A Moment When I Have To Say "No, Your Other Right"

A White Liberal Discovers She's A Conservative White

I get it, I really do. It’s safer to stay within the confines of “my people” and the lure of the Facebook like or the retweet doesn’t hurt either. The constant reinforcement of my views is intoxicating, whether appreciated by peers or shared by public figures I admire. The only versions of the opposition that make it to my newsfeed are the most extreme examples, the easiest to pick apart and mock, the Duck Dynastys of the world. The thoughtful, measured opinions of conservatives never find their way to my screen, and I don’t go looking. It’s easier to pretend that they’re all “crazy” than actually listen.

TMR: Saving The White Race, One Idiot Racist At A Time

Some racist white reader's comments can crack me the fuck up:

 My closest black friend, if he was whinging like you, yeah, I would tell him to his face to suck it up. You just blame your major malfunction on being black. The blacks I knew in the service, the blacks I worked with in Atlanta and the few black friends and acquaintances I have here in NorCal don't blame everything on slavery and their oppression.



That said, I am glad I'm not black. I don't need the extra stress. 

Let's see if we can break this down, together, shall we? 

 Howard acknowledges that being black in this environment - in itself - is (in his words) "extra stress". 

But, if Howard's "closest black friend" opened up to him about the "extra stress" - because it came, specifically, from "slavery and their oppression" - Howard would "tell him to his face to suck it up."

And people like Howard are wondering why Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty, never heard a word, either. It never occurs to them that, while having a "closest black friend", they're not so close to be considered the type of white people blacks speak openly or honestly to - they're just a bunch of weirdo racists.

 Honest question, Howard:

Considering what you just wrote, do you honestly think your "closest black friend" needs you for a friend?

 I also agree with you that us whites have no idea how much more difficult life is for the black man in America. You seem to be just recently discovering that all of your tea-bagging chickenhawk buddies are really racist nutjobs and now you feel burned just like your ex-wife. Apparently you don't handle rejection well. 

I can tell Howard's not enjoying this process - going for the San Francisco ex-wife burn, like he was there - and, notice, he does that while, at the same time, admitting he seems to be learning something from what I'm doing for him. Is that gratitude or what?

(Money, Howard, the word is money.) 

And, I guess, I'll take this time to remind you I walked away from the Tea Party crowd over Mitt Romney - not the other way around. So, if anybody can't handle rejection, it's Whitey, Inc., of which you are a member.

In any event, if you want everyone everywhere around you to be walking on eggshells 24/7, I suggest you go back to your ex-wife's new-age cult friends where they will be happy to accommodate your sensitive aura. 

See, Howard, now you're getting interesting because you've cracked open the point of this blog - cultism. And you did it all by your lonesome, though (being a racist) you got the power structure backwards, as usual: 

You - the whites - are my "ex-wife's new-age cult friends" demanding "everyone everywhere around you to be walking on eggshells 24/7". And you won't give it up - you're arguing for it right here. You'll even try to pose like you're the injured party. It's pathetic, considering. Especially you, thinking I'd go for it. 

 

You are right. My mistake. I thought you could be treated like a man.

Ooooh. And men don't fight for their rights against you? 

Do you think racist white men even know what that word means? I'm serious. With the value system you've been raised in - that's produced this horror for others - can you call yourselves "Men" as the rest of us understand the term? Based on what? Slavery? Jim Crow? Public lynchings with a picnic basket and the family in tow? All-white, racist juries for hundreds of years, trying your fellow citizens who you now claim shouldn't fight for anything YOU don't agree with? Stolen wealth? C'mon, "Man", lecture me on the integrity you're so sure I lack, for daring to question the likes of you, who the world now looks down upon.

Perhaps your child-like worldview is what makes the visual art you cobble together so raw, original and appealing. 

 Does this guy sound like a former slave owner or what? 

"The negro has a child-like worldview that makes the art he 'cobbles together' raw, original and appealing." 

Jesus Christ, man, you are a walking well of disgusting ideas.

I do have to say, thanks for turning me on to Mingus. Us poor white guys have no clue about real music. I'll always think of you when I listen to The Clown.

Um, that would be my Step-Father, and - if he was still alive - he'd be proud of me and telling you to kiss his black ass:

   Charles Mingus narrates pieces of his own story. Born from a half black/half Swedish father and a half black/half Chinese mother (later having a half black/half Indian step-mother) Mingus tried to be all types of races but found he was a misfit that didn't belong anywhere; so he says he's just a negro. He sums this up stating, "In a society which sends messages that are racists capitalists, and have Judaeo-Christian ethic roots, the transmission of these messages to Black people can lead to socializing of their young with non-complementary values."

John Handy and Sue Mingus describe Charles as individual, volatile, strong, supremely honest, uncompromising, and having a very dynamic personality that ran like the color spectrum; testing people to see how far he could go. Wynton Marsalis describes Charles as never victimized by a style and that he was always relating his music to something human.

Jerome Richardson says Mingus was aware of what was going in regards to race and never backed down from it. John Handy says he did what most others could not, mainly because he was conscious of the race issue.

Lem's Comment Home Update: "Duck Dynasty" Never Mentioned Blacks, So Lem's Doesn't See Them, Either

Dust Bunny Queen (another loyal, gun-toting member of the racist Lem's Comment Home) sums up the Duck Dynasty controversy in a post showing concern for the show's well-being - just as those wonderful non-racists have been really, really concerned about how blacks can move forward after this catastrophe what happens to white South Africans after they abused blacks for hundreds of years:

I had never watched the show until all the broohaha about gay people, God and where guys want to stick their penises.

Notice anything missing, "cognitive dissonance" fans? 

How about Phil Robertson's comments on "happy" blacks - which were regularly deemed even more cock-eyed than his gay comments?

DBQ, Lem (who made the post) and the rest of the gang, totally blocked the black comments out. You know, like the Comment Home's hero, Martin Luther King, would've done. Like they've done King's "War On Poverty", racist whites have compartmentalized Robertson's black comments, so thoroughly, for all intents and purposes, they no longer exist to them.

This is how history - even history as recent as this - gets so messed up by a white majority, they no longer recognize it. And then, they accuse everyone of lying, and railroading them - which they, then, have to avenge, so the cycle of white violence and discrimination is repeated, because whites can't stand hearing the truth about themselves.

And, Ladies and Gentlemen, blacks are expected to LIVE with these nutjobs.

White racists are walking mental issues on display:

Blacks, at least, have a decent explanation for ours,…

 

I'm Here, I'm NOT Queer - O.K., I May Not Even BE Here

 Damn it, Caucasians, with the exception of Ann Althouse (who really needs to straighten up and fly right) y'all are fucking up TMR's whole "white racists" curve with this one:

  "Even with Republicans standing up for the reality show Duck Dynasty’s patriarch, their ratings are taking a beating,...It would seem that Phil Robertson’s anti-gay, blacks were happy during the pre-civil rights-era rant, had an affect."

Redeem yourselves - immediately - betray me racially as soon as I have my back turned:

I wouldn't want to get homesick or anything,…

 

Woke Up Wondering (Where I Am & How To Get Away)

I'm a sucker for a Tea Party photo from Madison, Wis. - wildly over-stating Obama's racial intentions - when that state's terrible civil rights record easily colors why a Tea Partier, specifically, would think that way. I got the photo from this post:

  "How the GOP Became the 'White Man's Party': Dog Whistle Politics - Coded Racial Appeals Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class" 

I often wonder if white bloggers read blacks, beyond The Root, because I rarely find whites linked to them - that includes Instapundit & Co. If they did, they'd find more to discuss than the shallow pursuits they do cover, or even how they talk. They make me think they don't understand, blacks talk amongst ourselves, as well:

"Annually, my grandmother recounts my Uncle James' Christmas Day birth, explaining that because the hospital was understaffed and didn't execute his birth certificate until the next day, his birth date is listed as December 26.

As in past years, someone asked my grandmother why she didn't point out the mistake. Her eyes grew wide, and she shook her head violently. "No! You don't understand," she tells us. "I was at Charity Hospital! Those white doctors didn't talk to us, and we didn't question them."

While my grandmother was in labor, her mother and aunt would wait in a closet-size room reserved for Negroes. Once a black child was born, a nurse would enter the room with her back to its occupants and write on a chalkboard the mother's name, the baby's sex and weight, and whether the baby was dead or alive. With a frown, my grandmother added, "The only thing they ever said to me was, 'Guurl, what you gon' name this baby?'"

That my grandmother would not point out such a mistake is unfathomable to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We only know of her strength. To us she is the lifelong domestic who birthed nine healthy babies, buried two grown sons and slept in the bed her husband had died in hours earlier. But in her eyes, when she tells this story, I can see her vulnerability, her fear that "they'd send me home and not let me come back."

Shannan Hicks, a researcher and storyteller who focuses on the Northern Louisiana post-Jim Crow era, is not surprised that black workers shielded their true feelings from [Phil] Robertson.

"This was the age of black lynchings. A black person would never have reveled their true self to a white person who looked and talked like Robertson," Hicks said before referencing the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem that opens with this stanza:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties."

I'd like to see Ann Althouse apply her writing skills to that poem's meaning today (Curiously, she didn't say much about Phil Robertson's racial comments,...). Does she think about it, in regards to her black friends? Or, Lee Atwater's ghost, haunting the  conservative language used most frequently by her readers:

 

Avoiding black issues by avoiding blacks is a strategy - and tactic - that's easy for whites. (I have many a white friend for whom I was the first black person in their life. I don't know a single black person for whom I can say the same about whites.) I don't think whites comprehend what that means, usually, when they make judgements on things like crime. 

 But what do I know, right? I'm just another black guy, put firmly in his place (We don't want to hear that!) but still carrying on in the country of my birth - which I know very, very well:

"Let’s conduct a little thought experiment. First, for the sake of this thought experiment let’s assume that you have no morals, ethics, or conscience. You are comfortable lying to people, even if they are sick, and even if it will harm their health."

Yep, that much is clear:

"You are comfortable" with it all, I'm not, and slavery's over. 

Slavery's Over. 

And that last link, above, is describing my American Dream,…

Have Blacks Made Shows Only To Make Fun Of Whites?

Despite the fact that an average of 14.6 million Americans tune in each week to track the adventures of the Robertson family when you count DVR recordings, I've never understood the appeal. For me, the question isn't why Phil Robertson was suspended. The real mystery is why he and his family -- who run a successful business making supplies for duck hunters -- have a television show in the first place.

I have a theory. Here is what you need to keep in mind as you waddle through this controversy: The reason that "Duck Dynasty" is on television is to make liberal studio executives at A&E, and parent company Disney feel superior, while making big profits for the studio.

The Robertsons are on television so that people in New York and Los Angeles -- the kind of folks who refer to anyplace in between as "flyover country" -- can feel progressive and enlightened by comparing themselves to simple country folks in Louisiana who, according to the elites, are neither. (And can make lots of money doing so.)

"Duck Dynasty' is this era's ode to "Amos 'n' Andy." In that show -- which aired on radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s and which was created, written and produced by white people -- Americans were given the opportunity to laugh at African-Americans, adding insult to the injury that this group of citizens was already sustaining before the civil rights movement.

Now, Americans have a new group to laugh at -- a self-described "bunch of rednecks from Louisiana."

I'm with you 100% except for one difference - however they're portrayed, Duck Dynasty signed up for the heckling of themselves and others like them:

There wasn't nothing "reality television" about Amos & Andy,...

 

Let's Hear It For The "Blind & Naïve" To Black Suffering (& The Idea Fighting Sexism Is As Important As Racism)

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” 

- Phil Robertson

“While [Phil Robertson's claim] is possible, it is highly improbable. Robertson is 67 years old, born into the Jim Crow South. Only a man blind and naïve to the suffering of others could have existed there and not recognized....”

- Charles Blow

“I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart,...”

- Frederick Douglass

“People do need to grieve when they've lost,…

But,…There was a brightness and a happiness to the songs that dominated,...Even the songs about crying. The biggest song about crying in 1963 was 'It's My Party.' Lesley Gore is gloriously triumphant in her claim of the right to cry.

...It still appeals to me more than the anguished bellyaching of soul music.”

- Ann Althouse

So, what's TMR's Christmas message to we sad, angry, misunderstood, "bellyaching" black people, who whites, today, don't want to help (no matter what we say, or what happens to us, including death) unless we agree with them, their politics - and, not only their version of history but, even the current state of our very being?

Don't you DARE restore "a brightness and happiness" to their lives.

And - no matter what "they" say or think or do - Merry Christmas!



ADDED - I can't forget my girl:




A Big Holiday Shoutout to PW (and her family):

I've never felt alone with y'all there,...

Malcolm Xmas

"Anti-black violence was a regular feature of African-American life throughout the Jim Crow South, and especially in Louisiana. [Duck Dynasty's Phil] Robertson's recollection is a tremendous whitewash that would be stunning if not for the sad reality of our national memory. For as much as Americans celebrate the lives of men like Martin Luther King Jr. and women like Rosa Parks, there's little awareness of what Jim Crow looked like for ordinary blacks. The quotidian violence that defined the era — from forced labor camps to attacks on whole communities — has vanished from our collective consciousness, if it was ever there to begin with.

It's no wonder we don't want to talk about Phil Robertson's other, impolitic comment, since — when it comes to remembering the past — he's just like the rest of us."