Grandmother cringe factor

David Seaton's News Links
Barack Obama describes his grandmother as:

"a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

I don't know for sure if I'm the only one who found this all a tad supercilious, but I suspect I'm not.

It turns out that I too come from serially broken homes like Obama and, hey, I too had a white grandmother, who like Obama's, was

"a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who love(d) me as much as she love(d) anything in this world"

And hey, huge coincidence.... she too was frightened of black men just like Obama's. Wow.... and that made Obama cringe?

Cringe?

Good thing he never listened to Chris Rock on the subject:

"The media has distorted our image to make us look bad, why must you come down on us like that, brother? It ain't us, it's the media." Please, cut the fucking shit, okay. Okay? Okay? When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't looking over my back for the media: I'm looking for niggas!'

Now that makes me cringe, and I don't cringe very easily. You don't have to be Bill Cosby to know that there is huge problem in the United States of America with black men.

"The United States has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. While the United States currently incarcerates 750 inmates per 100,000 persons, the world average rate is 166 per 100,000 persons.(...) African Americans, who are 12.4 percent of the population, are more than half of all prison inmates, compared to one-third twenty years ago. Although African-Americans constitute 14 percent of regular drug users, they are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56 percent of persons in state prisons for drug crimes." “Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost? US Senate Report

And many of the causes of this problem were well described by Obama's "old uncle" Reverend Wright, (I bet the 'old uncle' bit made Wright cringe). Here is how he preached it.

"The government gives them the drugs [referring to the Iran-Contra Affair], builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people...God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme"

Now brother Noam Chomsky couldn't have said that any better. If we were going for truth and not truthiness, Obama would have defended both his white granny's and Jeremiah Wright's views, because both of them are making intelligent and realistic comments about a problem that affects both their lives, as it does any American of any color that lives anywhere but places like Iowa and Minnesota.

So, in fact, where others see a history making, earth shaking, speech steeped in authenticity, I only see Tony Blair with a fabulous tan. DS

Rutgers, race, history... heavy stuff

David Seaton's News Links

Right away, I have to say that Don Imus should be fired because he's an idiot. Did he think he was being "down"? Nobody could be so stupid as not to realize that the young women's feelings would be hurt by being called "nappy headed hos". Publicly calling a young lady a "whore" can get you (and your network) sued for defamation.

In a purely American context, however, "nappy headed" caused equal pain and was considered equally offensive, and that's what I'd like to talk about. I'd just like to use the incident as starting point for some personal observations made from having lived so many years away from the States.

I come from the suburbs of Chicago, which were, and probably still are at heart, as racist as Alabama, but in my family of liberal Democrats, the "N" word was never, ever pronounced, even by the Saint Louis Missouri branch. African-Americans who worked with my stepfather (a musician) came to dinner with the same regularity as his white fellow workers did... although there were neighbors of ours that didn't like that. I went to integrated public schools in a university town with a large, old, African-American community with no overt, or vulgar redneck type racism. Still the tension was always there and flavored all areas of life. There were so many things you couldn't say, gestures of friendship that were frowned upon (by both races) etc, etc. Until I went to school abroad I thought that this was universal and something intrinsic to relations between races, I found out, in fact that it was really about history.

Over here I went to school with dozens of Cubans. Most of them had some African blood somewhere, "la gotita" or "little drop", what Cuban author Gulliermo Cabrera Infante called, referring to a parisian Cuban intellectual, "the Congo was a tributary of his Seine". Some were white as the driven snow... I was blown away by how little that meant and really blown away how they talked to each other. Everybody, white and brown alike called each other, "Negro" (pronounced "naygrow") and "Negra" and mulato and mulata. I had a drop dead beautiful, Cuban girlfriend who insisted that I call her mi Negra... she said it made her feel sexy... she liked to call me her "chinito" ("little Chinaman" and I was redheaded little mick). Racial terms, were terms of affection!

Then I went to art school in England with several African-Africans and again discovered that relations between people of different colors could be perfectly natural. Even with fellow students of British Caribbean origin you didn't have to walk on eggshells like with African-Americans.

Funnily enough it was the war in the Balkans and the hatred between the Serbs and the Bosnians that suddenly made it all fall into to place for me. Serbs and Bosnians are both Slavs, they both speak the same language, but history has made them enemies.

Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. America is millions of little Bosnias. That history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba too. I think it has something to do with America's puritanical steak, with its hatred of vulnerability and slavery is total vulnerability. Anyway, I would really like it if the scandal was about calling a nice group of young ladies "whores" and not about mentioning their "nappy" heads. DS

The glorious nation of Kazakhstan should sue or spoof Israel - Robert Bridge -Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links

There is a very interesting letter to the editor in the Financial Times from Robert Bridge, I've read it in the dead tree edition, but its electronic access is restricted. If you have access, here is the link. Please send me a copy to paste up, if you can get it. What it says in short is that:
"Given the Jewish people's extreme sensitivity about antisemitism in in any form, is it not bizarre that one of their own would 'document' a fictional "Running of the Jew" ceremony where antisemitism , according to a past national conference on Soviet Jewry at least, is "non-prevalent"?(...) Would a "Running of the Jew" ceremony in Berlin be too risqué for movie audiences? Yes, I think it would, but why pick on a historically tolerant society? I think Mr. Cohen should understand that any form of antisemitism is non-permissible - even in the hands of a Jew. Then and without irony Mr Cohen suggests in his film that homosexual Kazakhs must wear blue hats in public. However this is better than gays fared in Israel last week when their gay pride parade was canceled amid security concerns. It seems that the options open to the glorious nation of Kazakhstan are twofold: take Mr. Cohen to court and sue him for character assassination, not to mention possible economic damages, or take a Kazakh crew to Israel and produce its own spoof film."

Yeah it might be fun to take a camera into a café on Dizengoff and start a sing along of "throw the Arabush down the well". The skinny is that nothing bad happens to anybody in Kazakhstan because of their ethnic or religious origins and in Israel Arabs and non-Jews in general are legally discriminated against. I think Israel is begging for some Borat to visit it and investigate the attitudes and foibles of its population. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. DS