In Remembrance

¡Hola! Everybody...
The exploitation of King’s name, the distortion of his teachings by conservatives, is one of the uglier developments in contemporary American life. I agree with Michael Eric Dyson that the “I have a Dream Speech” should be put to rest for at least ten years...

The audio (after the jump) clip is Robert F. Kennedy's eulogy on the day of MLK's assassination. The words are chilling in light of the direction our nation has taken and the fact that RFK was also cut down by an assassin two months later.

* * *

-=[ Misquoting the Dream ]=-

A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.,Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, mainstream society viewed him mostly with fear and contempt. In response to King’s anti-war stance (as expressed in a 1967 speech), TIME magazine called King a “demagogue for Radio Hanoi.” Years later, Reagan the Great damned King as a near communist.

Today, however, a miracle has taken place in America: Dr. King, it’s now been discovered, was a conservative! By taking a snippet from one 1963 address Dr. King has been co-opted by the right as the most quoted opponent of affirmative action in America today.

While the transformation of King from communist to conservative is almost complete, it deserves an explanation.

It should come as no surprise that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have his words taken out of context. After all, King’s status today effectively ensures that conservative writers, academics, pundits, and politicians will feel compelled to borrow King’s words to advance an agenda. What better political plum than claiming the ideological support of an iconic figure such as King? Nowhere is the tendency to “play the King card” more evident than in the claim by dozens of contemporary conservative writers, academics, pundits, and politicians that King’s basic goal was “color-blindness” and that he viewed such visual impairment as the road by which racism would best be addressed.

Typically, conservatives rely on one line from one speech. Of course it’s only the most famous line delivered by King, one of the few most folks have probably heard: the one from the 1963 March on Washington, the “I Have a Dream” speech in which he expressed the hope that one day persons “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” For conservatives, this is proof that King would oppose race-conscious policies such as affirmative action, since, after all, such efforts require an acknowledgment of race.

Conservatives of all colors and stripes have clung to this line as a rallying cry in their war against “reverse discrimination.” Shelby Steele, for example, in The Content of Our Character (the title obviously used in order to evoke the famous King line) is harsh critique of affirmative action policies, claiming they have “done more harm than good” and implying that King would agree. Steele seeks to prove this not only with reference to the “Dream” speech, but also by recounting a 1964 presentation in which King implored black youth to get ahead: the implication being that King was an apostle of the myth of rugged individualism and hostile to special efforts to provide full opportunities for people of color.

In similar fashion, many other conservatives have misrepresented King. If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, I am sure you have run up against the now ubiquitous practice of the cutting-and-pasting of the Kool-Aid King. See if you notice any of the following...

Clint Bolick, a leading critic of affirmative action, wrote in 1996 that King did not seek “special treatment” for blacks, and cites the “content of their character” remark as justification for his position. Tamar Jacoby wrote in 1998 that King’s “dream” was color-blindness. The Thernstroms, in the social science bible, America in Black and White, make the same claim. Paul Sniderman wrote, “The civil rights movement... took as its ideal a truly colorblind society, where, as Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied, our children would be judged... ” by, yup, you guessed it, you know what.

Some have gone further and have advanced the notion that the modern civil rights movement’s support of affirmative action is a betrayal of King. Dinesh D'Souza, in End of Racism, states authoritatively that affirmative action is a “... repudiation of King’s vision, in that it involves a celebration and affirmation of group identity.” He makes the bold assertion that Black leaders are the antithesis of Martin Luther King's principles, which he defines as the ideology that “race should be ignored and we should be judged on our merits as persons.” Strangely, D'Souza calls for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguably the greatest legislative achievement of the movement King led.

Yet, despite the overwhelming noise by the right that Dr. King principally sought color-blindness and would have opposed affirmative action, even a cursory examination of his writings makes such a position extremely difficult to defend. King never said he believed that the best way to achieve the dream of racial and economic equality was to pretend racism had vanished. Nothing could be further from his principles. In fact, contrary to the popular modern fiction advanced by conservatives, King favored quotas, affirmative action, reparations, and race-based hiring as immediate relief from systemic racism. This is an unpleasant bit of history to those who have tried to turn him into a (safely dead) black conservative with which to bash liberals. But it was his actual views.

From the outset, King placed responsibility for the nation’s racial inequality squarely on whites. In an article written in 1956 and included in James Washington’s edited collection, Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., King wrote that whites had “rejected the very center of their own ethical professions... and so they rationalized” the conditions under which they had forced blacks to live. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1963, King specifically criticized white ministers and white moderates, who he condemned for being “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” and whom he said were perhaps more of a barrier to true freedom for blacks than the Klan. This is the letter in which he famously wrote that an unjust law was no law at all. In short, King was hardly color-blind. He was clear as to who the victims and who the chief perpetrators of racism were -- and he said so in clear and forceful language.

It is true that King called for universal programs of economic and educational opportunity for all the poor, regardless of race. However, he also saw the need for programs targeted at the victims of American racial apartheid. King was even clearer on affirmative action. In a 1963 article in Newsweek (published the very month of the “I Have a Dream” speech), King suggested it might be necessary to have something similar to “discrimination in reverse” as a form of national atonement for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

The most direct articulation of his views on the subject is found in 1963, in Why We Can't Wait, King noted:

“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”

In a 1965 Playboy interview, King spelled out what that something special might entail, and it was far more substantive than affirmative action. In fact, King stated his support for an aid package for black America for $50 billion.

I am not saying that King's thoughts on this issue should be the determining factor on how people should feel about affirmative action or other race-conscious efforts. How they feel and think about the legacy and abiding problem of discrimination is up to them. No one should assume that simply because Dr. King appears to have supported such efforts that this necessarily makes King, and those who support affirmative action today, correct.

I am trying to point out how conservatives are compelled to link their views to King (and misrepresent and warp King’s message in the process) in an attempt to dismantle or disparage such programs. I find it the height of dishonesty and hypocrisy to claim the mantle of King's moral authority. Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness or legitimacy of affirmative action, it is only fair and just to insist that we present King’s views honestly and completely and not attempt to use his words for purposes he would have found unacceptable.

Love,

Eddie

Update #1: Came across this excellent piece via an online friend. If any of this even remotely consevative, please contact me ASAP!

Playin' the King Card

¡Hola! Everybody...
The exploitation of King’s name, the distortion of his teachings by conservatives, is one of the uglier developments in contemporary American life. I agree with Michael Eric Dyson that “The Speech” should be put to rest for at least ten years...

* * *

-=[ Misquoting the Dream ]=-

A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

-- Dr. King, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, mainstream society viewed him mostly with fear and contempt. In response to King’s anti-war stance (as expressed in a 1967 speech), TIME magazine called King a “demagogue for Radio Hanoi.” Years later, Ronald Reagan the Great damned King as a near communist.

Today, however, a miracle has taken place in America: Dr. King was a conservative! By taking a snippet from one 1963 address Dr. King has been co-opted by the right as the most quoted opponent of affirmative action in America today.

While the transformation of King from communist to conservative is almost complete, it deserves an explanation.

It should come as no surprise that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have his words taken out of context. After all, King’s status today effectively ensures that writers, academics, pundits, and politicians will feel compelled to borrow King’s words to advance an agenda. What better political plum than claiming the ideological support of an iconic figure such as King? Nowhere is the tendency to “play the King card” more evident than in the claim by dozens of contemporary conservative writers, academics, pundits, and politicians that King’s basic goal was “color-blindness” and that he viewed such visual impairment as the road by which racism would best be addressed.

Typically, conservatives rely on one line from one speech. Of course it’s only the most famous line delivered by King, one of the few most folks have probably heard: the one from the 1963 March on Washington, the “I Have a Dream” speech in which he expressed the hope that one day persons “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” For conservatives, this is proof that King would oppose race-conscious policies such as affirmative action, since, after all, such efforts require an acknowledgment of race.

Conservatives of all colors and stripes have raised this line like a rallying cry in their war against “reverse discrimination.” Shelby Steele, for example, in The Content of Our Character (the title obviously used in order to evoke the famous King line) is harsh critique of affirmative action policies, claiming they have “done more harm than good” and implying that King would agree. Steele seeks to prove this not only with reference to the “Dream” speech, but also by recounting a 1964 presentation in which King implored black youth to get ahead: the implication being that King was an apostle of the myth of rugged individualism and hostile to special efforts to provide full opportunities for people of color.

In similar fashion, many other conservatives have misrepresented King. If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, I am sure you have run up against the now ubiquitous practice of the cutting-and-pasting of the Kool-Aid on King. See if you notice any of the following...

Clint Bolick, a leading critic of affirmative action, wrote in 1996 that King did not seek “special treatment” for blacks, and cites the “content of their character” remark as justification for his position. Tamar Jacoby wrote in 1998 that King’s “dream” was color-blindness. The Thernstroms, in the social science bible, America in Black and White, make the same claim. Paul Sniderman wrote, “the civil rights movement... took as its ideal a truly colorblind society, where, as Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied, our children would be judged... ” by, yup, you guessed it, you know what.

Some have gone further and have advanced the notion that the modern civil rights movement’s support of affirmative action is a betrayal of King. Dinesh D'Souza, in his the End of Racism, states authoritatively that affirmative action is a “... repudiation of King’s vision, in that it involves a celebration and affirmation of group identity.” He makes the bold assertion that Black leaders are the antithesis of Martin Luther King's principles, which he defines as the ideology that “race should be ignored and we should be judged on our merits as persons.” Strangely, D'Souza calls for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguably the greatest legislative achievement of the movement King led.

Yet, despite the overwhelming noise by the right that Dr. King principally sought color-blindness and would have opposed affirmative action, even a cursory examination of his writings makes such a position extremely difficult to defend. King never said he believed that the best way to achieve the dream of racial and economic equality was to pretend racism had vanished. Nothing could be further from his principles. In fact, contrary to the popular modern fiction advanced by conservatives, King favored quotas, affirmative action, reparations, and race-based hiring as immediate relief from systemic racism. This is an unpleasant bit of history to those who have tried to turn him into a (safely dead) black conservative with which to bash liberals. But it was his actual views.

From the outset, King placed responsibility for the nation’s racial inequality squarely on whites. In an article written in 1956 and included in James Washington’s edited collection, Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., King wrote that whites had “rejected the very center of their own ethical professions... and so they rationalized” the conditions under which they had forced blacks to live. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, King specifically criticized white ministers and white moderates, who he condemned for being “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” and whom he said were perhaps more of a barrier to true freedom for blacks than the Klan. This is the letter in which he famously wrote that an unjust law was no law at all. In short, King was hardly color-blind. He was clear as to who the victims and who the chief perpetrators of racism were -- and he said so in clear and forceful language.

It is true that King called for universal programs of economic and educational opportunity for all the poor, regardless of race. However, he also saw the need for programs targeted at the victims of American racial apartheid. King was even clearer on affirmative action. In a 1963 article in Newsweek (published the very month of the “I Have a Dream” speech), King suggested it might be necessary to have something similar to “discrimination in reverse” as a form of national atonement for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

The most direct articulation of his views on the subject is found in 1963, in his Why We Can't Wait, in which King noted:

“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.”

In a 1965 Playboy interview, King spelled out what that something special might entail, and it was far more substantive than affirmative action. In fact, King stated his support for an aid package for black America for $50 billion.

I am not saying that King's thoughts about this issue should be the determining factor on how people should feel about affirmative action or other race-conscious efforts. How they feel and think about the legacy and abiding problem of discrimination is up to them. No one should assume that simply because Dr. King appears to have supported such efforts that this necessarily makes King, and those who support affirmative action today, correct.

I am trying to point out how so many feel the need to link their views to King in an attempt to dismantle or disparage such programs. I find it the height of dishonesty and hypocrisy to claim the mantle of King's moral authority. Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness or legitimacy of affirmative action, it is only fair and just to insist that we present King’s views honestly and completely and not attempt to use his words for purposes he would have found unacceptable.

Love,

Eddie

Racism in America

¡Hola! Everybody...
Editing is the hardest task in writing... I am afraid the following isn’t a shining example... I started this series a while back, so it would be better if you go to the real intro (click here) and its follow-up (click here). The second link is especially important because I define my terms there.

* * *

-=[ Racism in America, pt. III ]=-

DYSON: And if white guys were being mistreated this routinely and being murdered as they are, by policemen, this would not be acceptable. That‘s why President Obama needs to use his bully pulpit to explore race, not run from it, not avoid it, but to engage it.

MATTHEWS: I think he engaged it by getting elected last year.

DYSON: Not enough.

(cross talk)

MATTHEWS: You don’t know. He‘s off. He’s free.

DYSON: I got brothers in prison.

MATTHEWS: And they are -- well, tell them to get a good lawyer.

-- Chris Matthews and Michael Eric Dyson on Hardball discussing the arrest of Dr. Gates

* * *

What follows in the next few entries could be loosely termed a literature review on racism in America. Plugging through such literature can have an adverse effect on your state of mind. As much as you think you know, one still comes away shocked at the persistence of racism. Add to that the overwhelming effort -- on all levels -- to deny its existence and it can get pretty much gloomy. A friend claims she knows when I’m immersed in the literature because she says my mood changes. LOL

It’s a trip... I am reminded of Dante’s inferno: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here... ” LOL!

All kidding aside, what I hope to offer is a critical theory of racism not only to explain and better understand it, but also to envision possibilities for change. Since at least the time of Marx, critical theory has attempted to uncover the dialectical relationship between systems of oppression and human agency.

The core problem of the racial dialog in this country (if we can even claim one), is that too often many Americans, especially white Americans, see racism as an individual matter, as something only overt bigots engage in. In this way, the racist foundations of all our cultural institutions are ignored or dismissed. A case in point is the interchange quoted above. What isn’t understood or acknowledged by Chris Matthews is that the arrest of a prominent African American academic doesn’t take place in a vacuum. As I will show in later entries, racial profiling, the uneven implementation of criminal justice policies, and negative black stereotypes all combine to create what is in effect an apartheid structure impacting almost all facets of the black experience in America. One cannot drive, shop, hail a cab, and apparently enter ones home while black. It happens and many white people either simply don’t understand or are apathetic to the enormity of the problem. That’s why Matthews can smirk and say, “Tell them to get a good lawyer.” He doesn’t get it. There’s a phrase, “Driving while black,” used to describe one form of racial profiling. I would say there should be another catchall phrase: “living while black.”

But I digress... Racism is much more than an individual issue. It is both individual and systemic. An extensive social reproduction process that generates both patterns of discrimination within institutions and an alienating racist relationship enables systemic racism. On the one hand, you have the racially oppressed, and on the other, the racial oppressors. These two groups are a function of the racist system, and therefore they have different group interests. The oppressed seek to overthrow the system, while the oppressors seek to maintain the status quo. In this way, in typical dialectical fashion, social oppression contradictions that compel change. Great inequality of resources across the color line eventually leads to periodic eruptions of resistance by African Americans and other people of color.

At this juncture conservatives believe that a color-blind constitution means public solutions to end social inequality between racial groups are illegitimate, the equivalent of “reverse racism,” or “racial social engineering.” This view adheres rigidly to the notion that government should be held to a strict standard of racial neutrality and that any attempts at legal redress to rectify racial inequalities is wrong.

I reject this position. If America is to achieve its full potential, I think it is the government’s duty to use public policies to root out abiding racial inequality. I think it makes sense to consider carefully how labor market discrimination, private institutional practices, and public policies have contributed to the accumulation of economic and social advantage in white communities, and the concomitant disinvestment of social and economic capital in communities of color.

Most people assume that white racism cannot account for abiding black inequality. Conservatives attribute persistent gaps in poverty rates and income between blacks and white to African Americans’ socially irresponsible choices regarding education, marriage, work, and crime, rather than to labor market discrimination. What accounts for labor market disparities, conservatives say, cannot be discrimination since they submit that discrimination has all but disappeared. What accounts for wage inequality is the differences between blacks and whites in pre-market factors such as schooling, work habits, life and job skills. According to conservative scholars, what may look like persistent employment discrimination is better described as employers rewarding “workers [who have] relatively strong cognitive skills.’

In the coming entries, I will show that the analyses of conservative scholars suffer from a myopic insistence on disregarding sets of data while focusing on data that girds their arguments. In other words, their work is seriously flawed.

In the coming days I will show racism impacts criminal justice, health, employment, education, and yeah, sports.

Eddie

Wealthfare

¡Hola! Everybody...
Today? Welfare Queens!

* * *

-=[ Corporate Welfare Queens ]=-

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”

-- Ronald Reagan during his 1976 presidential campaign

And she was black... he should have added, since studies show that the perceived face of poverty is black and female. Reagan never named a particular woman because the woman never existed. contrary to the conservative spin, there never was an army of young, amoral, crack-addicted black mothers driving Cadillacs while giving birth to litters to super-predator cop killers.

Reagan specialized in the use of the outrageous anecdotes that were usually false. Yet the media so sensationalized his stories that these falsehoods were used to frame any public debate about poverty. Make no mistake: the new and improved racism is couched in the conservative language of individualism and boot-strapping. Because his “examples” of welfare queens relied on existing stereotypes of welfare cheats and resonated with news stories about welfare fraud, they did indeed gain real footing within the public discourse on poverty.

However, the real story should have been about a different kind of welfare queen. A Welfare Queen that actually existed, most likely drove higher end gas-guzzlers and wore three-piece suits: the Corporate Welfare Queen.

Even at its height, “welfare” as perceived by the public was probably about 1% of the federal budget. Corporate Welfare, government programs that provide special benefits to specific industries or corporations, have always been far more generous than anything ever given to the poor. Poverty, in case you haven’t received the memo, is a sin in these times of KKKorporate KKKristianity. If you’re poor, it’s because you lack morals, drive, intelligence, or any kind of civic responsibility. KKKorporate KKKristianity postulates you’re poor because you’re not a real KKKristian. After all, didn’t rich people pull themselves out of the muck?

Well, maybe we should rethink that last part. Many of the largest companies have been on the welfare dole, including Wal-Mart, General Motors, Boeing, Archer Daniels Midland, and the notorious Enron. And all this was before the latest capitalist collapse -- I mean! -- “economic downturn” that has resulted in $ trillions being given away to failed CEOs.

The ultra conservative Cato Institute estimated that the federal government spent a total of $96.6 billion on corporate welfare in the fiscal year 2002. State and local governments also hand out money to businesses. Here in New York City, for example, we have a stadium built with $100 of billions of taxpayer money in which the citizens cannot afford to buy a seat. While subsidies for stadiums are popular, studies show that they do little to promote local economic improvement and never pay for themselves. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthy team owners who then go on to sell their teams at a huge profit.

Large businesses often bargain with (or more correctly extort) communities, demanding major tax breaks, free or reduced-price land, or infrastructure assistance in return for the promise of creating jobs. One recent study showed that Wal-Mart has received more than $1 billion in subsidies. Yet Wal-Mart often destroys almost as many jobs as it creates, driving smaller, more community-based retailers out of business.

However, the bulk of the real welfare money is distributed through entities that usually have the word “complex” as a descriptor. By far, the largest welfare program for rich people is known as defense spending, or the military/ industrial complex. As a nation, we spend more on defense than the next ten nations combined. I can’t tell you know how much we give away, because much of this money isn’t reported; but if we take just one program as an example, The Star Wars program, we can get a sense of how easily we give away our hard-earned money. Initially an idea that sprouted out of Reagan’s diseased-damaged brain, The Star Wars program has spent $100 of billions for an anti-missile program that has yet to hit a target! Yes, you heard that right: decades and $100 of billions for a program that cannot hit a target.

Not once...

::blank stare::

In addition, let’s not forget the $100 hammers and screwdrivers or the fact that I haven’t even addressed the latest round of welfare for the rich, otherwise known as “bailout.”

Which brings me to the second half of my post: a particularly vicious welfare program known as the prison/ industrial complex. Note that our government finds it fit to help to rich people. However, when it comes to the middle class, poor, and working poor, you’re on your own.

In our Amerikkka, the rich get welfare and the poor get to go to prison. I would argue that the sources of crime are well known (e.g. poverty, prisons, guns, drugs) but, in contrast to our approach to the rich, little is done to reduce the causes. In fact, I would submit the criminal justice system has a stake in its own failures (The Pyrrhic Defeat Theory). The Incarceration Nation has replaced the vision of a Great society. Plus, it’s an extremely profitable business traded on the stock market.

In 1996, Rand published a study that highlighted what works to reduce crime: preventing child abuse/neglect, enhancing children’s intellectual and social development, providing support guidance to vulnerable adolescents, and working extensively with formerly incarcerated youths. As it stands, we incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. South Africa's incarceration rates, at the height of apartheid, paled in comparison to ours today.

And yet, we lead the free world in addiction, crime, and violence. Furthermore, sociologists have confirmed that incarceration as a social policy reaches a threshold where it actually begins to increases crime and makes vulnerable communities less safe.

We need to ask some important questions: Who defines crime? How is the public image of crime created? How is crime not defined? What is the image we have of criminals? Why do white collar crooks get so little in comparison to the damage they do to society, and why is white collar crime rarely reported?

Blacks make up no more than 13% of all drug abusers but 74% of those in prison for drugs. There’s no way you can do the math and justify that number. Discrimination occurs at all phases of the criminal justice system from arrest to imprisonment. The race of the victim and the race of the defendant are significantly related to use of the death penalty.

I will state that people who cannot see a better way to curb crime, other than to lockup millions, lack more than imagination -- they lack intelligence. Crime and disorder, which flow from hopeless poverty, unloved children, and drug abuse, can’t be solved by building prisons, mandatory sentencing minimums, or hiring more police.

From an empirical standpoint, what will work has been known for decades. It’s not the knowledge that’s lacking, it’s the civic will. We know what works:

• End poverty
• Letting the punishment fit the criminal harm
• Legalize or decriminalize drugs
• Create correctional programs that promote responsibility and prepare human beings to reenter society
• Gun control
• Limit discretion of police, prosecutors, and judges
• Implement the right to equal counsel.
• Explore a vision of a society with a more just distribution of wealth.

We ignore this at our own risk. This affects you, whether you know it or not, because where do you think they get the money to build and maintain prisons? From your child’s school.

The issue here is equally simple: do we want to create a society based on teaching our children, or locking some of them up?

Paz,

Eddie

White Privilege: Intro (sorta)

¡Hola! Everybody...
Okay! I didn’t even write about white privilege yesterday. All I did was post a cartoon about it and I was called everything from a hater of white people and of being obsessed with race (I’ve posted the cartoon again below). In fact! People! Didn’t you know I am a bigot?

I’ll be out all day, but I’m leaving part of an unfinished post I’m doing on racism... I will finish my series on race in the coming days. I simply didn’t have the time to finish this section -- formatting the references and lining up all my research notes... But since I was shown so much love by my white brothers and sisters yesterday, I couldn’t help putting more out there for them.

* * *

-=[ Racism: White Privilege ]=-

White privilege exists. White privilege is pervasive. If you doubt me, then please 'splain reeky how a poor student, failed businessman , and draft dodger became president for two terms though he never really won a plurality of the popular vote.

::blank stare::

Seriously folks: there’s just no way of denying it. Up to now, I have focused my discussions of racial inequality on labor markets, the criminal justice system, residential segregation, and education. But the fact remains that race also counts in ways that are almost invisible to White Americans. While they often go unrecognized, these patterns of racial disadvantage highlight the insidiousness and power of racism in American life. Because most Americans use a narrowly defined concept of racism (which is actually prejudice, not racism), they fail to recognize the subtle manifestations of racial inequality that are deeply embedded into the fabric of our society.

To see better the pervasiveness of white privilege, let us take something as seemingly simple and mundane as shopping. I have shown in previous posts that blacks and other minorities are denied mortgages far more frequently than whites with comparable incomes and credit scores. But even in other situations, race plays a powerful role. Researchers studying automobile dealerships in the Chicago area, for example, found that salespeople offer significantly lower sales prices to white men than to blacks, even when economic and other factors are taken into account. Another study found that blacks pay significantly more for car loans arranged through dealers than whites did, despite having comparable credit histories. Similarly, clerks in retail stores are frequently more concerned with the color of the shopper’s skin than their ability to pay (as any person of color who has been followed by security while shopping already knows). One clothing chain, for example, stamped an information form on the backs of personal checks. The form included a section marked “race,” and shoppers were classified “W” for white, “H” for Hispanic, and “07” for black (well, what did you expect: “N”?)

Sociologists have found widespread evidence that black shoppers were treated less respectfully than their white peers. One sociologist, Joe Feagin, reported, “No matter how affluent and influential a black person cannot escape the stigma of being black even while relaxing or shopping.”

[This is merely the tip of the iceberg. My full post will be more rigorous with a reference list appended as an intellectual courtesy.]

Now, you would think that any fair-minded and reasonably intelligent person, when presented with these facts, would stop and reflect, right? No! What I get from too many white people is hate and anger. For pointing out the reality of white privilege, I am often called a bigot, I am accused of hating white people, and of being obsessed with racism.

I say those people can go fuck themselves. I’ve had it with them. For me, being aware of racial inequality and benefiting from it and not doing anything about is racism.

Love,

Eddie