The "White Ghetto" is International: Poor Whites in South Africa are an Example of Justice and How the Chickens Do Indeed Come Home to Roost

In our earlier conversation regarding The National Review's story about poor whites in Appalachia, there were some very useful and insightful references to Apartheid era South Africa. Americans are obsessed with race; Americans often forget to locate the dynamics of white supremacy in their own country within a broader global context. The color line was not national. It was global.

There was a South African Apartheid State. There was (and remains, although modified, massaged, and evolved) an American Apartheid State as well. Thus the obvious irony: a president who happens to be black leads a country that remains in many ways racially segregated--by habit and history's legacy--as opposed to present law. A second irony, the United States' first president who happens to be black reigns over white American Empire:

The "white ghetto" in America is both sad and pathetic. South Africa also has a "white ghetto". Perhaps it is nationalism and a belief in American exceptionalism applied in a counter-intuitive manner, but I have some sympathy for the poor white rural folk in this country--even while I condemn their (assumed) bigotry towards people of color.

The poor whites of South Africa? A group who until several years ago benefited directly from, and were directly subsidized by the racial terrorism of a white minority against a black majority, and now complain about racial democracy? I do believe that they are getting their comeuppance.

The wages of sin are death. Moreover, the white poor in South Africa are now having their balance sheet called in and the butcher's bill paid. The white poor in South Africa have reaped what they have sowed. Is that not justice?

Alternatively, am I letting the white poor in America off too easy for their being complicit as a group with American Apartheid?

The White Ghetto is Not a Land of Milk and Honey. It is a Place Where They Use Soda For Money.

Owsley County, Ky. — There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. 

Earlier this week, President Obama gave a rather tepid and safe State of the Union Address. It did not address in any serious or broad way the national crisis regarding wealth inequality or stagnant wages. Interestingly, and very odd to my ears, Obama did wink to the "challenges" faced by "young men of color" in the labor market. And of course, the president offered nothing concrete about how to address said problem.

Obama's speech, and the much discussed assumption that he would address the United States' criminally high rates of income and wealth inequality, reminded me of a recent essay that was featured by the Right-wing website and publication The National Review.

It begins like a bad joke; the story is real. What would happen if a prominent conservative and Right-wing publication sent a black man to research and subsequently write an expose about white rural poverty?

The answer is simple: a train wreck of cognitive dissonance would occur among the National Review's commenters as they are forced to confront the fact that is white poverty, and how their default scripts about lazy black and brown people are challenged and upset.

They are Just Better at Life Than You: How Racism and Social Networks Reproduce Income and Wealth Inequality

History still binds us to the present:

Five years after the inauguration of the first black president, racial inequality lives on, reproducing itself in a vicious cycle. Even if all discrimination were to end tomorrow, self-reinforcing racial disparities would continue, according to the new book “Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage,” by USC Gould School of Law Professor Daria Roithmayr.

Roithmayr’s book focuses on racial gaps in housing, education and jobs—for example, Latino and black poverty rates are between 2.5 and four times the rate for whites, and black unemployment is double that of whites. Drawing on work in social network theory and other disciplines, Roithmayr argues that everyday choices recreate these racial gaps from one generation to the next.

“It’s really a racial ‘rich get richer’ story,” Roithmayr says. “It’s all about the power of networks.” 

"Reproducing Racism" is an important book. I wonder if Barack Obama will be reading it?

In conversations about structural inequality and the "new" colorblind racism, one of the repeated themes is how inequality is largely reproduced through impersonal, macrolevel, decision-making processes. The old racism--reduced to human caricatures which remain very dangerous--of KKK members, skinheads, and overt bigotry is an anachronism.

Here is the irony: as a society, Americans can (for the most part) claim victory over the most noxious and easily defined types of racist behavior in the public sphere. However, by focusing on the remnants of "old fashioned" racism, institutional and colorblind racism in the present is protected...if not nurtured.

President Obama will give his State of the Union Address in a few hours. He will say nothing radical or especially forward-thinking about wealth and income inequality. Moreover, wealth and income inequality in the United States is a stark reminder of the power of the colorline. It is no coincidence that African-Americans and Latinos have significantly less wealth and income than their white peers.

White wealth and black poverty was an intentional decision by white elites and policy makers from the founding of the United States until the end of Jim and Jane Crow. The destruction of inter-generational wealth for people of color, and the literal transfer of land, labor, cash, and capital to whites, was the nation's stated public policy. It was not an accident. American Apartheid was a system of racial exploitation by white society with the goal of economically marginalizing and oppressing people of color.

A Black "Thug" Toddler Equals National Coverage. A White Woman Leaves Kids in Car to Die So She Can Have Sex? Near Silence

Where is a white version of Don Lemon when we need him? A brave white man to lecture white women about their bad parenting skills, out of control libidos, and the rampant "bad" culture among White Americans, more generally?

Alas, what shall we do with the white women?

Heather Jensen left her two children unattended in an automobile so that she could sneak off and have sex with a man who is not her live-in boyfriend. Heather Jensen's two children died from heat exposure while their mother rutted with her Lothario. The deaths of William and Tyler were directly caused by their mother's negligence and lack of impulse control.

Ennisha Devers's child was video recorded in her home while he cussed and acted like a "thug". The video recording was shared by a local police organization that is concerned with how "the black poor" are raising their children, and as an example of a broken culture which produces criminals, thugs, and hooligans. Apparently, black toddlers who use profanity when prompted by adults will be incarcerated later in life.

A story about black "thug" toddlers prompts a national conversation. By comparison, a story about a white woman whose irresponsible behavior results in the deaths of her two children is an outlier, and passes without much comment from the national media.

For many otherwise smart, well-intentioned, and decent white people (and some others) white supremacy's intersection with white privilege exists as an abstraction. This is the very nature of privilege: it blinds those who possess and enjoy it.

Are Michael Caine and Marlon Brando Right? Is There Only One Viewer? And Are We All Actors as a Way of Maintaining Human Civilization?

For all of my many complaints and worries about the negative impact of social media and the Internet on human communication and social relationships, there are moments when they afford us opportunities for learning that would have required such an excess of time and energy as to be prohibitive--if not impossible--not too long ago.

I admire effortless expertise (thus the obvious question, how good and skilled does one have to be for their expertise to appear so natural and easy?); I admire, even more, those true experts who are able to communicate their gifts to a general and interested public.

Skilled writing for any venue or format ought to be deeply and intensely personal. Moreover, as I have shared here on WARN many times, blogging, being a serious member of the online commentariat or essayist, freelance writer, or other type of media personality in more traditional and conventional mediums is a performance. In those venues a person has to be "more real than real". Do they not?

And borrowing from the philosopher Judith Butler, most people are "performing" some type of identity as well--be it gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, or class.

Thus, what is taken as "natural" are in many cases a combination of biology and socialization. For most of the above categories they are wholly fictive.

In all, our performed identities are socially constructed scripts. Do not make a common error in inference here: these identities are no less real because they are performed. These identities are paradoxical: we hold on to them tightly because the performance of identity is so natural that many of us cannot imagine any other possibilities.

The Internet offered up two great finds that I would like to share on these matters.

The Ugly Lie of Glenn Foden's 'It's Not My Fault That Gravity is Racist' Editorial Cartoon

I am curious as to your reactions and thoughts about this editorial cartoon by Glenn Foden.

Its narrative is obvious: the country's first president who happens to be black uses false claims of racism to deflect responsibility for his failures. Such claims are part of a broader "colorblind" white racist narrative that people of color--blacks in particular--are a group of ingrate lying complainers who use false charges of racism, accusations which are de facto slurs against good white people, to somehow get over in America.

Foden is not indicting Obama; he is indicting black and brown Americans as somehow being dishonest liars, and whose experiences are vetoed by the ability of white folks, working through white privilege, to publicly invalidate what they have experienced and know.

In the Age of Obama, "colorblind" white racism has succeeded in advancing one of the most noxious and bizarre claims in recent memory: a new public opinion survey highlights how 44 percent of respondents actually believe that "racism" against white people is as significant a social problem as racial discrimination against people of color.

Such a data point speaks to a type of white backlash and rage that is being actively deployed to advance the plutocrats' and the 1 percent's agenda of using racial anxiety and hatred to further legitimate the evisceration of the public commons and the social safety net. Glenn Foden's cartoon is a visual embodiment of a process through which white elites have been able to manipulate the white working class and poor into supporting policies that actually hurt them economically.

However, I am trying to reconcile why I feel unsettled by the semiotics of such an obvious cartoon.

Could it be that I am offended intellectually, and my sense of reason is disturbed, by how any thinking person could believe that Barack Obama, who rarely if ever talks about race (except to scold black people), is somehow able to deploy his "blackness" as political capital in an effective manner on a national level?

Maybe this editorial cartoon bothers me because I am instinctively repelled by intellectual dishonesty, especially as it serves white supremacy.

President Obama has been subjected to a range of racially motivated assaults by the White Right. They include the grotesqueness that was/is Birtherism, to a resurgent Confederate States of America in the form of the Republican Party (and their habit of embracing the American Swastika i.e. the Confederate flag), and a Right-wing media machine that has deployed some of the most base and ugly stereotypes about black people in order to smear Barack Obama and the First Family.

Glenn Foden's editorial cartoon suggests that all of those events either have not happened and/or that the reasonable assumption that anti-black animus by many in the white polity--read: the Republican Party, a good number of Independents, and Red State America--has no impact on Obama's popularity or political legitimacy.

Racism is not an opinion. It is an empirical fact. Given the disconnect by the White Right from empirical reality across a range of policy matters, the white supremacist ethos of Glenn Foden's cartoon is part of a larger pattern of anti-intellectualism by movement conservatives.

Politics involves the manipulation of feelings, emotions, and symbols to advance some end goal where power and resources are protected, conserved, or redistributed within society.

Foden's cartoon is a great example of how white racism and white racial resentment can be manipulated and marshaled by one (deceptively simple) image. If "art" is supposed to move the spirit I commend his technique and ability; I remain disgusted by the lie he advances.

Pork Chops on Trees? Watermelons Blowing in the Breeze? If '12 Years a Slave' is Too Challenging a Movie For Some Audiences and Critics, Perhaps They Would Prefer 'Goin to Heaven on a Mule' Instead?

I shared a clip from Al Jolson's 1934 short film Goin to Heaven on a Mule some years ago. It still resonates.

Continuing with our conversation about the white privilege infused reaction by some film critics to the film 12 Years a Slave, I wonder if in the future, perhaps the enslavement of black Americans should be depicted in a happy and fanciful way in order to soothe white folks' feelings and anxieties?

Would this not protect the tender sensibilities of film viewers and cultural critics who find white on black violence and cruelty too uncomfortable, "theatrical", and "exploitative?"

A remake of films such as Goin to Heaven on a Mule would cater to Whiteness, its racial myopia, and how there are a pitiful group of black and brown conservatives who yearn for a return to the good old days of imagined and fanciful white benevolence on the slave plantations of the Old South. Times were oh so simple then...were they not? Or are such opinions exclusive to self-described white trash like the TV show Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson?

Life here in Age of Obama, post civil rights, America is too stressful me. I am going to buy a ticket to Al Jolson's version of black people's heaven on Kayak.com. My watermelon fueled flight leaves on Friday afternoon of this week. Are any of you coming along with me? What should we expect once our delayed, and quite late plane, arrives there?

The Historical Record is Not Kind to Film Critic Dana Stevens' Epic White Privilege Failure of an Essay on the Movie '12 Years a Slave'

This is an image of a 19th century wood engraving called "Slaves in Brazil: The Terrible Torture of a Slave", from 'Journal des Voyages'. It depicts a black slave being boiled alive as he hangs above a huge cauldron.

The film 12 Years a Slave was a Disney version of the Maafa and the crimes against humanity visited upon black people during the centuries-long slave regime in the Americas.

No mainstream American film would dare to show the true range of white on black torture and cruelty that took place during slavery in the West because such depictions would not be believed by the general public: those deeds would be either described as "unrealistic" or diminished to the level of the "ridiculous" by the moniker "torture porn".

Alternatively, the White Right's media machine would convince its low information public--what are veritable human lemmings--that a movie which portrayed a black man being held over a boiling cauldron by white slavers is "anti-white", and that black torture is somehow an example of "reverse discrimination".

I would like to return to our earlier conversation about film critic Dana Stevens' recent essay at Slate magazine on the movie 12 Years a Slave. As I wrote here, white privilege damages the thinking process of otherwise decent white folks because it actually convinces them that they can alter empirical reality to fit their own priors.

In the case of Slate's Dana Stevens, white privilege and the white racial frame permitted her--in a natural and unthinking way--to assume that the autobiography upon with the movie 12 Years a Slave is based, must somehow be an "inaccurate" representation of anti-black violence by whites during the Southern slave regime in the United States.

Richard Sherman and the Perils of Alpha Male Black Masculinity: I Wonder, What Would Happen if He Channeled 'Conan the Barbarian' or 'The Gladiator?'

I am meditating on what the silly controversy about an alpha male multimillionaire athlete named Richard Sherman, who completed a highlight reel reception during the Seahawks' victory over the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, reveals about the precarious nature of black masculinity and celebrity in the post civil rights era.

A moment of confession. As much as I respect the sociology of sports it is hard for me to muster up any sense of disgust or upsetness about a group of millionaires putting on a public show to hype up the Superbowl. We always sell "the sizzle not the steak". Moreover, I think that as demonstrated in his interview with Skip Bayless, that Richard Sherman is a bit of a jerk who is premature in his proclamations of career-long greatness.

However, please do not misunderstand my thoughts about Richard Sherman. The negative response to his interview on ESPN from some people, across the color line, is a telling moment--one that reminds us of how black men are held to higher standards of comportment and public behavior than white folks in American society.

Why? American society is profoundly uncomfortable with confident, assertive, black masculinity. There is a paradox here: black masculinity is feared, worshiped, and loathed--often at the same time, and by the same people. The mass media and culture industry profits from the spectacle.

Two questions.

What if Richard Sherman (or another successful and confident black male athlete) gave a speech similar to that of Russell Crow's character from the movie Gladiator?

Would he be loathed and criticized? By who?

What if Richard Sherman (or another successful and confident black male athlete) gave a declaration of life's virtues and meaning akin to that of Conan: The Barbarian?

Would he be loathed and criticized? By who?

Richard Sherman is causing a ruckus because he is a confident black alpha male who destroyed his foes--and then boasted about it--without any worries about being "classy" or appropriately deferent. Why should he? And are matters either that complicated or simple?

If Dr. King was in Fact a "Republican", I Too Can Entertain Some Fantasies: Was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a Space Alien? If Dr. King was a Porn Star, What Would He Have Chosen For a Stage Name?

Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is a prime moment for the type of empty hagiographies that come to typify "great" men and women who have been accepted in America's pantheon of public heroes.

Consequently, Brother King is an empty vessel where his radical politics, and how he was one of the most unpopular people in the United States at the time of his murder, can be erased and filled with lies.

In the worst and most dishonest example, for Republicans, the radical Dr. King who was in reality a Democratic Socialist, can be remade as a type of conservative who would support their anti-poor, and anti-black and brown agenda.

For Democrats, Dr. King is viewed as one of the their team--because they are the de facto political organization which best (for what that is worth) represents the political interests of people of color, the working and middle classes, and those who are disgusted by an America that nakedly and publicly embraces corporate power and the agenda served by the plutocracy.

In reality, Dr. King would be disgusted with the Democratic Party, as it is just the more Left-wing of a two party political system that is stridently conservative, and neither serves the public interest nor the public good.

Moreover, Brother King was not beholden to either political party. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held the Republicans in especially low regard. To that point, he wrote:

The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The “best man” at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade.

Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.

For me, Dr. King was a living and breathing person. He was not perfect. He was a dreamer. Dr. King was flawed. And he was not a saint.

A Japanese Poem by Yosa Buson For the 2014 AFC Championship Game Between the New England Patriots and the Denver Colts

Are you all ready for a great game of football? A match-up between two of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game?

My bus and bar book for the week is Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. It contains a Japanese poem by Yosa Buson, one that presciently describes today' AFC and NFC championship contests:

As the spring rains fall, soaking in them, on the roof, is a child's rag ball.

I am still trying to decipher its meaning(s).

The AFC Championship game will be close...too close for my comfort. My prediction? The team who has the ball last will be victorious.

If my beloved New England Patriots win I will eat a celebratory dinner.

If my beloved New England Patriots lose I will eat a dinner in honor of their struggle.

What teams do you think will win today and make an appearance in the Superbowl?

Denver is it. Now we wait for the other half of the equation.

'12 Years a Slave' and Dana Stevens' Epic White Privilege Failure in Slate Magazine

The Oscar nominated film 12 Years a Slave, which seems destined to win a number of awards, is still being discussed and processed by cultural critics and film reviewers. For example, on Friday of this week, Slate Magazine posted an essay by Dana Stevens about the film.

Unfortunately, her comments are a spot-on example of white privilege and how the white racial frame empowers many otherwise decent and well-meaning white folks to reproduce white racism in a quotidian manner.

She actually wrote the following:

I guess, simply put, I’m just not sure I’m down with body horror as a directorial approach for a movie on this subject. After a certain point it seems to serve more to shut out (and gross out) the audience than to make them think, feel, and engage...

But when the white overseers and masters—particularly Fassbender’s red-bearded supervillain, but to a lesser degree the figures played by Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, and Benedict Cumberbatch—show up, there’s sometimes the hint of a prurient horror-movie vibe that can feel exploitive. I felt this when Dano’s rather theatrically vile character sang that hideous “Run, nigger, run” song in close-up. Or in the many scenes when Fassbender (who, on a second viewing, I find to be laying it on a little thick) wanders his plantation with a bottle in hand, circling like a predator, looking for someone to humiliate and abuse.

It is easy to talk about white racism as a system that operates to maintain a sense of group position and power in a given society. Moral claims are easy to make relative to racism and white supremacy as well--the language of "good" and "bad" people, the racists being the latter, the rest of us the former, is compelling and safe.

I would suggest that the more challenging framework for understanding white supremacy as a cultural, political, and social force, is how it works through Whiteness's and White folks' capacity for narcissism, ego, myopia, and a willful and cultivated cluelessness and ignorance about matters related to the power and history of the color line in the United States and elsewhere. 

The Weekly Standard's War Monger William Kristol Does Not Hear the Guns of August When Thinking About World War One. Instead, He Worries That We Have Forgotten the Glory of War

Continuing with our earlier discussions of the 100 year anniversary of World War One, I came upon the following essay from Right-wing pundit William Kristol by way of Charles Pierce who writes for Esquire. I read it. I was disgusted. I wanted to share it with you.

The trumpets of war call to Right-wing commentator and pundit William Kristol.

He cannot resist their siren song. He is ready and prepared to spill blood. For him, the anniversary of World War One is not a caution about the futility of industrial warfare. No. The United States, the greatest of all nations, must be reminded of how war does in fact make one great. To Kristol, only cowards and the weak are fearful and cautious of it.

Such wisdom and yearning for war, from a man who helped to launch one of the greatest foreign policy debacles in American history, and who also dodged serving in the military during Vietnam (while supporting the conflict), deserves mocking.

What if Barack Obama Really Did 'Despise' and 'Hate' White People?

Fireball, the character from The Running Man movie Allen West, the upstanding and esteemed former Congressman who (while in the U.S. Army) abused Iraqi war prisoners, and is apparently in a BDSM Christian relationship with his wife, continues on with his Right-wing black face race minstrel routine at his own political latrine--a show which of course has been picked up by the white supremacist website WorldNetDaily.

Allen West's newest exercise in self-hating negritude misrepresents how a very basic directive by the Department of Education and the U.S. Attorney General's office that school discipline should be "race neutral" is in fact more evidence of Barack Obama's "anti-white socialist anti-capitalist supporting the degenerate negroes and their bad culture agenda" which is destroying all that made (White) America so great.

West's latest screed is a gem. Once more he legitimates white racism and white racial resentment towards people of color while spinning fictions about the administration's "anti-white" agenda:

This is my clear and succinct message to white Americans. How long will it be before “you people” realize you have elevated someone to the office of president who abjectly despises you — not to mention his henchman Holder. Combined they are the most vile and disgusting racists — not you.

Barack Obama is not a black president. As I have argued here and elsewhere, he is the Scold-in-Chief of Black America. The intellectual dishonesty of the Right is most clearly demonstrated by those many instances when their media noise portrays Barack Obama as a great progressive and Left-wing ally of Black America.

Those who are grounded in empirical reality, and not high on the political jenkem circulated by Fox News and the Right-wing media, see the facts for what they are: Barack Obama has consistently avoided talking about white racism, how the color line negatively impacts black and brown life chances, or the particular challenges faced by the African-American community in the post civil rights era.

Allen West, his other self-hating black conservative kin, their white handlers, and the Fox News establishment who circulate the lie that Obama is "anti-white", collectively suggest an obvious question and intervention.

What if President Barack Obama really did hate white people? What would his "anti-white" policies look like? And what type of anti-white America would President Obama be creating as we speak?

An anti-white Barack Obama? Wow. Quite a fantasy and a dream.

Disney Just Beat the Star Wars Expanded Universe in Its Testicles With A Shoe

I have discussed my thoughts and feelings about the Star Wars franchise at great length here on We Are Respectable Negroes. I am not a casual fan. I consider Lucas' creation a personal gift. Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon during the 1970's and 1980's. Along with hip hop, it defined my childhood and teen years.

Because of that allegiance, I am very worried about what Star Wars has become with the Prequels. Lucas did not "rape" our childhoods. Such talk is silly fan boy blubbering. Lucas did however make some choices about his own creation that many of us disagree with. It is his universe to play with; we just live in it. We also do not have to be pleased with his unfortunate choices.

J.J. Abrams, working for Disney films, will direct and help to write the new Star Wars sequels. He is the best of many bad options for the films. He resuscitated Star Trek as a franchise for the general public. In doing so, Abrams killed Star Trek as serious fans understood it. Abrams has told the media that Star Trek was his promotional reel for getting the Star Wars job. The latter is Abrams' true love--so he claims. However, I worry that we often do wrong by those we deeply care for. I am practical. If I were hiring a chef, I would not accept his poorly prepared dish of filet mignon and a promise that he will do better in the future as grounds to give him a job running my flagship restaurant.

The last few days have brought a flurry of news about the new Star Wars trilogies. If one believes the leaks posted online, Obi-wan Kenobi may have a secret love child who is a young person of color. Hugo Weaving, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberpatch, and 12 Years a Slave's Chiwetel Ejioforare are also supposedly being considered for roles in the new Star Wars films.

Hugo Weaving is a natural fit. Fassbender could work too. Chiwetel Ejioforare? Benedict Cumberpatch? We shall see.

I am more struck by the announcement that the original script will be rewritten. Instead of a cast of younger actors who are the heirs to Han, Luke, Leia, Lando, and the rest of the Original Trilogy ensemble, Abrams wants the first installment in the new films, Episode VII, to be a homage and send off for the original characters. We have also learned that Disney and Lucasfilm are going to review what is known as the "Expanded Universe"--those novels, comic books, video games, etc.--and the suitability of its various elements for official Star Wars "canon" and lore.

Why Do Americans Hate Welfare? There is No Shame. The Mother of the "Ghetto Thug Baby" Featured on CNN Defends Her Parenting Skills on the Evening News

When a child misbehaves the parents should be held accountable for not instilling proper values and home training in their offspring. But, what if the child's parents are themselves children? Moreover, what if the parent's parent was also a child when they birthed him or her?

Part of that answer is seen in the interview with the 16-year-old parent of the "ghetto thug baby" whose cussing, picaninny routine--which I discussed here--was shared on national television by CNN last week.

Once more I yearn for a return to shame as a social force with power and meaning in American life.

If my street pirate in training child was featured on a national news program, and subsequently viewed by millions of people online, I would go hide under a rock because the shame would be both oppressive and omnipresent. But if one does not know any better, how can we expect the ghetto thug baby's mama to do any better?

The performance of black ghetto hooliganism and thuggery for mass consumption is a genre of entertainment in the United States. It is a spectacle that drives Internet memes and also makes hundreds of millions (if not billions of dollars) for large global corporations. I have no interest in contributing to the pleasures brought to some people, across the colorline, by mocking a human zoo (one which is typified by the poor decision-making skills and social disorganization common to the American "ghetto underclass").

The white supremacist website Worldstar Hip Hop has enough copycats and supporters. They do not need my help. Simultaneously, the politics of black respectability to which I am committed demand that I not compromise my commitment to truth-telling and efforts to locate such episodes of ghetto underclass spectacle within a larger social and political context. Yes, I walk a fine line. I may falter; I may fall in a less than graceful pose; I will still keep trying.

The spectacle of the ghetto thug baby, and now his mother's efforts to vindicate herself, is important because of the human tragedy it represents. 

Is the American Food Supply Chain Really So Vulnerable and Unreliable? Post "Polar Vortex" and Winter Storm, Is Your Local Supermarket Still Barren and a Picked Over Mess?

I went to the supermarket several times this week and last. I was trying to buy food in anticipation of the severe winter weather that would hit Chicago and elsewhere. I discovered that there was a run on many food items--chicken and other meats especially. Odd. There was a plethora of beef tongue and ox tails. I made peace with the fact that I was out of luck. Worst case scenario: I would survive on soda and granola bars.

I returned to the supermarket several times this week--a major chain--and again, whole categories of goods were not on the shelves. A gentleman next to me asked one of the employees "what was going on?" and he replied that "the weather messed up their shipping and the trucks are still not here". The storm ended on Sunday night. The store was still barren on Thursday. I shook my head, wondering, what would happy if there was a "real" disaster, perhaps a mass terrorist attack explicitly designed to disrupt the United States' infrastructure?

Growing up, my father always kept a full commercial sized meat freezer--this was in addition to the freezer that was part of the refrigerator. He was a child of the Great Depression. He had been homeless as a kid and knew the pain of hunger. To his credit, this is why my father would always buy a homeless person food if he or she asked him.

Part of the motivation behind his keeping a full refrigerator and freezer was a sense of masculine working class pride. We always had more than enough food. Someone could lose their job and there would be food for months because his family was not going to the state or singing up for the dole to get help.

One summer there was a tornado. We were without power for more than a week. Despite my father's best efforts we lost at least a thousand dollars worth of food. He dutifully replaced it over the next few months. I took away the wrong lesson from that experience. Instead, I should have learned that if at all possible a family should have a backup electric generator. In error, my lesson was that I would not keep that much food in the refrigerator for fear of spoilage (freezer burn or other types of waste).

As result, I have gotten into the bad habit of buying food as needed.

A 'Picaninny' in a Veritable Human Zoo: Why Did CNN Choose to Feature a Story About a Black Toddler Acting Like a "Ghetto Thug?"

8,000 comments later, most of them racist screeds too low and disgusting for even the bathroom wall at a Neo-Nazi meeting, CNN has finally decided to close the discussion on its story about a half-naked black toddler, who encouraged by its parents and other adults, curses, poses, and acts like a "ghetto thug".

My politics are direct and transparent.

I am very traditional in my concern for and commitment to the politics of black respectability. I have repeatedly argued that a decline in the public norms around shame have been a net negative for American society. Based on those priors, the video (taken by law enforcement agents as a warning to the ghetto underclass) of a black child acting like an adult street pirate--learned behavior that signals something profoundly wrong about the child's home environment--is abuse, as well as grounds for the parents to be put in jail and the minor to be handed over to the state.

The late Richard Iton wrote a genius book called In Search of the Black Fantastic.

There he worked through how the Black Public Sphere and black private spaces were challenged and compromised by technology such as the Internet, and a spectacular public gaze that is simultaneously obsessed with African-American culture, yet still hostile to full and human representations of black humanity, and serves as a tool of the surveillance state.

Iton also details how black Americans and other members of the diaspora have found ways to use new media and other technologies in ways that can be simultaneously both liberating and regressive in how they are located relative to the new post colonial Jim and Jane Crow racial order, globalization, and neoliberal politics.

CNN's choice to give a platform to a video of a black toddler performing in a veritable human zoo and freak show is located solidly within Iton's framework. The speed and rapidity of how the Internet circulates an ostensibly private moment is a challenge for old models of communication and privacy. However, the thuggish black performance displayed by the black child in CNN's story is also a callback to old racist stereotypes and caricatures of African-Americans that served to legitimate chattel slavery and American Apartheid.

As such, the "ghetto" "thug" toddler in the CNN video (as taken by the Omaha Police Officers Association) is a 21st century version of the white racist caricature known as "the picaninny".

Will Mitt Romney's Black Grandchild Inspire Him to Fight the Republican Party's Racism? And Did You Know that Mitt Romney's Black Grandchild's Name Means "Small Dark One?"

Two final quick thoughts about the Mitt Romney Melissa Harris-Perry joking about black adopted children kerfuffle.

In reading the comments at the Daily Kos and Alternet in response to my essay on this whole faux drama, I was moved to ask some additional questions.

Allowing for the trolls and white racists who populate those spaces, there seemed to be some legitimate hurt and confusion over the very basic puzzle that I offered--one which Salon's Britney Cooper and the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates also picked up on as well.

Fighting the Easy "War in Snow and Ice" Here in Chicago: Even the Italian Alpine Troops of World War One Would Likely Say That This is a Damn Cold Day

It is mighty, mighty, cold here in Chicago. I gave into curiosity and went for my traditional "snow walk" last night and today. I love the snow. I like a good blizzard. We ghetto nerds take any chance necessary to pretend we are on Hoth with Luke and Han.

I will spare you the obligatory "And I thought they smelled bad on the outside" joke. 

Even by my winter loving standards, 40 below zero turned me around as I sought shelter. May the fates have mercy on animals, the homeless, and any other folks who do not have ready access to warmth.

I am about to eat a homemade bowl of Vietnamese Pho soup, watch Netflix, drink some beer, and get ready for work on Wednesday. As I watched the temperature plummet to dangerously low levels here in Chicago, I was reminded that everything hurts in extreme cold, basic movements are made difficult, and simple tasks made complex.

For my ghetto nerds and grognards, can you imagine fighting a war in such an environment?

In most other countries, 2014 will bring public discussions and memorials for the one hundred year anniversary of World War One. America is a world onto itself. Thus, we do not concern ourselves with World War One because World War Two is the only war in human history that really "mattered".

The cult of the Greatest Generation was born out of American triumphalism at the end of the Cold War. Its blinders remain. American Exceptionalism will ensure their long-term hold on the country's sense of geopolitics.

Nevertheless, the 100 year anniversary of World War One has generated some great discussions both online and in print.

Politics as Professional Wrestling: Help Me Understand. She Committed No Wrong. Why Then Did Melissa Harris-Perry Apologize to Mitt Romney's Family?

The lie that is the myth of the "liberal media" is exposed again.

Martin Bashir was fired from his show on MSNBC for telling the truth about Sarah Palin's gross and disgusting ahistorical and offensive comparison of "Obamacare" to black chattel slavery.

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry has suffered a week of heckling criticism from conservatives and the Right-wing noise machine because one of her guests made an observation about how seemingly out of place Mitt Romney's adopted black grandchild is in the sea of waspy Whiteness that is the Romney clan.

Moreover, the brief discussion of Romney's adopted grandchild was benign. No one pointed out the reasonable (and obvious) questions that could be asked about why a family of white Mormons, who are among their religion's "elect" and elite families, would adopt a person of color when black people are supposedly stained by the Curse of Ham and not allowed (until a recent "revelation") access to white Mormon heaven? Nor did anyone highlight how the racial diversity in the one time Republican Party presidential nominee's family is seemingly at odds with the Tea Party GOP's white identity politics of racial resentment.

The Most Important Question Surrounding the Ani DiFranco Plantation Retreat "Controversy": Are White Women the Natural Allies of People of Color in the Struggle Against Racism?

Ani DiFranco cancelled her "Righteous Retreat" for artists which was to be held at a former New Orleans slavery plantation.

She is very upset and hurt by how the public through social media condemned her choice of venue. Tim Wise and Brittney Cooper have done a thorough and precise job of eviscerating Ani DiFranco's white privilege stained faux-apology for making such a choice.

Moreover, there is no need for hundreds or thousands of words to describe Ani DiFranco's white privilege fail.

It is much more efficient, and easier, to watch white anti-racism activist Sister Jane Elliot bring an entitled young white female college student to tears in the documentary The Angry Eye.

That young woman and Ani DiFranco are not too different in their responses to a critical engagement about their relationship to supporting and sustaining systems of white supremacy. Literal and virtual white women's tears have a ton of cultural power in the United States. White women's tears have gotten black men hung from trees. They command TV viewing time and shows. White women are a protected class in the United States. When white women's tears and pain are ignored, even more upsetness naturally ensues.

In her apology, Ani DiFranco is deflecting. Instead of offering up a simple "my bad", the default is a long-winded essay that is more defensive and deflective, with the emphasis being on how her critics are overly sensitive, than in owning her mistake. If she so chose, Ani DiFranco could have written two sincere sentences that would have done much more work in her favor than the many sentences and words she offered.

Excuse-making uses many more words than acts of contrition, transparency, and vulnerability.

Ultimately, and as is often common when well-intentioned liberal and progressive white folks are criticized for their racist behavior--intentional, passive, active, accidental, mistaken, or otherwise--Ani DiFranco's rebuttal to her critics is tone deaf. She knows the lyrics, chorus, and verse of the metaphorical songs that are in the anti-racist white folks' musical catalog. However, Ani DiFranco does not sing those songs with any soul or heart. She is a lounge singer, hitting the notes, but ultimately lacking the heart or the pipes.

The more important question about Ani DiFranco's plantation retreat controversy is a simple one: What is it an example of? How can we relate Ani DiFranco's faux-apology to larger and more important concerns about white supremacy and white racism?

Administrative Matters: Please "Like" We Are Respectable Negroes on Facebook and Adding a Call-in Phone Number For Friends and Foes Alike So That They Can Share Their Witty Thoughts

For the new year, I have made a few additions to the sidebar here at We Are Respectable Negroes.

For a variety of privacy related and political reasons, I do not use Facebook in my personal life. However, I have finally accepted that Facebook is a very effective way of quickly circulating my online work to a large audience. As happened with several of the most popular essays here on We Are Respectable Negroes, folks may find a story here and then discuss it elsewhere. Using Facebook more aggressively is a way of capturing some of that traffic and bringing it back to this site more effectively.

To that end, I have created a fan page for We Are Respectable Negroes on Facebook and added a "Like" feature here on the site. The Facebook app is right below the Google followers box. If you are so inclined can you please add yourself and share with those contacts who you think would like what we are doing here on WARN. As I joked on Twitter, having a Facebook "Like" box with just a few followers is like going to the sex club butt naked and bragging about your particular manly gifts and then coming up a whee bit short in that department. Public shame can be a killer.

The second feature I have added to We Are Respectable Negroes is the ability for readers to call in via their phones and to leave a message in the site's voicemail box. I was telling a friend about the hate mail I receive and he said too bad you can't have those clowns leave a voice message as it would be priceless fun. He is correct. So, if you have declarations of love, hate, erotic commitment, poetry, wisdom, or even random questions, click here and you will be connected via Google Voice for free. As they merit, I will put together a compilation reel and post the best messages here on the site.

Legal stuff. Any messages you leave are the property of Chauncey DeVega and We Are Respectable Negroes and can be used for any purpose without compensation or notice as I see fit. 

Should be fun my friends.

Those people who are interested in interviews or other business related matters should simply email me directly.

What are some of your suggestions and hopes for We Are Respectable Negroes in the year 2014?

May You Have Good Health and Fortune in the Upcoming Year: Vibing to "On the Dark Side" by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band and Pondering a "What if?" Time Travel Scenario for New Year's Eve 2013-2014

I would like to wish all of you a happy new year. It is 2014 here in Chicago, I am sitting in my apartment, drinking a beer, watching Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, and pondering if I will venture out. It is not Echo base on Hoth snowy. But, it is "do I really want to go out in that mess to see folks at the local pub?" snowy.

That image may seem sad to some, me, a beautiful beast of a man home alone on New Year's. I am pretty content. I just got off an airplane. I had a nice and needed visit home. I recharged my batteries. I am feeling even and balanced. No real complaints.

As a follow up to my reflections on home and traveling for the holidays, I will be posting an obligatory essay on New Year's resolutions, my own personal inventory and self-evaluation for 2013, and some questions about how best to grow up as the years slip past while still remaining a child at heart. Public policy, politics, racism chasing, and other such matters can wait a few days. I really like sharing and chatting with the good folks who frequent We Are Respectable Negroes. I especially enjoy having a nice relaxed conversational salon during the end of the year and holiday times.

Two thoughts.

First, for those of you who are home, out at the bar/club and bored, or just chilling, medicated, and enjoying your own company or those of intimates, friends, and family however defined, what are some of your New Year's Eve songs for 2013-14? As I throw back a few Sapporo beers, my pick three consists of John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band's "On the Dark Side", Marvin Hamlisch and Barbara Streisand's "The Way We Were", and James Darron's (Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine) "The Best is Yet to Come".

If you were making a personal soundtrack for 2013 looking forward to 2014, what songs would it contain?

And for the ghetto nerds and others so inclined, I offer the following Twilight Zone-inspired What if? counter factual scenario to consider.

If you had the option of traveling back in time to the first day of 2013, and redoing the last year with what you know now, would you take the option? Alternatively, would you rather make peace with the year 2013--and all of its happenings, personal challenges, growth, and experiences--and just move forward to 2014? Thus leaving the past in the past?