No Benefit Of Doubt

If the episode that made Shirley Sherrod a household name has taught me anything it is the fact that even the most benign action by someone doing their best to inspire or invoke or nurture racial harmony is open to interpretation or manipulation so far out of context that the result can be anything but the sought after, yet elusive, racial harmony.

In a selectively edited video clip of a speech to members of the NAACP that was intended to inspire people in the predominantly black audience to put whatever lingering racial animosity they may harbor against the white community aside and start seeing people as people, Ms. Sherrod was branded a racist who practiced reverse discrimination.  The abridged clip showed Ms. Sherrod recalling the first time a white farmer had asked her for help.  She recalled how she was tempted to do as little as possible to help the man save his farm.

But if anyone bothered to look at the full video clip, they would see that Ms. Sherrod continued saying that she learned that it isn’t always a black and white thing that we’re dealing with.  She learned to see the farmer as someone who needed help and she did what she could to help him.  The farmer and his wife consider Ms. Sherrod a dear, close friend and came to her defense as the managers of the Agriculture Department that she worked for, the White House, the NAACP, FOX News, and many other institutions and people moved swiftly to condemn her.

President Barack Obama has a little experience with this issue.  When Mr. Obama made his entreaties during the whole Jeremiah Wright affair, trying his best to salvage his bid for the White House, a lot of people didn’t bother to listen to his message and instead interpreted the gesture as some kind of backhand slap against his elderly white grandmother.  Just in case you may have forgotten, or just never knew, some people condemned Mr. Obama for throwing his grandmother under the proverbial bus by referring to her as a typical white woman.  All some people heard was an insult.  To this day these people deny that he said anything positive about race relations.  Considering what Mr. Obama went through back then it is even more disappointing that he would stand idly by as Ms. Sherrod was railroaded on behalf of his office.

When it comes to racism, it’s so easy to take the most cursory glance at black people trying to make a statement about our issues regarding race and make gigantic, astonishing, mind bending leaps of conclusions based on fictions that have absolutely nothing to do with anything remotely resembling reality.

Black people who talk about racism are only trying to stoke the fires of racial conflict.  Black people want reparations and want to seize power and authority so that we can do to the white community what the white community did to our ancestors, did to our elders, and in some cases, did to us.

It would be ludicrous to try and argue that no black person feels the need to follow the golden rule of the Hebrew bible and demand an eye for an eye.  Of course there are black people who are so angry that they want the white community to suffer the same racial animosity that the black community suffered.  But not every black person thinks that way and it would be most advantageous if more people, especially other black people, would remember that every now and then.  All too often, black people who talk about ending racism are subjected to examples of the very racism that they are trying to bring people’s awareness to.

This is just another example in a long list of our racial hypocrisy.  A white celebrity bounty hunter will use a number of racial epithets in reference to his son’s girlfriend, a good ol’ country boy with his own radio show referring to a group of predominantly black women as nappy headed whores, a comedian who let lose with a string of curses at the black people in the audience, and people are more than understanding and ready to give them the benefit of doubt.  But black people who have the audacity to talk openly about their past in a message of racial healing are the scorn of our society.

Hopefully you’ll appreciate what I’m trying to say here.  No doubt there will be some who won’t, can’t, or will choose not to understand this message.  Not everybody who is white is a racist.  Not everybody who is black is a racist either.  If we can give people who are clearly referring to black people as niggers, whores, and such the benefit of doubt, why would we hesitate to do the same for black people who want to put our race relations in the proper context as well?  The benefit of doubt is just another one of those things in life that does not get applied equally along racial lines.

Bus Rides Then And Now

Unemployment Benefits Will Only Lead To Decadence

Yesterday, President Barack Obama signed a bill extending jobless benefits to more than two million unemployed Americans, ending a long political stalemate. The day before, the United States Senate approved the bill. The next day the House of Representatives speedily passed the measure and quickly passed the legislation on to the oval office. The new law extends unemployment insurance through November for many people who have not yet exhausted their aid. Benefits would be retroactive to late May, when the previous extension expired. Jobless benefits vary from state to state but typically expire after half a year. This law would extend benefits for some to ninety nine weeks.

A Republican filibuster held the bill up in the Senate until the two conservative senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, made the decision to cross party lines to end the block tactic. Most Republicans contended that the thirty four billion dollar measure should be paid for with spending cuts rather than tacked onto the national debt. Democrats argued that the over ten percent nationwide jobless rate was a national emergency and exempt from budget offset requirements.

Some conservatives theorize that the jobless benefits program has morphed into an entitlement program over the years. The program which started in the great depression era was originally intended as a temporary bridge to help the jobless until an economic recovery could put the majority of people back to work. But now, in some of the hardest-hit states, the long-term unemployed have been able to collect benefits for almost two years.

Some conservatives argue that the long term availability of unemployment insurance has turned it into something akin to welfare. Some argue that the program is subject to abuse and is counterproductive for encouraging people to actually look for work. Republican Senator John Kyl of Arizona said that to continue to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for people to seek new work.

Some people will make the choice to live off of three hundred dollars a week, a little less than sixteen thousand dollars a year, and would rather get paid to sit around the house instead of going out and getting a real job. With twelve hundred dollars a month people will be able to pay for their mortgage or rent, utilities, food, transportation cost, entertainment cost, medical care, and other miscellaneous and incidental items. Unless somebody is über thrifty or living in a cardboard box or some combination of two and then some, not very many people will be satisfied with getting unemployment assistance of three hundred dollars weekly.

It is true that people getting their unemployment compensation may not be as desperate as their counterparts who aren’t getting anything. Somebody getting unemployment wouldn’t settle for any job earning the federal minimum wage. A lot of people would rather use unemployment as a stop gap while they look for a job that they would be more inclined to keep and earn a decent living off of. Keeping people desperate only benefits employers who would be willing to take advantage of desperate people.

If our conservative politicians believe that desperate people work harder and are therefore better for our economy, wouldn’t desperate wealthy people be willing to work harder to make profits be good for the economy was well?

Lowering tax rates on the wealthy gives them a disincentive to make the kind of investments necessary to keep the economy functioning at peek efficiency. Using the same logic that has been applied to the unemployed, the wealthy have no incentive to work harder for their healthy profits when they are given tax breaks that allow them to keep more from making less. The incentive to do better, to earn more through a hard day of investing, is reduced.

The lost revenue of the tax cuts is estimated to run into the trillions of dollars. And that was money that did not need to be paid for with cuts elsewhere in the budget. The trillions of dollars that could’ve gone to the government simply evaporated. And now some of us want to focus on a fraction of that sum in order to pay for the unemployed who are just being paid much too well to get a job. The hypocrisy is amazing when you stop and think about it.

Obama’s Supporters Deserve Obama’s Support

According to recent polls, President Barack Obama’s popularity is continuing to fall to record lows.  A lot of political pundits are dismissing Mr. Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party as losers when America does its midterm elections later this year.  A lot of talk is going on about how many seats the Republicans will be able to pickup this year.  The Republicans are practically drooling over the prospect of winning back control of the Senate or the House of Representatives or possibly both.  Robert Gibb, the President’s Press Secretary, is resigned to the fact that his party will lose and should take steps to minimize the political losses.

I’m not surprised that Mr. Obama is going down in the poll numbers.  The man spends a lot of time turning his back on supporters to embrace people who’d never support him.  Some people would prefer to support Beelzebub himself than give Mr. Obama the time of day.  But that fact would never keep Mr. Obama from trying to appear to be a centrist as he trades away the faith his own political base has in him.  If the people who voted to put Mr. Obama in office wanted a public option then I would think that Mr. Obama would do what he can to keep that public option on the table.  Too much is given up to win a halfhearted compromise.

But what is truly disappointing is how quickly Mr. Obama will distance himself from people or entities that have supported him.  Yesterday, the Obama administration worked to distance itself from Shirley Sherrod, a bureaucrat for the USDA in Georgia who was unceremoniously kicked to the curb because of a video that showed her talking about a situation that happened more than twenty years ago where she was being asked for help from a white farmer who was about to lose her job.  Based on a video clip that clearly took Ms. Sherrod’s statement way out of context, officials in the Obama administration did not hesitate to ask Ms. Sherrod for her resignation without giving her the slightest benefit of doubt.

That seems to be typical operating procedure for this White House.  We saw evidence of this before Mr. Obama was elected President when videos surfaced of one of Mr. Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, surfaced during the primaries.  Mr. Obama tried to distance himself from his spiritual mentor.  But when that didn’t work well enough to put the whole issue in the past, Mr. Obama found it convenient, as well as politically expedient, to kick Mr. Wright to the curb.

The same thing happened to Van Jones who was appointed by Mr. Obama to head the newly created position of Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.  Mr. Jones became embroiled in a controversy over his political past that included a public comment disparaging congressional Republicans.  Conservatives launched an aggressive campaign against him and Mr. Jones resigned from that political post just a few short months later.  Way to support your supporter.

What happened to the organization formerly known as ACORN is a crying shame.  ACORN no longer exists because of the outright distortions that were attributed to it.  A video is made showing an ACORN worker talking to an undercover conservative posing as a pimp about utilizing government assistance in order to get a house where he can run a brothel.  Based on one video out of one office the Obama administration allows ACORN to be banned from receiving any federal assistance and the agency crumbled and crumbled hard.

The former White House Social Secretary Desirée Rogers was at the center of the controversy surrounding the Salahis, a couple who managed to crash a state dinner hosted by President Obama in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.  The Secret Service ultimately took the blame for the failure after members of the House Committee on Homeland Security voted against issuing Ms. Rogers a subpoena.  But shortly thereafter, Ms. Rogers resigned the position.  Although it was reported that the decision to leave was Ms. Rogers’ to make alone, the White House quickly named her successor in time for the next state sanctioned party.

These are the more high profile resignations and stiff arming from Mr. Obama and his administration.  There are others for sure.  But one thing I do notice, it seems to happen a lot to people who once called themselves close friends to Mr. Obama and his family.  And the example of ACORN is one of many exceptions.  But considering that this was a community oriented organization, you’d think Mr. Obama, a man with a history of being a community organizer, would be more compassionate and willing to stand up for this institute.  Instead, Mr. Obama manifest the type of behavior more associated with the proverbial phrase” don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.”

With such disregard for any type of loyalty to his closest supporters is it really surprising to see so many supporters abandon Mr. Obama and consequently the rest of the Democratic Party?  At the first sign of trouble, Mr. Obama runs like a political Scooby-Doo that heard his partner Shaggy say he just saw a ghost.  No investigation necessary.  Just put those feet in high gear and sort out the details long after any hint of danger is gone.  If Mr. Obama can turn tail at the first sign of trouble from any of his supporters, especially the ones closest to him, it would only be karma if his supporters turned tail and ran from Mr. Obama.

Prejudice And The White Farmer Epiphany

Two wrongs don’t make anything right. That’s been a golden rule that has been said to just about everyone at least a hundred times in the average life span. Just because something wrong happens to you doesn’t make it okay to do something wrong back. It will solve nothing and will not set anything straight. Nothing that is, except for race.

Time and time again I have received comments from people saying that black people are just as racist to white people as white people are racist to black people. I have to disagree with that statement. Generally speaking the black community is not in a position to deny the white community anything close to the way the white community can deny the black community. For every dollar the white community controls the black community controls something like two cents. Compared to the black community the white community controls five thousand percent more wealth than the black community. The white community controls far more jobs than the black community. The black community does not have the ability to deny the white community much of anything. Therefore, I hardly think the black community is in a position to exercise much racism against the white community.

What I think people mean is that black people are just as prejudice to white people as white people are prejudice to black people. If all things were equal, you would probably have white people complaining about blacks denying them services or products or opportunities just as much as black people complain about the denial of services, products, and opportunities from white people.

But things are far from equal and therefore we live in circumstances that find an entire host of disparities between the two communities. A lot of people want to justify this disparity with the claims that black people would do it if black people had the chance. So these people believe prejudice and racial preferences is just a natural condition of being human and there is nothing immoral or unethical about our racial status quo.

I disrespectfully disagree. Yes, it is true that we have prejudices. But we have the ability to look beyond prejudices to see another individual for who they are. I might think that white people are more prejudice than black people. But if I come across a white person that I never met before I understand we have a clean slate to start a relationship. I don’t stick my hand out to shake someone’s hand thinking that they are going to discriminate against me. I shake another person’s hand hoping for the best. I like to think that I do not allow my prejudices to dictate how I interact and treat other people. I would like to think that other people learn to do the same.

Days after the NAACP clashed with segments of the tea party organization over allegations of racism, a twenty four year old video surfaced showing Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod standing at a podium telling a story to an audience about how she, a black woman, was tempted to withhold help from a white farmer facing bankruptcy. Ms. Sherrod thought that the white farmer was too big for his britches and had made an initial decision not to help the man as much as she could have. When the white man came to her nonprofit agency for help, and not any government agency, she could not help but think about all the black farmers that had lost their farms because some white person didn’t feel that the need to help black people. At least that was her initial response.

Ms. Sherrod appeared to revel in retelling the story about the white farmer. I saw the video clip for myself. And a lot of people who have an interest in justifying prejudice and making people in the black community appear just as prejudiced as their white counterparts would stop the clip right there as if proof to support their position that there is deep prejudice on both sides of the racial divide.

But there is more to that video clip. Ms. Sherrod went on to say that that she had an epiphany. Ms. Sherrod explained that she started to look beyond the color of the farmer’s skin. She admitted that she learned to see that she didn’t have a white farmer looking for help to save his farm. Ms. Sherrod learned to see a man needing help saving his farm. It wasn’t a matter of race. She learned that two wrongs would never make what she was feeling right. She put her prejudice aside to help another person. And to support her contention that she did help that farmer, Roger and Eloise Spooner, the white farmer and his wife, confirmed that Ms. Sherrod helped save their five hundred acre family farm.

As a black woman that admitted her moment of prejudice in a video clip, Ms. Sherrod is being crucified. People with an interest in stoking the fires on issues of race are pointing fingers and demanding blood. Ms. Sherrod was asked to resign from her position in Georgia by USDA Deputy Under Secretary Cheryl Cook under orders by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. There was no opportunity for this black woman to redeem herself for her crime of thinking about not helping a white farmer to the full extent of her ability.

It’s too bad Ms. Sherrod wasn’t somebody like Senator Robert Byrd. Mr. Byrd admitted being a member of the ku klux klan, arguably one of the most prejudiced and racist organization in the history of man. But that didn’t keep people from celebrating his life and his achievements. Mr. Byrd had his epiphany and people are ready to accept that at face value. But then again, holding fast to Mr. Byrd’s past mistakes is no way to prove that black people are just as prejudice as white people.

The NAACP vs The Tea Party

The tea party and the National Advancement for the Association of Colored People (NAACP) have been accusing each other of racism for the past week. This dust up started about a week ago when the leaders of the NAACP approved a resolution accusing tea party activists of tolerating racist elements in their movement. NAACP President Ben Jealous said that if the tea party wants to be respected and wants to be part of the mainstream in this country, they have to take responsibility.

Members of the tea party and other conservatives trying to court these people quickly shot back with their own claims that the NAACP is itself racist and irrelevant. Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots said in an interview that it was a little ironic that an organization that has lost legitimacy through its own racism is trying to call the tea party racist.

Mark Williams, leader of the Tea Party Express, took things a step further saying that the NAACP is an organization of professional race baiters who make a very good living off racial tension. They make more money off issues of race than any slave trader ever. According to Mr. Williams, it is time for groups like the NAACP to go to the trash heap of history where they belong along with all the other vile, racist groups that emerged in our history. In an interview with CNN, Mr. Williams referred to the NAACP as a bunch of old fossils looking to make a buck off skin color.

Phillip Dennis, founder of the Dallas Tea Party, said in an interview with FOX News said that the NAACP was irrelevant and should have ended fifty years ago. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said the NAACP should stop name calling.

The brazen contempt some people in the tea party have for the NAACP is truly thick enough to the point of being tangible. The tea party’s vitriolic counter attack on the NAACP is truly the wrong message from an organization that encourages its members to hold placards accusing President Barack Obama of not being an American citizen, signs referring to Mr. Obama as a lying African, and other signs that depict the President as an African witch doctor. Not as prevalent but still seen at tea party rallies were effigies of the President as a monkey or as Curious George eating a banana and banners implying that a black man doesn’t belong in the White House, amongst other things.

One thing that truly resonates with me is the fact that so many people who campaign with the tea party’s blessing will come out and say that we need to tolerate racism and discrimination in our social collective. I do believe I heard tea party favorite Rand Paul say that he believes it is not our government’s responsibility to assure that businesses keep their racist and discriminatory practices in check. It is the right of the racist to practice racism. And this is a man who can conceivably go to our nation’s capital and make laws protecting the rights of people who are racist to deny services and products to a portion of our community.

To accuse the NAACP of being little more than an organization of race baiters does nothing to help calm the situation down. In fact, it only stokes the fear and suspicion on both sides of the issue. The NAACP has long been an advocate of the black community, a community that does not feel any positive political connection to the tea party movement. The NAACP has fought for the civil rights of minorities while some tea party candidates promise to do what they can to keep government from helping to enforce civil rights and fair treatment for all.

There may be people within the NAACP who harbor prejudices against white people. But I seriously doubt if they are running for political office at the national level and promising to do what they can to make the open display of racism part and parcel of the American landscape. Whatever perception of racism by people within the NAACP may exist, it is clearly no threat to white people. It is an empty threat. The same cannot be truthfully said by people who may want to indulge racism within the tea party.

Tea party leadership will brazenly display contempt for black people. Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express escalated tensions and rhetoric when he penned a satirical letter under the name of NAACP President Ben Jealous to Abraham Lincoln and posted it on his organization’s web site. After a series of revisions, forced by people who were outraged by Mr. Williams’ rather special sense of race baiting humor, the letter was pulled off completely. Here it is in its original entirety. It should be noted that there is nothing on any NAACP web site that is even remotely offensive to people who support the tea party. In fact, just asking people in the tea party to reject such things is too offensive to some tea partiers.

It should also be noted that the National Tea party Federation has disassociated itself from Mr. Williams’ Tea Party Express. Isn’t that an example of what the NAACP resolution asked for in the first place?

Dear Mr. Lincoln:

We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely,
Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Head Colored Person

Waffle Diplomacy

My son is so cute! Right now dude is throwing a tantrum. He’s been eating waffles with blackberry honey from a farm in state of Washington every single day for the past week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mom said enough is enough. Baby boy has an eating disorder where he gets attached to a single food item and then won’t eat anything else for days. We started with waffles and quickly moved on. We’ve been through frosted flakes, cornflakes, corn Chex, pretzels, celery, fresh salmon, shortbread cookies, and corn chips. And now we’re back to waffles. We can go about a week before his mother puts her foot down and says it’s time to change. No more waffles! As of this morning my son had his last waffle for what will may become a lengthy while.

My son made it through lunch mostly on milk. His mother made him a little salmon, a few carrots, and some corn chips. He enjoyed eating them at one time. Maybe he’ll go to something he’s familiar with pretty easy. But baby boy wouldn’t have any of it. He kept going to the fridge, getting the milk and pouring it into his glass. Mom caught on and cutoff the milk supply. By dinner time, my son was jones-ing for his waffles. He’d go to the freezer and open it himself, point inside, and demanded his waffles. And when he didn’t get them in a timely manner, the tantrum started.

The tears practically spurted out his eyes. The little feet started stamping. The wailing commenced. He shook his head back and forth like he was trying to spin it around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. He screamed. Mom calmly sat down at the kitchen table as if to say, oh well. The gauntlet went down.

Dude followed mom to the kitchen table and took his seat. I was already at the kitchen table, surfing the net, looking for jobs, and catching up on the latest news. In front of baby boy was a plate of salmon. He protested. The head went back and forth, his lungs sucked in an extra supply of air to heighten the decibels of the wailing, and the tears started to flow with even more alacrity. Spittle began to hang from his bottom lip. Dude was pulling out all the stops to look as pathetic and as miserable as possible. Mom just rolled her eyes. I didn’t realize she could appear so unconcerned.

I had to laugh. The whole thing looked like something that could’ve come straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting if Mr. Rockwell did more stuff with black subjects. It was a moment of spontaneity that could tell a story. I grabbed the camera and snapped a few pictures just to remember the moment.

If I was either one of them I’d probably throw in my towel. But these two were pulling out all the stops. And then suddenly mom’s cover cracked. She asked me if I thought it would be a good idea to scramble him some eggs. I said, hell yes, just a little too enthusiastically. I admit I’m a wimp and I have no defenses for my son’s tears.

She got the eggs out the fridge, got a pan out the cabinet, got the spices off the shelf and went to work. Baby boy tamped down the wails but continued to tug on mom’s nerves with a little whimpering. She cooked the eggs, put it on a plate and put it in front of him. He screamed on the first bite and spat it out. The eggs weren’t what he wanted. He jumped from his chair and started his tantrum again with a new enthusiasm. Mom rolled her eyes, turned around, and went to the sink to start washing the dishes.

The second time around baby boy was the one to crack. His bawling began to sputter. Eventually he went back to his seat and began to feed himself the eggs. I must’ve said something, but what it was escapes me right now so it must’ve been nothing really, and mom turned around and asked if I thought she was really mean. She followed my gaze down to our son and was happy to see him eating his eggs. The curse of whatever spell the waffle and honey cast on the boy was broken. When he was finished, mom was pretty happy. She knew that the eggs weren’t going to fill him up so she decided to give him some brown rice toast with a little honey on it. Not quite the waffle he wanted but it was a gesture of compromise nevertheless.

My son ate the single slice of toast. When he was through he asked for another. Mom said no and the two cut their losses. Trust me, eventually he’ll go back to eating waffles and I will be a happy man. We went to the grocery store yesterday and made a serious investment in his waffle supply. We’re not going to let those waffles degenerate into something that resembles and taste like cardboard with ice crystals. We’ll be back here in two, three weeks tops. Somebody’s got to eat all those waffles. By then, baby boy will probably be on cornflakes like an addict will be on crack. He’ll be jones-ing for something. And we’ll replay this whole routine in another episode to get him to eat something different like all those waffles in the freezer.

Controlling Deficit Spending

I guess principles have to kick in sometime…

The Color Purple, Black and Blue

Whoopi Goldberg is making news for her staunch defense of Australian actor, director, and producer Mel Gibson.  Mr. Gibson made frontline, headline news for another one of his special rants recorded by his former girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva.  The alleged tape with an alleged voice that is allegedly Mr. Gibson sounded awfully convincing.  Either somebody is doing a serious Mel Gibson impersonation or dude is as guilty, and as busted, as sin.  The recording reveals a new depth to Mr. Gibson’s racism and an introduction to his misogyny.  The voice on the tape admits to hitting and abusing a woman.

Ms. Goldberg is standing by her friend “Mel” and is out front and center defending him, all alone if she has to.  Ms. Goldberg says that Mr. Gibson has been to her house and he has played with her children and she simply doesn’t feel that this man is racist.  On the television show The View, Ms. Goldberg stressed that while she didn’t condone what Mr. Gibson but that doesn’t make him a racist.  Ms. Goldberg said that being a black woman, she would expect a little bit of leeway to have some feelings of alarm if she was around a white racist.  Way to stick up for the man Ms. Goldberg, especially when everyone else is dropping him like a hot potato cooked in a nuclear powered microwave.

One of, if not the most, famous characters portrayed by Ms. Goldberg on the silver screen was her character Celie Johnson from Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple.  The story was about the life of a poor uneducated young black woman in 1930s Georgia who is forced into a marriage against her will to Mister, played by Danny Glover, who just so happened to have played police detective Roger Murtaugh opposite Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs in the Lethal Weapon series.

Mister is an abuser.  He expresses nothing for contempt for Celie.  Mister has an affair with Shug Avery, played by Margaret Avery, a singer that occasionally comes to town and spends time with Mister.  Shug comes to live with Mister and Celie when she becomes ill from a “social disease” and Celie nurses Shug back to health.

Shug learned a profound respect for Celie.  Celie told Shug that Mister beats her when Shug is away.  When Shug found out what was happening, that Mister was abusive Shug had nothing but support for her friend.  Shug told Celie something to the effect, He ain’t never hit me but if that’s what he’s doing we’re going to stop that son-of-a-bitch.  Next thing you know Celie hightailed it to Memphis, Tennessee, and became an independent woman with her own tailoring shop.  She couldn’t have done it without another woman backing her up.

All that shit flew out the window.  As far as Whoopi is concerned, The Color Purple was just a fairy tale.  That kind of thing just don’t happen in real life.

When Whoopi Goldberg hears that her friend “Mel” is a man who can throw down some seriously profane language with some seriously charged threats.  There’s a tape of it happening and Ms. Goldberg wants to stand up and say that we’re the ones who are having a misunderstanding.  Dude is just being stupid.

That shit ain’t just stupid.  It’s indicative of some deep down issues.  The man admits he’s been hitting her especially.  He goes into a hateful tantrum when he doesn’t get his fucking before she goes to sleep and so she deserves to get her teeth knocked out!

And she actually wanted to date that guy!  I know crazy, unstable people don’t let you know that they’re crazy and unstable until long after the relationship starts and you’re significantly emotionally invested.  But there must’ve been some clues along the way that make a lot more sense now that she’s got the hindsight of twenty/twenty vision.

Regardless of how their relationship started and what she may have seen along the way and her decision to stay and suffer ever growing abuse while their connection to each other continued to veer off course, Ms. Grigorieva finally said she had had enough.  If Ms. Grigorieva told a friend like Shug, that friend would have done what she could’ve to help.  The abuse would stop.  Period!  The last thing she would’ve done is go in front of everybody and say that she spent time with Mister and Mister just ain’t like that.  And this is the woman that played the very epitome of spouse abuse.

I can understand Ms. Goldberg’s desire to help her friend.  But instead of trying to defend the man she should be telling her little homie from down under to get some freaking help.  It looks like its time to give the dude some tough love and tell him that this kind of shit is not acceptable.

I cannot help but wonder if Ms. Goldberg would be as understanding if her friend “Mel” looked more like Mister.  I bet she’d truly see the light then.

Black Pot Bob

“I live in the city of Niagara Falls, where the population is mostly Italian, Irish, Polish, and African [...] I was on my porch this evening, when I saw two young black women with strollers walking on the sidewalk with two young children walking with them. One of the women began yelling at her daughter (a two year old who was walking with them) saying “get the fu$% up here” and almost pulled her socket out of her arm. I said to her (as she was on my property at that point–where my driveway meets the road) please don’t use that language in front of me and those young kids.

What do you think the response was? Like an animal, she began to yell all sorts of lovely profanity towards me, including cracker, and told me to put my hood back on. I asked her to leave my property, and her and the friend continued to throw remarks my way, including “better watch your house tonight”.

Is this normal? Not for the average working white family. There is a fundamental problem among the black population–it’s called entitlement. About 20 minutes later, I had someone, a black man, come up to me and try to sell me baby clothes that he clearly stole from Wal-Mart (still on the bag with Wal-Mart tags on them).

Do I need to go any further? I’m sure I’ll get replies stating that I’m racist. When does that whole dumb game ever end? Everytime that word is used, the person who used it tends to lose credibility within seconds, as everything said after that point is not taken seriously by the reader.

I believe that blacks are the most racist people in this country” – Bob

If Bob is not a straight up racist I don’t know who is. He gets into an argument with an ignorant black person, a black woman who obviously never learned parenting skills and doesn’t know the first thing about how to interact with children and uses it as proof of the racism of blacks. I’ve seen this type of behavior myself in my own neighborhood.

I have seen first hand how some black people talk to a young black child with anger and rancor because the child cannot keep up with his or her legs one third the length of the adult’s. I’ve seen first hand how some black women yank on a child’s arm to give them that extra incentive to move their tiny legs even faster or to pay attention to where the two are going. Somebody needs to explain to these people that children are naturally curious and might look around and become distracted by the tiniest thing. Instead of doing things to extinguish the child’s curiosity, we should be trying to do more to nurture it.

I’ve seen black people go off on other black people for suggesting a more tactful way of interacting with a child. Nobody should have much difficulty imagining the rant Bob described. But instead of the word “cracker” substitute the word “nigger” and you’d have the same conversation between two black people. Is the black woman still racist? I think her behavior is an example of ignorance, rudeness, hostility, abusiveness, stupidity, and a lot of other things, but racism wouldn’t be part of that list.

The black woman attacked Bob verbally. She threatened him. Chances are pretty good that she would have done the same if Bob was black. This form of ignorance being displayed here isn’t limited to a certain skin color. Although it might be racist to the casual observer or someone itching at the bit to make black people look like the harbingers of prejudice, this is in fact not even close to being some form of racism. The woman wasn’t able to deny Bob anything but a pleasant time to relax in front of his house. She didn’t deny him a proper education. She didn’t deny him a job. And although she made an empty threat to do so, she didn’t deny Bob a place to live.

Bob’s comment goes on to say that a black man tries to sell him what appears to be stolen merchandise from Wal-Mart. Bob assumes that the man stole the clothes.  I have no clue whether it’s true or not, but for the sake of argument we will go along with his assumption.  While this might be indicative of unethical behavior, how exactly does this equate to racism? How did the black man deny Bob any of his civil rights?  How is this black man’s behavior some form of prejudice?

But now let’s look at Bob’s words and thinking. Bob runs across a black woman who might be suffering from anger management issues and a black man who might have questionable ethics. He takes these two people and uses them as the yardstick for the entire black community. He doesn’t say that these two black people are messed up. He says that black people are messed up with our racism. He uses his experience with just two black people as a judgment against all black people.

Bob says that white people wouldn’t be able to get away with the type of behavior black people exhibit. I guess we are to assume that white people are never ignorant and malicious to their own children or to anybody else. White people never get annoyed with other people who might try to say something about ignorant behavior. White people never cheat or steal from others. According to Bob, this behavior is only endemic of people from the black community.

Bob is the epitome of racial negative prejudice against black people fueled by a white man’s hypocrisy. In reality, black people exhibit behavior that runs the gamut just like white people. Some black people are very ignorant. Some black people are thieves. It doesn’t mean that all black people are ignorant and thieves. There are very law abiding black people and black people who are of the highest integrity. But people like Bob would call black people who don’t quite fit into the “all blacks are scum” view of the black community a rare exception. Therefore, they feel that they are justified in their hatred for all black people.

White people use racial epithets. In fact, Mel Gibson made headline news recently, again, for one of his off the wall, racist and misogynistic rants against his girlfriend, admitting on tape that he beats her. And in the Bahamas, that young white guy called the barefoot bandit was caught shortly after he crashed landed a plane he stole. And then, after he abandoned his stolen plane, dude went on another crime spree breaking into people’s homes and businesses. But black people are the definition of unruly and our behavior is not normal for the average working white family.

People like Bob don’t realize that the behavior discussed here isn’t normal for the average working black family either. Black people are racists? Maybe that is true. I’m sure some are. But Bob hasn’t done or said anything to convince me of that fact one way or another. But is Bob a racist? Oh yeah! He is as racist as they come. He is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. If he was walking in front of my house where my driveway meets the road, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell him to get the hell off my property.