Author Archive
Fear of Voting
From the very beginning those in power in the United States have been afraid of allowing everyone to vote. If one looks at the Federalist papers written by Madison, Hamilton et al. one sees a clear fear of the “rabble.” The republican structures of government like the Senate and the Electoral College are to prevent one person, one vote from having the effect it would normally have. The mythos of a democracy has really meant the democracy among a select group. At various times this group has been defined by race, gender, property ownership, economic position, birthplace, grandfather clauses, knowledge of legal documents, and now government issued ID’s. Nowadays this is further compounded by voter apathy in which even those who can vote, don’t vote. Although they don’t admit it those in power are not unhappy about this because it ensures their power. Not only do they get their followers out to vote they prevent potential voters for other candidates from voting by gerrymandering, voting ID laws that discriminate against the poor, and other obstacles to voting.
If, to quote a line from one of my favorite movies The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” then the greatest trick those in power have pulled is convincing potential voters for their opponents that they are wasting their time voting. I know, I know that voting doesn’t cure all the things in one’s life and sometimes not even the most important things. However these people must be stopped.  Not only are they tearing down the social fabric of the safety net, they are destroying any pretense of democracy, urging wars that will kill thousands, and dooming the middle class to an ever constricting life. They are ensuring that they and their friends benefit while the rest of us suffer.
Lest we forget it was only fifty years ago that people were marching, being beaten, and dying so that a Voting Rights Law could be passed.  It is a law that now is being unraveled by Supreme Court justices appointed by elected conservatives. We cannot allow this to continue.  It is a betrayal of our ancestors and a a neglect of our responsibilities to those who come after us.
The latest news is that two African Americans have been elected to the City Council of Ferguson, Missouri.  We are long past the naivete that this automatically means that things will get better for Ferguson’s African American population. Too much of their misery is caused by things not under the control of the city council. We have also learned that every brother ain’t a brother and every sister ain’t a sister. A black face does not guarantee policies that favor the folk. Time will tell if this is going to make a difference for Ferguson. However now the possibility exists that the police force will know it is under scrutiny.  The murder and exploitation of the African American population will continue at its own peril and the police now face the discretion of African Americans in oversight positions.
The problem is there are thousands of Ferguson’s and a bewildering array of candidates for local elections. Who has the time to learn enough about them to cast informed votes? We must.  It is becoming a matter of doing so or literally having local governments for whom black lives do not matter. Voting has moved from an option to the only form of self defense we have against the conservatives and Tea Partiers at all levels. We Americans have a long and proud history of not fixing the roof until we are in the middle of a storm and it is leaking. Look around you; the roof is leaking.
If one drills down below the frenzy of materialism that is Christmas in this late capitalism world, you find sentiments of a thankfulness for family. I have often thought when some pundit extols  the wonders of family values, “Hasn’t that person ever had one?” Families are messy things. They are bundles of neuroses, quirks, chance, selfishness, unselfishness, secrets, denied longings, self confidence building, confidence destroyers, love, and arguments. In short they are humanity in a nutshell. All families seem to be loving in their own ways although we wouldn’t call some such. Most are hotbeds of unconditional love although some are hotbeds of indifference at best. I was one of the lucky ones growing up in a family that loved me fiercely, taught me I could do anything, constantly encouraged me, and kept the quirks and neuroses down to a minimum that I could easily deal with.
The older I get the more I realize that not all had grown up that way. It is more than whether one had one or two parents, more than if the gender of your parents was the same or different. Not all families or family values are positive things and even when they are positive  they are not unmitigated “good things.” They can do us irreparable harm as well as incalculable good. Given they way our neural networks are set up, the variety in the circumstances we face, and the unlooked for people we encounter along the way, it could hardly be otherwise. Families are the cocoons in which we develop, the first places where we learn about the world as well as ourselves. We learn from our families not only from the things they say but even more from the things they do. We are probably hard wired to do so. If the things we learn are about hatred of others for whatever reasons, they are not good things. If our cocoon gives us a false idea of the world outside and our role in it, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us we are intrinsically better or worse than other people, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us to think only about ourselves and not to give of ourselves to other people, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us that the only good people in the world are ones who look or speak like us, it is not a good thing. If it teaches us that the world is all good or all bad, it is not a good thing.
Families are part of the minefield of growing up, but they can be part of the ways of finding your way through the world long after you reach adulthood. Siblings can become best friends or at least “frenemies.” Parents can become role models or guides at each stage of your life as can aunts, uncles, cousins, or even fictive kin.  I am just saying that they didn’t have to be.  Good family relationships are based on love, goodwill, selflessness, hard work, and an element of chance. They are not the absolutely affirmative or constructive relationships  that politicians preach and there are certainly more positive configurations of family than the one way conservatives posit. However, they have the potential to be enormously fulfilling and I feel the work I have done as a parent is probably the best thing I have done. I hope your family relations are indeed positive and if they are please don’t take them for granted.  It didn’t have to be that way so appreciate and count your blessings.
The news: Two police officers were shot to death by a black man claiming it was in retaliation for the police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. This is a tragedy clear and simple and my heart goes out to the families of the two police officers.  However it is not the media nor President Obama nor the mayor of New York that is to blame as the Police Benevolent Society official and probably many police officers claim. It is the fault of one insane man who wanted to go out by making a splash.  The issue of police over-reaction and brutality must not be subsumed by this tragedy. The right to protest nor any media coverage of it should not be affected no matter how conservatives will spin it. Last summer two whites killed police officers in Las Vegas, but there was no thought that all whites should be looked on suspiciously as a result.  There should be no police, media or public reaction that this incident proves black males are inherently violent. Put another way  if a white cop killing a black man does not prove that cops are violent, then a black man killing a cop doesn’t prove that blacks are inherently violent. Unfortunately that is the lesson some folks will take from this.  In political debate people too often take whatever happens as confirmation for whatever political or social prejudice one has. Some police and some whites will take this as proof of the inherent violence of the communities that people of color inhabit and will try to use it to justify a continuation of heavy handed tactics. They should realize that it is these heavy handed tactics that are contributing to their danger instead of blaming the mayor, the president, protesters, and anyone else that calls them on it. The community support that would have warned them that such a gunman was stalking them must be painstakingly built for policeman’s own safety as well as the community.
Those who blame the media or the politicians have learned nothing and they will not become safer through this reaction. Increased safety should be their goal. Avoiding the things that lead to a rupture with their communities rather than fighting publicity and reaction to police behavior, is the way out of this quagmire.  Doing what they have been doing will not make them safer. What the protesters and critics are doing is pointing the way to safer policing for both the police and the community by showing them the behavior that is counter productive. If they will listen rather than reacting with knee-jerk defensiveness they will become safer in an inherently dangerous job. The real tragedy is if we do not learn from this senseless act.  Then the sacrifice of these two officers and their families will be in vain.
Three things strike me about the release of the Senate Committee’s report on torture by the CIA. First there is the limited extent of outrage by the general public at what the CIA was doing in our name. Partly this is about limited media coverage of the outrage and partly the timing of the release.  People are certainly caught up in the materialist consumer frenzy that is Christmas and with the unrelenting revelations of white police killing unarmed black people at will.  There is only so much outrage to go around. We are experiencing outrage fatigue. On a deeper level there are those who don’t care what the country does as long as the citizens feel safe. It doesn’t matter whether they are actually safer which is arguable, but torture made them feel safe. For example there is the Fox News correspondent who cried “awesome” when these acts were revealed because she was impressed at the lengths the government would go to to keep her safe. As I often told my students when people are scared they will give away anybody else’s rights and some of their own. The public acquiescence in these horrific acts is more terrifying to me than the awful acts themselves. To his credit John McCain bucked this trend by standing up on the floor of the Senate and expressing his opposition to these methods.  As a former POW who was tortured himself he could provide a unique perspective.  Some of those in power like Obama and Dianne Feinstein did express their outrage but it only leads me to my second point. Those in power should have made it their business to know and the current outrage faux or not is too little too late. We can and should blame Bush and Cheney and the intelligence apparatus, but some of this also happened on Obama’s watch.  If the most powerful man in the world couldn’t get straight answers from those who work for him, then we have a problem. Sure the CIA lied and misled but if there is no or at best belated presidential or congressional oversight of these people, they are allowed to run wild. There is also the wink and nod reality that as long as there is plausible deniability that those in power knew, the CIA could do what it wanted.  That what it wanted produced little in terms of actual actionable intelligence is proof of what happens when you let the inmates run the asylum.
The other thing that strikes me is the reaction to the report. Some have criticized the report for revealing covert actions or announced that the report itself will put more Americans in danger.  This seems to me a part of the pattern of magical thinking that pervades these folks.  A thing does not exist until someone acknowledges it.  Conservatives have long applied it to things like sex education believing that it is education that has put these naughty ideas in adolescent heads, not that they were already there. Mentioning racism or class warfare brings it into existence and it wouldn’t have existed otherwise. This is of course nonsense. The rest of the world especially the Arab world knew about these acts and has acted upon that knowledge for years. It is part of the reason that the United States is the big Satan to them and there have been so many acts of terrorism against us. Even Hollywood has guessed that such actions have happened and has featured them prominently as a trope in its mythology e.g. Zero Dark Thirty or Homeland just to name a couple. Our allies like the Israelis have known about it for what seems like forever and some have even helped us execute it. In some ways the Senate seems like the last to know.
The combination of a public that accepts our role as torturers with little more than a murmur of opposition, leadership that promotes or at least passively acquiesces in torture, and part of the majority political party that believes such things have actually helped, does not bode well for the moral health of the country. The CIA’s complaint is not that it is shown to have committed terrible and immoral acts, but that the report calls them ineffective. Of course many people are outraged by these revelations. However they seem to be swimming against the tide. Where are the public demonstrations?  It makes one wonder what has happened to the basic decency of our country? Was it too a casualty of 9/11?
A long time ago I read something in a John Barth novel, that has always stayed with me.  It is the idea that nothing has an intrinsic value.  All value is assigned by us who chose a moral aesthetic, that is a system of good and bad, then cloak it in a belief system that supports that aesthetic or the other way around: we choose a belief system and accept the moral aesthetic that goes with it.  Either way Barth’s “nothing has an  intrinsic value” is a place to start that has some advantages.  For one it points out the inherent and massive indifference that the universe has about what seem to us moral choices. On the one hand it is nihilistic and means that Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” is merely wishful thinking. On the other hand it means that we create value and meaning so we are not condemned to follow a moral system created for us by the universe. It is a humanistic philosophy that puts humans at the center. This is not moral relativism of the “I’m okay, you,re okay” variety. Once you have adopted a moral aesthetic it allows you to judge other ones. If for example you place the highest positive value on expanding human knowledge of the universe, then belief systems that tend to censorship, hinder the development of new ideas, and lead to close-mindedness, become poor ones to you no matter how widely spread, tightly held, or fervently preached they are. As an alternate example if you believe that the most valuable thing is to create a religious state on earth be it Christian, Muslim or something else, then things that prevent that, whether capitalist materialism, secular authority, or propagation of alternative faiths, become morally “bad” things.
How does one establish such a moral aesthetic? One way is to adopt an ideology or religion which in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz creates, “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [read humans] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” He argues that, “these sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos – the tone, character and quality of their life it’s moral and aesthetic style and mood – and their world view – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In religious [here I would add ideological as well] belief and practice a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life.” If you are within any such system Geertz’s ideas are heresy in contrast to the simple truth expressed by your ideology.
If we understand such ideologies rather they be conservative talk show ones, ISIL in Syria ones, evangelical Christian ones, or even progressive political doctrines, we can see why there would be difficulty communicating with others outside your belief system. If you believe that your world view represents the way things in sheer actuality are, non believers become evil, fools, idiots or at best the misguided or uninformed. Each system has its own signs and symbols, its own things people accept on faith alone, its own rituals.  There is plenty middle ground between a closed belief system which says my way or there is no purpose in even talking to you, and a loose moral relativism that says all belief systems are valid.  Can one say I don’t really know how things in sheer actuality are, but I have chosen to be behave as if this were true and for these reasons? Might we have a belief system that is somewhere between unchangeable and inconstant? Can we believe in something but then alter our view as events and circumstances change or we grow? I am not talking about not having any fixed stars or beliefs by which to navigate. I am saying that differences in religion or ideology are differences in choices and that creates the possibility that change can occur or that conversation can take place. We can choose sides but let’s not make our choices rigid.
My father died almost forty years ago.  I remember that day well. In those days I usually called home every Sunday just to say hello to my folks and to let them know I was fine.  My father’s birthday, his 58th, was on a Friday, but I chose to wait until my regular Sunday phone call on that Sunday to give him my “Happy Birthday Pop.” I never got the chance.  That Saturday I got a phone call from a relative who was making the necessary phone calls.  She is a health care professional and in the professional way they had taught her she said “I’m sorry to have to tell you but your father has expired.” Expired. Like a parking meter his time was up. This wasn’t a complete surprise, it was his sixth heart attack that I knew of and he had been forced to retire early because of his ill health.  Nevertheless he had been in okay health when I had spoken to him the  previous Sunday.  He had a heart attack while driving on his way home after doing some Saturday morning errands.  My foster brothers were in the car with him when he had a massive heart attack, slumped over the wheel, and managed to slow the car down while it  slowly drifted until it hit a tree. The foster kids were unhurt but for a while they were adamant about not going down that street. He had passed away by the time the EMT’s got to him. I dutifully flew back to New York from California and must have sleepwalked my way through all the funeral rituals.  I have little memory of them.
Eighteen years later my mother passed away from lung cancer (she was a heavy smoker) but that’s another story.  As we were packing up the house after her death I ran into a box containing my father’s medals from World War 2. My father had served in Army campaigns in North Africa and Europe. He talked little about his Army experiences except to tell me to take care of my feet because he said, “when your feet hurt nothing else is right.” Aside from this practical advice he did not talk about the war or his experiences there.  In fact my father wasn’t much of a talker at all.  Oh he was polite and loved by all he met, but when alone he was introverted and content to sit and read the newspaper. It was in fact the newspaper that precipitated his applying for his medals.  He read an article about all the World War 2 vets who were owed medals, but who had never claimed them. By this time his health had started to become an issue and he was forced to spend more time away from his work as a building superintendent in Manhattan.  He was eventually forced into an early retirement. At my mother’s urging he applied for his medals and a few months later (this was the military) they arrived. There were more than a half dozen of them.  Most were campaign and service medals that you got just for showing up. One, however was the Bronze Star for heroic action. He never explained what he got it for, although he looked at it and you could tell that it brought back memories, but ones that he preferred to keep to himself. Later he said that he got the medals so that we kids would know that he once was somebody.  We had never thought otherwise.
Several years ago I tried to find out how the Bronze Star was earned by writing to the designated military bureaucracy, but their form letter reply contained no additional information except the campaign and date it was awarded. I guess it will forever remain a mystery. More to the point “Why do I keep my father’s medals so long after he died?” I have never served in the military. I was of an age to serve during the Vietnam War, but first a student deferment and then a high number in Nixon’s draft lottery meant that I never even got close to serving. Â Nor have I ever wanted to serve in the military. Â As a kid I never had toy soldiers or GI Joe’s and never even pretended I was in the military. I was part of the generation that questioned American participation in the Vietnam War. Â I could not imagine being in a war zone where people were shooting at me, trying to kill me, and I would have had to shoot back. As I grew older I have become more and more opposed to war and cognizant of the toll it has taken on the young men and women of our country. Every time there is jingoistic talk and saber-rattling I just shake my head in wonder. Â I understand that the medals and the pomp and circumstance around them hide the ugly reality of war so that young people will continue to serve.
So why do I keep my father’s medals? Perhaps because they were my father’s medals.He wanted me to have them. When I pass on they can be thrown out, I doubt that anyone else will want them. For the meantime they can stay in their cardboard box, a silent link between us that matters to me but that no one else cares about.
I was watching Jon Stewart’s takedown of the Fox News coverage of the Ferguson, Missouri outrage. As is usually the case it was brilliantly done. My favorite part was Fox News’ Sean Hannity explaining how he would act if stopped by a policeman and implicitly saying that black men should do likewise.  He said that he would put his empty hands out the window, then get out of the car, pull up his shirt to show that he had a handgun in his waistband and explain that he had a permit to carry that weapon. The look of incredulity on Stewart’s face and his first comment “you really have no f*cking idea do you?” mirrored my sentiments exactly. I suspected but did not have the proof that they were so far gone.  They live in a world not just of fiction, but of science fiction where there is an alternate reality working.
After I had finished marveling at the depths of Hannity’s delusion I began to wonder how he might go about confirming that he was right. Â He could ask inner city black males how they think they would be treated if they behaved as he suggested. Â Oh that’s right Mr. Hannity probably doesn’t know any inner city black males from personal experience. Â Hmm, how about asking some of the police who work the inner city beat how they would respond to a black man or a white man for that matter who behaved as Mr. Hannity suggests. Or better yet why doesn’t Fox News try a little experiment and have actors act out Mr. Hannity’s little scenario in an inner city setting for real cops and see what happens. What, no volunteers. Â Well maybe then we could just hire actors to like ABC does with its “What Would You Do” series. Â The form releasing Fox News from any damages that may result, might be a tough sell to any actors but some may be hard up enough to take the job.
It occurs to me however that Fox News commentators may be so comfortable living in their delusions (think back to election night last year and Karl Rove refusing to believe Mitt Romney had lost) that the last thing they want is to test them out in the real world. Perhaps some secretly know they are delusions and suspect how such tests might work out. I think that this is what (among a list of things) I hate most about them.  I hate their arrogance that presumes their self righteousness without any evidence beyond their own belief systems or their hypocrisy in knowing what they spout could not stand up to real world testing. At that they are no different from bloggers like me sometimes are.  They however  presume to be journalists, have an audience of millions and a responsibility as journalists to check their facts in order not to mislead that audience. Their failure to do so is leading many people to a view of the world that is so unrealistic as to promise a car wreck further down the road.
In response to the Facebook challenge to list ten books that were important to me I want to briefly add some to the list of those I have already mentioned
Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon. It turned me around on the psychological effects of colonialism and made me realize how much like African colonialism the situation of African Americans was.
“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.†…“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.†… “A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.†… “To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.â€Â
Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois. It made me realize how lyrical and poetic memoir, sociology, history, politics and even musicology could be in the right hands. Its most famous quote:
“the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro… two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz. It contains an essay called “Religion as a Cultural System,” which looks at systems of belief as solutions to fundamental problems of existence. I used that essay several times in class to mixed success. Many students were fervent believers in some religion and viewed an attempt to see belief systems as solutions to problems as an atheistic heresy rather than a process of thought. For others the act of thinking about thinking just gave them a headache. Admittedly Geertz is not the easiest thing to read. Â Here is a sample:
“sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos–the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood –and their world view–the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In religious belief and practice a group’s ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life. This confrontation and mutual confirmation has two fundamental effects. On the one hand, it objectivizes moral and aesthetic preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life implicit in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given the unalterable shape of reality. On the other, it supports these received beliefs about the world’s body by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth. Religious symbols formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed authority of the other.”
For people who are inside a belief system apparently talking about it in a “meta” way is a difficult thing to do because they think it implies that the “reality” the belief system  describes isn’t real. I never took this to be Geertz’s point but other folks did. Perhaps it was because it implied that other realities and religions were also valid.
That’s enough to ponder.
A little while ago there was a Facebook challenge circulating among my friends:Â quickly list 10 books that were important to you without thinking about it too much. Not being one to be constrained by the rules I wanted to do it but with some thought rather than quickly and not necessarily with 10 books. My list is considerably different from those of my friends and colleagues but I always was an odd duck. The first book is one few will have read but many will have heard of: Moby Dick. I read it for the first time when I checked out a copy from the adult section of my public library (it may have been the first “adult” book I read.) I was 11-12 at the time. I read it as an adventure story just skimming over the long boring parts to get on with the exciting ones. In other words I read it as a young boy would. It is important to me not for that first reading but because of my second. Â Later in high school it was on a summer reading list and I re-read it presumably because it would take less time to read something I had read before. I was amazed at how different it was. Â Those parts that had seemed so boring to me before suddenly became the more interesting. Â The discourse on whiteness, the subtle racism toward Queequeg, the historical context, and above all the vengeance obsession became parts that strangely interested me. Â I then had the sudden insight that it was me who had changed not the book. This was a new idea to me. A reader brought his “baggage”, into the reading of a book. Â It was his situation, his spot within the life cycle, his experiences, other books he had read, his knowledge of the world at that moment, into each reading of a book. I resolved to re-read Moby Dick every ten years or so believing new parts of the book would reveal themselves to me each time. Â Sadly I have not followed through on this pledge though I have re-read many books since.
The second reading experience I want to talk about is really not a book at all. In  high school we were assigned to research an historical event. I chose the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.  Why? I had heard that it was an important case in a history that involved African Americans like me.  In addition it had happened within my lifetime but I knew little about it because I was only four years old at the time. I don’t remember my elders talking about it in 1954 but that may have just been me. The high school had an excellent library and I was able to research much of the media reaction at the time of the decision. I didn’t end up digging too deeply into the case’s roots nor the long drawn out attempts to circumvent it that followed.  Looking back it was a pretty rudimentary project, but it was my first history project with primary materials.  At the time I enjoyed doing it though I did not realize how central to me history would become. More to the point it was the first time I realized how out of touch with the world I truly was.  It was 1966 and momentous things had been happening around me my entire life and I was only peripherally aware of them.  Of course the civil rights movement had been an exciting television show in my house, but I had neither the historical knowledge nor the life experiences to appreciate it. Little did I know that all hell was about to break loose when I arrived in college in 1967.
I did not read the next two books until long afterwards. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela and Country of My Skull by a female Afrikaner named Antje Krug. I group these two together because they provide the yin and the yang of South Africa. Together they embody the hope that in South Africa’s future they can meet in the middle and be better people for it. Mandela’s book is about how to make integrity pragmatic. He knew that he was opposed by people who feared the future he represented. He knew that the way to win them over was to show them through his own magnanimity, show him through his respect for them and demand for their respect of him, show him through his rationality and steadfastness, that their fears were groundless. Krug’s book is about her coverage as a journalist of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. She has to learn of the injustices committed in the name of ordinary Afrikaners by the racist regime. She also had to learn what Mandela was teaching: that the only true future lay in respect not fear of blacks. Given recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere those are lessons folks in our country need to learn too.
(To be Continued)
Recently a friend sent me this Chris Rock video and asked me what I thought of it.  She was appalled by it but many of her friends and acquaintances liked it. Admittedly humor is a multi-leveled thing and viewers take different things out of it. This is the problem with ironic art.  This is especially true of African American humor where a subordinate (the fancy word is subaltern) hides their criticism of the dominant culture in code or behind masks. On the surface this is about how black behavior either one’s own or that of a companion may precipitate police beatings.
On one level it can be seen as a criticism of black behavior; on another an inventory of police overreaction, both of which lead to the beatings and by extension the shootings that have become an epidemic. As a criticism of black behavior it is aimed both at the black community and to those whites who believe this stereotypical behavior is shared among most African Americans. In these roles it becomes a revelation of a ‘dirty little secret” that the license of humor allows to be aired.
For black folks it is an exhortation to clean up their behavior albeit a humorous and satiric one. This is nothing new. Recently we have heard it from Bill Cosby, Barack Obama and most recently Al Sharpton in his “eulogy” at Michael Brown’s funeral. These exhortations at least have the virtue of claiming that African Americans have some control over their lives by modifying their behavior. The problem here is that it is not true. Oh it is certainly true that among a group as diverse as African Americans we all know someone who would behave in these ways. What is not true is that it makes the difference between being treated fairly by the police and being beaten or being hired and not being hired or being suspended from school and not being suspended or getting ahead and being left behind. Study after study has shown this. Individual behavior does not alter the stereotypes to which most African Americans are subject. No matter how well one behaves at some point someone is going to judge you by the stereotype and not your behavior. This makes all the self-flagellation about black behavior moot.
For whites, even those sympathetic to the African American cause, it allows them to breathe a sigh of relief because these stereotypes have indeed crossed their minds. To have as major a validator as Chris Rock confirm and excuse these perhaps subconscious but at least hidden thoughts, is a blessing. Comedian Dave Chapelle walked away from a multi-million dollar deal for the continuation of his comedy show when he realized that his popularity was because others had taken his humor in the wrong way. They were taking it as a confirmation of their stereotypes rather than the send up of them he had intended. Perhaps Chris Rock will one day realize that his humor is a double edged sword. Perhaps not.
The other side of the Chris Rock video is that these, let’s call them quirks of black behavior, provoke a gratuitous violent reaction among police officers. This is the subversive subaltern view of the dominant power structure. Chris Rock is also saying that these behaviors among African Americans may trigger [not an accidental use of the word]Â Â behavior by police but it in no way justifies it. In each example the black behavior falls far short of what it should take to lead to police violence. Taken as the satire that I believe was its intent, the video mocks the idea that there is a “proper” mode of behavior by blacks that will not lead to police beatings. Â Even the most trivial of black “mis-behaviors” may bring about dire consequences. Indeed this is the problem with all the “it’s their own damn fault” arguments. Blacks never know what behaviors will set off the police, even innocent ones may do so. The safest course is to avoid the police altogether. However some contact is unavoidable given what must be done to survive in the inner cities and the mission of the police.
The black litmus test for racism is “Would a white person have been treated the same way?” When simple acts like jaywalking or walking in the middle of the road may bring about police action in black neighborhoods when no one would even care in white ones, when belligerence by whites may or may not bring about police violence, when vague descriptions cause innocent blacks to be stopped and detained when whites would not be, when black behavior is viewed more suspiciously than whites doing the same thing, then we have a racial problem.