racism | The Bitchy Pundit - Part 2

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil

July 21, 2013 by Bitchy

So the right wing lost their shit over an impromptu speech that President Obama gave on the Trayvon Martin verdict on Friday. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you watch the whole thing.

The freakout was centered around the assertion that this speech was President Obama’s attempt at race baiting. I have to say that the right wing in America never fail to exceed my expectation of ignorance. In this case, the ignorance runs eighteen levels deep.

Let me start by saying that these attacks are rooted in the belief that if we don’t talk about racism, it doesn’t exist. That’s only true if you benefit from the white (or whitish) privilege that allows you to never experience racism. But it’s not even true for those people, since they feel the need to proactively shut down the conversations about racism. Those conversations intrude on that privilege, and they can’t have that. When a black man tells you about being followed by security in a store and you respond by putting your fingers in your ears and screaming, “LALALALALA”, you are not just ignorant; you’re choosing to be proactively ignorant. The only reason you wouldn’t want to hear it, is because it makes you uncomfortable. And the only reason it’s uncomfortable for you, is because you know that it’s really happening. If you genuinely believed that it doesn’t happen, you would be completely nonplussed by these stories. When someone quotes bible verses to me, I’m completely unaffected by their words because I don’t believe that the bible is anything other than mythology created by primitive people who were trying to explain the unexplainable. I’m neither moved nor angered by it because I put no credence in it. People who want to shut down conversations about race are lying to themselves, and they’re doing a bad job of it.

The other thing that I couldn’t help but notice about the attacks on Obama over the speech, is that no one accused him of lying. No one said that. Not one single wingnut made the assertion that Obama was fabricating his experiences as a black man in America. They’re just pissed off that he shared his experiences. How dare he remind us that he’s black? The manner in which they chose to attack this speech couldn’t have more effectively illustrated the racism that black people in America experience every single day. They didn’t attack the content of his words. They attacked the blackness of his words. I don’t know if that’s simply a function of the fact that he intruded on their white privilege, or that they’re pissed that a black man has made it so much further than they’ve managed to go even with all of the advantages they were born with. I’m not going to speculate on that, nor do I need to in order to make my case for the racist nature of these attacks.

Willfully ignorant is the worst thing in the world that you can be. It’s a life wasted. We’re not on this earth to collect things; animals do that. We’re not on this planet to breed; animals do that. We’re here to exercise our sentience to its fullest extent. We’re here to learn things and to grow, both intellectually and spiritually. And if you’re trying to make sure that doesn’t happen, you’ve wasted a life.

These asshats who are pissed off at what Obama said, who didn’t even bother to go to thegrio.com, theroot.com, twib.fm, or any of the dozens of other sites that offer news from the black perspective are proactive racists. They don’t want to be bothered with other people’s issues because those issues intrude into their lives. That’s modern racism. Pretending that people of other races don’t have vastly different experiences with which to draw from is modern racism. Not seeing color is modern racism.

When you hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil, you don’t stop evil. It doesn’t go away because of your failure to acknowledge it. You’re actually giving evil your tacit permission to continue. And you squander your own life by not feeding your mind and your soul with all of the experiences that life has to offer.

What Now?

July 17, 2013 by Bitchy

Everyone is trying to figure out what to do to fix the egregious injustice done to the country (yes, it happened to all of us) in the Zimmerman verdict, myself included. There’s talk of pushing the DOJ into bringing a new case against Zimmerman. I understand that reaction, but I don’t think that’s the way to go.

I don’t think that DOJ has enough to successfully bring a hate crime case against Zimmerman. I know that a lot of people want to see sufficient evidence in his prior overtly racist comments, and his cousin who flat out says he hates black people, but I don’t see enough there to successfully prosecute a case. In my opinion, the worst thing that can happen to the state of racism in America would be for Zimmerman to be acquitted again. He would be seen as a “victim”, being hunted down by a justice system motivated by race. I don’t want to see that happen. Trying Zimmerman is not, in my opinion, the right way to go.

I hope that the Martin family decide to file a wrongful death civil suit against him, just to make sure that he never collects a dime of money from a book deal or speaking engagements, or whatever else he decided to do to earn some cash. But that’s as far as “punishing” Zimmerman can go. As much as I hate it, he got away with murder. We just need to accept that.

That said, don’t get me wrong, I’m not feeling hopeless. I do think that there are some things that we, the American people can do, and I have a few ideas. Step 1; donate to Marissa Alexander’s legal defense fund. Marissa Alexander is spending twenty years in jail for firing her gun at the wall next to her abusive ex-husband, who she had an order of protection against. There was a mountain of paperwork to back up her assertion that her husband abused her, and that she legitimately feared for her safety when he was near her. She was not allowed a “stand your ground” hearing, which would have averted the farce of a trial that ended in a jury deliberating for twelve minutes before convicting her. I’ve spent more than twelve minutes choosing which restaurant to eat dinner in. We can’t do anything for Trayvon, but we can get Marissa a rock star attorney to file her appeals. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in America, it’s that money buys you the verdict you want.

My second step is to make sure that all of the Trayvon Martins become national conversations and get their day in court. We need to be vigilant against corrupt police forces that sweep the murders of black men under the rug. Remember, George Zimmerman wasn’t charged for forty-four days. It wasn’t until we all got involved, that the justice system finally took action even though some of the investigators involved wanted to charge Zimmerman that first night. We can’t continue to accept racial disparity in how criminals are treated. Here, for instance, is a case we should all collectively focus in on now.

We need to shine a light on these cases, not just to right the wrongs in our justice system, but also to change our culture.

In listening to juror B37 talk about the trial, it became obvious to me that she could not relate to a black teenager. She thought he was acting suspicious by “walking slowly” “late at night” (unless you’re a fucking farmer 7 pm is not late), “looking into houses” (based on nothing other than Zimmerman’s word, and who the hell doesn’t look into windows when they’re walking?). She seemed to give Zimmerman every benefit of the doubt, buying everything he said (even though his story changed dramatically), and believing everything his friends said. Who doesn’t assume that any defendant in a case like this isn’t highly motivated to twist events around in order to avoid years in prison? She ignored the fact that every single person who identified the calls for help on the 911 calls as being Zimmerman, went on to say preposterous things. For example, his coworker claimed she had no idea why George wasn’t at work after the incident. All she knew was that he was on FMLA. Are you fucking kidding me? You work in the only company in the world that has no rumor mill, and no access to local news? Or Zimmerman’s elderly friends who weren’t following the case at all. Your friend is on trial for murder and you’re not scouring the internet for information every day? Preposterous! She didn’t find Rachel Jeantel credible. Are you shitting me? I’ve never seen a more honest testimony from anyone in a trial, ever. So what accounts for this lack of common sense and disregard for plausibility?

Relatability. She related to all of Zimmerman’s friends so much so, that she didn’t see how preposterous their testimony was. She flat out told you she couldn’t relate to Rachel or Trayvon, referring to “their world”. Is that racist? I don’t know, you decide.

But I think it’s important to bring national attention to as many of these cases as possible. We need to give people enough exposure to “their world” (whatever “their” is for each individual) as possible, until they realize it’s “our world”. We need to change our culture. We need to start exposing even the most sheltered Americans to the reality of our country. We need to make people aware of the fact that their experiences aren’t all of the experiences in America. In short, we need to start busting bubbles all across the country until people like Rachel Jeantel and Trayvon Martin are no longer “others”, but “ours”.

I know that I sound like a sunny optimist, but I firmly believe that you change a culture by proactively changing it. When I say proactive, I mean vigilant. We need to be vigilant about changing things in America. We’re the only ones that can change it. We can tear down age old prejudices and social constructs. We can stop accepting the fact that different races and different classes in America have different justice systems. We can demand equal justice for all races. We can demand equal justice for all classes. It’s time to stop accepting that rich people get away with anything, and that poor people get less justice, and that’s just the way it is.

Enough! It is in our power to level the playing field. It’s time we stop being complacent and use our power.

Stand Your Ground

March 23, 2012 by Bitchy

Everybody is talking about the the murder of Trayvon Martin. I for one, am overjoyed that the public is paying attention. But as with most things, there’s an aspect of the way this story is being reported that is escalating my already overactive bitchiness.

The reporting on this story suggests that George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested because of the heinous “stand your ground” law that was passed in Florida in 2005. That’s just flatly not true. George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested because the police department in charge of the investigation, didn’t care to investigate. Whether their incompetence was racially motivated or not, is something that will eventually come out (I hope).

Here’s the deal with “stand your ground”. It applies to situations where a person is confronted with mortal danger from another person. Normally, when you’re confronted with a mortal threat, it is your duty to do everything you can before using mortal force yourself. This includes running away. The “stand your ground” law removes that obligation to flee, but it doesn’t remove the requirement that you be confronted with mortal danger. In other words, if someone is waving a butcher knife in your face, and you happen to be armed with a gun, you can shoot them without first trying to get away. It does not give you the right to shoot someone who is waving a bag of fucking skittles in your face. Skittles are not a mortal threat so this law doesn’t apply to such a situation. At this stage in this story, “stand your ground” does not apply.

I bring up that it doesn’t apply yet because I’m concerned that focusing on it now will have two potentially adverse affects on the eventual outcome if this situation. The first thing I’m concerned with, is that talking about the law deflects from the inaction on the part of the police force. We need to stay focused on their actions and the motivations behind those actions. If their actions were a product of inherent racism, we need to make sure to expose that. Secondly, I’m worried that going after “stand your ground” now leaves advocates for it’s repeal open to criticism from the NRA and the politicians they’ve bought. The criticism will be framed by accusing liberals of wanting to repeal a law that we never wanted in the first place. As I said, this law doesn’t play into this story yet. The time will inevitably come to scrutinize this law, but it’s too soon.

“Stand your ground” was cited by the Sanford police department as being the reason why for why they just accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self defense. They’re lying to deflect. We need to keep advocating for an investigation of the police force instead of focusing in on the law. If you’re running around talking to your friends about how this law led to Trayvon Martin’s death, you would be wrong. And you would be wrong in a way that allows for proponents of this law to accuse you of pushing this agenda.

Don’t worry, you will have the chance to shine a light on this law. That opportunity will come if the police stick to their initial excuse of using this law not to do their job, or when the defense will invariably use this law as part of their strategy. I’m not sure the police will stick to their story. The backers of these laws (yes, they’re trying to pass them all across the country) must by now, see that letting the police use it as their excuse jeopardizes their precious neanderthal law. I don’t believe they will allow that to happen. But I do believe that Zimmerman’s defense attorney will use it.

My point here is that you should stick to the facts when discussing this case. Making false claims about how this law played into what happened opens you up for legitimate criticism. We can win this debate by focusing in on the facts at hand. We risk losing it when we distort the facts.

Re: The Ground Zero Mosque

May 26, 2010 by Bitchy

If you’re a smart person, I’m not talking to you right now. This is an email I’d like to address to another demographic. Although, smart people can help me out by forwarding this to the people that you know that fit this demographic.

Dear Fucking Idiots In America,

I understand that your panties are in a bunch over a mosque that we’re planning on building at ground zero. I would like to be among the first to tell you to shut the fuck up, you ignorant bigot.

You see, your ass backward thinking is going to get me attacked, here in New York. While you wax poetic about hypothetical terrorism from your safety nest hundreds or thousands of miles away , I live with it every day. And as you propagate your ignorant, isolated views, you put me and my city in danger. I know that you don’t do this with malice, so let me educate you a little bit.

Terrorists aren’t born. They’re created. They’re recruited, and then they’re worked up to hate the purported enemy so much, that strapping a bomb onto themselves and committing suicide just to take a few of them out makes sense. Getting people worked up to the suicide bombing state takes a whole lot of demonization. You really have to frame the enemy as being a threat to all that is good and holy. If you can do that effectively, you can recruit legions of people to commit acts of terrorism until the end of time. They key is really all in the messaging. The nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were brainwashed into believing that America’s primary objective in the world is to destroy Islam. They believed that they were dying for everything that is good and holy.

When we invaded and occupied Iraq, a country that had done nothing to us, we reinforced that belief that America is out to destroy Islam so recruitment became easier. We started seeing Muslims becoming radicalized in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the UK, the US, and in Iraq, where we saw a brand new flavor of Al Qaeda emerge.

All of that happened because ignorant people got to call the shots. People that had no fucking idea about the culture in the middle east were making decisions on how best to deal with the middle east.

Let’s step back twenty years to where this all began. It really began when the Reagan administration, who were ignorant about middle east culture, decided that we needed to help Afghanistan fend off the Soviet Union. None of this was altruistic, of course. Reagan was scared shitless of the Soviet Union. So he was persuaded that going in and training and arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan was in our best interest. That was all fine and good and it worked out more or less the way the ignoramuses wanted it to in that, the Mujahideen did succeed in driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. It all went horribly wrong after that, when we failed to provide Afghanistan any support to rebuild their country. This created a chaotic struggle for power among various factions of Mujahideen and Islamist warlords, which subsequently gave birth to Al Qaeda.

So you see, Fucking Idiots Of America, two generations of your ignorant brethren taking action without bothering to understand what they were getting into, is what got us to 9/11.

So now that we’re here in 2010, and still dealing with this global terrorism threat thanks to ignorant people like you. I hope that, with the information I just shared, you understand why I want you to shut the fuck up.

Recruitment of terrorists continues, and we’re still in danger. It’s time to disarm the recruiters. We need to cut them off at the knees. Fighting them “over there” is ultimately what brought them “over here”, so that didn’t work.

Now we’re going to try something new. We’re going to demonstrate that we’re not out to destroy Islam, and therefore don’t rise to the level of evil that necessitates strapping a bomb to your chest. We’re going to do that by building a mosque near ground zero. We’re going to make it harder to convince some poor schmuck to commit suicide on order to kill a few of us.

I’m sorry that after all of these years, you’re too stupid to understand this tactic. But I don’t actually need you to understand it. I gave up on the hope that this was possible when you made Sarah Palin your poster girl. I just need you to shut the fuck up, and stop providing fodder for the recruitment of future terrorists. Accept the fact that we’re going to build a mosque near ground zero for the primary purpose of demonstrating that your dumb ass doesn’t represent America.

You don’t think of New York as “the real America” anyway. You can’t shun us one day, and them presume to tell us what to do the next. We’re not within your border so shut the fuck up.

You can be ignorant, bigoted, and small if you want to but do it quietly. I just want to be safe.

Sincerely,

-Bitchy

The Apple Did Not Fall Far From The Tree

May 20, 2010May 20, 2010 by Bitchy

I’m referring to Rand Paul. It’s barely been thirty six hours since he won the republican primary for the open senate seat in Kentucky. Since his victory, he’s said some things that make him seem a little bit racist.

Before I can share my opinions on Rand, I must first begin with Ron Paul. I do have to preface all of this by telling you that I do not believe in blaming the son for the sins of the father. I believe that doing so is unfair, and generally unfounded. When I bring up Ron Paul, I do so because I believe that it’s important to understand the ideology under which Rand Paul was raised.

Ron Paul first registered on my radar during the first debate for the republican primary in 2008. It became very clear in the first ten minutes of that debate, that Ron Paul was not your typical republican. He said a lot of things that made sense. I felt as if he was the republican counterpart to Dennis Kucinich in that, he was a conservative truth teller, impervious to party talking points and corporate interests. There were many points in which I vehemently disagreed with Ron Paul, but I definitely felt that he merited a closer look.

So I started to do some research. A few hours into my research, I came across the newsletters that Ron Paul published monthly from 1978 to 1999. I found this article about the newsletters from a January 2008 story in the New Republic. Let me short hand the article for you with some quotes from the newsletters;

“opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions,”

“if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be,”

He claimed that black representative Barbara Jordan is “the archetypical half-educated victimologist” whose “race and sex protect her from criticism.”

“Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day”

One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that “Welfaria,” “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,” and “Lazyopolis” were better alternatives.

But don’t worry blacks, you’re not alone in Ron Paul’s world of the unworthy;

In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine “who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist.”

In an item titled, “The Pink House?” the author of a newsletter–again, presumably Paul–complained about President George H.W. Bush’s decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite “the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony,” adding, “I miss the closet.” “Homosexuals,” it said, “not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”

“Homosexuals, if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals.”

Feeling left out, Jews? Don’t worry;

A 1987 issue of Paul’s Investment Letter called Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state,”

Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, “Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.”

I could go on and on, but you get the point. Being the skeptic that I am, I had to assume that the reporter on the New Republic story might have had an axe to grind with Ron Paul so I kept looking until I found actual copies of the newsletters. You can look at them here, here, and you can download one here.

I don’t want to keep going on and on about Ron because this post is about Rand, but if you want to know more about how Ron reacted to these revelations, just Google “Ron Paul” + newsletters.

Back to Rand. Here’s an interview that he did with Rachel Maddow last night;

And here’s part 2;

A few things struck me about Rand after having watched this interview.

The first thing is Paul’s cowardice. He lacks the courage of his convictions. If you truly believe something, it’s presumably because you think that your belief is the right thing. If that’s the case, there should be no need to evade directly answering questions about what you believe. The way he evaded answering the question tells me that he KNOWS that his views should be suppressed. If you know that you’re right or righteous, there’s no reason to obfuscate. You should believe that your correctness has the power to persuade others.

The next thing that struck me is his intellectual dishonesty in the gun example he brought up. A gun is something that you CARRY. You have the option of leaving it at home, and doing so won’t prevent you from going to a lunch counter. You can’t leave your “blackness” home. It’s WHAT you are, not what you do. That equivocation was absurd.

There was also a comment on Wednesday. A reporter asked Rand if he was concerned that holding his victory party at a private country club would “send mixed messages”. Rand responded by saying, ““I think at one time people used to think of golf and golf courses and golf clubs as being exclusive. But I think in recent years now you see a lot of people playing golf. I think Tiger Woods has helped to broaden that in the sense that he’s brought golf to a lot of the cities and to city youth, and so no, I don’t think it’s nearly as exclusive as people once considered it to be.”

I thought that it was a little bit unusual that he interpreted the question to be about race. My interpretation would have been that the question was about populism, since he ran as an allegedly populist tea party candidate. The mixed message lies in having your victory party in a venue that appears to be elitist.

I am not a person that feels comfortable labeling people as racists. I have lived in the most liberal parts of this country so racism is not a natural concept for me to wrap my mind around. So when Rand made the Tiger Woods comment, I didn’t jump to a racist conclusion even though I knew how he was raised. I was not willing to combine a seemingly innocuous comment with the sins of the father to conclude that Rand Paul has racist views. When I look at the Maddow interview and silo it apart from everything else, my inclination is to view his comments as staunchly libertarian rather than inherently bigoted. His platform is after all, one of libertarianism.

But when I put the totality of the information about Rand Paul together, I can’t avoid the conclusion that he is a racist.

Here’s the problem with racism today; it’s subtle because it isn’t tolerated in mainstream society anymore. Overt racism isn’t socially acceptable anymore so racists have to go undercover. They have to be subtle. A great example of this is the birthers. Clinging onto the belief that our black president wasn’t born in America, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, is just a subtle way of saying that he’s not one of us.

I really resisted concluding that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree when it comes to Rand Paul, but I can’t avoid it any longer.