← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 19061 | Posts: 21 | Started: 2005-07-09
2005-07-09 11:13 | User Profile
Over time, you see the same names get bandied about on boards like this: Podhoretz, Dershowitz, Perle, Kristol. One name I see practically friggin' everywhere, yet who rarely comes up for specific lambasting, is professional anti-racist wigger Tim Wise. And I mean [I]professional [/I] wigger: Wise earns his coin - and sizable bling it must be - solely from his efforts to subvert and destroy Western Civilization. (So you don't have to waste any effort wondering what [I]genre [/I] of humanity he belongs to.)
On the bright side, he's a strident anti-neo. After that, the light flickers out altogether. And - it must be said - it's not just Christian Zionism keeping the rank-and-file tuned to FOX News; it's that, nine times out of ten, when Bush is getting bashed on camera, it's usually a loathesome race traitor like this doing the bashing.
CV
[QUOTE]Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S., and has been called, “one of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous critics of white privilege in the nation,” by best-selling author and University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson.
Wise has spoken to over 80,000 people in 47 states, and on over 350 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale and Columbia. He has trained corporate, government, and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions, and has served as a consultant for plaintiff’s attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State. In summer, 2005, Wise will serve as an adjunct faculty member of the School of Social Work at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and conducted trainings with physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. In September 2001, Wise served as adjunct faculty at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he trained journalists to eliminate racial bias in reporting. From 1999-2003, Wise was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, and in the early ‘90s was Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized for the purpose of defeating neo-Nazi political candidate, David Duke.
Wise is the author of two books White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull Press) and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge). He has contributed essays to a dozen books and anthologies including White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism and Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations. Wise is also featured in White Men Challenging Racism: Thirty-Five Personal Stories (Duke University Press).
Wise received the 2001 British Diversity Award for best feature essay on race issues, and is a featured columnist with the ZNet Commentary Program: a web service that disseminates essays by prominent progressive and radical educators. His writings are taught at hundreds of colleges and have appeared in dozens of popular and professional journals. Wise serves as the Race and Ethnicity Editor for LIP Magazine, and articles about his work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle. He has been a featured guest on hundreds of radio and television programs, worldwide.
Wise has a B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University, where his anti-apartheid work received international attention and the thanks of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He and his wife Kristy are the proud parents of two daughters. [/QUOTE]
The next few posts on this thread will be Wise articles or excerpts. Forget Kristol or Horowitz or Suleyman or any of those guys as [I]windows into the Ashkenazi-American mentality[/I]....[U]this[/U] guy's shit is routinely jaw-dropping. The first one, though, I include because the [I]big horrible awful kicker [/I] to his "Grandma anecdote" is simply, shamefully flat-out hilarious.
[QUOTE][url]http://www.zmag.org/zmag//articles/july99wise.htm[/url]
Exploring the Depths of Racist Socialization
By Tim Wise
Every now and then a lesson comes easy. Other times we learn things by accident, if at all. And inevitably it seems, the lessons that matter most, often come from the least likely sources, and at the most inopportune moments. So much so, that if we aren't paying close attention, we'll miss them altogether. Such was the case last August when my paternal grandmother died, at the age of 78.
Although the passing of a relative may seem hardly appropriate as the jumping off point for a political commentary, it is precisely the oddity of it, which makes it all the more poignant and valuable. But first, a slight preface to what I'm trying to explain.
In the past few years I have had the good fortune to speak before nearly 60,000 people, in 40 states, on over 150 college campuses, and to dozens of community groups, labor unions, and government agencies about racism. Some audiences respond favorably, others not so much. But the message I deliver is always the same: those persons called "white" have a particular obligation to fight racism because it is our problem, created in its modern form by us, for the purpose of commanding power over resources and opportunities at the expense of people of color. Furthermore, all whites, irrespective of their liberal attitudes, "tolerance" for others, and decent voting records, have to address the internalized beliefs about white superiority from which we all suffer. No one is innocent. No one is unaffected by the daily socialization to which we are all subjected--specifically with regard to the way we are taught to think about persons of color in this society: their behaviors, lifestyles, intelligence, beauty, and so on.
Without question, convincing white folks--particularly those dear liberals who insist every other friend they have is black--that they too have internalized racist beliefs, even of a most vicious kind, proves the most difficult in the work I do. You can't prove the point with statistics, or poll numbers, or by pointing out the wide disparities in life chances that form the backdrop of American institutionalized racism. Convinced that they are free from the biases, stereotypes, and behaviors that characterize "real" racists, such persons inevitably seem the most resistant to the analysis offered here thus far.
It is with this in mind that I return to my grandmother. For her death--and more to the point, her life, right up until she died--offers more in the way of proof that racist socialization affects us all than anything I have experienced.
You see my grandmother was one of those good liberals. In fact, in many ways she was beyond liberal, particularly given the time and place in which she spent most of her life. Born in the Detroit area, she and her parents moved south in the 1920s. Her father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. A member that is, until the day in 1938 when his only daughter informed him that she had fallen in love with a Jewish man, and that in addition to that, his hatred of blacks was unconscionable to her. She then handed him his robes, and with her mother's approval, asked whether he was going to burn them, or if she was going to have to do it herself. She challenged him despite what must have been the palpable fear of standing up to a man who was none too gentle, and most certainly capable of violence. As it turns out, he would never attend another Klan meeting, and by all accounts changed his attitudes, changed his behaviors, indeed, changed his life.
Throughout her life she would stand up to racist bigotry on a number of other occasions: threatening to commit vehicular homicide on a real estate agent who sought to enforce restrictive covenants in her family's chosen Nashville neighborhood; standing up to racist comments whenever she heard them, from friends, family members, or total strangers. The fear which often paralyzes whites and makes us unwilling to challenge racism--described by James Baldwin as the fear of being "turned away from the welcome table" of white society--was something that played no part in her life. She was a woman of principle, and although not an activist, in her own way she nonetheless instilled in her children and grandchildren a sense of right and wrong which was unshakeable in this regard. She is in no small part responsible for who I am and what I do today.
But enough of the praise. Heaping accolades on the dead is not my intention here. For there is another part of this story which is less heartwarming, and yet more instructive and important than anything said heretofore. It is the part about my grandmother's death.
A few years ago it became obvious that MawMaw, as we knew her, was developing Alzheimer's disease at a fairly rapid pace. Anyone who has watched a loved one suffer with this condition knows how difficult it is to witness the deterioration that takes place. The forgotten memories come first. Then the forgotten names. Then the unfamiliar faces. Then the terror and anger of feeling abandoned. And finally, a regression back to a virtual infant stage of development, complete with the sucking in of one's lips so typical of newborns. It is a fascinating disease, in that it renders otherwise healthy persons helpless, eventually causing not only a mental meltdown, but a physiological one as well. It renders its victims incapable of reason or comprehensible thought. It saps the conscious mind of its energy, and therein lies the point of my story.
You see resisting the weight of one's socialization requires conscious thought. It requires the existence of the ability to choose. And near the end of my grandmother's life, as her body and mind began to shut down at an ever-increasing pace, this consciousness--the soundness of mind which had led her to fight the pressures to accept racism--began to vanish. Her awareness of who she was and what she had stood for her entire life disappeared. And as this process unfolded, culminating in the dementia ward of a local nursing home, an amazing and disturbing thing happened. She began to refer to her mostly black nurses by the all-too common term, which forms the cornerstone of white America's racial thinking. The one Malcolm X said was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country. Nigger. A word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but one that remained locked away in her subconscious despite her best intentions and lifelong commitment to standing strong against racism. A word that would have made her ill even to think it. A word that would make her violent if she heard it said. A word which, for her to utter it herself, would have made her, well, another person altogether. But there it was, as ugly, and bitter, and fluently expressed as it probably ever had been by her father.
Think carefully about what I'm saying. And why it matters. Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was-and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it reasserted itself and exploded with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed herself, for God's sake. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a nigger. America had seen to that--and no disease was going to strip her of that memory. Indeed, it would be one of the last words she would say, before she finally stopped talking at all.
Please understand my point: Given this woman's entire life, and the circumstances surrounding her slow demise, her utterance of a word even as vicious as nigger says absolutely nothing about her. But it speaks volumes about her country. About the seeds of pure evil planted deep in every one of us by our culture; seeds, which--so long as we are of sound mind and commitment--we can, choose not to water. But also seeds that left untended sprout of their own accord. It speaks volumes about the work white folks must do, individually and collectively to overcome that which is always beneath the surface; to overcome the tendency to cash in the chips which represent the perquisites of whiteness; to traffic in privileges--not the least of which is the privilege of feeling superior to others--not because of what or who they are, but rather because of what you're not: in this case, not a nigger.
In so many ways that's all whiteness ever meant, and all it needed to mean for those of European descent. To be white meant at least you were above them. If you had not a pot to piss in, at least you had that. To call another man or woman a nigger and to treat them the way one is instructed to treat such an untouchable is to assert nothing less than a property right. It is to add value to what DuBois called the "psychological wage" of whiteness. When my grandmother was strong and vibrant she had no need to take advantage of these wages, and indeed, often tried hard to resist them. But in weakness and confusion it became all that her increasingly diseased mind had left. And she called in the chips.
Maybe all this is why I'm so tired of other white folks trying to sell me bullshit like: "I don't have a racist bone in my body," or "I never notice color." See, MawMaw would have said that too. And she would have meant well. And she would have been wrong.
Fact is nigger is still the first word on most white people's mind when they see a black man being taken off to jail on the evening news. The first thing we think when we see Mike Tyson, Louis Farrakhan, or O.J. Simpson (as in "that murdering nigger"). Think I'm exaggerating? Then come with me to America's airports and have a drink with me at the bar the next time an African American other than Oprah, Michael Jordan, or Colin Powell makes the news. Take a cab ride with me anywhere in this country, and if the driver is white (or really anything but black), and the trip more than 15 minutes, see how long it takes for the word or its modern-day coded equivalents to spew forth from their mouth, once they find out what I do. Ask me what white folks yelled at black students who occupied the basketball court during a Rutgers/U. Mass game a few years back to protest racist comments by Rutgers' President. Fans who mere seconds before had been wildly cheering black basketball players, and yet could and did turn on a dime as soon as they were reminded of the racial battle lines which trump NCAA-inspired brotherhood every time. And then after that, tell me the one again about being colorblind. Let's go to Roxbury tonight, or East LA, or to the Desire housing projects in New Orleans, or to any MLK Boulevard in any city in America and then let's see how hard it is to spot melanin. Colorblind my ass.
Then once we're all through feeling bad for having been sucker-punched by racist conditioning just like everyone else, then please, for the love of God, let's learn to forgive ourselves. Our guilt is worthless, although, it should be said, far from meaningless. It has plenty of meaning: it means we aren't likely to do a damned thing constructive to end the system which took us in, conned us, and stole part of our humanity. And what those women at my grandmother's nursing home need and deserve--much more than a sniveling apology from embarrassed family members--is for me to say what I'm saying right now, and to encourage everyone to be brave enough to say the same thing. To put an end to this vicious system of racial caste. To spend every day resisting the temptations of advantage, which ultimately weaken the communities on which we all depend.
Those nurses knew and so do I why my grandmother could no longer fight. For the rest of us, there is no similar excuse available.[/QUOTE]
2005-07-09 11:29 | User Profile
Tim Wise claims to have been an atheist since age ten. He fits the typical profile of an anti-racist activist: evangelical atheist or heathen, "irreverent," scornful of ordinary white Christians. Now, doesn't that description ring awfully familiar? Non-Christian "White Nationalists" also tend to fit that profile.
2005-07-09 11:39 | User Profile
Hello Raina.
2005-07-09 13:37 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Origen]Tim Wise claims to have been an atheist since age ten. He fits the typical profile of an anti-racist activist: evangelical atheist or heathen, "irreverent," scornful of ordinary white Christians. Now, doesn't that description ring awfully familiar? Non-Christian "White Nationalists" also tend to fit that profile.[/QUOTE]
Many, maybe even the majority, of White Nationalists were conservatives before they became nationalists. But they realized that modern "Judeo-Christians" ignore racial issues and champion Israel.
Indeed, I myself went to church as a youth.
2005-07-09 13:50 | User Profile
Check out this exchange between Tim Wise and the folks at the "[B]Jewish Tribal Review[/B]". It turns out that hypocritical Wise is a veritable Rainaesque backstabbing manipulator:
[url]http://www.jewishtribalreview.org/wise2.htm[/url]
Petr
2005-07-09 14:02 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]Check out this exchange between Tim Wise and the folks at the "Jewish Tribal Review". It turns out that hypocritical Wise is a veritable Rainaesque backstabbing manipulator:[/QUOTE]Yet another Christ-hating Jewish atheist. We must oppose such swine to the fullest, but at the same time, remain cognizant of the fact that Christ-hating Nazi atheists are no better for our purposes.
2005-07-09 14:07 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]Many, maybe even the majority, of White Nationalists were conservatives before they became nationalists. If you mean the WNs found on Stormfront and VNN, I doubt it. Conservatives do not detest Christianity, the very basis of Western civilization. Christian nationalists realize that race is an empty shell without God.> But they realized that modern "Judeo-Christians" ignore racial issues and champion Israel. You must mean dispensationalists, who are a minority of Christians in the U.S. On the other hand, atheists are much more likely to be left-wing. The two categories have always gone together hand-in-glove. As for ignoring race, the most Christian parts of the country (the Midwest, Deep South) are also the most racist and segregated. The most secular parts are the most multiracial and multicultural. Do you really think it's an accident that more secularism has meant more race-mixing? Or that the Jewish organizations like the ACLU and American Atheists always advocate both secularism and multiracialism?
2005-07-09 15:09 | User Profile
[QUOTE]It turns out that hypocritical Wise is a veritable Rainaesque backstabbing manipulator[/QUOTE]
Yeah, Wise embodies the dictum of the three types of falsehood being [I]lies, damned lies and statistics.[/I]
Unfortunately, he addresses an awful lot of school groups (I assume his employee-seminars are joyless, mandatory-attendance affairs as eagerly anticipated by his audiences as root canals) and represents a very real and dangerous flank in the War Against White Society. It doesn't take much to convince kids that the devil they don't know has [I]gotta [/I] be better than the devil they do, but they don't always grasp that the lessons of Pandora's Box are worthless if learned after-the-fact.
Below is a mercifully-abridged primer of Mr Wise's Vital Messages To America.
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-12/19wise.cfm[/url] QUOTE whites, by virtue of our higher average scores, are of superior character to black and Latino students? Well, according to Webster’s Dictionary, the relevant definition of character is, “moral strength, self-discipline, fortitude.” That says nothing about academic performance, or intelligence however defined. Indeed, how could it? The Nazis were led by men who probably would have scored highly on the SAT; so too those who designed Napalm, or sanctioned the slaughter of America’s indigenous populations. So too Ted Bundy, or the young white man with the 1350 on his SAT and a slot in the freshman class at Berkeley, who murdered a young black girl in the bathroom of a Nevada casino a few years ago. So which is it? Should we judge people on the basis of character, or rather on the basis of previous academic achievement? I vote for character, because when it comes to which students have exhibited the most fortitude, defined as “the strength to bear misfortune and pain patiently and calmly,” there can be little doubt that students of color would come out on top. Which students, after all, have had to persevere against the odds more often: Which have had to bear the most pain? Whites whose membership in the racial majority allows us to go through life fairly oblivious to our own race and the role it plays in our everyday experience? Or students of color? To ask the questions is to answer them. For students who have faced obstacles of race and class to even partially overcome those obstacles and score a 1000 (out of 1600) on their SAT says something rather amazing about their character. If one starts a race three laps behind and finishes only two laps behind, is it not obvious that such a runner is objectively better than the one who hit the tape ahead of them? Didn’t they run faster, harder, with more determination? Didn’t they demonstrate character? And what of self-discipline, that other aspect of character to which Webster’s refers? Could it be that blacks would here too bump whites? Quite possibly: after all, blacks show far more restraint and self-control than their white peers when it comes to things like drug and alcohol abuse. So by all means, let’s encourage schools to judge students on the content of their character. Doing so would be a great way to promote diversity and racial equity at the same time, along with cutting down on substance abuse and mass violence related to that abuse. Perhaps over time, whites would even learn to assimilate to the black norm of hard work and sobriety, and begin to “act black,” which certainly couldn’t hurt their academic careers or our nation. After all, we would all reap the benefits of character-based standards, and an end to the damage done by smart but pathological members of the dominant majority. [/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-05/25wise.cfm[/url] [QUOTE]Oklahoma University's baseball coach Larry Cochell was fired recently, for using the n-word during off-camera conversations with two ESPN reporters. As sportswriter Joe Biddle put it, while Cochell's choice of words to describe one of his players was clearly unacceptable and deserving of censure, it was no more offensive than the casual use of the same term by blacks themselves About half of African Americans, when polled, say the word should never be used, and the other half argues that it can be used among blacks in certain contexts. But whether or not some in the black community continue to use the term, there is no reason why whites should audibilize it, ever. That most whites would call this a double standard is irrelevant. It's sort of like the old playground wisdom that I can talk about my momma, but you had damn well better not do the same. Double standard? Sure. But so what? That many whites won't be able to understand this simple point is testimony to nothing so much as our own sense of entitlement. [/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-08/02wise.cfm[/url] [QUOTE]As for the issue of rape, fears of black male sexual aggression have long occupied the fevered imaginations of racists, and translated into disparate treatment in the criminal justice system. Even today, for example, although blacks commit only 24 percent of all rapes, according to victim reports, they are 35 percent of all persons arrested for rape. In fact, the black share of overall sexual assaults is likely much smaller than 24 percent because victim reports only reflect sexual crimes against persons 12 and older. Yet supplementary crime data on sexual assaults against small children indicate that whites are nearly twice as likely to be involved in such crimes. If child sexual molestation and rape were considered along with the figures for victims 12 and older, the black share of overall rape would likely fall close to their population percentages, while the share committed by whites would skyrocket. [/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-06/01wise.cfm[/url] [QUOTE]Ask the average American to describe the typical drug user or dealer and they’ll say he’s a black male, even though blacks make up only thirteen percent of drug users and sixteen percent of dealers. Most dealers and 76 percent of users are white, according to federal data. Ask the average American to describe the typical violent criminal, and likewise they’ll say he’s a black male, although the Justice Department’s annual Victimization Survey indicates that African Americans commit only 26 percent of all violent crimes in a given year. Non-Hispanic whites commit the majority of such offenses, and thus, are the “typical” violent criminals. What’s more, the typical formula of “urban schools/urban kids of color bad,” “suburban schools/white kids good,” is also false. According to the Departments of Education and Justice, white high school students are more likely to bring a weapon to campus than blacks, and according to the Centers for Disease Control, white male seniors are twice as likely as black male seniors to bring a weapon to school. In fact, among all major racial and ethnic groups for which data is collected, blacks have the lowest rate of carrying weapons to school.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-05/18wise.cfm[/url] [QUOTE]If Jayson Blair did not exist, white America would have to create him. The confirmed New York Times plagiarist and all-around journalistic con man, after all, is the perfect foil for those whites who have always needed to find a dark face capable of confirming pre-existing biases towards, suspicions of, and fears about black people. Indeed we have long invented proofs to fit our prejudices. Racist beliefs about blacks and their propensity for savagery were confirmed (for racists at least) by slave rebellions. Racist beliefs about black intelligence are confirmed (for racists at least) by any black student who drops out of an elite college, no matter the reasons. And now there is Blair, who confirms (for racists at least) that blacks are a little less honest, a little less truly talented, and taking jobs from more capable whites because of misguided racial preferences; preferences that allow them to get away with fraud or shoddy work in a way that whites presumably never would be allowed to do. But really now, who are these folks trying to kid? The stock narrative of American history, created by whites to be sure, is nothing but a string of fabrications, after all. Christopher Columbus discovered America and was the first to prove that the world was round. Wrong. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then ‘fessed up to his father because he could not tell a lie, though apparently historians had no such compunction. The nation was founded by people who, despite their persecution of those with religious beliefs different from their own, were seeking religious freedom. Strike three. One nation, with liberty and justice for all: by now you probably get the picture. Truth be told, Jayson Blair is really quite the amateur trickster compared to the chroniclers of American propaganda and triumphalist pseudo-history. But this should come as no surprise, as the powerful by necessity must be more talented at bullshit than anyone else.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-04/30wise.cfm[/url] [QUOTE]Consider the words of Billy Graham, who has been exposed in a taped conversation with Richard Nixon exclaiming his love for Israel while simultaneously ranting about the “Jewish-controlled media” and their pernicious behind-the-scenes political machinations. Indeed, most fundamentalist Christians profess their love for Israel, all the while propagating the belief that Jews are destined for a lake of fire unless they accept Jesus as their personal savior: in other words, unless they cease to be Jews. Their Zionism is opportunistic at best: based solely on the hope that once the Jews return to Israel, the Messiah will soon follow, damning the Jews to hell in the process. Their goal of conversion is itself intrinsically hostile to Judaism, irrespective of their “love” for the Holy Land: after all, to convert the Jews to Christianity would be to complete an act of spiritual genocide; to end Judaism altogether. The fact that these fine folks might plant trees in Israel or say prayers for her survival hardly compensates for their desire to eradicate Judaism just as surely as Hitler sought to do so. [/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-06/24wise.cfm[/url] [QUOTE]Recently, when speaking to a group of high school students, I was asked why I only seemed to be concerned about white racism towards people of color. We had been discussing racial slurs, and a number of white students wondered why I didn’t get as upset about blacks using terms like “honky” or “cracker,” as I did about whites using words like “nigger.” On the one hand, of course, such slurs are quite obviously inappropriate and offensive, and ought not to be used. That said, I pointed out that even the mention of the words “honky” and “cracker” had elicited laughter; and not only from the black students in attendance, but also from other whites. The words are so silly, so juvenile, so utterly pathetic that they hardly qualify as racial slurs at all, let alone slurs on a par with those that have been historically deployed against people of color. The lack of symmetry between a word like honky and a slur such as “nigger” was made apparent in an old Saturday Night Live skit, with Chevy Chase and guest, Richard Pryor. In the skit, Chase and Pryor face one another and trade off racial epithets during a segment of Weekend Update. Chase calls Pryor a “porch monkey.” Pryor responds with “honky.” Chase ups the ante with “jungle bunny.” Pryor, unable to counter with a more vicious slur against whites, responds with “honky, honky.” Chase then trumps all previous slurs with “nigger,” to which Pryor responds: “dead honky.” The line elicits laughs all around, but also makes clear, at least implicitly that when it comes to racial antilocution, people of color are limited in the repertoire of slurs they can use against whites, and after all, you can’t put white people in their place when they own the place to begin with. Power is like body armor. And while not all white folks have the same degree of power, there is a very real extent to which all of us have more than we need vis-ÃÂ -vis people of color: at least when it comes to racial position, privilege and perceptions.
Consider poor whites. To be sure, they are less financially powerful than wealthy people of color. But that misses the point of how racial privilege operates within a class system. Poor whites are rarely typified as pathological, dangerous, lazy or shiftless the way poor blacks are, for example. Nor are they demonized the way poor Latino/a immigrants tend to be. When politicians want to scapegoat welfare recipients they don’t pick Bubba and Crystal from some Appalachian trailer park; they choose Shawonda Jefferson from the Robert Taylor Homes, with her seven children.
Skeptics might say that people of color can indeed exercise power over whites, at least by way of racially-motivated violence. Such was the case, for example, this week in New York City where a black man shot two whites and one Asian-Pacific Islander before being overpowered. Apparently he announced that he wanted to kill white people, and had hoped to set a wine bar on fire to bring such a goal to fruition. There is no doubt his act was one of racial bigotry, and that to those he was attempting to murder his power must have seemed quite real. Yet there are problems with claiming that this “power” proves racism from people of color is just as bad as the reverse. First, racial violence is also a power whites have, so the power that might obtain in such a situation is hardly unique to non-whites, unlike the power to deny a bank loan for racial reasons, to "steer" certain homebuyers away from living in “nicer" neighborhoods, or to racially profile in terms of policing. [/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]I found myself at the mall, passing a line of parents and their children, waiting to have a few seconds alone with Santa. You know Santa, right? The big white guy who only works one day a year and yet no one calls him lazy; the big white guy who exploits elf labor in a sweatshop for no pay while his wife does all the housework, and yet no one calls him a slave master; the big white guy who invades millions of homes on Christmas Eve and yet, no one arrests him for breaking and entering. Yeah, that one. Though there has been an attempt to make use of Santas of color in malls around the country lately, I think we can all agree this is pretty absurd: if Santa were black, there is little question he'd have been shot dead years ago in the vestibule of some New York City apartment by the NYPD's Street Crimes Unit. After all, how could the cop be sure that toy gun he was bringing to the child inside wasn't real? Better safe than sorry; and anyway, that bright red suit would make him a logical target, seeing as how red is the color favored by members of the Bloods street gang. But it wasn't this kind of irony about a black Santa that animated the comment I heard while strolling through the mall that day. No, it was pure racial resentment and nothing else leading the white woman, child in tow, to say to her friend, "don't you think it's silly to have these Black Santas? Everybody's trying to be so P.C. I mean, come on, a Black Santa? Everyone knows Santa is white." Her friend of course agreed. Everyone knows Santa--a make believe entity for those who haven't figured it out yet--is white. The insistence on the racial purity of this entirely fictional being, as if this was a real person, struck me as hilarious, and right up there with the folks who send get well cards to their favorite soap opera characters when they fall ill on the shows. Fantasy, reality, ah screw it, who cares? I'm starting to realize the awful truth: white people are certifiably insane.
It all made sense though once I passed the woman and noticed the holiday stationary and cards in her bag. The ones with the calming, soothing face of Jesus staring back at me. You know the Jesus I'm talking about right? The one with the pale skin, blue eyes, and rock-star good looks? Yeah, that one. The same Jesus that has occupied the minds of Western Christians for the last five centuries, ever since Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint his image, and used his lily-white cousin as the sitting model. Oh shit, I've stepped in it now. Questioning the ethnic heritage of Christ himself. Silly me, but I always had thought the Christ child was born in that part of the world we call the "Middle East," which, if we were being honest, we would easily recognize as basically a part of Africa, separated from the continent by the man-made Suez Canal. As such, the odds of him looking the way he does in churches across America are pretty much slim and none. But don't tell that to most of his followers: especially the ones who are white like me. [/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/1999-07/03wise.htm[/url] [QUOTE]Flipping channels, I stumbled across "Talk Back Live:" a CNN production, in which the host asks questions of guests, interspersed with comments from audience members, in what appears to be the food court of an Atlanta shopping mall. There I was informed by the host, who was discussing the Kosovar refugee crisis, that "We as Americans don't know how it feels to be driven from our homes, to be refugees, and we shouldn't take that for granted." And that was all it took. After all, when someone explains what "we" have or have not experienced - particularly if that person is white - it's best to pay close attention, and ask just who is this "we" anyway? Fact is, there are quite a few of "us" who need not be told to take seriously the thought of being uprooted from our homes, nor lectured to about ethnic cleansing. I'm thinking here of that part of "we" that is black, and knows that their very presence here "as Americans" can be explained by an act of forced removal; nor that part of "us" that is indigenous Indian, and has known little else since the white man first arrived; nor that part of "us" that is Chicano, and carries the collective memory of the theft of a large portion of what was Mexico.[/QUOTE]
I've saved the funniest, most absurdly self-important screed for last:
[url]http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/1999-06/june_20wise.htm[/url] [QUOTE]Occasionally when I'm speaking to college students, attempting to inspire at least a few to commit themselves to social justice, I'm asked the question for which there is no easy answer: "What's the point? Can you make a difference? Why fight against such incredible odds?" It's one of those rare times during a lecture when the speaker has to stand in a figurative sense naked before those one hopes to inspire.
And it's a good question, after all. There is much to suggest that justice, peace and equity are pipe dreams; the bombing of Yugoslavia; the embargo against the people of Iraq; the passage of welfare "reform"; the expansion of the prison-industrial-complex. "Don't these ominous trends,' they ask, 'ever make you want to throw up your hands and quit?"
There was a time when I might have said yes to that question, but not anymore. And what made the difference was a letter I received many years ago from Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa; a letter he sent to the anti-apartheid group I co-founded at Tulane University in which he thanked us for sending information on Tulane's investments in apartheid-complicit firms-information which convinced him to reject the school's offer of an honorary doctorate.
As if knowing that those of us involved in the divestment battle were doubting our relevance, he offered a profound rationale for the work of any freedom fighter: "You do not do the things you do because others will necessarily join you in the doing of them, nor because they will ultimately prove successful. You do the things you do because the things you do are right."
There's much to be said for such simplicity, as it's usually a lack of complication which allows people to feel. Religion, after all, isn't terribly complex, but has inspired, for good and evil, millions around the world. There is something to be said for knowing you did all you could to stop a war, eliminate racism, or improve your community. There is something to be said for a good night's sleep, and the ability to wake in the morning, look oneself in the mirror, and never doubt that if you died before lunch, you would have lived a life of integrity. Sure, some roll their eyes at such talk; but for others - folks desperate for lives of principle and substance - the answer is meaningful. They are desperate for someone to assure them they can do it, and unless we reach them before the "real world" begins to feel like a burden and they develop an interest, proprietary or otherwise in maintaining the status quo, they will likely drift, moved to action rarely if ever, having had to compromise so much so soon. [/QUOTE]
2005-07-09 15:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Origen]If you mean the WNs found on Stormfront and VNN, I doubt it. Conservatives do not detest Christianity, the very basis of Western civilization. Christian nationalists realize that race is an empty shell without God.You must mean dispensationalists, who are a minority of Christians in the U.S. On the other hand, atheists are much more likely to be left-wing. The two categories have always gone together hand-in-glove. As for ignoring race, the most Christian parts of the country (the Midwest, Deep South) are also the most racist and segregated. The most secular parts are the most multiracial and multicultural. Do you really think it's an accident that more secularism has meant more race-mixing? Or that the Jewish organizations like the ACLU and American Atheists always advocate both secularism and multiracialism?[/QUOTE]
Modern Christian churches often promote racial egalitarianism. So they are actually left-wing churches. In fact, there are few truly conservative churches in America these days.
2005-07-09 18:43 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Franco]Modern Christian churches often promote racial egalitarianism.
Name one modern, Western institution that doesn't promote racial egalitarianism.
So they are actually left-wing churches.
Not necessarily. The term 'left-wing' is actually pretty meaningless when it comes to 'racial egalitarianism' or whatever. In fact, it just doesn't apply at all. If you want to talk of 'conservative churches', then I would say that America has the most 'conservative' churches in all Western Christendom. Of course I am speaking of doctrine, which is the only area a descriptive term like 'conservative' would be applicable.
2005-07-09 20:34 | User Profile
And as this process unfolded, culminating in the dementia ward of a local nursing home, an amazing and disturbing thing happened. She began to refer to her mostly black nurses by the all-too common term, which forms the cornerstone of white America's racial thinking. The one Malcolm X said was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country. Nigger.
:lol: The Negroes probably referred to themselves as "niggas" all day long so she probably picked up on that. Also, senior citizens sometimes have very good long term memories despite mental "diseases." So the fake, phony brainwashing of the politically correct environment is washed away revealing the true essense of what she was dealing with.
2005-07-09 21:21 | User Profile
This is hilarious.> Perhaps over time, whites would even learn to assimilate to the black norm of hard work and sobriety, and begin to “act black,” which certainly couldn’t hurt their academic careers or our nation. After all, we would all reap the benefits of character-based standards, and an end to the damage done by smart but pathological members of the dominant majority. I wondered who would take this guy seriously, and found this> One thing can be said for conservatives: they are nothing if not unoriginal.
This truism was driven home yet again recently when I found myself in a debate over affirmative action with such a person, who insisted that folks like me, by virtue of our support for the concept, had abandoned the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. A freeper or a dittohead preaching the wisdom of MLK is easy pickings for him. With someone like JewishTribalReview, all he can do is throw a temper tantrum.
2005-07-09 22:00 | User Profile
I wish I had time to do justice to the writing and thinking of ol' Tim-Tim (and maybe some time I will), but note how he seems to be tucking into the "racism" issue with vigor enough to indicate to me that he feels some heat from our side. That is, he doesn't just drone with the usual left-wing crap, he seems to be trying to incorporate what we say and argue into his stuff.
He debated Jared Taylor (link on his page and AR's).
Tim-Tim v. the Horowitzim:
[url]http://www.zmag.org/RaceWatch/wisehoro.htm[/url]
2005-07-10 05:44 | User Profile
I'll give Wise more credit than I did, seeing that he debated Jared Taylor.
[url=http://www.amren.com/interviews/wisetaylor.htm]Debate transcript[/url]
He argues with more rigor in his debate with Taylor than he does in the fatuous essays Il Ragno quoted, but he still plays his games.> If you look at the National Center for Education statistics or the Department of Education data, you’ll find, for example, that rates of both criminal, violent and criminal property victimization in suburban schools that are overwhelmingly white has been equal to, if not slightly higher, than the rates of violence in schools that are in the inner city and heavily black and brown. I'm not familiar with the study he cites, but since it lumps physical violence and vandalism into the same category, I strongly suspect it was designed to conceal racial differences.
Horowitz called Wise a self-hating Jew. But in the debate Wise makes clear that only his paternal grandfather is Jewish, which means that he is not a member of the Tribe by the Tribe's own rules. A wanna-be, perhaps. A traitor, for sure.
2005-07-10 06:28 | User Profile
In that particular column where he mentions that only his father's father is Jewish, he [I]begins [/I] the essay with "I am a Jew." Not I have Jewish ancestry or I'm the sort of neo-Jew most hardcore sheenies won't accept.
He plays the same games with his bloodline that he does with his precious statistics. Like saying 'blacks are only responsible for 26 per cent of rapes' when they're 10% of the population, or 'discovering' that the FBI crime statistics are racist (thus 'unreliable').
2005-07-10 08:59 | User Profile
[B]She could not remember how to feed herself, for God's sake. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. [COLOR=Red]But she could recognize a nigger. America had seen to that--and no disease was going to strip her of that memory. Indeed, it would be one of the last words she would say, before she finally stopped talking at all[/COLOR].[/B]
So, the only sensible thing ever to cross Granny Jewhumper's sucked-in lips did so only after she became completely Milky in the Filbert. I wonder if she made turd-effigies of her nurses after the hourly self-beshittings.
2005-07-11 00:16 | User Profile
Tim Wise is a complete fraud.
[URL=http://www.gnxp.com]Gene Expession[/URL], a web log about scientific [and racial] reality, wrote a very good commentary on Wise's exchange with Jared Taylor.
[url]http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004046.html[/url]
2005-07-11 01:02 | User Profile
Note that the author is forced to backtrack on his dismissal of Taylor...if not his [I]socialized distaste [/I] for him.
[QUOTE]Taylor has psychotically argued that it is more ethically “justified from a genetic point of view” (whatever that means??) for a person to prevent the immigration of two African blacks into America than it is for them to save their own drowning child; a nonsensical, poorly justified ethic that Taylor (who obviously doesn’t have children himself) is actually promoting. But [B]according to the Bamshad results, what would actually be “justified from a genetic point of view” would be for a white person to prefer the immigration of, or to save the life of a black person over another white person about 1/3 of the time – an ethic which actually contradicts White Nationalism. [/B] Taylor, of course, already knew what his ethics were, the ludicrous quasi-scientific gene rationale was drawn entirely post hoc from the newly minted church of Frank Salter. The Salter crowd, including academic White Nationalists like Kevin MacDonald, is the far Right version of what Alan Sokal was scathingly exposing on the far Left, where [B]marginalized political philosophies, seeking depth and legitimacy, turn themselves into cargo cults by co-opting the language of math and science. What else can we call it when intellectually decadent academics mine terms and ideas from biology, and use them out of their original functional scientific context to promote ethno-states? [/B] How is it different from those other Post-Modern academics on the other side of the political spectrum who use out-of-proper-context terms from physics to promote socialism?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Gregory Cochran and Birch Barlow have brought to my attention that the claim that [B]people from different races are more genetically similar 1/3 of the time, whether the intended interpretation of Bamshad's paper or not, is [U]not true[/U] [/B] except for single DNA segments.
So the criticisms of Taylor for making this claim must be retracted, which is no small admission. Though I will add that criticisms of Taylor based on poorly justified ethics and Sokal-worthy Salterism are not related to, and hence effected by, this news. [/QUOTE]
Of course, author Jason Malloy can't be entirely faulted. Having taken 1500 words or so to point out, time and again, that Tim Wise is an opportunistic liar by examining his claims [U]as science[/U], and denuded of their sociological intent...he almost [I]has[/I] to scrape up some good old-fashioned snooty disdain for the Racist and his mean-spirited [I]ethno state[/I] just to maintain the facade of even-handedness.
Heck, no PhD in genetics is even required to hack [I]that [/I] one. Any second-grade schoolteacher can tell you all about [I]punishing both boys involved in the fight, regardless of who instigated it[/I].
2005-07-11 03:15 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Note that the author is forced to backtrack on his dismissal of Taylor...if not his [I]socialized distaste [/I] for him. [/QUOTE]
True, but Gene Expression is not a White Nationalist, or, for that matter, any nationalist web log. They are mostly libertarians [and mostly graduate students in the biological sciences] who recognize that there are racial differences.
They are useful for pointing out that race exists and keeping abreast of current scientific research, even if they offer no solutions beyond the typical libertarian prescriptives.
2005-07-11 03:27 | User Profile
Oh, I know, I'm already familiar w/ the site. Just thought I'd point out that no one espousing loyalty to white folks can ever expect to get off without at least a stern warning. If Taylor's citing of scientific writing had been impeccable (and he's a damn sight better at it than Wise), the author - simply to preserve his own 'credibility' - would have to at least shoehorn in an expression of his personal disgust at Taylor's politics.
I don't care how specialized the forum is or how esoteric a niche its readership falls in; you've got to take a moment to characterize the guy resisting race-suicide as some sort of defective - psychotic, delusional, mean-spirited - whether you even believe it or not. Some (very brave) scientist ought to study that phenomenon sometime.
2005-07-11 03:49 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] I don't care how specialized the forum is or how esoteric a niche its readership falls in; you've got to take a moment to characterize the guy resisting race-suicide as some sort of defective - psychotic, delusional, mean-spirited - whether you even believe it or not. Some (very brave) scientist ought to study that phenomenon sometime.[/QUOTE]
I believe they have; Professor Kevin MacDonald and Professor William Pierce examined this phenomenon in depth. The proper socological term is, I believe, Jewish theocracy--amazingly enough, all academics who wish to preserve their respectability have stridently denied its existance.