From the Claremont Institute:
The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth's shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers'.(emphasis mine).
That's something that makes me think. What are we to make of the Southern Strategy. Glenn Loury? Help us out here bro.
I've recently all but finalized a deal to be a columnist at Africana.com. I've been interested in speaking to larger publics for a while now. I am not jetting...but I suspect my writing will be sparser here. Thanks and shout outs to Mike for putting me down, and to the various crews I've rolled with over the last 12 years or so: Gravity, Utne Reader, Table Talk, Brainstorms, the Afrofuturists, the Family, AFAMED, and of course the Ques.
On All Things Considered it was reported that foreclosures are rising in Austin. I've got a few friends there now and from what I understand the housing is abundant and affordable. It seems to me that if you've been preparing, and have some money stowed away, that now would be an excellent time to purchase real estate in places like Austin. In fact, now would be an excellent time for black investors to jump into the fray en masse. But aren't there ethics involved? Listening to the woman talk about how she's got her eye on a house but she didn't check it out on the inside "because there's people living there now" was poignant.
I am coming to realize that the way I study Race and Politics, Black Politics, and Urban Politics in the American context is flawed in at least one important way. By focusing on an N of 1 (that is, by only looking at the way race plays itself out in American urban spaces), I am neglecting the fluid nature of people, ideas, and institutions. While geographic borders in the West are pretty much fixed...I don't see Canada trying to annex Seattle anytime soon...people and ideas cross borders with a great deal of ease. Even in these times. Michael Hanchard is one of many scholars responsible for bringing this to light. How can we understand the particular plight of black men for example, without looking at the way that globalization has impacted manufacturing processes throughout the west and the south?
While I don't believe that something like hip hop should somehow be thought of as "naturally" political, I do believe the studying the forms hip hop takes on as it crosses borders may aid us in understanding the transnational aspects of black politics.
I remember when the newly rebuilt Detroit's Museum of African American History opened for the first time. They decided to stay open for 24 hours, so everyone would have a chance to see what was then the largest museum of its kind. My wife and I had just left a fraternity ball, so we were dressed to the nines. It was PACKED. Executives, tradesmen, hairdressers, students, players, pimps, and hustlers.
Walked by a woman I thought I knew from somewhere. Turned out to be Lani Guinier.
Almost ten years later the museum was on hard times. Attendance fell far short of expectations, and funding sources were as dry as a bone. The curator approached the City of Detroit to step in, but the city is facing its own budget crisis. So what happens?
The great (I'm sorry, make that Great) Judge Damon Keith steps up to the plate.
In order to prevent another maafa, Rwandans are attempting to get rid of ethnicity. Here's a snippet, because registration may be required:
This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree.The re-education camp is one way of driving the point home to people who once lived by the motto "Hutu power." As Hutu fighters who fled to Congo after 1994 return to Rwanda they are sent to the camp. Along with civics they are taught some hands-on skills like carpentry. They leave with $75 and, at least in theory, a whole new way of thinking.
That new thinking has its critics — those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.
Haven't we heard this refrain before?
I watched today's 9/11 Commission hearings with interest because Dr. Rice was on the mic. It should be readily apparent to all that I don't like Rice's politics, I don't like her boss' politics, and I think they should both be booted for massive incompetence, and for their marked indifference to principles of reason. But while I was watching her take on the commission, I began to have a significant amount of sympathy towards her. I thought she was being badgered unnecessarily, and that she did an excellent job of dealing with her critics.
But listening to her on the radio was another story entirely. I found myself siding with the commission--my default position--and railing against Dr. Rice's stalling tactics. Why the difference? The pattern of questioning didn't change...nor did Dr. Rice's responses? The only thing I can figure is that when I was watching her being spoken down to....literally....there was an implicit racial dynamic at work which had an impact on my assessment.
I didn't watch the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings. Nor did I watch much of the OJ trial. I'm wondering if the same dynamics were at work. I'm going to send a set of random trackbacks to other black bloggers predisposed to think like me in the hopes that I can get some traction on this dynamic. I know about the research, but I'd like to know whether in this specific case, it was me or if there was something else going on.
George? Prometheus? Ward? Mike? Lynne Luvah's around here somewhere but I can't find her at the moment.
From the archives. Back in 92 or something, before the Web happened, I discussed race and multiculturalism on Compuserv. A Couple Exerpts.
Illegitimacy! O'Rourke you crack me up.
On a non-serious tip, take this racist argument. White women are 3 times as likely to have abortions than black women. It's because white women are not smart enough to raise children on their own. White people can only survive in nuclear families and thus have invented the words 'bastard' and 'illegitimate' because they are actually jealous of non-whites who can be successful single parents.
You obviously go for that dysfunctional stuff to pin on blacks, but who can blame you. You have lots of company. Of course I am sure that you have the intellect to rise above such pettiness so I'll give you a more reasonable opinion on the subject.
First to the data. I'm sure you could guess that to support your argument about 'illegitimacy' your data needs more precision. How does "illegitmacy" break down? What portion are married women who divorce and keep the children? What portion are widows? What are the comparative figures for whites? What are the income levels of these single parent families? I heard an interesting argument that the reason that proportionately more children are born to young black mothers is precisely because more black women are becoming college educated and are having fewer children, later in life.
A good book that I think you would like (It is absolutely packed with statistics) is "The Black Power Imperative" by Theodore Cross. (Basic Books, 1988(?)) He outlines an exhaustive strategy about all the things that can be legally done within the purview of American democracy to get blacks to catch up to the American mainstream, demographically speaking. I thought it a bit boring because they are mostly things I've heard a million times and who cares about demographics. The numbers can be highly illuminating for people who dig numbers.
This argument brings to mind June Jordan's essay "Don't You Talk About My Momma!" from "Technical Difficulties" (Pantheon, 1992). You seem to be repeating Daniel P. Moynihan's 1965 argument, but he's been discredited. Cultural differences make for different family arrangements. "Illegitimacy" is defined from a distinct point of view. At the Columban parish Holy Name of Jesus (all black) where I schooled for two years, most of the young women were married before the age of 20 and took their vows quite seriously. "Illegitimacy" was a very real to them. Despite the fact that many of them married poor men, they refused to work. A perticular kind of family life was most important to them. I was shocked to see that one of the brightest women I knew from that parish never went to college, but taught Sunday School. On the other hand, my cousin who got a full scholarship in Arts to Brown was raised by my aunt and all of us. He could likely be counted among the "illegitimate" but that's a word I never hear black people use against each other. I know all this must be boring you because you probably want me to explain the 'millions' of blacks who live in 'dysfunctional families'. I mean who even heard of black Catholics in Los Angeles and who really cares about one black Sunday School teacher? Who cares about how my cousin was raised? I guess that's the point. You are right about white folks not being in delicate positions. They shouldn't be. Family matters are personal and black folks ain't leaving it to Beaver.
"Illegitimate" "subhuman" "lazy" "irresponsible", whatever.
"slavery" "poverty" "racism" "unemployment", whatever.
THE BLACK FAMILY PERSISTS!
deal with it
When it comes to principles, I would wager that we are in very close agreement. I beleive most Americans are. When it comes however to practice, we are a bit off. Exactly where 'practice' comes in to play is something I beleive we are both experimenting. So conflict here is OK, though competition is not.
What makes us unique in America is our intellectual and physical mobility. We have, as individuals within certain broad limits, the opportunity to 'shop' for principles. It is the nature of our modern society which isolates us from the demanding skills of self-preservation. Therefore we can be successful Americans (given middle class status) in the military, in the professions, as skilled labor, in the clergy etc. Relatively few of us in the middle classes join our parents business, live in the same town from birth til death and identify primarily with the land. We then mark our passages through life as bourgeois individuals identifying with whatever groups we spend time with. We operate on certain sets of principles appropriate to the times and places. Why else would we talk about the 50s 60s 70s and 80s? What's the real difference? We change fashions and revise our ideas and politics in response to the changes we perceive, because we can. In short, we are not Amish.
This fluidity is something specific to large, literate, modern populations. It empowers individuals to do things once only monarchs could do, have personalities and choose lifestyles. In addition, modern conglomerations of power, for example international media, multinational corporations, and globally operating proprietaties accentuate this ability. I believe it was impossible for early philosophers to judge the import of such developments. If there is one thing so many of us admit, a scorn for government control, it is because of the benefits (or rights and privileges if you will) one can get from loyalty to these modern power structures. So again our sense of duty to principles is up to us based on our individual bourgeois panaply of choices. Of course there are real limits to this choice, but not in the American Dream.
Its nice to think about rights as the Enlightenment thinkers portray them. Fixed. Inalienable. But rights are nothing more than privileges. The defense of individual rights/privileges is entirely dependent on the individual loyalty to the defender and the defender's willingness and ability. Freedom isn't free means exactly that. It's a bargain. "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed." The African American experience teaches the temporal nature of such bargains as a very basic lesson. If you claim loyalty to anything other than America, whites will inevitably work to deprive you of your "inalienable rights" and if you claim more than they think you deserve, you will quickly find what they think of your ability as a human to seek justice. Derrick Bell makes a brilliant case for this in "Faces at the Bottom of the Well". But the black experience notwithstanding, the very conceptualization by any human being, finite as we are, to delineate the full scope of defensible rights in absolute terms is quite a conceit.
The work of successful modern governments is striking a balance of those priveleges it seeks to defend for its citizens and limits to its own authority. A literate population will be demanding. Jefferson and company deserve their share of accolade for striking the 18th century post-colonial/pre-industrial/ agrarian/slave labor ecnomic balance (Im being historically specific). It proved successful. What is interesting is by what right Jefferson and company took it upon themselves to declare and define those rights by fiat. I grant them that simply by reason of their complaints which I see as legitimate. We would all to well to recognize this motivation in all political opposition movements and the liberating aspects of fights against tyranny in political thought. Yet today we harken back to feudalism as the lords of capitalist industry, whether state lords, corporate lords, or private lords exercise their privilege with sovereign spirit. It is convenient for these leaders to claim the rights and privileges of individuals for themselves and consequently for the enterprises they control (Richard Secord comes to mind). The point is that what intelligent people might conceive as rights/privileges for their own justification is slippery and has slid far beyond the control of Religions, Kingdoms, and now even Governments. That's OK. The proof is in the sanctity of the bargain.
Many Americans, have come to find little hope in fealty to the Federal government. Alexis deTocqueville was wrong. We haven't chosen to vote ourselves comfort, rather we have switched loyalties from the central government to organizations of our own choosing. American democracy doesn't give us the privileges we want and it costs too much. I beleive that unless there is a radical change in the nature of our representative government, that American citizens will abdicate federal loyalty in greater numbers. I don't particularly like that. Good government is a relatively cheap way to defend rights and privileges. I wonder how we will reconcile a decline in patriotism to our need for public spirit as this trend continues. We need serious political reform.
As for Rand's lack of specificity. I want to know (but not really) beyond her abstract declaration and repulsion to racism how she expected people to combat it. Go hide in some happy valley behind an electronich shield where the racists couldn't find you? Where did she write to the New York Times and call for changes in government policy? How could she interpret history as simply a great struggle between brave individuals and shuffling masses when she took so little time to understand the validity of political struggle. I still agree that "No concept man holds is valid until it is fully integrated into the sum of his knowledge" but Rand strikes me as one particularly detached from integrating her concepts into the sum of humanity. Objectivism is hamstrung by its inability to realize that over time and space, peoples methods to power change. Modern society as we know it is not absolute and the dichotomy between good and evil will not always be defined by the suppression of individuals. But I really don't want to belabor the point about crediting or discrediting Rand, which I think indicates something important about culture. All of us in this forum may agree, as I said up top, about principles of individual liberty but for me the person who best exemplifies that might be Frederick Douglass, for you 'Solzienitzn'. The point is that each moved under very specific conditions with courage against very specific oppressions bringing along with them very specific followers. It is these actions in history which demonstrate the actuality of these abstract principles which in themselves have no power to liberate humans nor to defend such liberties. To evade the facts of history is to create a moral video game in mental hyperspace. To me, Rand is such a player.
re:Now, you mention the Declaration of Independence. It should be noted
that the principles in that document were the source for the eventual removal
of slavery. The prinicple of individual rights is the reason you have an
inkling that men should be free.
Aww come on John, mentally retarded children from preliterate roving bands of cannibals captured as slaves would have an inkling that they should be free. It should be noted that in Haiti, slave revolts freed the slaves. They had no constitution. They may not have created an admirable government but slavery was ended and the French hit the road. Though my knowledge on the history of slavery is thin, I do know something about the Fugitive Slave Act which gave license to bounty hunters to return escaped slaves into bondage. And the only reason I spend a lot of time quoting the Declaration is because it's something lots of folks respect, plus it's real easy to understand and supports a great many arguments. I would wager that John Brown and most abolitionists were motivated by Christian principles rather than Constitutional principles. I would similarly wager that about Nat Turner. But I do agree, in principle, that a constitutional framework against slavery would work best starting with a declaration of rights. Peter Suber would argue in "The Paradox of Self-Amendment" (Peter Lang, 1990) on a purely logical basis that any constitution with an amendment clause can be amended to say anything. To attribute modern freedoms to original intent given our history of amendment is logically inconsistant.
mbowen
ps. having watched charlie rose this evening on pbs re: thurgood marshall (a frat bro of great distinction) it came as a pleasant surprise to hear from one of the interviewees, a certain circuit court judge from philadelphia, say that in a bicentennial speech marshall commented that the constitution wasn't all that hot when it started but it had gotten a lot better and was destined for better days. amen! but as we know in the final dissent of old man marshall "..the currency of the Court is now power, and not reason"
Over with the Afrofuturists, I've been going through a number of raisons d'etre and mapping out black cyberspace. Here follows materials from the archives...
The full transcript of this forum can be found at Drylongso.
Phase One:
When I first got on computer networks to communicate with other folks, there were very few black women or men online on at all. This had mostly to do with the fact that I was emailing on the Xerox internal network in the mid 80s long before there was a public Internet. So, I started my online discussions at a time when the builders of the networks frowned heavily on any non-technical discussion. Matters of netiquette were taken very seriously. That didn't stop me from having black oriented political and social discussions in the Xerox corporate intranet.
Since I had been fairly prominent in college as a national officer with NSBE, I felt that on the Xerox network I was continuing the discussions about the fate and future of blacks in Corporate America from a business and technical angle. It was certainly a male dominated world, but it existed primarily as a support network. Nobody took any social discussions seriously. The very idea of men and women meeting each other socially online was simply not done. Besides, most of us already knew each other. We assumed that white folks were listening in, and the biggest controversies had to do with airing dirty laundry.
Phase Two:
A literacy project got me involved with open mike poetry in Los Angeles around 1990. Some of that got political, and it occurred to me that any black organization that would publish a newsletter would be a candidate for their own website. It was in this spirit a few years later that I created my first website with the idea in mind that many black organizations would follow suit. It was not to be. Everything associated with the information superhighway was considered elitist, and there was a sort of anxiety about it being another example of what white folks purposely did to leave black folks behind. So between black men and women there was no issue because most were not participating.
SCAA
There was a golden age of black conversation on the net that took place between 1993 and 1996. For the most part, however, gender issues were deeply subordinated to racial and political issues. The core of the group of participants there came to know each other well enough to distinguish gender issues from personality issues. Nevertheless, there were always new folks coming into discussions, who would take communications issue and extrapolate them to "the problem with us." As a compiler of the FAQ for the SCAA group in 1995, gender issues simply weren't high on anyone's priority list. What was much more important was maintenance of the space free and clear of racist "drive-by" conduct. SCAA finally fell to a barrage of racists and serves no useful purpose today, diehards not withstanding.
Salon Table Talk
At Salon, we got into issues of identity and gender a lot deeper. One notable conversation there was specifically about hiding race and gender in cyberspace. Having been hardened by the experience of SCAA, it was clear to me, as the Internet was getting popular with non-technical folks, that certain mythologies were being promoted. I don't believe any of the black veterans of the SCAA wars would easily swallow the cliché on the Internet that "nobody knows you're a dog." We knew all too well that being black was more than just skin color--that identity was a crucial part of the way you saw and thus discussed things online. If anything, the anonymity of text enhanced the differences and conflicts as well as the contrasts and synergies. But it certainly did not obviate them. Cyberspace made you more of what you are; only the things you really felt passionate about would come through in a memorable way. So when this subject was breached at Salon's Table Talk, I really took a hard line against masking.
I never wanted to get into a trap with "authenticity," partially because spoofing identity was part of the fun of some cyberspace haunts. I think the nature of MUDs and IRC lend them particularly to this. But I never considered these places for the kinds of discussions I wished to have vis-à-vis black cultural production, criticism or political talk. Instead they were social adventures. I did have an online life as a girl named "Sindeetha" at a game site called "Sissyfight," which was very popular for a short time.
Black Planet, NetNoir
I have spent only a limited amount of time in black on black social forums where the primary activity is socializing and flirting. They simply came into being too late in my life to be of any use.
Conclusions
In general I would say that black folks' expectations for the type of interactions in which gender issues are significant came to the Internet some time after I did. In the early days, people simply didn't expect anything. People didn't expect black folks to *be* online, much less socialize there with any seriousness. Even when I had dreams of millions of black folks online, I didn't expect or desire a dating service.
I think it must be said that the contributions of black cultural production or academic quality materials has been disappointing and too little too late for me. It is in that area that I wish such matters could be handled better. I blame black professors and professionals for following the dollar instead of contributing to community. Those who are intelligent and capable of delivering evolutionary content to the web don't bother and/or take a cynical attitude towards the entire enterprise. Those who have been trained to speak about such social issues only do so to be paid, and their default in the online world leaves it to lay-people to struggle with issues to which the answers already exist. Consequently, I don't really look for much. Yet. I can admit to having exceptional expectations. That I'm not satisfied in no way suggests that a plurality of black folks can't be. I've always been the explorer looking to carve out new frontiers. Let's see what happens next.
Mike Bowen - Summer 2003
I perceive that people have come to appear more real to each other over the years in cyberspace. The convention of masking, originally established by techies, and the inability of the medium to use long names and pictures, has given way to more highly interactive virtual communities with highly stylized artifacts. I would think that BlackPlanet is a very good case in point. When content management software became available at no cost, the texture of online communities changed. Suddenly people who were very opaque in IRC using an abbreviated name and spurting short comments intermittently had the chance to put some style into a permanent website which added a dimension to their chat. With IRC, as soon as you stopped typing, you disappeared. With a website, you became permanent. Furthermore, with a website, you could attach pictures of yourself, artwork, favorite quotes and longer texts about yourself.
Additionally, people became more real in cyberspace because they volunteer information about their own circle of communicants and interests. Back in the days of Usenet before free website authoring became possible, individuals would put their ‘sig’ at the end of each post. I have never seen a sig with a list of friends. Websites always list things that people might find interesting. So people could then be judged not only by what they say on one particular day, but by the online company they keep. Sure, you could tell something about a man who quotes Shakespeare, but he could become more complex if his best friend quotes Muddy Waters and less so if his friend also quotes Shakespeare.
Despite all of this, serious dislocations occur. The more real the cyber presentation is, the less likely one is to question your interpretation of it, and therefore the more likely you are to be shocked if you misinterpret all that you see. The problem is that as real as this cyber presentation feels and as much communication as it allows, it is not community. It still lacks the nuance we have with personal relationships offline. Whatever is established online is always and can never be more than an artificial community. We can no more have a relationship with people online than we do with movie stars or rock idols. Every communication is a presentation, and every presentation is interpreted. What exacerbates this problem is the reality of connecting with a wider variety and larger number of individuals online than offline.
Before establishing my persona of ‘boohab’ I wrote:
Everything I do in computer-mediated communications (CMC) is an experiment in blackness as a post-modern concept. I am futzing with identity in cyberspace and trying to figure out what happens to your race when people cannot see you, hear you or smell you. (hee haw). Everybody knows that you have some freedom in CMC to choose who you be. If I choose to be black, how would I express it? If I choose to be white, how? Why? What can I say in CMC that I would never say face to face? What silences are overcome w/ respect to racial issues, which are created?
Everyone who represents consciously in a gender-specific way in cyberspace must reckon with its sensory deprivation. It’s not enough to simply write “I am female” because this is not how people perceive femininity offline. And so presenting oneself simply as female has issues not unlike presenting oneself as anything for which the imaginations of your audience cannot easily adopt. If you are attempting to be an instructive figure as well, the challenge is even more severe.
I recently got into a bit of trouble addressing someone who called herself ‘thuqmami’. I was looking around for black content in the blogosphere and found a registry site called blogs of color. It turned out that it was undergoing construction, but 9 out of 10 links I found were dead. I considered it an embarrassment and said so. I was certainly passing judgment from the perspective of an upper-middle class middle-aged father from the old school, but I ended up being corrected. There actually is a difference between a ‘thuq’ and a ‘thug’. Thuqmami actually inherited the name and the site from someone else. After a time, we came to understand each other, but it took more than a few emails.
Goddess’ remarks brought to mind something that I did see very often, which was the flaming of younger more naive persons, especially women but all newbies , who were trying to express themselves artistically without any understanding or consideration of the conventions of online conversation. I seem to recall this happening often. One spot that I used to hang out in was Café Los Negroes. It was chocked full of people who felt it was their appointed duty to put a personal spin on everything that happened. So it was as much a billboard for certain characters to rant on with inside humor as it was a public hangout. Anyone who felt it important to creatively express their blackness was suddenly held to very rigorous, if arbitrary standards. A certain smallish clique of members would give each other affirmations on their own style of speak and observations, and others who came in fresh, especially those considered unorthodox would get the virtual equivalent of a cold shoulder. I recall that this seemed rather cruel for some.
So I think the reality of cyberspace is that black folks feel as though the kinds of relationships they have in real life will be the same kind that they have online and are sometimes surprised and/or ill equipped to deal with the real individuality of people they do meet. People seeking affirmation of their personal lives and relationships are just as often as not given a cold reception or condescended to for opening up their feelings online. It’s very easy for people to turn you off and decide not to care. I think it is a mistake for black folks to assume that all black oriented content online is expressly for them and people like them. They must recognize that the monolith is shattered. This ability of cyberspace to create connections ends up introducing people to each other with widely differing perspectives on what it means to be black, the negative experience of a failure to create community only reinforces the stereotype of black disunity. Considering how important the idea of unity has been, it is not surprising that black folks may tend to be more disappointed with online experiences than others.
Cyberspace is capable of establishing a type of communications that you wouldn’t be able to sustain in person and that is good. Cyberspace fails to maintain the quality and nuance of multi-sensory communication of community and flattens experience into the strictly literary and visual; this is destructive of the expectation of a beloved community. The distinction between advanced connectedness, which the Internet delivers, and real community, which it does not, is the difference between our expectations and reality.
Mike Bowen - Summer 2003
The full transcript of this forum can be found at Drylongso.
Recently Baldilocks argued that while white supremacy in the South was pernicious, the actions of Islamic terrorists is a while nother bag. In response I asked a few questions.
First things first.
When engaged in dialogue about white supremacy in the South, it's crucial that we understand what terror really looked like. When we think about Jim Crow, we usually think about separate facilities right? Separate bathrooms, separate restaurants, separate drinking faucets, separate schools. But imagine if you will a people without protection of the law. Imagine over 200 years of mob rule.
Take a look at the link above. Carefully. See the smiling faces of children? The proud faces of the men? Note also that these activities didn't take place in the dead of night, but rather in the middle of the day. While I don't believe in the Apocrypha about the term picnic, I can understand why some people do.
Now how in the hell could people actually get away with this? How could they go to sleep at night? How could they stay sane? Two words: Judeo-Christian ethic.
What Juliette is arguing is that there are no textual references in Islam that could create an Islamic version of Martin Luther King jr., like there are in Christianity. She is also arguing for a "pure" Christianity that was somehow tainted by racists who used it wrongly. To this I say two things:
1. What do you get when you run a search for "peace" in the Qu'ran?
2. If Christianity was used "wrongly" why did it take 335 years before it was used correctly?
The first question is important because Juliette is making an assumption that the text of the Qu'ran is geared towards violence and war. Passages on concepts like "peace" in comparison should be either difficult to find or narrowly tailored.
The second question is important because Juliette assumes that through a combination of time, and powerful words convincing people to act right, white Americans got their act together. If such a reading is correct, then it still begs the question of why it took so long for this to happen.
Second take onIslam and terrorism. Islam is approximately 1572 years old, dating from what I believe is the time of Muhammad's death. How old is what we think of as terrorism? Does it date back to the forties? To the twenties? For Juliette to make the argument that Islam is almost "naturally" a war prone religion, this question is important isn't it? If the first terrorist act were committed YESTERDAY for example, we wouldn't be accurate in calling Islam "warlike"...just as if Muslims engaged in mass lynchings for 1500 years straight we wouldn't necessarily be right in calling it
"peaceful."
The controversy over the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Inglewood has been brought to my attention once again. I am all for Wal-Mart for a number of reasons. Let me add more.
Wal-Mart, in my estimation, will inevitably drive other local businesses out of business. But I also am convinced that they will grow the amount of net business conducted in the area. But what of the downside, and specifically, what of black consumers and businesses? Is this mainstreaming not wanted?
It is still an open question as to what efficiencies black owned businesses provide operating in a black community. Lower marketing costs perhaps? Will these necessarily be passed on to the consumer? Or will it be that black consumers are willing to pay higher prices from black merchants?
We can take it for granted that Walmart's 'capital force projection' is sufficient to deliver low prices irrespective of their location. So even beyond the question of Ujamaa vs Black Capitalism vs Blackface Capitalism, we have the question of price. Assuming that Wal-Mart gets the green light in Inglewood, there will exist some overlap with regard to products and services available to the community. I for one, would love to see these premises tested head to head.
I made just such a request to someone I met at Earl Ofari Hutchinson's joint who said they represented the local Inglewood merchants, and said such data would be forthcoming. But he is just as likely to have lost my business card as I have his. Hopefully we'll hear him squawk again after the election.
My point again is that I don't believe there is sufficiently effective gravity in the current Democratic black politics to resist the material benefits of mainstream American life and those irrational arguments presented (e.g. contra Wal-Mart) which attempt to justify a racial exceptionalism are reactionary & theoretical, taking very little of blackfolks real lives into account. There is no reason to expect that African Americans themselves are any more or less resistant to the very idea of Wal-Mart than anyone else, yet since there is a preponderance of people who claim to represent blackfolks with anti-corporate and socialist labor philosophies, they assume that doing their work is 'black' work. The effect of blocking the expansion of Wal-mart into Inglewood is thus highly symbolic of what would be considered 'good' for blackfolks and if successful, can energize a lot of people. But while this could be considered a political victory for the left, it comes in direct contradiction to the broad calls for investment by mainstream corporations into heretofore neglected communities.
What is specifically ironic about this opposition to Wal-Mart's investment is that the most commonly used framework for arguing against capital infusions, gentrification, has not been employed. Wal-Mart is nothing if it is not downscale and of great benefit to those people with low incomes. I continue to shake my head.
A few years back Mel Farr, a former Detroit Lion running back, was run out of the car dealership business. Farr took a gamble on those who were credit risks, and their inability to pay, along with his own shady business practices eventually caught up with him. Reading this story reminds me a bit of Farr, but also makes me think about some of the hurdles folk have to jump through in order to fight racism. Note that the possibility that the dealer is shady AND that his superiors are racist isn't being considered. It's a zero sum game.
I'm not sure who the judge is in this case, but this is a clear victory for the side of the right and the just. While America is not the anti-racist nation it could be, it is not quite the racist nation that it once was. What that means for those of us who support Affirmative Action is that it is very difficult to gut Affirmative Action in a straightforward manner. It has to be cut a piece at a time, usually using minor to major forms of deception. As long as organizations maintain vigilance we should be ok. The trick though is still to build up k-12 given our 25 year window.
(Edited to add the question mark. Ward Bell notes that this probably shouldn't be called a "victory" given that signatures are still being collected. We'll know more soon, but he has a point.)
Twenty years ago today, Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father. The first song I can consciously recall hearing was Let's Get It On. I had just moved from Detroit to Inkster, was all of three years old maybe a bit more, and I was in what was probably a rent party given by my neighbors down the street. Today's news that Gordy is selling the last bit of Motown is utterly appropriate, and similarly tragic. Even though Gordy is as old as dirt...and to quote one of the Detroit Three, I am more interested in Ford's robots than I am in Motown (Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder being the exceptions), I cannot help but be saddened by this development.