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.

The Last Airbender, or Shyamalan’s Cynical Egg?

01 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Avatar: The Last Airbender, Bryan Konietzko, Cynicism, M. Night Shyamalan, Michael DiMartino, Movies, Racebending, Roger Ebert, The Last Airbender

The Last Airbender Poster. Source: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:External_editors

I’ve been reading the reviews. On HuffingtonPost, by Roger Ebert, on Twitter and so on. I’ve been watching the previews since December. I’ve read all of the articles about casting and race (see my post “Racebending Avatar: The Last Airbender” from April 2009). As of midnight in New York and L.A., the movie has finally arrived. And for most fans of the greatest animation series ever, The Last Airbender‘s DOA, SOL, and FUBAR, all wrapped into one. M. Night Shyamalan, who hasn’t done a great film since Sixth Sense in ’99, should’ve used all six of his senses before agreeing to wield a cleaver to a show based on multicultural authenticity and a sense of humanity only matched by its revealing humor.

The truth is, this isn’t all Shyamalan’s fault. Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the creators of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, sold their movie rights and creative direction for this movie so easily and cheaply. They may as well have been the McDonald brothers selling what’s now McDonald’s to Roy Kroc back in 1955. The producers of the film and Paramount Studios should be shot with a turkey for letting a live-action film based on an animated series — which almost never works out — make it to a CGI board, much less a screen.

But even with all of that, the picking of mostly White actors to play multiethnic roles was horrendous. The making up for this by making all of the actors playing Fire Nation characters — the bad guys — Maori and South Asian was another sign. Not at all dissimilar from the constant complaints about Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), the last of that long-running franchise. The special effects of fire and water-bending — not so special, in the words of Beavis and Butthead. And 3D effects? Huh? Really?

Avatar Aang, Back Turned. Screen Shot, Avatar: The Last Airbender

This shows how cynical the world that controls what we see and hear is. They think that the consuming public is so stupid, our kids so demanding, that they can serve us slop out of a garbage can with a fungus-covered plastic spoon, and then expect us to like it. It’s still a world in which our heroes and villains must look and act a certain way, our appreciation for anything not overtly American gets thrown out of a window, our need for the bombastic more important than our need for the authentic.

The real jaded-ness here, though, is that The Last Airbender wasn’t made with fans of the animated series in mind, the majority of whom are teenagers and adults. No, this movie was made for the five to ten-year-old set, the ones who may or may not have seen the Nicktoons replays of Avatar: The Last Airbender. But even the kids who have seen the series cannot appreciate the layers of complexity in the show, the richness of the characters, or the overall dialogue of the series. That’s what folks like Shyamalan are counting on.

My son was asking about The Last Airbender this morning, because he thinks that it’ll be like the animated series. Soon to be seven, Noah has a more thorough understanding of the series than most his age. But he doesn’t know how bad this movie is. If I’m pushed to or if he begs, I might take him, if only to show him how a good series can be turned into a horrible film. Then I’ll ask Shyamalan to give back his salary for making such schlock.

The Silent Treatment

21 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Mount Vernon High School, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, Class of 1987, Coolness, Culture, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Race, Silent Treatment, The Roots, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Source: Screen Shot from The Roots, “Silent Treatment” Music Video, Geffen, 1995

Right after the MVHS graduation ceremony at Memorial Field in June ’87, it started. I’d walk down the street to the store, and bump into one of my suddenly former classmates, say “Hi,” and get no response at all. The few times I bumped into a certain Ms. Red Bone, she’d stare straight at me, then straight through me, all as I said “Hi.” She just kept on walking, as if I had phased out of our space-time continuum into a parallel universe. By the beginning of August, I honestly thought that these people, my classmates for so long, were showing their true colors. They just didn’t like me, not me because I’d been a Hebrew-Israelite or me because I was poor or me because I listened to Mr. Mister. It was all about me, something within me that they detested.

“You can’t pay any attention to that. They’re all just jealous,” my new friend E (see “The Power of E” posting from August ’08) said when I told her about the ghost treatment over lunch one day. She and I worked for General Foods in Tarrytown that summer.

“Of what? Of me?,” I asked in disbelief.

“It’s because you’re not trying to be anybody except yourself,” she said.

“That’s a good theory,” I thought, but I didn’t really believe it. E was fully in my corner, and much more obvious about it than anyone else.

This pattern of treatment had only occurred two other times. Once was in sixth grade, after I came to Holmes with my kufi for the first time. My best friend Starling stopped talking to me, and refused to even acknowledge my presence for nearly two weeks before our second and last fight. The other was earlier in my senior year, in the weeks after the final class rankings were posted. Some in the Class of ’87 were upset with me because I was ranked fourteenth in our class. Three of them responded by not talking to me at all. They’d walk by me in the hallways, looked at and through me, and kept going without so much as a nod. That went on from mid-December through the beginning of March.

The Black “Party All The Time” folks in my class, the popular and dapper folks, snickered whenever they saw me. So I guess that they decided that to acknowledge me after graduation would me contaminating themselves with the knowledge that I was still alive, still figuring things out, still not cool enough to be bothered with.

Three years later, I bumped into one of these folks on my way home from my summer job with Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in White Plains. I was walking home to 616 on East Lincoln, having just gotten off the 41 Beeline Express. It was after 6:30, and I was beat from another day of database work and my research preparations for my senior year at Pitt. Coming in the opposite direction toward North Columbus was a party-all-the-timer, a popular, slightly light-skinned dude named J. Since I assumed that he would walk by me as if I were thin air, I started to walk by him as if he weren’t there.

Surprisingly, J stopped me and said, “Hi, Donald.” He said that he needed to talk to me, to tell me that the path that I walked in high school, while weird, was a better path than the one that he was on. He told me about his mind-bending experiences at Howard, about his dropping out and need to take care of some serious emotional and mental health issues. After a year of work at Pitt and in Westchester County, I could tell, too.

At first, I was taken aback. I mean, this was a guy who laughed at me for nearly six years, who’d never lowered himself to so much as to give me a thumbs-up while in school. Now J was sharing the most intimate of details about his life with me? I asked him, “Why are you telling me this?” Among the other things he said, the thing that stuck with me was, “Because you’re true to yourself.” I gave him a handshake, and wished him well.

That was nearly twenty years ago. I guess that J and others were under a lot of pressure — peer pressure, girl pressure, family pressures — to be cool, to be successful, to be something other than themselves. None of this justified how they treated me back then. Nor does it justify how any of them may see me now. I’m just glad the only silent treatment I get now is from my wife when I’ve taken a joke too far. At least I know that she’ll talk to me again, eventually.

Another Day In Paradise

17 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, music, Politics, Pop Culture

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...But Seriously, Another Day in Paradise, BP oil spill, Energy, Environment, GMOs, Greed, Monsanto, Phil Collins, Union Carbide

Source: Virgin, Atlantic, WEA. The image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic.

A little more than twenty years ago, Phil Collins (no relation) released the first song from his …But Seriously album, “Another Day In Paradise.” In the context of the times, it was part of a series of pop music songs that sought to arouse a social justice consciousness in the late-’80s, to stem the “Greed is good” culture that had evolved during the Reagan Years. Though overwrought and a bit like being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, “Another Day In Paradise” — a song about homelessness in America — was the final #1 hit of the ’80s, and the first one of the ’90s as well.

That song has as much relevance today as it did twenty and a half years ago, and not just with the issue of homelessness. The current BP oil deluge crisis, the manipulation of the housing market, our growing personal and national debt, even the tampering with our food by corporate giants like Tyson, Monsanto, and Con-Agra. All fall into the paradigm of a society faced with ills of its own making yet in nearly complete ignorance of its own participation in these disasters. Our addiction to oil is stronger than any individual’s addiction to crack cocaine or crystal meth. The housing market and our net debtor status reflects greed run amok and nearing the speed of light. And the food crisis — with the obesity and health crisis it has created — is an indication that our narcissism and greed knows no bounds.

Progressives and others on the left — people even more left than me — tend to act as if these corporations aren’t affected by their own evil decisions and policies, that the ills that they have created will only affect our adult children and grandchildren. In fact, that’s how our representatives in government talk as well. But, as we are seeing with the pictures of oil and mud-soaked pelicans and turtles, that’s simply not true. What’s been happening to our environment, energy, food and economy affects all of us, rich and poor, now, not in twenty or fifty years, but now.

The rich can and do clean up the crap that affects us all better than we can because they have the money to do so. But they still breathe the same polluted air, eat the same GMO foodstuffs — especially if they run Monsanto and Con-Agra — and drink the same contaminated water that we drink. They’re just too rich and ignorant to realize that we’re all in the same rickety boat, and that with each windfall profit, their putting the nails in their own coffins too.

The lyrics to Phil Collins’ song go something like this at the end:

You can tell from the lines on her face
You see that she’s been there
Probably been moved on from every place
Cause she didn’t fit in there

Except the “she” in the way I see these lyrics today isn’t a homeless woman. It’s the riches of our planet, as we rape and torture it into what we hope is submission, ignoring the signs that the consequences for our greed are already too high for us to pay. Our paradise world has already been turned into a living hell for millions all over the world — from half-century-long oil spills in Nigeria (see In Nigeria, Oil Spills Are a Longtime Scourge – NYTimes.com ) to the half a million victims of the Union Carbide toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India in ’84. With Katrina in ’05 and this BP disaster this year, maybe this is only our procrastination, incompetence, narcissism and greed chickens coming home to roost.

The World Is Not Enough

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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A Question of Freedom, Abby Sunderland, Academy for Educational Development, AED, Affluence, Catcher in the Rye, Cem, Holden Caulfield, Into the Wild, Jordan Romero, Ken, McCandless, Narcissism, New Voices Fellowship Program, R. Dwayne Betts, Youth

Mount Everest from from Kalapatthar in Nepal. Photo Source: Pavel Novak Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

A few years ago, at my social justice fellowship job in DC, I worked with probably the worst program assistant in all my years of work. He was a twenty-two-year-old graduate of U Virginia or some other four-year institution in the heart of the Confederacy, and this was his first professional position. In eight months’ time, he managed to screw up in every conceivable way. He sent out professional emails with the signature, “Scooby Dooby Doo.” He’d address me with, “Yo, wass up,” as if we were friends. He slept in one day during our summer conference, and showed up hung over and in the clothes that he’d worn the day before another day. He couldn’t even do a mail merge without turning it into the German loss at Stalingrad. It took all of these screw ups and more before my boss was ready to entertain firing him. My former boss’ lament was, “He’s young. He’s just trying to figure things out.”

It’s one of the biggest and most hypocritical statements I’ve heard, and not just at my former job. We make excuses for youth — at least some youth — because we believe that somehow, some way, these folks will one day find themselves and take over the reins of our society and world. If this were a universal thing, that would be fine with me. But it’s not. If you’re educated, middle class or affluent, White and male — and sometimes female — the above is what people say about you when you screw in ways that would’ve gotten me fired inside of a week, whether at sixteen, nineteen or twenty-two.

The fact is, we live in a society in which for those folk whose concerns have grown beyond money, food,

Bungee jumping off the Zambezi Bridge, Victoria Falls, Africa, 1996

shelter and basic education and health, the everyday world isn’t enough. We think that youth and young adults have the mandate to search for themselves and screw up at all costs, because, well, the world is already theirs to inherit.

We don’t make excuses for poor White males, or Blacks, or the millions of undereducated youth regardless of race, gender and wealth the same way we do for the likes of the fully advantaged. Do we normally call it a mere mistake when a young woman of color gets pregnant at seventeen, or when someone like the author and poet R. Dewayne Betts (of his memoir A Question of Freedom) somehow ends up an accessory to a violent crime at sixteen? Of course not! We condemn both, treat them like they’re full-fledged adults, and hope that they rot out of our sight, media and mind.

From Holden Caulfield in the late J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye to the real-time Chris McCandless in the movie and book Into The Wild, the well-off mandarin class has embraced the contrarian and narcissistic perspectives that some youth have of our flawed and brutal world. Instead of fighting for a better world, the fictitious Caulfield and the real-life McCandless both went off in search of a reality that never existed anywhere except in their own minds. Ultimately, one took his own life, while the other put themselves in a position to lose his in not-so-wild Alaska.

Wooden sailing boat Kleine Freiheit – 70 year old gaff cutter

I don’t object to the likes of thirteen-year-old Jordan Romero climbing Mount Everest with his father. Nor do I object to sixteen-year-old Abby Sunderland’s attempts to circumnavigate the world solo, despite the dangers of such. What I do have problems with, though, are the underlying assumptions and reasoning behind such feats. This isn’t just about man versus nature or about finding oneself through an epic struggle. Really, it’s about the reality that our world — at least for the kinds of folk that I’ve described here — isn’t enough for them anymore. It certainly wasn’t enough for their parents.

We celebrate these youth as if this is the way to live, and that right and wrong and consequences don’t matter. At some point, we need to get over our affluent obsession over youth, over ourselves and our collective lamenting of the state of our world, if we ever hope to grow up and fix whatever ails us and our world.