Archive for the “race” Category
Not sure if this is going to be a series or not, but sometimes I wonder why — when someone says something with so much obviously wrong with it — no one seems to ask the obvious question. For example, Bill O’Reilly:
On Saturday, former Vice President Al Gore made a surprise appearance at the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. In his speech, Gore praised the gathering of progressives, saying that they are part of an effort to “reclaim the integrity of American democracy.”
While the attendees of Netroots Nation received Gore with enthusiasm, his appearance has caused Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to declare that Gore has “gone off the deep end.”
On his radio show today, O’Reilly claimed that Gore was now associating himself with the most “hateful group in the country.” “And I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here,” said O’Reilly.” He then claimed that attending Netroots Nation was “the same as if he stepped into the Klan gathering.”
I haven’t seen anyone asking the obvious question: How exactly does Bill O’Reilly know what a Klan gathering looks like, let alone what it’s like to step into one?
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Anyone who thinks the injustices of the past remain in the past is living in a “post-racial” fool’s paradise. There are black folks in this country who are just now getting justice for decades of discrimination. Like the black neighborhood in Ohio that was denied public water for decades, for no other reason than racial discrimination.
Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio were awarded nearly $11 million Thursday by a federal jury that found local authorities denied them public water service for decades out of racial discrimination.
Each of the 67 plaintiffs was awarded $15,000 to $300,000, depending on how long they had lived in the Coal Run neighborhood, about 5 miles east of Zanesville in Muskingum County in east-central Ohio.
The money covers both monetary losses and the residents’ pain and suffering between 1956, when water lines were first laid in the area, and 2003, when Coal Run got public water.
The lawsuit was filed in 2003 after the Ohio Civil Rights Commission concluded the residents were victims of discrimination. The city, county and East Muskingum Water Authority all denied it and noted that many residents in the lightly populated county don’t have public water.
Coal Run residents either paid to have wells dug, hauled water for cisterns or collected rain water so they could drink, cook and bathe.
From 1956 to 2003? You know, then, that means that several people, over long periods of time — well after the age of Jim Crow had officially passed — knew this was going on, and were either alright with it or didn’t see fit to put a stop to it.
From 1956 to 2003.
[Pic via -ReRod- @ Flickr.]
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Well, that didn’t take long. Just this morning I asked:
I’m just wondering if it’s too far-fetched to suggest that we’re probably not too far from the day when someone — a gay couple who gets married, or the person who officiates — does get arrested and locked up. What happens then?
I guess I have my answer.
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I really should learn to let stuff like this go, but…
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Tags: patriotism
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I did a double-take when I read this on CNN. It’s been a while since I read Fire in a Canebreak, an account of the last mass lynching in the United States, which took place in my home state in 1946. Apparently, there’s new evidence in the case.
State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.
In a written statement, the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they collected several items on a property in rural Walton County, Georgia, that were taken in for further investigation.
On July 25, 1946, two black sharecropper couples were shot hundreds of times and the unborn baby of one of the women cut out with a knife at the Moore’s Ford Bridge. One of the men had been accused of stabbing a white man 11 days earlier and was bailed out of jail by a former Ku Klux Klan member and known bootlegger who drove him, his wife, her brother and his wife to the bridge.
The FBI statement said investigators were following up on information recently received in the case, one of several the agency has revived in an effort to close decades-old cases from the civil rights era and before.
“The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.
Of course, there are people who’d rather they did ignore it.
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With my morning pretty much sewn up with work and meetings (and since I’m no longer taking my laptop to meetings) at work, it’s hard to say whether I’ll get around to writing or posting much at all today. I’ve got something almost written, and a couple of things I’ve been wanting to write for weeks now. But they will have to come after everything else.
In the meantime, I might as well do here what I spend most of my time doing anyway: promoting the writing of others who have time to write, whereas I don’t. Granted, it’s not so much writing, on my part, as just copying-and-pasting, but it fills this space. And if you came here looking for something to read, the least I can do is help you find it.
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Via Ex-Gay Watch. This doesn’t surprise me at all.
Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) sent out a mailing today titled “NAACP Rocks,” referencing a 2006 letter of appreciation from the organization to PFOX. According to the attached copy, PFOX held an exhibit at the NAACP annual convention that year. It is not yet known if they participated in 2007 or if they will be there this year, but the email suggests they plan on participating in 2009.
The PFOX exhibit displayed useful information on unwanted same-sex attractions and tolerance for the ex-gay community. We distributed many brochures, flyers, stickers, and buttons. The attendees were enthusiastic about our booth and our ex-gay volunteers staffing the booth were well received. Many people remarked at how glad they were to see us and took extra handouts to distribute at their church back home. Gay groups like the Human Rights Campaign have exhibited at the NAACP for many years, but PFOX was the first and only ex-gay booth there.
We would like to exhibit there next year. Please make a love offering at http://www.pfox.org/donate.htm or send a gift to the address below so we can pay the exhibit booth fee.
Thanks and see you at the NAACP convention next year!
Here are examples of the brochures PFOX might have circulated.
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Image details: Obama Holds Final Primary Night Event In St. Paul served by picapp.com
I can only think of one moment in my memory that compares to this. It was when I stood in front of my television and watched the Berlin wall come down, live on CNN. I’m not yet sure that another wall has come down now. In fact, I’m more certain that significant portions of it still stand, and some may have been reinforced.
But there’s an opening now. It was there before, but it’s much, much wider now. Through it, we can just see the other side, and even have more hope of reaching it.
I only wish my father had lived to see this moment. After all he saw and experienced in his lifetime, I’m sure it would have done his heart some good. If I actually get to go to the convention and cover it, now that I’m credentialed along with the rest of the bloggers at Pam’s House Blend, I’m sure I’ll be thinking about him. And maybe again at inauguration. Maybe I will have the chance to take Parker to downtown D.C., to the inauguration, to witness the moment. He may not grasp the significance then, but he will when he remembers. And he will remember. I know I will.
But tonight, when I get home, I’ll take down from the shelf a project Parker and I have been working on for a while now. It started around the time that my son finally started to notice race, and perhaps he even perceived more about the differences made between people based on race than he had words to express. Wanting to pass on to him an idea of his heritage, and what people who look like him have and can accomplish, I decided we would start a photo album.
First, we put in family pictures, and I explained to him who each person in each picture was. Then we moved on to African Americans who are famous for their accomplishments. I tried to pick people whose accomplishments matched his interests — a black race car driver, because at the time Parker was into race cars; a black astronaut, because for a minute he wanted to be an astronaut; a black composer whose songs are among those I sing to him at night, when it’s my turn to put him to bed. We paste the pictures into the book, and then a short paragraph about that person, which I would read to him.
It’s our little history book, I guess. And tonight we’ll put Barak Obama’s picture in that book. For both of us, it will be an example of what he can accomplish. I will look my son in the eye and say to him what my parents said to me: “You can do anything, and be anything you want if you work hard at it. You could even be the president.” The difference is that when my parents said it to me, it was a dream — perhaps a belief in what the future and their country could be.
Tonight, when I say those words to my son, it will still be a dream just this side of reality; but a dream within reach, where it has never really been before.
And, after a long period of neutrality during he primaries, I guess it’s finally time to finally declare myself. From this point on I’m an Obama supporter.
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Ever since I wrote a post about adoption and African American children back in 2004, I get occasional emails from people considering adoption — considering cross-racial adoption, especially — asking for information and advice. I’m not an expert, by any stretch of the imagination, but I try to answer them. The interesting thing is that I still get those emails even though I haven’t posted much on the subject since then.
But that post came to mind recently, when I read a New York Times article about race and adoption.
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It took me an entire weekend to absorb Hillary Clinton’s most recent bit of “dog whistling.” Not because I didn’t understand it, but because I couldn’t quite believe it. That is, I couldn’t believe how unbelievably stupid a move it was for any Democrat.
Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
Clinton’s blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.
I have just a couple of things to say to the Clinton campaign.
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This weekend, we attended a local conference for LGBT parents and families, and I spoke on a panel about interracial couples and intercultural families. At some point, I found myself speaking less as a gay dad and more as a black man raising two black sons, and wondering aloud just how I would prepare them for the reality of what they will likely face as black men, and how I will prepare them for that without catalyzing what I know is an inevitable loss of innocence; the same innocence I love to see in them, and so want to protect as a parent.
But I know that I will be doing them a disservice as their father if I don’t prepare them for the reality I’ve experience myself, and that they will both have to face in their own time. It’s no surprise that in the middle of the panel discussion, I remembered an exchange I had with my own father.
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I’ve been called a lot of things, believe me. But “too black” has never been one of them, by any stretch of the imagination. So, I was initially amused when I read that The Bilerico Project — where I’m a regular contributor — has been accused of being “too black” and “too transgender.”
Monica Roberts has an interesting post on Transgriot about white flight that directly mentions TBP and some of the things people have been saying about us.
I’m also seeing and hearing the same whispers on other GLBT oriented lists that I peruse that Bilerico is ‘too Black’ or ‘too transgender’. Is that your code word or whatever the frack excuse you’re using for not only not wanting to read the posts of people that don’t look like you, but don’t want to engage in the frank discussions we have on various issues on the Project?
If that’s your opinion, you’re entitled to it. But basing those comments on a small portion of the generated comment of the Project being authored by African-American GLBT people is bigoted and asinine.
That just begs today’s open thread question… What kind of blog do you think Bilerico Project is? When you think of us, what’s the first word that pops in your head? Poll after the jump so you can vote on whether we are too [insert group here].
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