Mary Sisney's Blog - Posts Tagged "clarence-thomas"

As horrifying as the events of the past week have been--two more unarmed black men killed by the police, five Dallas police officers who were protecting protesters killed by a too well-armed, insane black male veteran--I have been encouraged by some of the responses. As usual, Obama's (Dallas) speech on the topic was eloquent and balanced, although some may have thought he was a bit too easy on the police; other politicians/talking heads called for more empathy and less blame. I have written about this topic so often and for so long that I am growing tired of it. But I can't keep quiet when so many others who know and care so little about race relations continue to talk and write. So here are my solutions to the "black and blue" problem:

1) Let's talk. People who think racism will disappear if we just stop talking about it are as ignorant as the people who think Obama was born in Kenya or that Donald Trump is going to build a wall, paid for by the Mexicans, between Mexico and the USA. As I've said many times lately, racism is like cancer and termites; we can't eliminate it if we don't know where it is. We need to talk not just to people in our own race or those sympathetic to our cause but to those on the other side. I'm not as cool as Obama, so I have tried to avoid talking to bigots face to face (I don't want to go to jail), but I've enjoyed debating them on Google+ and in other social media forums where I know I can maintain my cool. I've actually even made a few of them think and show me some respect, although most just block me, usually when I mention Obama's white mother. White people with black and other nonwhite friends and nonwhite people with white friends, you need to talk to your friends about race. If you can't talk to them about it, they are not your friends, and you shouldn't want to be their friends. But we need to watch how we talk, and as I said in an earlier post (3/30/14), we all need to grow thicker skins, be less defensive. Blacks and other nonwhites, try to avoid calling whites "racist"; instead try to show them how their thinking about race is wrong and let them determine whether or not they are racist. Whites stop pretending to be colorblind, and stop talking about purple people. There are no purple people (and why purple, my favorite color, why not blue or green?), not really white (actually more beige or peach, sometimes orange) folks. Nothing says I'm a defensive white person who becomes nervous when race is mentioned than the "I don't care if they are white, black, or purple" line.

2) Public bigots shut up; public intellectuals speak up. Certain people like former New York mayor Rudy G. and presumptive Republican nominee, "whiny bitch" Donald T. need to stop talking. They need to be (publicly) silenced on the subject of race. For slightly different reasons, we don't need to hear from Reverend Al Sharpton and Reverend Jesse Jackson. Fairly or not (and their reputation is at least partly earned), they are seen as race baiters, men who show up whenever they can make some noise (or maybe even some money) by talking about race. Sean Hannity and some of the other right-wing race baiters on Fox News should also keep quiet. But we need to hear from intellectuals who have studied and thought about race for years, people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME, and media critic Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who in 1997 wrote the book that needs to be reissued immediately--THE ASSASSINATION OF THE BLACK MALE IMAGE. Novelists and poets like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie also need to write essays or talk on television about this crisis. Most people probably don't realize that in the nineties Morrison edited two books of essays on race--RACE-ING JUSTICE, EN-GENDERING POWER: ESSAYS ON ANITA HILL, CLARENCE THOMAS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY (1992) and BIRTH OF A NATION'HOOD: GAZE, SCRIPT, AND SPECTACLE IN THE O.J. SIMPSON CASE. Since the media has resurrected both of those cases (hmm, I wonder why), Morrison's books also need to be republished.

3) Let's laugh. Comedians who feel comfortable joking about race also need to be heard right now. Bill Maher, Louis C.K., and Chris Rock, keep going after Trump, but you are the best race humorists, so we need you to joke about this blue-black problem. Chris, joke about how you feel when you see a cop. Louis, you do the opposite; joke about how you and the white cops are buddies, even when you're carrying a gun and drinking while driving. Bill, you know what to do, something similar to your joke about what would happen if a young black man attacked an older white woman when you were discussing the 2008 (Obama versus Clinton) Democratic primary. All of the rest of us need to get a sense of humor about race. The nonwhite people should probably tell the jokes about themselves, but whites need to be able to laugh. An older white friend (she's in her seventies) and I enjoyed my joke (despite some earlier tension when discussing race) about her black dog sitting on the couch (he supposedly knew better) after I had sat on it. When I returned to the couch after she forced him off, he lay on the floor with his head in his paws for a few minutes and then looked at me with a slightly plaintive and slightly annoyed look. I said, "Hey, don't look at me like that; I can sit on this couch because I'm not as black as you." The black dog didn't laugh, but we did.

4) Ignore the molehills and focus on the mountains. In other words, forget about the politically incorrect and focus on the systemic, dangerous, pervasive racism that I've been dealing with for almost seventy years. It's not important that Paula Deen or Donald Sterling used racist language in private. Who cares what they said in their homes? But when son of an immigrant white mother Donald Trump can openly question the citizenship of son of an American white mother Barack Obama because Obama's father was a black man born in Africa while Trump's father was a white man born to German immigrants in New York, that's a problem. And it's a bigger problem when Trump can become the Republican nominee by doubling down on his bigotry. When Will Smith and some barely known British actor who played Martin Luther King don't earn Oscar nominations (so that they can lose to Leo), it's not a problem, nor is it a victory when many diverse actors win the Tony or are nominated for the Emmy, but it's a problem when ABC (home of Shondaland on Thursday and "blackish" on Wednesday) is clearly assassinating the black male image by focusing on OJ (twenty years later) and Bill Cosby. HBO's movie on Clarence Thomas also seems oddly timed. Where are all of the anniversary shows on Columbine or Timothy McVeigh? When the late Natalie Cole does not receive as much attention at the Grammy Awards as the late David Bowie, it's not a problem, but it's a problem that black males are more likely to be shot and imprisoned while black female victims are more likely to be ignored. It's a big problem that all Americans don't receive the same treatment that white males receive. When a white male shoots up a school, a theater, or an abortion clinic, or blows up a government building, we don't suggest that all white men should be deported back to Sweden, Germany, or wherever their ancestors originated, nor are we afraid of all white men because we know that some of them are crazy, savage killers ( in the past they not only shot and bombed, they lynched and castrated; one innocent-looking blond man even ate people years ago). But the biggest problem is that fair-haired whites look more innocent than dark-skinned blacks because we've all been brainwashed to view white as innocent and safe (angels wear white) and black as evil and dangerous (witches wear black). As I said in a comment recently, even the black Spice Girl was called Scary.

5) Let's learn. It's probably not possible or maybe even appropriate for all students to be required to take a course in ethnic studies to earn a high school diploma. Besides, what the student learns from that course would depend on the teacher (a racist teacher might teach the wrong lessons). But I know that the white students who took my general education black literature course learned not just about black literature but about what it feels like to be in the minority. Even when only 40% of the students were black, the whites were in the minority because there were quite a few Asians and Latinos taking the course. A few of the white students admitted feeling threatened in a class taught by a black teacher and where their people were often cast as the villains. Depending on the students and how they approached me with their concerns, I would either laughingly welcome them to my world or I would snap at them, "Hey, Faulkner is one of my favorite writers, and he says that black people stink. I love HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Do you know how many times the word 'nigger' appears in that book?" Nonwhite students are steeped in the white world. Most of the books that we read are written by and about whites, and once I left elementary school, I had only two nonwhite teachers. Whites also still run our country (check out Congress and the Supreme Court), and they are still all over television and the movies. But most whites are less familiar with nonwhite cultures. They need to learn about those cultures so that they can understand and maybe even empathize with us. We are less fearful of those we understand.

I still believe that racism will not end until we are all so mixed that we can't distinguish the races, but until that happens (and I'll probably be dead by then), we need to work on trying to understand each other, and as the late Rodney King said, "Just get along."

We are what we read, I say. We’re also what we recommend that others, especially folks from a different race, read. When a born-rich, white male colleague at Cal Poly Pomona recommended that I read another black California professor Shelby Steele’s book, I knew after I read the book that my colleague was at best a racism denier and at worst an unrepentant racist (although not a white supremacist). Steele is what I call a racism apologist, a term I use for people of color like brown Dinesh D’Souza whose book ILLIBERAL EDUCATION I hate read and Richard Rodriguez whose memoir HUNGER OF MEMORY I hate taught. These public intellectuals of color make racist white folks feel better by assuring them that they’re right, and we liberals are wrong, that the real problem is not racism but affirmative action or political correctness. Walter Williams, an economics professor whose book on race one of my privileged white female students who has worked in the Peace Corps and unfortunately spent some time in Russia sent me in 2017, is a racism apologist. I found it interesting that my local paper, which I had already noticed had a more conservative opinion page than the LA TIMES, published articles by him on two consecutive Sundays and that just as I heard from my student for the first time in months (she’s a busy relatively new mother and a teacher) I was suddenly receiving negative feedback to my almost three-year-old one-star review of Williams’ book. Of course, the majority of racists and racism deniers probably don’t read, so they rely on politicians like Senator Tim Scott and Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson or media “influencers” like Candace Owens to comfort them during times like these when they’re being told that racism exists and colorblindness does not. Racism apologists are to racism deniers and racists what potato chips and chocolate are to me and wine and weed are to less sober Americans. I self-soothe with cc (chips and chocolate); racists self-soothe with ra (racism apologists).

When the former student reached out to me (and to a black friend she made during her Peace Corps days) last month, I learned that she had read Shelby Steele and Candace Owens (I didn’t realize she had written a book) as well as Walter Williams. This white woman who claims to be Libertarian (are there any liberal Libertarians?) was not an English major but took two of my classes because she liked my tell it like it is, nonconformist personality. She probably assumed I would agree with Williams’ suggestion that liberal solutions like the minimum wage hurt more than helped blacks because I said in THE BRONZE RULE that I didn’t let black students get away with using their race to excuse bad writing. I would tell them my story, which included no Head Start since it didn’t exist, no kindergarten, and an illiterate maternal grandmother, and let them know that if I could become an English professor they could pass Freshman Composition with a “C.” But she missed or misread the earlier passage in that chapter where I discussed the self-fulfilling prophecy, now called confirmation bias, saying that too many black students lived down to racist white teachers‘ low expectations of them. I guess I should have made it clear for the self-soothing racism deniers reading my book that those students probably didn’t have the advantage, the privilege, of being taught by black females during their first six years of school that I had, and that ten weeks with me could not cure thirteen or more (including nursery school or Head Start) years of being told that they are intellectually and culturally deprived because of their race, that they shouldn’t expect to do as well as white students. I set Ms. Peace Corps Libertarian, who maybe should move to Russia, straight by letting her know that seeing black folks as dysfunctional and needing help was the wrong approach, that we are the exceptional race, and her folks are the ones who need even more help than they already have gotten since they’re the ones killing people and taking opioids while we have overcome barriers and succeeded without becoming spiteful and cruel.

As soon as I set Ms. Libertarian straight, I had to mean-tweet Mr. Williams and the paper that published his first article “Please Spare Black Americans From White Liberal Paternalism.” First, I had to let Mr. Williams know, since he’s apparently still living in the 20th Century, that the Speaker of the House is a woman, and the Majority Whip is a black man. I didn’t mention the last President and the last winner of the popular vote because I didn’t want to shock him with the news that women and people of color are running the “liberal” party. He obviously thinks Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the “white paternal liberals.” Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Julian Castro didn’t register with him. Then I addressed the following statement: “Nowhere else on Earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.” He was referring to how much black folks had overcome in the century and a half since slavery ended. I pointed out that we had a half-black, half-white President more than a century after slavery, but Nelson Mandela had become President of South Africa much sooner after apartheid ended. Of course, South Africa is predominantly black, but clearly the whites in South Africa didn’t pass voter suppression laws and do whatever else they had to do to prevent the majority of blacks from electing Mandela. They also didn’t exterminate so many blacks that they no longer outnumbered whites. When a Native American becomes President, then we can compare ourselves to South Africa on overcoming racism. After all, our first black President does not have any slave ancestors. His black ancestors are still in Africa. Next I addressed the following absurd statement: “The first step is to acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and won.” I wondered in my mean tweets if Williams missed the attacks on affirmative action in the eighties and the voter suppression that continues today. He also apparently knows nothing about the new Jim Crow, where black men and occasionally women are jailed for life for nonviolent crimes. Occasionally, they’re jailed for years without even being convicted of any crime because they can’t make bail. And he hasn’t noticed how many unarmed black people have been murdered, often by the police, without the murderer being tried, much less going to jail. The white folks who read and accept Williams’ nonsense are like the black folks on crack and the white folks on opioids. It’s not surprising that they’ve become unhinged by the BlackLivesMatter movement. They think the civil rights battle was won in the sixties or maybe in 2008 when a half-white man was elected President by a minority of white people and a large majority of people of color.

Although I don’t waste my time communicating with Ben Carson, who I suspect is as crazy as Donald Trump, I’ve also mean-tweeted and/or commented on the ridiculous statements of racism apologists Candace Owens and Senator Tim Scott. After saying that he had been racially profiled by police seven times, Scott claimed there was no racism. Actually, although he seems sensible, he may also be crazy, so I probably shouldn’t waste my time trying to school him. I haven’t heard his explanation of why cops would profile him if racism doesn’t exist because there is no logical explanation. Scott is racially profiled because he’s a dark-skinned black man, and what has happened to him proves that racism still exists in America. Scott’s allowing himself to be used to write a so-called police reform bill that included no significant reform is the kind of racism apologist act that gives bigots like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump cover.

Since she doesn’t hold a political office and only really foolish people would consider her an intellectual, Candace Owens is probably less dangerous than Carson, Scott, and Williams. However, she testified at a Congressional hearing on race, and several racism deniers, including Ms. Libertarian, have mentioned her to me. I had fun with Ms. Candace after watching part of a video where she declared that she could not support George Floyd because he’d been in jail and claimed that Shelby Steele had planted some ideas in her head. First, I let her know that Mr. Floyd doesn’t need her support because he’s dead. I told the clueless Ms. Candace that dead people don’t need our support; maybe their families and friends do, but they don’t. Then I told her how to read. She must read critically and not allow writers to “plant ideas” in her head. Finally, after teaching her a brief lesson on criminal justice and racism, I gave her a list of books to read, starting with THE NEW JIM CROW, which explains why so many black men are in jail.

White racists have always relied on “submissive” black folks to give them cover, to tell them that they’re good masters and that the other black folks are lazy, ungrateful criminals. These race traitors have at times, like during slavery, been spies who would inform on slaves planning to run away or revolt. The “real” Uncle Tom was not one of those race traitors. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s protagonist was a humble servant, but he actually died helping two black female slaves to escape. I should probably stop using his name in vain when I attack the racism apologist in the Supreme Court—Judge Thomas. I should call him Uncle Clarence instead of Uncle Thomas. He, Uncle Ben, Uncle Tim, and Aunt Candace will continue to soothe white folks who want to believe that the problem with black folks is they’ve been given too much free stuff, that white liberals are the real racists who have ruined black folks with their “paternal” socio-economic programs, and that black folks who are in jail or who are murdered by cops should be blamed for their fates.

I’ve said in the past that racism deniers are worse than white supremacists because the white supremacists are honest about their racism. But worse than white racism deniers are black (brown and yellow) racism apologists. These race traitors make money and gain power by telling the racist white folks what they want to hear, by denigrating their own people and giving cover to whites who are oppressing and even killing them. Because I’m not a race traitor, I usually try to avoid attacking my own people, but I make one major exception. I will attack racism apologists. I want to spare the world from them.

RIP, John Lewis. You were never a racism apologist!

Proving that he’s almost as corrupt and insane as the 45th President, Lying Ted Cancun Cruz complained about “court packing” when some Democrats suggested that the Supreme Court should be expanded to thirteen justices. Did he miss what happened in 2016 and 20? Did he miss Grim Reaper McConnell’s bragging on Fox about how he prevented Obama from appointing judges? Did he forget why Reid killed the filibuster for appointing lower court justices so that Obama could appoint at least some district justices only to give Grim Reaper/Moscow Mitch the opportunity to kill it for the Supreme Court so that the twice impeached, two-time loser of the popular vote Trump could appoint three Supreme Court justices, two of them to seats stolen from the Democrats, and the third to a seat conveniently vacated by a conservative (Kennedy)? And wasn’t Lying Ted one of the senators who claimed that he would prevent Hillary from appointing judges when he thought she would beat Trump not only in the popular vote but also in the rigged electoral college? But Cruz and the Republicans aren’t the only ones talking crazy about the stacked Supreme Court. One New York Democrat suggested that Justice Breyer should retire to prevent what happened when Ginsburg died. How does Breyer’s retirement help change the numbers for the Court? If Biden replaces him, we will still have six conservatives, five of them appointed by Presidents who lost the popular vote, and three liberals. I have a better solution. Instead of “packing” the court by adding four justices, which will then give the Republicans the chance to add five if they figure out a way to steal more presidential elections (with the current very political, anti-democracy Supreme Court helping them, they probably can), why not pressure three of the current conservative justices to step down, thus unstacking and balancing the Court so that it better reflects America? It doesn’t matter if it’s the three who were appointed by the Putin-assisted, insane, incompetent, twice-impeached, two-time loser of the popular vote or the three who voted to gut the Voting Rights Act so that racist, anti-democracy governors and state legislators could suppress the votes of people of color. Three of them must go.

Maybe the three who should go are the ones who were involved in a real presidential election steal. In an earlier post (7/22/18), I pointed out that the attack on our democracy didn’t start with Trump; it started with the appointment of George W. Bush by the 2000 Supreme Court. That’s when the Court stopped pretending to be apolitical. They picked our President by stopping the vote count in Florida. The only member of that 2000 Court still serving is Clarence Thomas, who should have recused himself during the 2000 vote count deliberations since he was appointed by the father of the loser of the popular vote. At the time that I wrote that 7/22/18 post, Kavanaugh had not yet been appointed, although Kennedy had announced that he was (conveniently) retiring, and the notorious RBG was still alive. Kavanaugh and Barrett, who were appointed in 2018 and 20, were both involved in the Florida vote count as was John Roberts. What are the odds that three people involved in helping the Republicans steal a presidential election from the Democrats and the 2000 voters would end up on the Supreme Court twenty years later, and one of them would be the Chief Justice? Why aren’t more Democrats and media loudmouths commenting on that odd coincidence, which I discovered when Senator Amy Klobuchar confronted Amy Barrett during the latter’s confirmation hearings. If Kavanaugh was confronted about his participation in the 2000 election steal, I missed it because everyone was focused on his sexual misconduct when he was in high school.

The most democratic branch of our government right now is the executive because President Biden and Vice President Harris won both the popular vote and the electoral college. The President’s relatively high approval rating (59% in one recent poll) reflects that he’s really representing the American citizens. While the House of Representatives is a little more democratic than the Senate, gerrymandering has helped the Republicans win seats without winning a majority of the popular vote. Each election cycle, Democrats win many more votes for Congress than Republicans do, and yet they are often in the minority or (as in this cycle) barely ahead. It’ll take a lot of work to reverse that trend, and the work should start with the supposed-to-be-apolitical Supreme Court.

I love that Biden appointed Merrick Garland, the victim of the first Supreme Court steal, to be attorney general. It will be sweet karma if his department investigates and prosecutes the Republican court stackers. He needs to investigate the resignation of Kennedy and McConnell’s role in stacking both the lower courts and the Supreme Court with far right conservatives. Dick Durbin, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also needs to become involved, maybe focusing on the lower courts. Some of those unqualified judges appointed by Trump need to be impeached.

The media can assist in the unstacking by questioning the judgment of judges willing to accept appointments from a clearly insane and corrupt President who was openly seeking and receiving assistance from Russian President Putin, one of our chief adversaries. Someone who acted like a drunken fool in high school could grow up and learn to be wiser and more sober (ask Obama and maybe even somewhat wiser GW Bush), but should we trust the judgment of a man willing to accept a lifetime judicial appointment from a corrupt, insane, racist, self-confessed sexual assaulter? The same question should be asked of Gorsuch and Barrett, who accepted appointments to stolen seats. And what about the three remaining conservative justices who voted to gut the Voting Rights Act? What do they have to say about all of the voter suppression laws that have been passed since they took that very political, anti-democracy, racist vote.

Although Congress makes the laws and the President either signs or vetoes them, the nine supposed-to-be-apolitical Supreme Court justices are the ones who have the final say on whether a law will stand. It was the Supreme Court that approved of “separate but equal” Jim Crow at the end of the 19th Century and rejected it during the middle of the 20th Century. These justices are given life terms and don’t have to campaign for elections because they are supposed to be above petty politics, but the 2000 election steal by the Supreme Court changed that narrative. If we can’t pressure three (I wouldn’t mind seeing all six of them go) of these corrupt, anti-democratic justices to leave, then we must have term limits. There can’t be peace and justice in America as long as our highest court is infested with corrupt, anti-democratic justices like the five appointed by two-time loser of the popular vote and twice-impeached Trump and loser of the popular vote in 2000 and appointed by conservative justices in a real election steal GW Bush, and like the man who thought it was appropriate to cast the deciding vote on whether or not the son of Bush Senior, the President who appointed him to the Supreme Court, should win the state (and thus the presidency) where another son of Bush Senior was governor. It’s time for at least some of them to GET OUT!