The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Many people are rightfully concerned about the creation of a police state in Arizona (and now, Texas, since apparently, Texas intends to put a similar law in place. MY fear is more long-term, more about the confluence of economic interests and insidious law. In America, we already have an example of a history of laws passing over time that gradually targetted a particular people, in pursuit of the agricultural interests of the south – and that example is what eventually became the legal framework of slavery. Here is a brief overview of some of the issues:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p263.html

Whatever the status of these first Africans to arrive at Jamestown, it is clear that by 1640, at least one African had been declared a slave. This African was ordered by the court “to serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere.”

The grounds for this harsh sentence presumabley (sic) lay in the fact that he was non-Christian rather than in the fact that he was physically dark. But religious beliefs could change, while skin color could not. Within a generation race, not religion, was being made the defining characteristic of enslaved Virginians, The terrible transformation to racial slavery was underway.

emphasis mine

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p270.html

• Philip Cowen Case: At her death in 1664, a Mrs. Amye Beazlye left to her cousin a black servant named Philip Cowen. The will stated that Cowen should work for the cousin for eight years, then be given his freedom and three barrels of corn and a suit of clothes. At the end of the eight years, the cousin extended the contract three years. At the end of those three years, he informed Cowen that another nine years of service was due. In 1675, Cowen petitioned the court for his freedom. The court sided with Cowen, asking the owner to release him from servitude and to pay him the corn and the cost of a suit.

• Fernando Case: A bondservant for life, Fernando petitioned the court in 1667 for his freedom, arguing that, since he was a Christian and had spent several years in England, he should serve no longer than an Englishman was required to serve. The court dismissed the suit. Fernando appealed to a higher court. (Unfortunately, no record of the higher court’s decision exists.)

(there are two other cases at this link)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p262.html

Three servants working for a farmer named Hugh Gwyn ran away to Maryland. Two were white; one was black. They were captured in Maryland and returned to Jamestown, where the court sentenced all three to thirty lashes — a severe punishment even by the standards of 17th-century Virginia. The two white men were sentenced to an additional four years of servitude — one more year for Gwyn followed by three more for the colony. But, in addition to the whipping, the black man, a man named John Punch, was ordered to “serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.” John Punch no longer had hope for freedom.

That’s the legal background to the gradual erosion of even the limited rights African Americans had at the founding of this nation, until the legal framework was built up to decide, once and for all, that brown people born slaves should remain so their entire lives, and not as people even, but as property. So, a people arrive in the country with iffy legal status are gradually reduced to permanent slave status. But how about people whose legal status is known? How about free blacks?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p325.html

The passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, fueled a huge and vastly profitable underground industry that took full advantage of the inferior legal status of free and enslaved blacks. The law made it possible for a white person to claim any black person as a fugitive, and placed the burden of proof on the captive. Free blacks living in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other cities near the borders of slave states were especially vulnerable, though several well-known cases demonstrate that no state was immune.

Slave speculators (or slavers) — who legally purchased the rights to runaways, captured them, and then resold them at a profit — often seized blacks at random, banking on their inability to prove their status to the satisfaction of a magistrate. In one case, a slave speculator who attempted to seize AME Bishop Richard Allen found himself in debtors’ prison, charged with attempted kidnapping, false accusation and perjury by Allen, who dropped the charges several months later.

I would like to think that we are so far past this as a country that this could never happen to Mexicans in the south, who are working as day laborers in agricultural fields, but since in some cases Mexicans have already seen slavery conditions, and given our low level of sympathy for Mexicans as our suspicions about the legal migrant status is provoked, are they really so far off from the precarious position African Americans were in so long ago?

I don’t think so.

QT

A Turning Point for Voting Rights Law – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.
The New York Times has created a blog called “Room for Debate” – in which prominant Times contributors debate various thorny issues in the news.  It is a wonderful contribution to the ongoing struggle for genuinely trustworthy, nonpartisan education on various issues, and I heartily recommend it.

This issue relates to the  Voting Rights Act reauthorization – and I’m posting because so far I feel myself unable to follow the argument.  The argument (and therefore presumably, the law itself) seems to hinge on two separate issues, but commentators seem to address only one at a time.  The first is a concern about laws that would prohibit or suppress minority (in general, black in particular) votes, and the second is a concern about districting.  While I can see how they are related – they don’t seem to be the same at all – and it seems therefore that those in favor and those opposed to recertification are talking past each other.

I’ll be digging more into the issue – but if anyone has more to share on the topic, please do!

QT

The Tragedy And Betrayal Of Booker T. Washington – Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi’s BEST post ever.  He may not think so, but this is a very cogent piece of writing.  Read it.  A quick sample:

In retrospect, this was a grievous error. In point of fact, whites actually did have an existential objection to black people. Their beef wasn’t that illiterates and moral degenerates might get too much power. Quite the opposite. Their beef was that blacks would prove to not be illiterates and moral degenerates, and thus fully able to compete with them. To see this point illustrated, one need only look at the history of race riots in the South. When white mobs set upon black communities they didn’t simply burn down the “morally degenerate” portions–they attacked the South’s burgeoning black middle and working class and its institutions. They went for the churches, the schools and the businesses. It’s one thing to be opposed to black amorality. It’s quite another to be opposed to black progress. The lesson blacks took post-Atlanta Compromise was that whites had used the former to cover for the latter. These days, it’s popular to bemoan the fact that Washington has fallen into disfavor. But it wasn’t blacks who proved the Atlanta Compromise fraudulent–it was the whites of that era.

There’s been a lot of talk on the left that Michael Steele’s ascension to the head of the Republican party represented a degree of tokenism. I’ve long argued that tokenism or not, the fact of the matter is that years ago (not too many) it wouldn’t have even been possible, and furthermore – the man won by election – not by fiat. And of course, he won because President Barack Obama led the way to making it possible for the a black man to be the recognized leader of a major United States political party. Stomping all over that achievement just because it was republicans and not democrats, doesn’t work for me.

Anyway – here’s a news story that demonstrates even more powerfully, just how much Steele’s election really DOES matter: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18627.html

Michael Steele owes his dramatic victory in the race for Republican National Committee chairman to votes from island territories outside the 50 United States. Now, the question is what else he owes them.

The residents of the five territories, from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea to the tiny Northern Marianas in the Pacific Ocean, provided Steele with a bloc of 15 votes – one more than his margin of victory – when they swung into his camp late in the balloting last week.

Interesting. 15 votes from the islands. You know what? I’m betting that most of those voters are black and hispanic. Call me crazy, but – I think Mr. Steele has an agenda.

Moreover – the “black vote” is nowhere near as homogenous as people claim. African-Americans form only one part of the “black vote” and I’d argue that it is probably a solid block – maybe about 75% democratic leaning. But Africans and folks from the Carribean are more than likely a bit less homogenous – their experience in America differs significantly from the African American experience, though there are many touchpoints of solidarity, including the confrontation with racism on a daily basis. Hispanics, on the other hand, have never been a solid block – there’s always been a republican set and a democratic set of voters within the Hispanic community.

Anyone really want to shortchange Chairman Steele? I recommend seriously against it.

Remember that saying? That was early hip hop/r & b. Don’t know if white people talked about the flip side – I think the mainstream term was “B” side, from which you also got “B” movies (I think). Anyway…

I quoted on this blog and elsewhere, with some bemusement, about some whites who were clearly either racist, ignorant, or both, but who were voting for Barack Obama. I recalled with a good deal of approval, the Ohio man who thought Obama was a muslim, but was leaning toward voting for him anyway. (And this was BEFORE the financial meltdown!) I quoted somewhere the couple who proudly declared that they were “voting for the n*gg*r”. Change comes slow – and people are who they are. I appreciated all the stories like that. These, after all, are the white folks who won’t be easily integrated – but who will, it seems, be able to live comfortably in a pluralistic world, just the same.

OK, but that’s me looking at white people. What’s on the flip side? As is always true – there is no equivalence here – there is no racism against whites in this video – but having said that – this video is not safe for work…

Jay-Z My President is black Remix LIVE 1-18-09 from pleasedontstare.com on Vimeo.

H/T Ta Nehisi Coates

QT

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/even_more_prop_8.php

One guess at what group feels they were robbed of “meaningful gender identities,” and thus likely long for them with a much greater intensity than the rest of the populace. It’s quite likely that the same impulse that would attract men by the hundreds of thousands of men to the Million Man March–the sense that something had been lost–is the same impulse them that would lead them to reject an expansion, and to their mind, a redefinition of marriage.

A very good point. Another: the feeling that black people’s marriages are persistently under attack. A clinging to traditional marriage as a cure for some of the ills that affect black people is a characteristic of black America that is under-appreciated.

This is from Richard Ford’s article that Ta-Nehisi is quoting:

After all, traditional marriage isn’t just analogous to sex discrimination—it is sex discrimination: Only men may marry women, and only women may marry men. Same-sex marriage would transform an institution that currently defines two distinctive sex roles—husband and wife—by replacing those different halves with one sex-neutral role—spouse. Sure, we could call two married men “husbands” and two married women “wives,” but the specific role for each sex that now defines marriage would be lost. Widespread opposition to same-sex marriage might reflect a desire to hang on to these distinctive sex roles rather than vicious anti-gay bigotry. By wistfully invoking the analogy to racism, same-sex marriage proponents risk misreading a large (and potentially movable) group of voters who care about sex difference more than about sexual orientation.

After all, many opponents of same-sex marriage don’t oppose gay rights across the board. In California, same-sex couples enjoy significant civil rights protections and legal status as domestic partners, and voters have shown no interest in changing that. National polls show that overwhelming majorities support employment-based gay rights, including equal access to careers in the military, and same-sex civil unions. It’s only when it comes to marriage—the word, with its religious as well as civic connotations—that pro-gay sentiment dwindles: Recent polls show that only 30 percent to 36 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. It’s this finding, of course, that the results of last week’s elections echo.

The sharp differences in the polling numbers, depending on whether the question is marriage as opposed to almost any other gay rights issue, suggest that opposition to same-sex marriage isn’t simply the 21st century’s form of racism. After all, whites who opposed racial miscegenation in the Jim Crow South didn’t support other civil rights for blacks or civil unions for mixed-race couples. In fact anti-miscegenation laws worked hand-in-glove with laws prohibiting sex outside of marriage and intimate cohabitation of unmarried adults to effectively outlaw interracial intimacy altogether. When Mildred Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, successfully challenged Virginia’s law barring interracial marriage, they were not just fighting for social acceptance and hospital visitation rights. They were fighting a jail sentence, suspended on the condition that they leave the Virginia and never return together: effective banishment from the state. Anti-miscegenation laws were designed to prevent intimate racial mixing of any kind; by contrast, many of the people who voted to ban same-sex marriage are apparently supportive of same-sex intimacy—provided you don’t call it marriage.

Coates is not overwhelmingly persuaded, but I quoted more than he did because I think there’s a “there” there.

QT

The purpose of this blog is to avoid partisan politics but to talk about this time – the effect of the Obama candidacy on our country. I’ve focused mainly on race, though I’d hoped to get into discussion of gender (Sarah Palin helped me focus there a bit) and the wider discussion of culture – proposition 8 brought out a culture discussion, but I also hoped to talk a little bit about some of the right in front of our face happenings – like when Obama brought the house down doing his brush his shoulders bit. What a moment!

The Republican Party is having a bit of an identity crisis as a result of the Obama and Palin candidacies. Sarah Palin rallied the religious conservative base of the Republican party while wholly alienating the conservative “elite.” Given a choice, I’d choose that “conservative elite” – education and thoughtfulness deserve to be not only acceptable, but preferred qualities. Barack Obama exemplifies both, which in the long run thrilled his supporters (more on this later!). But the landslide victory of Obama over McCain was partially the result of African Americans and Latino voters going overwhelmingly for Obama. Combine that with an overwhelming youth vote favoring Obama, including a good chunk of evangelical youth, and you can see the problem the republican party is having – demographically they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The internal debate on this very issue has begun – with Gov. Michael Steele, one of the most prominant African-Americans in the Republican party – stepping up to run for the chairmanship of the party. And here is a debate between Pat Buchanan and a republican strategist – who happens to be African American:

QT

Jesse Jackson was caught on tape offering to castrate Obama for “talking down” to black folks and telling “n*gg*ers” how to behave. On The View, Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck sparred over the racial slur, with Whoopi arguing that blacks can use the word while whites can’t. Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaks into the issue with well-appreciated nuance and good sense. And so, I tried really hard to think about where I stand with it all.

It is true that there is some nuance in which calling another black person “n*gg*r” is indeed a sign of affection. That is – I can conceptualize it. I can conceptualize it in a humorous content (the way the word “fool” can be used in a teasing, affectionate way), and I have heard and understood brothers talking to one another that way. And because I recognize the inflection, I don’t flinch or even blink when someone uses it. I don’t have any personal affectionate usages of the word – don’t hang hard enough to have acquired the street sense of the word. But I get it.

For white folks who don’t it’s easy enough to explain. There is a clear difference – CLEAR difference, between two women calling each other “b*tch* affectionately, and a man doing it. Unless that man knows that woman REALLY well, and there’s a high degree of trust between them, under no circumstances will the term be well received. (BTW, Elisabeth Hasselbeck was crying over the potential use of the words in front of children. I think that the majority of us, unless we are heavy on the street cred, won’t use coarse language in front of children, so I’d like to take that argument off the table. If we don’t use coarse language in front of children but do use coarse language – the sense of the word n*gg*er and b*tch that I’m using falls in the exact same category.)

So it seems very clear to me that this argument that no one can ever use these words EVER just because white people (or conversely, men) can’t use these words willy nilly is just silly – it’s the ‘reverse discrimination’ argument run amok. We all can conceptualize circumstances in which it simply isn’t an outrage to use the words – and no amount of whining from the dominant culture on the issue is going to change this fact.

BUT… as a Baha’i, it occurs to me that we are missing the point if we leave it to purely situational ethics. Religion purports to give guidance on right and wrong that transcends situational ethics, and it occurs to me that this is one of those times when consulting the scripture might not be a bad idea. The thing is – it troubled me. It troubles me to see certain white folks, who likely call blacks “n*gg*r” all the time, complaining that they can’t do it openly. Those type of folks – you just KNOW that they aren’t being affectionate in their usage. And, here was Jesse Jackson – also CLEARLY not being affectionate in his usage. He’s calling black folks names – and he wants to be able to do it under his breath, the same way racist white* people do, while complaining that Obama wants to encourage improvement for blacks. And – he gets a bye on the subject… because he’s black, and because we all know – we black folk ALL know, just how prevalent it is in the black community for some of us to call others of us the “n” word in a less than affectionate manner. We on’t like it when whites do it, because there’s an inherent threat of an overwhelming prejudice – but we fail to notice the inherent threat of internalized self-loathing – buying into the frame that says that black people ARE n*gg*rs, or for that matter, that women ARE b*tches.

As I thought this through – I called to mind a central teaching of the Baha’i Faith – that we are created noble, and that it is we ourselves who make ourselves less than that. The Hidden Words from the Arabic say:

22. O SON OF SPIRIT!
Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.

(Baha’u'llah, The Arabic Hidden Words)

And that seems to be the crux whereupon this argument stops, at least for me. The term “b*tch” isn’t a noble title for a woman, nor is the term “n*gg*r” a noble one for blacks. These words, hurled at people to abase, have not yet proven to be capable of ennobling. This isn’t the Christians at Antioch – embracing the word “Christian” because they were proud followers of Christ. This is the anglo saxon for a female dog (funny that Islam is condemned for having some sects classify women and dogs as unclean, while we in the west call women dogs…), and the slurred adaptation of the word for black. Nothing wrong with being black – but the intent of the word is to keep blacks separate – apart from the human family.

So I’ve decided, finally, that while I agree with those who say that the words mean something different when people in the affected group use them, I also agree with those who argue that the words ought not be used.

I found a couple of other quotes dealing with language, and how we speak – and I wanted to reference them – just as a record of the ideal – that our speech ought to be harmonizing and uplifting, not tearing one another down.

44. O COMPANION OF MY THRONE!
Hear no evil, and see no evil, abase not thyself, neither sigh and weep. Speak no evil, that thou mayest not hear it spoken unto thee, and magnify not the faults of others that thine own faults may not appear great; and wish not the abasement of anyone, that thine own abasement be not exposed. Live then the days of thy life, that are less than a fleeting moment, with thy mind stainless, thy heart unsullied, thy thoughts pure, and thy nature sanctified, so that, free and content, thou mayest put away this mortal frame, and repair unto the mystic paradise and abide in the eternal kingdom for evermore.

(Baha’u'llah, The Persian Hidden Words)

Consort with all men, O people of Baha, in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship. If ye be aware of a certain truth, if ye possess a jewel, of which others are deprived, share it with them in a language of utmost kindliness and goodwill. If it be accepted, if it fulfill its purpose, your object is attained. If anyone should refuse it, leave him unto himself, and beseech God to guide him. Beware lest ye deal unkindly with him. A kindly tongue is the lodestone of the hearts of men. It is the bread of the spirit, it clotheth the words with meaning, it is the fountain of the light of wisdom and understanding.

(Baha’u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p. 15)

__________________________
*Racist white people =/= all white people. I shouldn’t have to say that, but in this current climate, it’s important to be clear – white people are not all racist, and certainly aren’t all itching to use racially charged language.