time in school in fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grade.

Snoopy & Charlie Brown. Source: Charles Schulz, Peanuts

At one point between fourth and sixth grade, I even created a pretend nation-state in our bedroom at 616, where I played out domestic and foreign policy issues through make-believe characters, from, of all things, the Peanuts comic strip. I saw the Cold War with the Soviet Union as one we absolutely had to win in order to keep the totalitarian communists at bay. Several of my Humanities classmates can attest to my defense of American foreign policy as late as ninth grade.

But even as I generally saw the US as the country the Scholastic Weekly Reader described it to be, I had my doubts as to America the always right and beautiful. It started at the end of fifth grade, when I hit the chapter in our social studies book about how we ended World War II with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I hadn’t seen the mushroom cloud or the fire-bleached skulls before then. It scared me, but more importantly, it made me think about how cruel it was to wipe out a city the size of Mount Vernon but with three times as many people in the same space.

Then, with the Reagan Years and the almost complete refusal to acknowledge racism and poverty in the ’80s got me to the point where I refused to recite the pledge by my junior year of high school. One of the reasons I never saw the military as an option for escaping the abuse and poverty I’d grown up with was because I saw American foreign policy as one that was at least as imperialistic as that of the Soviets. Iran-Contra, Vietnam, El Salvador and Grenada were examples of us over-stepping our role as the leader of the free world.

It got worse for me before it got better. The Gulf War (’90-’91) and my growing knowledge of American history and atrocities at home and abroad made me feel as if this country was never meant for me, never meant to be mine.

Luckily I had other people from which to draw inspiration about how to approach a nation that generally takes people like me for granted, as if my life and death doesn’t matter at all. People as varied as Derrick Bell, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison — not to mention my Army ROTC friends who served — served to inspire another sense of patriotism.

Their writings and speeches, their acts on behalf of civil rights, human rights and social justice did teach me two things. One, that even folks who serve in the military deserve credit for understanding that their projection of American power means little without clear objectives and a clear sense that this use of power is necessary, justifiable and can actually matter to and gain the support of the rest of the world. Two, that holding my country’s feet to the fire around racism, poverty, imperialism and other forms of injustice is a form of patriotism. Without the socially conscious, this country’s ideals, its flag and other symbols of power, are meaningless beyond the imperial. So, for better and for worse, happy birthday America.