To All My Black Friends

To all my black friends who have lived through this week:

I’m sorry.

I say this not to assuage any underlying sense of white guilt, not in any attempt to speak for all the white people of America or even any white person other than myself (they can all go fuck themselves for all I care).

I say this because it’s what a decent human being, or any human being at all, for that matter, would say to another human being who is going through unspeakable grief/loss/pain/trauma.  I say this because even if it is completely the wrong thing to say, it is better to say something–anything–than nothing at all.  But then, I am a blogger.  It is part and parcel of my unique vocation in life to express my unsolicited opinion on subjects about which I know nothing and have no place to speak.  And I am a white person.

Now, to all the white people who haven’t yet left the room since I started doing these anti-racist posts:  If your response to the events of this week is anything other than the above, then are you a decent human being?  Are you even a human being at all?

“But he should have complied!!!”

What black parent hasn’t sat his/her kid down at some point–perhaps multiple times–and had that excruciating talk about how to act toward the police?  What white parent has ever had to have that talk with his/her kid?  There is a gross injustice here.

“hE sHOulD hAvE coMpLIeD”  Shut the fuck up.

“But he was carrying a knife!!!”

Kyle Rittenhouse was carrying an assault rifle.  A.  Fucking.  Assault.  Rifle.  And all he got from the police was a friendly wave and a thank you.  After he had just shot and killed two protesters.

“Destruction of private property is not an acceptable form of protest.”

So murder is an acceptable response to destruction of private property but destruction of private property is not an acceptable response to murder.  Bitch, bye.

“The black community should be going about this differently.  You catch more flies with honey, you know.”

When your history includes three centuries of being owned by other human beings, shit gets complicated real quick.  That’s why they’re so angry.  If it was you, wouldn’t you be angry too?  If not, why not?

“But…black on black crime.”

At this point I am fully convinced that “black-on-black crime” is a fabrication on the part of a news media machine that for ages has been fully invested in promoting the worst possible stereotypes about black people and black communities in the service of systemic racism.  (Remember the news coverage about crack back in the 80’s?)  Even if black-on-black crime is really a thing, it is probably a symptom arising from the fact that many black communities are not nice places and they do not have a lot of the nice things that many white communities have.  Why?  We’d probably better not talk about that.

“What about all the absent black fathers?”

This is another one I hear a lot.  I’ll tell you where all those absent black fathers are.  And they’re not where you think they are.  They’re not running around out there living their best life now, living the drug/pimp/playboy dream.  They’re in jail.  Why?  Because you put them there.  I put them there.  We all put them there.  How?  Three words:  War On Drugs.  The New Jim Crow will tell you all about this.

“All those entitled millionaire brats boycotting in the NBA–who gives a fuck about them anyway?  They need to just shut up and play on.”

So when you are making millions because of your ability to pass/catch/dribble/shoot a ball at the highest levels of your sport, that automatically cuts you off from your humanity and from any feeling you may have for others in your family/community who are being crushed under the weight of American systemic racism.  Bitch, sit down and shut up.

“You’re just being a honky and speaking up for black people because you don’t think they can do that on their own, a nice soft form of racism.  The vast majority of African Americans do not support what you support.  But you keep on whitesplaining.”

I actually got that one from a Facebook friend, someone I used to be in choir with at my church, back when my church had a choir.

The truth is, black people have been speaking up.  For years.  Decades even.  And all it has gotten them is more of the same shitpile of systemic racism shoved down their throats by white America.  Whether by Donald Trump and his jacked-up neo-Nazi thug supporters, whether by George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Dylan Roof, etc., whether by the Ferguson cops or the other cops who incessantly perpetrate police brutality in black communities.  Or whether by the white people who are quite content to look the other way and just go on with their lives and act as if none of this concerns them in any way whatsoever.  It really makes no difference at the end of the day.

And they are tired of it.

White people:  Your black friends/neighbors/coworkers/etc. are most emphatically NOT ok right now.

When a fellow human being is experiencing immense loss, pain, hurt, grief, trauma, etc., the proper thing to do if you are a decent human being–or a human being at all–is to just say “I’m sorry” and leave it at that.

And when a fellow human being is experiencing grave injustice, the proper thing to do if you are a decent human being–or a human being at all–is to stand up and scream out at the perpetrators of said injustice, “Bitch no.  Not today.  Not on my watch.”

Some things should never have to be said, yet here we are.

Donald Trump in Jacksonville: Another Big Deal

If Donald Trump had had his way, he would have been in Jacksonville this week.

Why is that significant?

Because today marks the 60th anniversary of Axe Handle Saturday, a horrific incident of racist violence in Jacksonville.  White supremacists used baseball bats and axe handles to attack protesters who were engaged in sit-ins at downtown eateries to protest racial segregation.  The white supremacists numbered about 200 and included several KKK members.  Police were on the scene but did not intervene to protect the protesters.  But when a black gang called the “Boomerangs” attempted to protect the protesters, police arrested several of them.

Why did Donald Trump want to be in Jacksonville this week?  Not to commemorate the victims or the awful events of Axe Handle Saturday, but to accept his party’s nomination for the highest office in the land.

Ultimately that did not happen.  Due to the ongoing pandemic, those plans were scrubbed and the Republican convention relocated to Charlotte.

This is the second time this year that Donald Trump has attempted to hold a campaign event at the site of some horrific incident of racist violence on or near the anniversary of said incident.  As you may recall, a couple of months ago Donald Trump attempted to hold a campaign rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth on what would have been the 99th anniversary of the Greenwood race massacre.  In the face of immense public pressure he postponed the rally by a day.

Back then, if one was absolutely and resolutely intent on giving Donald Trump the benefit of every possible doubt, the best that one could have said was that he and/or his campaign staff had made a simple gaffe by failing to do some basic research into the history of this particular site and this particular date.  But this time, all possible doubt has been removed and the benefit of the doubt is gone.  Donald Trump’s message of hatred and denigration of all who are not privileged white males stands revealed for what it is.  That message was played out live and large and in excruciating detail in Tulsa in June 1921, and again in Jacksonville on August 27, 1960.

For this reason, Donald Trump must go down–and go down hard–in November.

A Few Words About Affirmative Action

“Affirmative Action was nice.  It had its time.  Its time is over.”  So goes the common thinking about affirmative actin in the white universe.  But is affirmative action really unnecessary these days?  Well, how many high-ranking executives named LaDonna or LaTrell or Quaevon or Shameka do you see in the top corporate boardrooms of America?  I would say no.  The data backs this up:  Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 3 percent of executives and senior-level officials, 4 percent of doctors and 5 percent of attorneys are black.  On the other side of the coin, blacks are twice as likely as whites to be poor or unemployed and the median income of white households is nearly twice that of black households.

Reality check:  Discrimination happens in the hiring process all the time.  Given two resumes with identical qualifications, if one has a white-sounding name and the other a black-sounding name, the one with the white-sounding name is 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be called in for an interview than the one with the black-sounding name.  In instances where candidates are “on the bubble” as to whether or not they are qualified for a given job, white candidates are given the benefit of the doubt much more frequently than black candidates.

So what is affirmative action?  Here is how it is supposed to work:  You have a job.  You have clear and unambiguous criteria as to what makes a person qualified for the job.  Given a pool of candidates who all meet the criteria, you select the one who moves your organization closer to where it wants to be with respect to diversity.  Are you hiring an unqualified or a lesser-qualified candidate?  No, because those candidates don’t even make it into the pool in the first place, if your hiring process is working like it is supposed to.  Traditionally, when there are several qualified candidates, the successful candidate usually has some above-and-beyond experience (like a special internship or a study-abroad experience) that sets them apart and gives their resume a little extra juice.  Here’s the problem:  The vast majority of candidates with these above-and-beyond experiences are white.  If these above-and-beyond experiences are essential to succeeding in the role, then you should have put them in the criteria.  Under affirmative action, if it isn’t in the job criteria then you don’t get to consider it.

A lot of white people describe affirmative action using terms such as “reverse discrimination” or “reverse racism”.  Admittedly I was one of those white people, once upon a time–not so long ago, actually.  Now?  Not so much.  When black people are vastly underrepresented at the highest levels of corporate America and overrepresented at the lowest levels of American society, that is a grave injustice which must be made right.

This is Too Much

Police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin (about halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee), shot an unarmed black man named Jacob Blake seven times in the back.

I’m just going to leave that right there.

This is exactly why protesters are calling for the police to be defunded.

Musical Theory Has a Race Problem

Today I direct your attention to a piece by Jacqueline Warwick, musicology professor at Dalhousie University.  It is entitled “Music education has a race problem, and universities must address it“.  Though it speaks to what is essentially a minor dispute among highly-trained music educators at the collegiate level and will likely not be of much interest to those outside that world, it nonetheless serves to illustrate just how deeply systemic racism has penetrated our society.

The big idea:  In our society, and certainly in collegiate music departments all over the country, the only music that gets to call itself real music is European classical music.  This is deemed to be the only kind of music worthy of any serious study, and the only kind that doesn’t have to have an adjective in front of it (i. e. world music, pop music, electronic music, folk music).  When a music theorist addressed the inherent systemic racism here at a national convention of music professors, a scholarly journal devoted almost all of its following issue to rebutting his address.

In order for collegiate-level music education to remain relevant, this systemic racism must be addressed.  Already we have seen several extremely successful musicians (John Legend and Sarah McLachlan, for instance) who went to college but did not study music; collegiate-level musical training would not have been any use to them.  In this cultural moment, collegiate music programs must have an honest reckoning with the ideologies which say that white European classical music is the only kind that is worthy of serious study.

A Few Words About So-Called “Safe Spaces”

Today we are going to talk about so-called “safe spaces”.  With college students returning to school right now, it seems appropriate.

“Safe spaces” became a thing in the collegiate world over the past decade.  Many derided the very concept, calling it an overreach of political correctness and an unnecessary impediment to the free exchange of ideas that needs to happen in a university setting in order for a college education to be worth anything.  Those who advocated for safe spaces were frequently derided for being “too sensitive”.

But did anyone ever take the time to listen to those who were calling for safe spaces?  Did anyone bother to ask what it is that they believe they need to be kept safe from?

I can tell you right now:  Dissenting opinions are pretty low on the list.

On the Evolving Nature of Protest in Jazz

Today I direct your attention to a piece by Melvin Gibbs entitled “The Changing Nature of Protest in Jazz“, which explores how jazz music’s role in the fight against racial injustice has evolved over time.  Jazz music was birthed in the black community in the early 1900s, in clubs which existed because black people could not get into white clubs.  As jazz music came to be accepted in the white world, it made no demands yet its very existence was a demand in itself, as musicians used it as a vehicle to express what could not be said openly or directly.  With the Civil Rights Movement, jazz music became more demanding, reflective of black people’s demand for freedom and self-determination.  This led to the evolution of other musical forms, including today’s hip-hop.  Today, the practitioners of what has come to be known as “America’s classical music” have to wrestle with the question of how to respect the spirit and intentions of the genre’s founders while doing so in a way that works today.

Recommended Viewing: Matthew Desmond on Eviction

Today I direct your attention to Matthew Desmond, who points to another glaring injustice in our society which disproportionately impacts blacks and other minorities.  Desmond is the author of “Evicted:  Poverty and Profit in the American City”, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017.  Desmond is a professor at Princeton, where he heads up “The Eviction Lab”, a center which gathers data on evictions nationwide (amazingly, such data had never been gathered anywhere before Desmond came along) and proposes remedies which benefit both tenants and landlords.

Watch this 20-minute (almost) interview which aired on PBS back in June in which Desmond discusses his book, his work, the impact of eviction on American minorities, and what we as a society can do about it.

Ibram X Kendi on How Trump’s Election Forced a Racial Reckoning

Today I direct your attention to a piece by Ibram X Kendi at The Atlantic, entitled “Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?“.  Kendi is author of the 2016 bestseller Stamped From the Beginning:  The Definitive History of Racism in America.

In Kendi’s piece at The Atlantic, his big ideas are:

–Donald Trump revealed the country’s prejudices anew.  With Donald Trump in office, we can no longer continue in the illusion that we live in a colorblind society.  That option is no longer open to us.

–In doing so, he inadvertently fueled an anti-racist revolution.  The racism and injustice that we were able to deny during the Obama years became undeniable under Donald Trump.

–What happens next is up to Americans.  Now that a critical mass of people have reached a point where we can no longer explain away racial injustice, the question is:  What are we going to do about it?  There are two options:  We can vote Donald Trump out this fall and go back to pretending everything’s good now that the bad apple is gone.  Or we can commit to demanding full racial equality and a complete dismantling of systemic discrimination, and holding politicians and policymakers accountable accordingly.

Seven Deadly Sins on the Anti-Racist Path

Today I direct your attention to a piece from Canadian senator Ratna Omidvar and Diya Khanna entitled “Seven deadly sins to avoid on the path to anti-racism“.  In reckoning with Canada’s racism past and present, the authors note that in order to be successful, anti-racist work must be cognizant of the potential pitfalls which lie ahead, called the “Seven Deadly Sins”.  They are as follows:

1. Empty words and a singular action, also called “diversity theatre” or “performative ally-ship”.
2. Ignoring or failing to gather evidence.
3. Punting responsibility away from leadership.
4. Ignoring whom you have influence over and do business with.
5. Overlooking privilege.
6. Tokenism, or inviting someone into a role for the sole purpose of checking off a box.
7. Centering the dominant group.