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Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 July 2010
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Sunday, 6 June 2010
There's no way to articulate this better than the way Roger Ebert does is this essay.
How do they get to be that way?
That brings me back around to the story of the school mural. I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own? Yes, there was racism involved as my mother let the driver wait outside in the car, but my mother had not evolved past that point at that time. The hard-won social struggles of the 1960s and before have fundamentally altered the feelings most of us breathe, and we have evolved, and that is how America will survive. We are all in this together.
But what about the people in those cars? They don't breathe that air. They don't think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don't like those kids in the school. It's not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever "they" are.
How do they get to be that way?
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Sunday, 2 May 2010
DON’T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.
That's an ominous way to begin a column that proceeds to examine the reactionary immigration legislation recently passed in Arizona as a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" conundrum instead of a more populist "us vs. them" equation. But Rich makes a number of salient points.
Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.
True. Ever since Barack Obama's ascension to America's highest office become a fait accompli, segments of the population have become whirling dervishes, spitting out cultural molasses in their attempts to slow the force majeure of white descent as the majority demographic.
That's two French phrases in one paragraph. Need some Freedom Fries before we move on?
It wasn't election night that set these factions in motion. As soon as Obama began knee-capping Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race, the rumbling began. There's enough video of McCain supporters with monkey puppets and bigoted misspelled signs to fill several days worth of Fox News airtime, not to mention the countless Photoshop pics of the White House as a watermelon patch, or Obama caricatured as the Huggy Bear of 21st century American politics.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then loss of power most certainly turns folks into frightened, shrill dingbats.
Rich:
To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.
The legislators who voted for both it and the immigration law were exclusively Republicans, but what happened in the Arizona G.O.P. is not staying in Arizona. Officials in at least 10 other states are now teeing up their own new immigration legislation. They are doing so even in un-Arizonan places like Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and Nebraska, none of them on the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 list of the 10 states that contain three-quarters of America’s illegal immigrant population.
Ah, yes. The bed-wetting, hand-wringing, "what if they change the American symbol from a bald eagle to Cheech Marin?" crowd has mobilized, determined to dig into their very own ultranationalist Alamo, forgetting two key historical points - the Mexicans kicked Texian ass, and only two Alamo defenders survived.
But what of the current racial tensions permeating our national discourse? One hopes that clearer minds will prevail, but then again, no one puts Baby in the corner. And that's where many who have enlisted in the alabaster army fervently believe they've been forced.
It's not true, of course. Sadly, rational ideas and fear mix like the Gulf of Mexico and BP oil. Nate Silver could set the loyalist gringos straight with some metrics and fancy graphs and trendlines, but facts and figures are no match for cultural hysteria.
In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.
In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.
Sound the bugles, you pallid jingoists. Want to read a history book on your Kindle while you wait?
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Thursday, 22 April 2010
That's saying something, because the adopted homeland of CrankyPants McCain has long been known to suffer from prolonged sunstroke and poison cactus pricks. What else could explain the litany of strangeness?
Via Wonkette:
Despite its complete dependence on Big Government welfare water schemes and its many scenic environmentalist locations and plentiful Mexicans, Arizona has been America’s Wingnut Paradise for half a century. But by the 1980s, even Barry Goldwater was too subtle for the modern wingnut’s taste, so used-car salesman Evan Mecham served as governor for just 15 months. That was long enough for Ev to kill Arizona’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and make enough racist statements to cost the state $25 million in canceled conventions after a nationwide boycott was called by Stevie Wonder. Then a lot of other ridiculous stuff happened: Walnuts McCain releasing Sarah Palin upon the nation, the sheriff of Phoenix running pogroms against Latinos, the state officially endorsing racial profiling to finally clear its territory of Mexicans. What could come next? Oh yeah, birthers.
Arizona’s house of representatives on Wednesday passed a bill requiring candidates for the U.S. presidency to provide their birth certificate to the Arizona secretary of state. Ha ha, that’s surely not aimed at any particular president currently in the White House who will be running again in two years.
I suppose it's true that if you really are crazy, you don't think you are at all, so that might explain the inexplicable seriousness of Arizona's inanity. But I'm beginning to think there's a little more than lunacy at work.
With stances against illegal immigration (involving brown people), the birthing movement (involving a black person), backlash against Martin Luther King day (black person again), it's becoming abundantly clear that the Grand Canyon state would prefer a coat of whitewash on everything.
Or perhaps the entire state is just fuckin' nuts.
The largest chasm in Arizona isn't the one carved by the Colorado river. It's the distance between their old ideas and modern civilization.
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