Tag Archives: Racism

Hate crimes that seem to sneak in under the radar

Education, Memoirs, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

We all know there are some hateful people out there. We see the evidence in the news each and every day. What often escapes us is the fact that a lot of this stuff is happening around us, or in places we’d least expect it.

Take Thunder Bay, Ontario for an example.

You may wonder why I’m discussing Thunder Bay, as I suppose quite a few of you are probably wondering where is Thunder Bay, as in you probably have either never heard of it, or you just never gave it much thought. For me, however, when I saw a recent article, all sorts of memories came to mind. My family (on my mother’s side) is from Thunder Bay.

Every other summer or so when I was a kid, what little there was of my family used to drive from California to Thunder Bay, Ontario. Each time we took the trip, my mom would point out that it used to be called Port Arthur, and that she was born there after her father moved to Canada from Poland after the war. And then during one summer, she and two of her friends took a road trip across the United States and settled in different locations (her best friend in St. Cloud, Minnesota, her other friend in Florida, and she in Santa Monica, California…where I was born).

When we used to take this trip, one of the things that used to fascinate me was the local lore, and specifically the tale of “the Sleeping Giant”, which was the story of a giant Native American who fell asleep on a mountain until one day he would be woken up to aid his people again. It’s a natural rock formation that looks like a sleeping giant, and I remember being able to see it from most areas of Thunder Bay.

Anyway, so years later, I’m reading an article and discover that Thunder Bay is back in the headlines. Except, this time, it’s because some racist moron threw a trailer hitch at a Native American woman walking down the street. What the article doesn’t tell you is that the woman eventually succumbed to her wounds and died. The local Native Americans refer to the crime as a “hate crime” but in all that I’ve read, law enforcement is treating it as a general crime that was originally being treated as an aggravated assault, and now that she died, are “considering” changing the charges. There’s a certain amount of dismissing of the crime in the rhetoric, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s because it was “one of them” that died, rather than “one of us” as so often happens in these types of circumstances.

Which brings me to ask the question: What must be going through someone’s mind that thinks this type of behavior in the first place was either acceptable, or that it was something that might be fun to do? I remember when I was young, and I heard that some of the older kids were going to be “heading into town to do some gay bashing”, and never gave much thought (back then, at least) to what that probably meant. Those young people back then thought that was a completely acceptable thing to do, just as much as this guy driving around in the passenger seat of his car thought it was a pretty appropriate thing to do to just throw a trailer hitch out of a car window and laugh when he said “got one!”.

What no one really talks about is that our communities brought these people up to feel that this sort of thing was okay. We defend ourselves by saying that we would never do such a thing, but then we’re shocked when someone who lives next door to us is charged with doing just that.

At what point are the rest of us also responsible? I ask because I really don’t know the answer to that, and I suspect that we’ll never find out because it’s never being discussed, and I doubt it ever will.

 

 

Most heterosexuals will never encounter the T in LGBT and that’s really the problem

Memoirs, Relationships, Writing, , , , , , ,

When I was very young, I remember my grandfather once telling me that the way to understand people I don’t understand is to actually interact with them. At that age, I remember him having me introduce myself to random strangers at the mall in Santa Monica, California. It didn’t really matter to him who the person was; he wanted me to approach and meet every person I could.

Now, today, that probably wouldn’t be the greatest approach when dealing with a kid because of how our society has changed to where people practically fear any stranger, but back in that day, it worked. And I learned a lot from it.

That approach carried me through most of my life, and I’m glad for it, but at the same time I understand that not everyone had that kind of upbringing. I was lucky to grow up in a diverse community where there were people from all walks of life. I wasn’t lucky to be born into poverty, but part of me thinks that there were some advantages to that situation, and one of those was the ability to exist with numerous groups of people who gravitated towards the lower end of the economic ladder. Having lived in both sides of the economic spectrum, I would like to think I’ve picked up some of the positive qualities of both. I probably also picked up some of the negative ones, too, but what is a life that doesn’t involve some bit of reflective wondering in hopes of living life to its fullest?

Growing up poor, I lived with those who were always on the edge of despair, if not deeply in the middle of it. Serving in the Army, I was exposed to all sorts of different races and ethnicities, not as separates but as comrades and allies. After the service, I traveled the country, living in numerous communities for months at a time and then moving on to find another. The people I met, and the stories they had to tell and share, filled my memories for the wonder that each and every one of them revealed. After my wanderings, I ended up back in San Francisco (kind of where I ran out of money and had to actually find a “real” job), and I was exposed to all sorts of new experiences.

I should probably mention one of the important aspects of my character, and that’s that people tend to share a lot of information about themselves to me. Partly because I’m receptive, partly because I’m easy to talk to, and mostly because I care about what people have to share with me. A friend once told me that I should have been a counselor or a psychiatrist because of how good I was with people, but I never went that direction because I always felt I was getting something great out of every encounter and taking money for it would have felt wrong.

So at some point I went back to school to get another degree. And this time around, it was different. Before, I went to West Point where my approach was a career in the Army. This time, I wanted to learn about things I missed the first time around. I didn’t even care what it was I was studying. I just wanted to know more abut things I didn’t know.

What kind of things did I learn? Well, aside from rote memorization of school material, I started to learn a lot more about the people who existed around me. I discovered there were people from all sorts of different walks of life. I befriended guys who were paying their way through school by waiting tables but intended to be investment bankers when they graduated, women who wanted to help people by becoming social workers yet funded their education by tying up men and spanking them in dark, air-conditioned lofts above laundromats, nervous English-Second-Language students who signed up for debate because they knew they were destined to be criminal attorneys, and so many others who were all individuals, each with his or her wonderful, personal story that was both unique and important.

One of those unique individuals I came across was someone I’ll refer to as Bobbi who was the person who lived next door to me in a really run-down, flea-infested flat I was living in when I first went back to school. Bobbi was one of those shy types of people who avoided others but always smiled when you said hi, even if the response was nothing more than somewhat of a grunt or nod of the head in recognition. What I found most interesting about Bobbi was that I could never tell what gender Bobbi was. On the surface, Bobbi appeared to be a man that was slowly turning into a female. The hair was blond and frilly, kind of later Farah Fawcett-like, but the mannerisms were quite often both male and female, almost as if they were still fighting their way towards the surface. I remember the apartment clerk once remarked: “She’s in that transition stage where she’s still trying to determine which way she’s going to go.” Future conversations with this clerk indicated that he thought the confusion wasn’t necessarily Bobbi’s but a struggle with how Bobbi wanted to be perceived by those around her (months later, Bobbi said she preferred the pronoun “she” and I’ve never given it another thought).

A few years later, I was working for a church that had a transgender member (for identification, I’ll call her Chris) who was having a very difficult time with those around her. She was very much in the same stage that Bobbi had been, but the struggle was much deeper as this person was scared to make changes because of how she perceived others might not accept her in that capacity. Unlike Bobbi, she quite often returned to her male “self” in the circles of others because of how she felt they might think about her. Years after I parted ways with that organization, I heard from a member of that group that someone had attacked Chris as she was walking home from the church, and she was seriously beaten, to the point that she has never actually recovered.

I’ve known a few more over the years, but to be honest, I don’t think of them as transgendered people I’ve known, but as people I’ve known that just so happened to be transgendered. And I think that’s where the problem stems for so many others who see people who are different as some kind of affront or challenge to them for reasons that make little sense when you spend any time thinking about it.

This is probably why I think being a writer is important. If I was a filmmaker, I think I would want to touch on these subjects as well because what I’ve started to learn is that not a whole lot of people have the life experiences that I’ve had. Instead, they’ve had more sheltered lives that create all sorts of barriers to thinking differently than anything they’ve personally experienced. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are things I’m still struggling with, simply because I’m not perfect, nor have I had every type of experience one can have to tackle so many of these issues. But I would like to think that having some of the experiences I’ve had, at least I’m willing to explore new ideas and opportunities.

And that’s what I fear for those close-minded individuals out there who see the world through a closed prism. And it’s probably why a common individual can have such hateful thoughts and still think he or she is a good person. I wish there was a way to expose everyone to a world of experiences so that they could reach that understanding that hating a person for being different is equal to hating one’s self for not being open enough to want to learn more about one’s fellow people. Because once you live with the people you might hate, chances are pretty good you’re going to be forever changed by the experience.

My Run-In With the Klan in the Mid1980s

Politics, Relationships, , , , , , , ,
The protest is getting out of hand
The protest is getting out of hand (image from in game screen shot of City of Heroes)

It was shortly after West Point, and I was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. One weekend I had time off, so a few soldiers and I decided we were going to take a trip to Nashville for a concert that was taking place there. This was in the middle of the 1980s during a period of time when the United States was starting to regain some of its image around the world, as much of the 1970s was spent recovering from the disastrous Vietnam War era. Reagan was president, the Soviet Union still had years until it collapsed, Star Wars had finished its original trilogy, the Cosby Show taught us values from someone who still had a lot of respect throughout the country, and there was a sense that things in the future were going to be improving because so many technologies appeared to be in our headlights, like microwaves, cell phones, the Internet and some device called a Rubik’s Cube.

So we hopped into my Mercury Capri, all five of us, and made our trip south. In case you’ve never taken the trip by car before, it’s a really nice drive through beautiful country.

Anyway, somewhere around the border of Kentucky and Tennessee (to be honest, I don’t remember which side of the border when this happened), we came to a huge intersection that was kind of bogged down with traffic. It felt kind of out of the ordinary because traffic had been moving so smoothly only moments before. And then I discovered why.

On all four corners of the intersection were people dressed in white robes handing out pamphlets to people in their cars. For some reason, this spectacle seemed to slow traffic down to a standstill. It took me a couple of moments to realize what was happening, but traffic was moving slowly because each driver was having somewhat of an impassioned conversation with whatever person in robes showed up alongside that driver’s car. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear any of their conversations, but part of me to this day hopes that the words exchanged were not friendly, but I honestly don’t know any of those details.

This was the Ku Klux Klan handing out their pamphlets to the people who were driving through their county.

Now, I’d never seen one of those people before in real life. Sure, I’d heard all of the stories about them, watched films of some of their notorious deeds in the past and knew that since the early days of this country they represented some of the most vile sentiments people could possibly have. But seeing them in person, I had no clue what their intentions might be, or even how much of the past history the group made was part of what they might be doing on that particular day.

Then I reached the position where they were located. They were blocking traffic, one person standing in front of a car to make sure you had to stop while another came over to the window to speak and offer their pamphlets. I was kind of oblivious to what was really going on, but the person who came to my window knocked on it and gestured for me to roll down the window. Somewhat curious, I did.

Okay, two things are important to this story. First, the person who knocked on my window was a female Klan member. Second, well, I should have probably mentioned a little bit more about the group of people in my car.

There were five soldiers in my car, tightly packed into it. The guy in the middle back seat was white, and so was I. The guy sitting next to me and the two men seated near the doors in the backseat were all African-Americans. Every person in the car was a seasoned veteran and currently serving in the Army.

So I rolled down my window, and I was not known for holding back on anything I had to say, so the first thing out of my mouth was: “So, they’re letting women into the Klan now?”

The woman stared at me for a second and responded with: “Women have been in the Klan for years.”

On instinct, I said: “Wow, how progressive of them. I guess they let anyone into it these days.”

To that, the guy seated next to me crouched over to the window and said. “That’s so cool. How long until I get to join?”

And I think that’s the moment that she realized the car was packed with a mixture of people she was probably not all that comfortable with seeing. The two guys in the backseat yelled out: “Can I have a pamphlet?” and “What time are your meetings, cause most of my mornings and afternoons are kind of busy these days with Army shit?”

The woman turned to her partner who was blocking my car and pointed to the car, I guess trying to figure out what she should do. I helped them make a quicker decision instead.

I said: “If he doesn’t move, I’m running his ass over.”

The guy in front of my car motioned for one of other partners, kind of trying to motion him over to the car or at least to assist him in blocking the car. Now, I don’t know what they were intending to do, but let’s put things into perspective. We were all trained killers and even without guns could do some serious damage to someone if we needed to, so if they would have stopped us and forced us out of the car, even if they were armed, the chances are there would have been three fewer Klan members alive that day.

I also noticed that one of the guys in the backseat, a part time power lifter who people used to call “The Tank” (which is someone ironic because he was an armored division officer) had his hand on the door handle and was about to step out and start an encounter that wouldn’t end well for anyone. In my rear view mirror, I could see the whole group was already transitioning into the “fight” of fight and flight mode.

Instead, I gunned the engine and just lurched forward. The woman at my window jumped back and the guy directly in front of me saw me coming and literally dived to the side of the road. The other guy that was heading towards the car also jumped back, realizing that I was flooring it and had no intentions of remembering my car had a brake pedal.

So we continued driving until I stopped a few miles out so the adrenaline could subside. One of the guys n the back yelled: “Let’s go back and fuck them up!”

But we didn’t. We continued on and made it in time for the concert we went to see. A good time was had by all.

That was my one and only encounter with the Klan. But I never forgot it.

Why white privilege is the wrong battle to be waged in seeking equality and justice

Economics, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk lately involving the concept of “white privilege” and how quite often a Caucasian will misunderstand his or her benefits of being white while trying to appear just towards those who do not maintain the same generic status. Some examples are the #alllivesmatter versus #blacklivesmatter, which is often used as an erroneous argument of “I care about everyone, not just a particular race.” And then from there a whole diatribe is usually leveled on the idea that anyone who is born white exists in a world of privilege that others can never reach.

Some of it is correct, but in reality, people with diabolical purposes are using these arguments to create a false dichotomy, something I often equate to a framing issue rather than a normative one. Let me explain.

The argument is that someone born white has certain advantages that are not afforded to someone who was not. Examples include: Cops tend to shoot non-whites more than whites; whites are less likely to be convicted of crimes than are non-whites, a white male with a prison record is more likely to get a job than a non-white person with a prison record, etc. Many of these can be summed up in this comic about white privilege. What people don’t seem to understand when they post these kinds of arguments linking to this type of information is that it doesn’t mean what they think it means.

word means When someone makes that argument about white privilege, it is followed by an insinuation that those are actually benefits, rather than lucky brushes against much worse circumstances. The fact that I’m a white male should not then be met with “well, aren’t you lucky that you don’t get railroaded by the system by cops who might hate you.” It should be met with “cops shouldn’t be railroading anyone anywhere”. It’s like we’re already on top of a slippery slope that is continuing to force us back to unwanted situations rather than we should all be on a flat surface trying to make sure that no one creates the slippery slope in the first place.

This is why #alllivesmatter is not an adequate substitute for #blacklivesmatter. Sure, all lives matter, but all lives are not being targeted. Black lives are. Therefore, a movement to make sure that doesn’t happen became necessary. #Alllivesmatter creates an “issue” that doesn’t actually exist so that if that takes the other’s place, we’re left with the situation we stared with: People doing nothing because it doesn’t affect them.

So, what’s my point? Stop focusing on white privilege because that is not the problem. The problem is the opposite: Minority Disadvantage. THAT is the issue that should be dealt with rather than trying to create a wedge between those being oppressed and those who might actually care that there are people being oppressed. This is why Occupy Wall Street was such a powerful voice that quickly got squelched by those who feared its power. The real oppressors are the ones who actually do have the power, the one percenters who control manufacturing, media and even the police forces. Without turning this into some outdated communist manifesto, the problem is that the people who need to band together aren’t because the people creating the messages for them to follow have done so in a way that only creates an us versus them dynamic but in a way that never actually addresses what needs to be addressed.

So, how do you find answers in a civilization that is so blinded to its actual problems? Well, we could do what my grade school teachers always said: Start at the beginning. How did it happen? If we trace the time back hundreds of years, it’s not hard to figure out that the government we live under was created by rich people who wanted to continue being rich (meaning others would have to be poor). This isn’t the social model people constantly think we’re living under because that social model would actually look at the group of people around us as equal and in need of the same benefits as everyone else. We don’t live in that society. Sure, we pretend to, but when it comes down to it, a person who has little is going to always have little to none, whereas someone with much is probably going to end up with even more. That’s the civilization we live in.

How do you recognize that if you’re currently living within its infrastructure? I can conduct a simple experiment just by walking into a bar and talking to the first woman I see. In the US, the chances are that the conversation will hover on what my job is (and how much I make) before it turns into anything more interesting. I’ve had this same conversation in many other nations, and strangely enough, it was usually me that thought I had to bring up money as apart of what makes me be me. It took years to realize that the further away I moved from centralized capitalism, the less focus there was on income as what someone is worth.

So back to my original question. What steps should we take to lead to a future of equality and justice?

I hate to go all Socratic, but if you want justice what steps are you taking to actually achieve it? Do you hold conversations with people who aren’t like you? Do you comment when someone says things that lead to injustice and inequality? I’ve listened to conversations in mixed demographics where some people have said some awful things about people not present in the conversation. What I find interesting is how many people don’t say a thing, or even worse, escalate the conversation to even worse levels. Speaking up in these circumstances is difficult, and I’ve felt the tug almost every time I have done so. But what bothers me is how often those moments go unremarked, almost as if they’re okay.

The same thing is happening today in our political atmosphere. We have some politicians saying some awful things, and so few people are even casting a light on these moments other than to treat it as a news cycle rather than say: “Hey, by the way, there’s an awful racist running for office. Here’s what he said.” And even in the few circumstances where this has happened, the people listening are responding with the thought process of “yeah, but he’s better than those other guys.” If our canary in the mine is at this level, we’re going to be breathing some pretty toxic fumes sooner rather than later.

So, what’s the answer? Right now, I don’t perceive one because I think we’ve moved so far down this road that we’re not going to turn around. Sure, a nation can adjust, as many have before (I mean, face it, we aren’t ruled by divine kings any more, so eventually we can make huge changes), but I don’t see our current civilization all that anxious to try to make things better for everyone because until someone is scrounging for scraps in the gutter, people aren’t all that focused on change. And when you reach the gutter, people stop listening to you and wait for you to die. So, rational change isn’t to be expected.

Irrational change, however, is a different story. That’s the sort of punctuated equilibrium that no one ever sees coming. Unfortunately, we’re coming closer and closer to having that as our process of change, only because most other methods have fallen on deaf ears or were dismissed by people who are pretty happy with the limited value of the status quo.

But what do I know? If I was truly wise, I’d be a rich entrepreneur and well rewarded in the society in which I live. There’s a joke in there somewhere, if you look hard enough.

The Problem of Dealing With Race By Invoking Historical Ancestors

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Race seems to be a big issue these days. I guess that’s a good thing. It means people are thinking about the concept and discussing it with others. At least that’s my hope. In some cases this is massively necessary because it helps deal with oversights that have been going on way too long. In other cases, not so much. What I see is that in those types of cases racism as a concept is used as a process to silence others or to beat people over the head in an attempt to collapse all disagreements under the blanket of racism, even if the individual artifacts we’re discussing may have had little to do with racism (which is why blanket criticism is used).

But this post isn’t really about that. Like I said, I’m glad people are addressing racism. There’s just way too much of it present in this day and age, even though a lot of closeted racists would really like to put forth the idea that racism is gone (so they can stop being rightly accused of being racists, or at least apologists for the same). What this post is really about is one of those commentaries that shows up in these discussions, and quite often this commentary comes in groups of people who don’t actually deal with racism in any way.

I know that sounds confusing, but let me explain. People who address and call out racism are quite often those who are directly affected by it. Racism directed toward race is more often addressed by African-Americans in U.S. society because let’s be honest: African-Americans are far more the targets of racism here than most other demographics. Sure, any minority race and/or ethnicity is a potential target for racists, so I don’t want to make an argument that assumes otherwise. But overall, African-Americans are going to have a better chance of perceiving racism more than a Caucasian because racists are pretty one-sided when it comes to this dichotomy. Sure, an African-American can be a racist, but part of what makes racism as powerful a weapon as it is is because it also has a mechanism of power to be used against the victim. A group of African-American racists standing around the streets of Wall Street aren’t going to chase a non-African-American away from Wall Street because the background of Wall Street doesn’t support such an attempt to alienate the victim, but a group of Caucasians targeting a non-Caucasian on a street of Wall Street might cause someone from that targeted demographic to think that Wall Street isn’t a safe place to hang around. The point is: Racism involves power, but it also requires power in order to be effective.

As an academic, I find myself around a lot of people who quite often invoke specific arguments whenever it comes to the idea of racism. I’m also a moderator on a very active current events message board, so I see all sorts of commentary that comes from that origin as well. And what I’ve come to observe is something I don’t believe a lot of people realize seems to be happening around them. And specifically, this sort of racism that is happening today is also very localized in its temporal vicinity (the time it inhabits right now). As a result, people today who are frightened of being perceived as race-challenged (or “racists” for lack of a better term) will do everything possible to avoid being cast as villains in this dynamic. As such, it’s not surprising to hear someone say something along the lines of “I’m not a racist because I have a friend who is black.” Okay, that one is kind of obvious because we’ve all heard that one and know how it’s almost become a punchline to a joke no one wants to admit making.

No, part of the problem stems from an argument that orchestrates how a lot of people who are a part of the problem that they don’t even acknowledge exists. We all know the argument, even though we don’t think much about it because we discard it because of its simplistic nature when we should have thought about and realized why it makes things worse rather than explain things away. You know you’ve heard this argument whenever you hear someone say “Well, my ancestors are from Europe, so I wasn’t responsible.” It’s one of those arguments made in hopes of closing off conversation (and hoping the topic changes as well). But think about it. If someone’s ancestors were from South Carolina, does that make that particular individual responsible for racism that happened 150 years ago and several generations ago as well? Probably not. But that’s only if you feel that responsibility ends with theoretical people who may or may not have been personally involved. Are people complaining about stuff that happened in the 1860s? I don’t think they are. We all know that horrible things happened back then, and we all pretty much agree today that if we could change things, we would make sure they didn’t happen again. Or would we?

And that’s where that argument that gets made loses its traction. There are problems happening today, and rather than deal with them today, we have people saying they shouldn’t have to be responsible because they weren’t around 150 years ago. But again, the problems exist today. What are any of us doing to change things here and now? I would argue “not a lot” because if we were all doing something to make things better, my belief is that things would be better.

Instead, we have ghettos, slums, income disparities, fenced off housing, more cops than educators, hostility towards certain populations, massive corruption in places that should be making a difference, and finger-pointing rather than any desire for accountability. An example is the City of Detroit. It practically collapsed due to white flight and inner city corruption. Instead of solutions that work to fix these problems, we end up with right versus left rhetoric, race baiting and people who support corrupt leaders because to not do so means giving ground to racist rhetoric. In other words, NO ONE is seeking to fix the problems, and the few who are seem to basically be drowned out by the people who find more importance in criticism and looking for scapegoats.

So, what’s the solution? Well, let’s stop caring about what the color of someone’s skin is and start looking at how we can make the neighborhoods of people prosperous and worth living in. That means also changing our criminal codes so that “crimes” that don’t hurt people stop being crimes. If “drugs” are seen as a problem, convict people to treatment programs rather than criminal institutions. Some aren’t going to be fixed the first time, but a responsible civilization doesn’t give up after the first time. It keeps trying until it works.

We also need to change our financial circumstances to benefit all. Yeah, a lot of very rich people are going to hate that. But having a few pissed off people and a civilization filled with thriving individuals seems like a good trade off. This A. Rand society of doing well and screwing over everyone else needs to end.

We need to stop going to war because some group of people don’t think like we do. Different thinking people should be interesting, not enemies. The reaction is that we need to do this because there are people out there trying to kill us. They’re trying to kill us because we always go to war against people who don’t think like we do. That tends to lead to diminishing returns. Change the thinking; change the outcomes. It can be pretty simple. Of course, the naysayers will say no because they only know the institution that we are currently in and like the frog in a well who sees only the circle of light in the sky, we’re never going to see constellations in the paths of other wells if we never get out of the well we’re currently stuck in. Just saying.

Or we can keep doing the things we’re doing and hope that somehow things get better. But they won’t. So good luck with that. I’ve given up trying, so I’ll be playing video games while the world crumbles around me. At least I can accomplish something with a high score. They don’t give Nobel Peace prizes for that, but I guess that’s just cause I don’t own an army that kills a lot of people. Yet.

Taking Umbrage With the N-Word

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There’s an interesting article on Salon this morning from Mary Elizabeth Williams on how white people shouldn’t use the N-word under any circumstance.  Ignoring for a moment that most of MEW’s articles tend to be reactionary and designed to cause people to get upset over mundane things that they wouldn’t normally pay much attention to, the points she brings up are interesting, although I’m not sure I completely agree with all of them. I’ll let you read it for yourself and then decide. What I did want to discuss is my own particular perspective in the whole thing, coming from someone who would never use the word, mainly because I find it offensive, and even more important, that it rarely serves a purpose in any conversation I’ve ever had.

But I want to go back in time a bit to a friend of mine I had back in the days of my second visit to the college environment. I had decided to attend a community college (years after the Army AND West Point), cause I was interested in pursuing computer science as a future field. Anyway, my roommate at that time was a really cool guy named (for the sake of here) Bob. Bob was friendly, a good all around guy, and he was dating a woman that he was eventually going to end up marrying. He was also a pretty big guy, and he hung around with a bunch of other big guys, a few of them caucasians and a few of them of all different types of backgrounds, ethnicities and colors. But one thing that used to shock the crap out of me was that Bob used to refer to ALL of his friends as “my Nigga.” And they would refer to him in the same way. And none of them had a single problem with it.

I once asked Bob if that word didn’t bother him, and he looked at me like I was a moron. To him, the word had little contextual meaning as it did to me. It didn’t even have the same meaning to the African-American friends he had, because I couldn’t resist asking them either. They just didn’t grow up in an environment where they felt the typical socio-economic fabric that hangs over so many African-Americans of urban locales. They just smiled when I asked about it and didn’t have a negative thing to say whatseover.

No one thought of Bob as a racist, and not once was race even considered a part of the conversation.

But for me, I never could come around to using that word, even in the mixed company of where it was tossed around on a constant basis. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying it no matter how “welcome” the word was. And part of that is because I grew up in an environment where the word was used in very negative circumstances. The whites I grew up with around in the late 1960s and early 1970s were living through forced busing and the ramifications of the Civil Rights movement, so there was still a long of antagonism existing back then. I was fortunate in being integrated with very diverse populations as a child because I was dirt poor in an urban environment (Santa Monica, California). While many of my caucasian neighbors (meaning people who lived way out of my neighborhood of crack houses and prostitution dens) lived in isolated communities, I spent most of my free time at places like the Santa Monica Boys Club, which tended to cater to the poorest kids who couldn’t afford to spend time after school at the YMCA (where the richer kids hung out). So, I was exposed to all sorts of diversity that quickly educated me on what words were friendly and which words were taboo. As I was always a friendly sort of kid, I learned the ones that made friends (and made lots of friends) and discarded the words that turned friends into enemies.

Years later, in the presence of Bob and his friends, I was completely out of place because the conversations they were having were alien to me, so I did what I did when I was a kdi. I listened and avoided participating whenever I felt uncomfortable. There are certain words I’m not comfortable saying, and I’ve discovered that that is probably never going to change.

This is why I don’t feel concerned that there are rappers out there using the N-word in their music. I generally don’t sing to rap music, mainly because there’s not a lot of it that insterests me. The types that does generally doesn’t have profanity in it, or it’s impact is in a completely different direction. I do think that there are a lot of people who feel they have to emulate that type of behavior to be seen as cool, and fortunately, I’ve never been known to be someone who seeks out that type of status. Whenever I consider myself “cool”, there’s usually a sense of irony or sarcasm involved.

Which brings me back to that word. I don’t know why people feel such a need to use it. But unlike the professor mentioned in MEW’s article, I don’t care enough about the fact that others use it to feel slighted myself. Words do have power in some circumstances, but what MEW and people like her don’t often recognize is that they also lack power if people don’t subscribe to their doctrine. Whenever I hear the N-word, I don’t think “subversive”, “cool”, or even “outrageous.” I think “uneducated” and “limited in vocabulary”. But then, when writing a novel, there have been times when I have chosen the simple phrase rather than the more complicated one because the message was the medium, not the other way around. And in those cases, I guess my own jury is still out.

Jelly Bellies are for eating, so please just shut the hell up

Business, News, Politics, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

One of the few givens in today’s society is that either some pop star is going to try to push the envelope by participating in some semblance of outrageous behavior (like saying the wrong thing, or forgetting to wear her clothes in public, or just having sex with strangers in church) or that some corporate executive is going to overstep his or her authority and say things that probably should have been sent anonymously to the racist message board where it belonged. Today, the owner of Jelly Belly decided to come out against transgendered rights in California, somehow thinking that his ability to make candy filled with high-fructose corn syrup somehow makes him an advocate for anyone who advocates hating people who are just trying to live their lives without discrimination and problems that most of us generally don’t have to deal with because we’re part of mainstream society.

A few weeks ago, it was Abercrombie & Fitch. Before that, Chik-Fil-something or other (honestly, just didn’t feel like looking up their name to spell it right as their company isn’t that important to me that I’d waste that much time putting their name into a Google search engine. And before that, it was Martha Stewart doing whatever it is that rich white women do when they’re not doing what rich white women do normally.

The point is: I’m getting really tired of hearing about corporate CEOs acting badly in public. It was fine when I was dealing with Paris Hilton, who was kind of an acting-badly CEO, even though she’s not actually the Hilton CEO. At least she was attractive and said lots of dumb things that made me laugh, even if that wasn’t her main intention. She at least provided entertainment, and I never felt that behind her ridiculousness was someone who was actually out there hating other people for being different.

But that’s what these CEOs are doing. They’ve made a shit load of money off of the rest of us, and for some reason they think that somehow now gives them the platform to spout some really racist, homophobic bullshit that somehow is relevant to the rest of us. If anyone of us have a problem with what they have to say, they chalk it up as irrelevant because what’s relevant is that we paid them money to become very wealthy and now that somehow their wealth and power makes them think that their opinions are somehow more significant than the opinions of the rest of us.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Those CEOs are not smarter, more lived, or even cognizant of facts that the rest of us don’t know. They don’t have more education than the rest of us; some of them have tons less. The only thing they have that the rest of us don’t have is money and gobs of it. That money opens doors for them so that when they have something “important” to say, people listen, which is why we’re hearing their racist, homophobic rants instead of just eating their candy.

What really seems to be happening is that our media pays dire attention to these Neanderthals because of the money factor. This is why when one of them farts on national television, we all have to smell it for the next couple of days. So, if we want to make this problem go away, we need to write to our media sources and say to stop telling us whenever a millionaire/billionaire sneezes. We don’t care.

Sure, the usual response is to start the infamous boycott of Jelly Belly products, or whatever product a company makes when one of these morons starts spouting his or her nonsense, but most often these products are things we like; we just don’t like the owners of these companies who make them. Why should we lose the things we like because they’re made by morons we hate?

The simple fact is that these CEOs are nothing more than people who were lucky at getting their product to the market and made a killing doing it. What they’re good at is business, so if they want to tell me how to run a bookstore, then the media should pipe that discussion to me. But I don’t go to a guy who makes candies in order to find out how I should feel about social issues in America. For that, I usually go to social figures who have knowledge in those areas of information. By the same token, I don’t turn to LGBT folk to find out the best way to reinvest my 401K; that’s not their expertise. Sure, one of them might know something about it, but you generally don’t just randomly go out into a crowd and start trying to get knowledge by hoping that maybe one of them might know something about the issue you’re dealing with. At least I don’t, any more than I have a tendency to avoid bringing my back pain issue to my dentist, who might feel bad about it but can’t really do anything to make me better.

So, with that said, can you CEOs please kindly shut the fuck up and get back to selling us things we don’t need?

We’re halfway through 2013 and racists are still living in the 1950s

News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Television, , , , ,

Cheerio’s did an interesting thing the other day. They created an ad where a white woman and her black child are having breakfast, and the kid goes to wake up dad, who is black. There’s no “hey, look, we’re doing an interracial thing here” commentary. It just exists as one of those “hey, life is life, so deal with it.”

 

Of course, the world couldn’t just leave it at that. As soon as Cheerio’s ran the ad, suddenly all sorts of uptight people had to chime in and make it out as if there’s something wrong because an interracial couple eats cereal in the morning. Imagine that.

What gets me is that it’s been 50 years since the very first interracial kiss (taking place in geek history between Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura). You’d think that we’ve come so far since then, and we should be at a point where we just laugh at this sort of thing. But there are people in America claiming that this is the worst thing ever. Looking at the Youtube stats, 21,673 people liked the video, while 1.453 disliked it. We’re talking about 6.3 percent of people actually registering that they don’t like whites and blacks being depicted as in the same family. The only positive is that 6.3 percent is pretty small (for example: on You Tube, 50 percent of responders disliked A Tribute to Jar Jar Binks. But that’s a whole other issue as 50 percent liking Jar Jar is downright scary to me. But I digress….

What’s of more significance is that there are still people who have a problem with interracial relationships. When General Mills aired the ad, there was a constituted effort to remove hate responses from those who immediately took offense at the approach. What was surprising is that with such a controversial topic (which in my opinion should NEVER have been controversial), General Mills stuck to their guns and refused to back down to any outlash against their message.

It should be interesting to see if this becomes more than just an outlier conversation piece, or if it leads to something that might possibly bring the US into the 20th century (a century late, but at least it’s a start).

Adventures in Volunteering…the good and the bad

Memoirs, , , , , , ,

One of the more difficult hurdles I discovered when trying to volunteer was actually finding some place where I could volunteer. Figuring that there were many agencies and groups that would be jumping up and down just waiting for a willing work pool, I started to inquire, only to discover the world of disfunctionality that exists within the volunteer corps themselves.

First, I thought it would be fun to build housing for the poor and struggling. Having seen the articles and stories on Jimmy Carter’s involvement with Habitat for Humanity, I decided to volunteer with them. Having skills in carpentry, I figured I’d be able to offer lots of assistance in this field, but when I showed up at the interview, I discovered a very interesting dynamic that existed there. The woman who interviewed me kept asking me “why” I was volunteering. She kept looking into the “crime” I must have committed to be referred to their group, and even though I kept saying I found their name in the phone book and wasn’t in trouble in any way, she kept treating me like I was some prisoner who was getting a furlough to work off a debt to society. But I tried to ignore that and eventually got to go to a site where I could work.

Well, I discovered this to be a very interesting situation in that the person in charge of that site had two modes: “Leave me alone” and “You are all scum who are working for me so get your asses in gear, or you’ll pay dearly for crossing me.” It took me a short bit to realize that the majority of the people who were part of this project were all working off some debt to society, and that most were court-ordered placed on this job. I tried to work in this environment, but I kept feeling that I was now cast in a bad adaptation of Cool Hand Luke, so that when my day was done, I decided this was not the kind of volunteering I wanted to do.

So, I looked for something else. And what I found in that search process was how much dysfunctionality there is in the volunteer search process. The people were generally nice, but finding an actual assignment was really difficult. I should point out that I wasn’t interested in working with kids, mainly because I was paranoid about the tendency of agencies to accuse anyone around kids of improper behavior, even if all you did was show up to work. I had a friend of mine who was working with kids for some years, and she was accused of all sorts of atrocities, only to finally discover that the woman accusing her was a certified looney, who the agency discovered after my friend was almost railroaded through the criminal justice system. I decided I didn’t want anything to do with that.

So, I found myself hooked up with an agency called Lighthouse for the Blind, which is a service to volunteer with blind people. The first meeting was what sold me on this group because there was a young woman who was recently afflicted with blindness, who was tasked with speaking to the volunteers who attended the first orientation. Her motivational speech about how helpful the agency was seemed insightful and interesting, but to be honest, it was when I was walking home from the first meeting when I was sold. The girl was walking down the street towards her destination, and she was taking forever to get down the street. The visuals we were offered during the orientation showed blind people making their way pretty well, but this poor girl was having the most difficult time walking down the street alone, and I was immediately sold on the need to see what I could do to help someone like this so that a journey should never take as long as that one was taking her that day.

When I volunteered, they set me up with an old guy named Frank. He was one of those cranky, “I can do everything on my own” kind of guys who really just needed help reading his mail, folding his money and getting him to and from the store every now and then. I volunteered with him for a few months, showing up a couple of times a week and pretty much being his eyes for such little tasks.

Of course, after a few months, he started opening up and felt a lot more comfortable talking to me about things. That’s when I discovered there was a hidden side to Frank that you’d never know from any previous conversation. The conversation that made me realize it went something like:

Me: You have a letter here from the AARP (the retired people organization).

Frank: Just throw it away.

Me: Are you sure?

Frank: Those people piss me off. They have too many agendas. Like the Coloreds.

Then he started referring to ethnicities and races in extremely derogatory terms. I guess he felt really comfortable with me by then, so he just opened up and, and I discovered I was volunteering to help one of the most racist people I’d ever encountered. And it never escaped me the fact that he was blind, which should have made a difference (at least to me, it seemed like it would), but no, he was dogmatic about his beliefs and he would waste no amount of time getting to how much he hated “those people”.

Finally, I realized I couldn’t continue working with this guy. I realized he needed my help, but whenever I actually tried talking about such subjects, he would pretty much shut me down and talk about issues in ways that were extremely demeaning. He pretty much hated everyone, including African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and the Irish. By this time, my girlfriend was constantly coming over with me, spending quality time with me and Frank. Bless her heart, but not once did she ever reveal to him that she was Chinese, even when he took the opportunity to refer to Asians in some horrible fashion.

So I stopped showing up and told the Lighthouse I had to discontinue this volunteer opportunity. I could have chosen to work with someone else, but by then I was completely burnt out, and my girlfriend no longer wanted me to work with them any more. I mean, there was only so much she could take, and I didn’t blame her either. She wanted to share such time with me, and there’s only so much you can ask from another person.

So I stopped volunteering. Every now and then I think about taking up another opportunity again, but I find it hard to take the next first step.

USDA Race Problem Shows That Racism Still Has a Lot of Work Ahead of Itself in America

Politics, , , , ,

I don’t know if you’ve been following this recent story, but every now and then a story of racism hits the main story lines, and then suddenly everyone starts acting like they’ve just discovered anything race-related can possibly exist. And then people act horrified, shocked, angry and intellectually assaulted that such a thing could be happening in this day and age. In this case, a woman working for the USDA told a group of people at an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet meeting that she, an African-American government employee, took great pleasure in NOT helping a white man who DARED to come to her for assistance at her government office. So, she went out of her way to make sure that she made his request both painful and impossible for him to gain any success. And she took great pleasure in it.

Well, obviously the people now discovering this You Tube video of her exploit are now going nuts distancing themselves from her, firing her and doing all sorts of posturing about how evil this really is, which is all understandable, but what needs to be acknowledged is that this really isn’t all that surprising. What it tells us is that racism still exists, and it doesn’t matter what side of the coin people hail from, there are still people who treat others with disdain mainly because they can. Instead of dealing with this as an actual issue that needs some kind of resolution, we’ll deal with it as a unique occurrence, as if it doesn’t happen all of the time, and when the next one gets discovered, it gives us room to keep compartmentalizing such incidents and never do anything about fixing them.

Face it. Some people are dicks. It doesn’t matter what color they are, what nationality they are, how much intelligence they have, how much money they have, whether they voted Republican or Democrat, or anything else. People are still dicks. What we need to do is get together as a collective and talk about this type of behavior in a clear-cut fashion so that everyone hears our voices. But we won’t. Instead, we’ll treat it as a one case wonder, and we’ll allow others to continue to hide in the shadows, doing this sort of thing over and over again, until they get found out and we repeat the cycle yet again. We’ve never really been all that good at bringing bad circumstances to light. It would mean discussing difficult topics, and if we can’t act holier than thou, we really don’t want to talk about it.

Racism is all over the place. So is ethnic profiling. So is reverse discrimination. But what should be focused upon is not that these things exist, which is important to know about, but to figure out why. Why are people still treating other people with disdain, placing some people in subcategories of humanity in comparison to others?

I say it has a lot to do with the complex intricacies of identity politics. People like to think of themselves as part of a collective, but at the same time, they’re incapable of indentifying themselves as part of a group without identifying others as outliers from their group. As long as there are people who don’t belong, their justification for all of the things their “group” believes in become all that much stronger. What good is a group of white males if they can’t look at another group of non-white males with some type of ridicule or condemnation? Think about wars we have fought. World War II was all about identifying the “evil Jap” or the “violent Kraut”, or whatever derogatory name one can remember. By doing so, we were able to rally around ourselves and fight against “foreign” aggression. It helped in that situation that those opposing forces ALSO saw themselves with identity that conflicted with us as well. But not always does it happen that way, and that’s where our problems are really starting to emerge.

Look at the War on Terror. It started after 9/11 with condemnations of anyone who was Arabic. And then immediately there was a realization that there were a lot of Arab-Americans who AREN’T our enemies, and that is still pretty hard for a lot of people to grasp. When you are so good at creating identity distinctions and placing people in another camp, it is very hard to realize that your enemy is a lot like Pogo first proclaimed: “We have met the enemy and he is us” or some variation of that phrase.

An interesting example of this problem hails from an unlikely source, and that’s a computer game, the most popular one around, World of Warcraft. In that game, without having to learn much about it, all you have to know is that there are two sides, the Alliance and the Horde. You choose one side or other based on your choice of race you pick for the character you are going to play. From that moment on, everyone who is automatically allied with the other side is your enemy, and you are automatically identified with the races that you were allied with as well. Think of it as living in a country where you were born, and everyone in that country hates the people from another country. You may never have a single dealing with a person from that other country, but one day you’re going to meet one somewhere, and you’re expected to hate him or her, and if possible, kill him or her, or contribute to that person’s personal demise. That is the kind of thinking that the game sets up, and it’s not that much different than how we deal with other countries in the world today.

When I was younger, I was working for a hotel chain as its investigator, and I befriended a young man from Iran (who happened to always refer to his country as “Persia”). He wanted to be an American, and he was as pro-US as you could be, including a fascination for all things Madonna (including a long protracted attempt to get me to buy for him the new “Madonna book” because he was too embarrassed to buy it from a store himself). But whenever her talked about Iran, he would then immediately start drawing sickles and pointing at the US, as if he understood that he had to hate the United States whenever identifying himself as an Iranian. No amount of common sense conversation ever broke him from this thought process, and even though he was good friends with every American he came across, when it came to national identity, I would not have been surprised to see him turn against those same friends and take up arms at a moment’s notice.

This is the kind of mentality we have to deal with whenever we discuss the ideas of ethnicity and race. Some people are locked into their beliefs because of an entire life, or a societal set of lives worth of time, spent thinking one particular way, automatically thinking bad thoughts towards people they know nothing about, nor have they ever had the opportunity to even gain a single negative action that would cause them to feel that way from a logical perspective.

In this country, we really need to discuss race because the only people talking about it right now are race-baiting people who see the world in, for lack of better terms, black and white. I watched an interview the other night with Al Sharpton about his response to the NAACP’s rift with the Tea Party and the NAACP’s allegations of racial tensions stemming from the Tea Party. At first, Sharpton sounded logical, and then he fell into talking points, where he wanted the Tea Party members to automatically have to condemn their own members in order to be taken seriously by Sharpton. Sharpton didn’t like racism from the Tea Party, but he had no problem condemning an entire organization because of their membership, effectively arguing that membership in the Tea Party meant you were a racist unless you were willing to codemn everyone else in the Tea Party as a racist. Use that argument to say that you if you’re a member of the NAACP, you must condemn all racist members of the NAACP, of which they do exist, or you’re a racist yourself, and look at where that might get you.

The problem is people want to equate posturing with logical actions, and no one wants to be baited into a stupid battle of words. And that’s what keeps happening.

Which brings me back to the original point of this post. I don’t think calling this woman a racist solves anything. Sure, she probably is one, but who cares? What is more important is to use her really stupid mistake (whether or not she would do it again is irrelevant to me) and try to open up a dialogue on this whole issue. Otherwise, we miss a great opportunity just so we can make stupid, irrelevant, political points. Unfortunately, that’s all that’s going to come from this moment. That, and that woman being out of a job for doing and saying something really stupid. It’s sad that we can’t get a better result that just that.