Don't Read King, Don't Listen To King, Don't Study King

More than one line about character and your mind is blown

Pretty soon, what those MLK statues represent is going to become an issue, and - after a quick re-reading of his work - TMR doubts America's whites will have an answer as to why they even built them:

"The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not diminish [Martin Luther King’s] zeal for reparations. 'Frederick Douglass said we should have 40 acres and a mule,' he told a mass meeting not long before his death. Instead, the nation left blacks 'penniless and illiterate after 244 years of slavery.' Calculating that $20 a week for the 4 million slaves would have added up to $800 billion, he noted acerbically, 'They owe us a lot of money.'”

The past is never really past

And just in time for the new arrivals,...

Frederick Douglass On The Celebration Of A White Lie

The man who - somehow - didn't make it into the movie "Lincoln"

The lie is, without fixing what's been wrong - for centuries - there's something worth celebrating and whites should participate: 

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,…your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery.” 

TMR's best wishes of the day, Folks:

May fireworks blow off your fingers as you choke on hot dogs and beer.

This sense of imagery - and love for our fellow man - came directly from American history, too, so celebrate that, as well,...

 

It Comes As No Surprise (Blacks Die Of Heart Disease)

"A white Houston man accused of misleading voters into thinking he was black to help him win election is now accused of not living in the district he was elected to represent."

"Blind people understand and experience race like everyone else,…"

"Yes, white women and black men and women in America's slave era were all victims of white patriarchal authority, but only white women had the freedom to vent their fury, albeit on the only people to whom they were superior.

...White American women and African-Americans have long had a complicated relationship on this score, epitomised by the bitter fallout between the 19th-century women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, when the two former allies split over whether black men should get the vote before white women."

"Researchers from Harvard and Tufts University have conducted a surprising study which shows that white people think that much needed racial progress has been made since the 1950s — but at their expense.

First of all, L-O-L-O-L-O-L,…"

"A black man must reach age 50 before his risk of an investigatory stop drops to that of a 25-year-old white man."

"Racism May Lead to Adult Onset-Asthma in African-American Women"

"Flint [Michigan] is a place where trouble follows brothers, including ones who have tried to play life straight."

"Watch Jay Z Hang Out With Two Women Having Oral Sex"

"I don’t think there has been a serious drama series in Britain with black people from all walks of life as the main protagonists."

"Try and rub the Black off"

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,...

Blood Clot/Dreadlock: Twisting Meanings/Hiding Heroes

"I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

"The creative process begins with selection: which narratives we decide to privilege over others matters. Our myths reveal mountains about who we are as a nation. Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” erased Frederick Douglass, reinforcing the tired notion that a singular white man, through the sheer force of his moral conviction, brought slavery to an end. In “Lincoln,”...this cliché not only hobbles the film’s cultural relevancy, it is a narrative failure as well. The story begins with Lincoln already having formed his opposition to slavery. Without the history of his relationship to Douglass, we have no idea how this president is willing to risk so much to pass the 13th Amendment. There is no inciting incident, no motivating factor: We are left with just a determined man. And the story suffers for it."

 

"Every move a picture,..."

"The first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States"

Hmmm.

"In the final speech of his life, Lincoln endorsed the idea of black voting rights. There can be little doubt that the re-elected president would have worked with the Republican super-majorities that would dominate the next Congress to create a Reconstruction that would give the newly-freed slaves a decent chance at full citizenship. But John Wilkes Booth had destroyed that incipient future. Instead, the new Republican Congress would be forced to work with an obstructive white supremacist Democrat in the White House, Andrew Johnson. And, as events turned out, the civil rights revolution would have to wait another hundred years."

Is the real story sinking in yet?

A Few Bad Breaks (Breaking Bad) Under Insane Beliefs

   "John Beard, Thomas Wilson, Alexander Scott, and Edward Thompson (the names they were known by in Pennsylvania) escaped enslavement of the Gorsuch family of Maryland and took up residence in Lancaster County.  Under provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave law,…

….Edward Gorsuch, a wealthy slaveholder, led a party of slave catchers into Lancaster County.  Hearing that they were on the farm of William Parker, a free African American, they, with the help of US Marshals, attempted to forcefully enact the arrest warrants. When Gorsuch and his men arrived, Eliza, Parker’s wife, blew a horn which summoned sympathetic neighbors.  Armed neighbors including former slaves as well as free black and white abolitionists converged on the Parker farm and confronted the Gorsuch party.  Fighting broke out and the elder Gorsuch was killed and his son wounded.  The US Marshals and the slave catchers retreated.

Later the Marshals returned with three detachments of US Marines.  By that point, William Parker and his wife Eliza were already en route to Canada, helped along the way by Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists.  Thirty-eight other men, however, were arrested including four white Quakers.  They were all charged with treason."

Use Your Noodles

“150 years after Frederick Douglas' mane, black people are still getting in trouble with whites over our hair. That's the limits of our  freedom.”

- The Crack Emcee, Monday, November 25, 2013

“Christian school to bullied African-American girl: Straighten your natural hair or get out”

- The Raw Story, Tuesday, November 26, 2013

 

40 Acres And A Mule Could've Solved Everything Cheap

Gearing up for it:

"Of course we’re doing better than chattel slavery. Of course we’re doing better than legal segregation. But what material benefit do we get from the comparison?"

150 years after Frederick Douglas' mane, black people are still getting in trouble with whites over our hair. That's the limits of our  freedom. The wealth created by the labor of millions for centuries, under torture, has been declared,...disappeared, putting America on pretty shaky psychological footing - not to mention, grinding it's dishonesty into the soil. A dishonesty the exploited already knew quite well and, so, expected.

"The help would often have a private chuckle about what we had heard, and how obvious it was that those speaking must have thought what they were saying went over our heads. We had schoolteachers working as maids,..."

Ahem. "We had"? Who was "had"? We're trending!

"Wisconsin Followed Trend As U.S. Sent Higher Rate of Black Men to Prison"

Go on, Y'all, do your thing - it's cool. I've already been made aware of how this works:

It's their word over centuries of evidence.

My life Vs. their beliefs.

Whatever they may be.

It's simply never been different, and a safe bet it would always be so,...

 

A Serious Problem: Blacks Think Of The Wrong Things

“Think of how Lincoln left Frederick Douglass out of the story of abolition and The Help was Emma Stone making her first black friend.

This is one of Hollywood’s most annoying habits that pervades in the absence of analysis.”

OMG (It Makes Logical Sense After All)

“On a February day in 1926 Washington, DC, Carter Woodson, one of the first historians to focus on people of African descent in the United States, announced the inaugural 'Negro History Week.' Woodson chose that first wintery week because it marked both Abraham Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’s birthdays,...”