Why I Hate Dave Logan & I've Only Just Read His Name

"So many bridges have been burned all at once. It's an awful situation, but if it happened to any one of us, the outcome would be the same."

 - Dave Logan, of the USC Marshall School of Business, on Sony's Amy Pascal possibly losing her job over racist emails

1961 was the year I was born in South Central, Los Angeles. I met my father and mother, as strangers, when I was 13 and 40, respectively, having only intermittent contact with them after that, to which I blame respectability politics. I can’t remember how many foster homes (some nice, some not) I was “raised” in. I took hellish beatings in them all.

Except for visits to a foster home by the “insurance man,” who my Great Migration “parents” of the time treated like a God, my first interactions with whites came about because it was discovered I was “smart.” By testing well in the 9th grade, I had won the honor, on my first day, of being seated between two white troublemakers the teacher wanted separated. Once I was introduced to the class, and between them, their exchange went like this:

“Hey, Marty, you like niggers?”

“Yeah, I think everyone should own one.”

I immediately got a bad reputation for using my desk - the kind with the chair attached - to bash both of their heads in. I didn’t care. I cared even less when we were punished “equally,” with them being sent home while I was made to wait in detention, until the day was over, and the school bus I caught at 6:30 AM returned we blacks to neighborhoods defined by gun fire.

The first time I was invited to a white person’s house, unexpectedly, my friend’s mother took one look at me, clapped her hands together and exclaimed, “Excellent: we’re having fried chicken for dinner!” My friend, mortified, hustled me to his bedroom, where I sat alone, surrounded by posters of his white heroes, as the two of them apparently discussed proper comportment.

  “There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.”

 - President Barack Obama, on what awaits the dark and successful

That friend, and two of his white friends I later met, went on to be cops. When we were kids, we’d sit in a soda shop (they bought mine) and, to my disgust, the three soon-to-be “officers” would make fun of the Mexicans working in the kitchen. They said they were only playing. Meanwhile, I couldn’t go to the same parties they did, couldn’t get the jobs they did, easily, and wandered the streets looking for shelter. One of the whites, the most sociopathic of the three - he beat up his girlfriend, and kept knives and “Japanese Throwing Stars” for the walls he occasionally punched holes into, when emphasizing a point - volunteered to work South Central, Los Angeles upon graduation. I think about him a lot when I consider, of my 20 black running buddies there, 16 are already dead. In 1979 I was encouraged by white parents to join the military as an out.

  “We, as a nation, have failed. It’s as simple as that. We have failed.”

 - Attorney General Eric Holder, on police abuses

I didn’t join the Navy to escape the ghetto, really, but because they had a drafting program, and I was artistically inclined. They cancelled the program as soon as I graduated the racially-fraught ordeal of boot camp, and when they asked me what I wanted to do then, I told them to send me back to South Central. “Not going to happen,” I was told, “you signed the paper - we own you.” I told them to put me on the next ship leaving the States.

Out to sea, I served under a redneck who also liked to throw knives, and - since he signed my progress reports - made it one of my jobs to return them. He, and another white guy who never rose above E-1, knew more about the ship than the Captain. Together, they smuggled drugs onboard at every port, eventually resulting in an investigation into why so many sailors were jumping over-board (myself included) and hoping it wasn’t merely that we were one of the first crews forced to endure an extended deployment of 9 months at sea, during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

I spent the last 8 months of my enlistment in the brig, having developed the nasty habit of clocking officers, in an unsuccessful bid to cancel my enlistment. I spent most of that time in solitary confinement, next to an extremely violent black guy named “Green,” who required six guards to escort him to the showers. I admired him, and he admired my singing voice, requesting I serenade him to sleep each night with songs I made up on the spot. It was a talent I hardly knew I had.

  "I was socialized well into adulthood. I was in the Navy nine years. I was formed before I started to do this. So, I think people that grow up their whole lives and were practicing their whole lives in the basement are different. Also, I was a severe stutterer until I was nearly 30,…I wasn't socialized to where that was how I validated myself.”

 - Bill Withers, interviewed in Rolling Stone, after his nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

 I was released on June 6th, 1983 and not long afterwards, found myself back as one of the few black guys in San Francisco’s fabled "Mabuhay Gardens,” attending a Flipper show. Their drummer, noticing my alienation, graciously bought me a beer and, later, encouraged me to keep writing songs. I did, and - while never getting rich - would eventually go on to be in a few of San Francisco’s most iconic bands.

When I finally went solo in the early 90s, wholly rejecting respectability politics as “The Crack Emcee,” my work was first positively reviewed by the LA Weekly. Later, the writer said he’d gotten some push-back for covering me favorably, and was told if he ever did again, he’d be restricted from new releases by the record company. He apologized if he’d hurt my prospects, but, as a black man, he was also afraid for his own:

Last I’d heard, that writer - a "smart" and talented guy - was sleeping in his car.

  ”White Americans of modest means are more likely to have inherited something, in the form of housing wealth or useful professional connections, than the descendants of slaves,…

…If everyone’s wages were growing, and if everyone felt secure enough in their jobs to quit every now and again in search of better opportunities elsewhere, I doubt that we’d be talking quite so much about white privilege,…”

BTW, it was Sony that was so turned off by the idea of helping me, or anyone who understood the implications of my work.

But, as I sit here in a homeless shelter, remembering and writing this - I finally am happy to say - that feeling is now so totally mutual,….
 

Eric Garner's Death: As America Finally Unclinches Her Hands (She Laughed In The Faces Of Her Biggest Fans)

Well. This rich. People even seem a little,...shocked. Like all this talk of "thugs" and death-for-petty-crime wasn't, both, inhumane and actually leading somewhere.

Another cop walked. In a filmed event, just like the president's new initiative is supposed to prevent. Weak:

"That is what America does. It is not broken. That is exactly what is wrong with it.”

Yep. And if you say it often enough, and loud enough, people will hate you for it. Ridicule you. Feel superior. You, black man, are "playing the victim." They can take it. Well they can have it: 

Two black guys are dead and the two white guys walked. 

In America.

How does it feel?

Joe Scarborough Takes A Stand: "What Am I Missing?"

The White-Wing media is having a blast watching Joe Scarborough getting flustered over the Ram's salute to Ferguson, since Joe swallowed the police's leaked-bait that Michael Brown stole some cigars, and thus deserved to die. Scarborough ignorantly steamrolls right over respectability politics (because there's no one on his panel who understands it) before acknowledging a lot of differences (but not the urgency) in how blacks and whites live - and are living - even as Joe's (oh so comfortably) speaking. He finally then passes the mic, only to discover only one person in the studio ("an old white guy") agrees with him. It looks like few outside agree as well.

But that's our White-Wing media:

There's no telling what they'll find inspiring,...

Ann Althouse: Race-Baiting For Her Racist Readership (As Easily As Don Lemon Is Making CNN's Lemonade)

She redefines "smug" AND America's history of racial justice

Getting race wrong (has she ever gotten it right?) is, now, such a daily operation for Ann Althouse, I can fully see what worth the University of Madison finds in her (employing a law professor who can't grasp what few options blacks have is "win-win") when - decades after MLK - we still live in a nation with unjust laws:

“This message — incarceration as racial oppression — has been cultivated by some who are dedicated to issues of racial justice. Those who are reacting to Ferguson by engaging in criminal violence are stepping on that message.”

He redefines "smug" AND America's history of racial justice, too

But then, it's her example that also makes it possible for me to see what worth CNN finds in employing Donald Dilworth Lemon (a reporter who also can't grasp what few options blacks have) when - decades after MLK - we still live in a nation with unjust laws:

To accuse Jackson of continuing MLK's "race hustle" - without mentioning whites illegally jailed and harassed MLK - works just as Ann's ignorant posts do

"Reverend, part of your legacy is that you marched with Dr. King peacefully, non-violent protests," he said. "What has changed in our culture and our society that people result -- resort to things that played out here last night in Ferguson?"

"You do know that when Dr. King was alive we had the Watts riots and the Newark riots and the Detroit riots and Chicago," Jackson responded, adding that "police action triggered those riots."

"Blacks are ten times more likely to be arrested. That matters.”

Whites said blacks should emulate "America's Dad" - blacks smelt a rat and said "no"

You see - considering America IS a racist place with unjust laws - the worth of these two's "respectable" racial cluelessness is obvious:

"Waiting for whites to grow up" is a better name for this place than the United States

They (and Cosby) can buy time for whites - to "make progress" - which means, of course, black lives can further rot,...until whites learn to process more complex ideas about blacks than currently possible.

Whites will keep saying their racism ended, whenever they say it did, in the meantime

Oh well:

At least we blacks can be "happy" because - between these two multi-racial mental giants - we're now part of our nation's racist's education.

Moral - and otherwise,...

Giuliani Is Proving Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Invaluable

Almost too predictable for mention - but it was

This weekend, when Chuck Todd asked former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani about the preponderance of white police officers patrolling black neighborhoods nationally, what did Giuliani do? He did exactly as Ta-Nehisi Coates said he would,...and changed the subject. Here's Coates in his piece, "Black People Are Not Ignoring 'Black on Black' Crime":

“The pattern is the transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people. Don Imus profanely insults a group of black women. But the real problem is gangsta rap. Trayvon Martin is killed. This becomes a conversation about how black men are bad fathers,...”

And here, sure enough, is a demonstration of that: Giulliani prefers saying anything - literally anything - to staying on-point, because: 

“The politics of respectability are, at their root, the politics of changing the subject—the last resort for those who can not bear the agony of looking their country in the eye.”

Because, if Giulliani was looking his country "in the eye," he'd surely see he's led a force full of resentful, and unrepentant, white supremacists who are incapable of dealing with the problems white supremacy has created for us all:



But he can't say that - he can't face it - so we get this, instead,...

Whites Can't Even Count (1919 Came Before "The 60s")

Wear the "wrong" pants and blacks deserve whatever whites do

Racist white's oppressive focus on the blacks they've made poor - and not white's own racist behavior - began long before LBJ:

During the Reconstruction era some Black Americans believed that the solution to social uplift was not in social reform but in individual moral behavior. Behind the idea was the concept that discrimination and systematic oppression took place because Whites did not respect Blacks. However, the theory went that if Blacks changed their behavior, fashion, and even music, Whites would begin to respect them and therefore treat them as deserving of dignity. 

Politics of respectability was,...an ideology, targeted towards poor Blacks, urging them to get on board with behavior that Whites deemed respectable, as a necessary and sufficient condition of racial uplift,…The Chicago Defender posted weekly reminders targeting poor Black Chicago migrants, admonishing them against vulgar language and ragged clothes. Avoiding these things, the newspaper argues in a May 17, 1919 issue, "will disarm those who are endeavoring to discredit the race." 

Instead of moral excellence being a possibility for us all, politics of respectability places the burden of virtue on the oppressed and lets the oppressor off the hook. Instead of challenging the oppressor to be fair, loving, or unconditionally compassionate, they demand that the oppressed "pull up their pants," "don't wear hoodies," "remain chaste," and "don't be lazy" -- while simultaneously excusing the unethical acts of the oppressor towards them.

We must still be in the Reconstruction Era

Whites in blackface just like always - but in 2014

Blacks seem to change much easier than whites - why is that?

When racist whites focus, on what racist whites do, then racist whites might become respectable themselves,...

This is how a white person looks "thinking about race"

ADDED:

History has shown that 'acting better' does not bring about being 'treated better.' We must remember that four girls were in Sunday school when their Birmingham church was bombed. Amadou Diallo did not commit any crime, obeyed the police, but yet was shot 41 times by the police. We can count numerous times in which women were raped not because they wore short skirts or were intoxicated but simply because they were women. This is why in "A Case For Reparations", Ta-Nehisi Coates claims: 

The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism [or any hatred for that matter] is disrespect. 

Moreover, respectability politics is not a philosophy where we value morality for morality sake but it is used as a means to achieve respect from Whites and men: a goal that may never be achieved.

Why Bill Cosby's "Respectability Politics" Are Rejected By Blacks Can Be Explained Using One Historic Photo

Well-dressed, well-behaved, going to school, hated