Mary Sisney's Blog - Posts Tagged "joy-reid"

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing what people my age often do--sorting through my past, looking for what to discard and what to save--when I came across two unpublished articles (actually one was a partial article) that I wrote in 1989. One was titled "The Language of Human Behavior" and focused on my experience with racism in the class (Language and Human Behavior) that I called my least favorite in my memoir. The other was untitled but focused on race relations myths, primarily on what I called "affirmative action myths." As I read those articles, written during the first year of Bush I's administration, the year I turned forty, two years before the Rodney King beating, and three years before the L.A. riots, I was stunned by how relevant my comments are today. How could there be so little change in my perception of the world and my place in it after almost thirty years of apparent progress?

I've always recognized the eighties as a backlash-to-progress period similar to the Jim Crow period following Reconstruction, and I've compared those two periods to the one we're in now. Maybe that's why my comments at the end of the eighties seem so relevant today. Before I read "The Language of Human Behavior," I remembered the attack on affirmative action, the dominance of conservatism during that period, and Bush I's use of "law and order" racism (the Willie Horton ads) in his 1988 Presidential campaign against the governor of Massachusetts. I even discussed how black people's hairstyles--the greasy jheri curls instead of the big Afros of the seventies--reflected the eighties political climate. Still, I was startled by the following sentence, explaining my heated, unprofessional response to the racist rejection of the book DISCOURSE AND DISCRIMINATION by some of the blue-eyed white students in my class: "One answer might be that I was responding to the increasingly tense racial climate in our society--the skinheads, the racially motivated murders, the Supreme Court's reversal of civil rights gains." I knew what the Supreme Court had done in the eighties, but I didn't remember that the skinheads were around during that period, and I still have no idea what eighties racially motivated murders I am referring to in that sentence. I remember that a black man was savagely murdered by being dragged behind a truck in Texas, but that must have happened in the nineties because Bush II bragged about the white killers receiving the death penalty during the 2000 Presidential debates. I guess there have been racially motivated attacks on black people in every decade of our history, and yet we are the ones who are considered violent and savage.

Both of these 1989 articles make points that I am still making. In "The Language of Human Behavior," I discuss how my students had made me feel better about our racial climate by convincing me that the racial slur "nigger" was a verbal taboo, more offensive than references to sexual organs or bodily functions. Then I argue, "But on that stormy day when I introduced a book that presented the minority point of view, their facial expressions and eyes told me something else. To those hostile students, on that day anyway, I was a "nigger," flaunting my blackness, forcing them to think about it." In two recent blog posts, the response to Michael Eric Dyson's new book (2/12/17), and my last blog (4/23/17), where I commented on the treatment of Paula Deen, I was still discussing the relative importance of that racial slur.

Although affirmative action is not the "hot topic" now that it was in the eighties, some of the points made in that article seem even more relevant now. For instance, I discuss the colorblind myth, pointing out how racist it is for white people to want to deny my race: "These people who need to deny race are as racist as those who seem overly preoccupied with it, those who seem to mention my race every time we talk. In fact, these "colorblind" people are probably more dangerous because they have convinced themselves that they are without prejudice while being clearly threatened by my race. Otherwise why deny it?" When I watch commentators knocking themselves out to explain why working-class, small-town Middle America white people would elect a born-rich, insane, white male New Yorker over a raised-in-the-middle-class and the Midwest woman, I recognize that they are ignoring the bigotry in the room. They are refusing to admit that most Trump voters elected an out-of-the-closet, politically incorrect bigot to stop the browning of America and put women in their place. And when I hear so-called liberals blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on "identity politics," I recognize their comment as the 2017 version of eighties "colorblind" racism. My 1989 statement is almost too relevant today.

Just as relevant today is the following passage from that second article: "This tendency to assume that only white experience really matters is reflected in the attitudes of some of the students. More than once, I have been forced to stop class to explain to a student that minorities are Americans. . . . In another class, students talked about the American culture. When I asked them what the American culture was, they described white Protestant culture." Omitted from that quoted passage is a section describing an incident I have referred to many times in discussing how we view Americans. In that section, I described how a Mexican American student told me that I was from Africa when I pointed out that I am both a minority and an American. I also point out in this section of the affirmative-action myths article that the word "non-white" is accepted by all, but when I would use the word "non-black," even in a black literature class, students would often laugh. Of course, every time I hear a commentator (once even a liberal black commentator) say, "America voted for Trump" or when I hear talk of "real Americans," I know that nothing has changed since the eighties. White people are still seen as real Americans while blacks and other nonwhites are seen as foreigners.

It's hard for this born-in-the-Jim Crow-South black woman to face the fact that almost twenty years into the 21st Century, so long after Dr. King's death, and even after eight years of having a mostly black family in the White House, so little has really changed in race relations. I saw another reminder of how little has changed yesterday when I watched a news story about racist fans of the Boston Red Sox. I wrote in my memoir about how shocked and enraged I was when I moved to the Boston area in 1979 and had to deal with racism so long after I left the South in 1964. I just laughed yesterday when I watched that story about fans shouting "nigger" at a black baseball player. What else could I do?

Fortunately, there are a couple of major changes from 1989 to 2017 that have helped save my sanity. I wrote those articles in the summer of 1989, the year I bought my first (used) computer. Now I don't have to wait until summer to write about my rage because I'm retired, and I don't have to write articles and wonder where I can publish them. Thanks to improved technology, I can blog, tweet, and post immediately. I can watch "Meet the Press," Rachel Maddow's show, or Joy Reid's show and then tweet the participants. I feel somewhat empowered by that change, but I wish humans were as skilled at improving relations with each other as they are at inventing new ways to communicate. If they were, 2017 would not feel so much like 1989 or even 1979.

I generally enjoy Joy Reid's weekend MSNBC show. She and I agree on most issues, and I like her personality; she's intelligent, articulate, politely combative, and occasionally comical. She's also as adept at nonverbal communication as another (rare) dark-skinned female anchor, Whoopi Goldberg. White folks and black men cannot roll their eyes the way black women can. However, during her last two Saturday shows, Joy has gotten on my last nerve as much as smug Chuck Todd of "Meet the Press" and other white media folks have. Two weeks in a row, she has failed to make connections between segments in her show and has failed to distinguish between friends and enemies, a serious problem for black folks trying to overcome racism.

On her June 10 show, Joy briefly discussed the Bill Maher controversy. She and her guest, pop cultural critic Toure, agreed with the general consensus that Bill is supportive of blacks, but he needs to watch his mouth since he's messed up on other occasions. I didn't mind that discussion too much, although I wish at least one black person with a microphone would point out that white people's using the word nigger is not even among the top 100 problems we face. But what annoyed me happened earlier in the show. Joy was talking to her blonde, pale colleague Lawrence O'Donnell about lawyers and pointed out that he was the only person in his family who was not a lawyer. She then said, "You're the black sheep of your family." I laughed delightedly, thinking Joy and Lawrence were about to deconstruct the subliminally racist phrase "black sheep." They didn't; Lawrence didn't say, "Yeah, I'm the good person in my family because the rest of them are sleazy lawyers." They didn't even seem to recognize the ridiculousness of a very dark black person calling a very pale white person a black sheep. (To be fair to Lawrence, maybe he was amused but didn't want to be attacked by the politically correct police the way Bill was). The day after that show, I twitter stormed Ms. Joy, pointing out that unarmed black people aren't killed because Bill Maher or Paula Deen said "nigger." I pointed out that racist language like "black sheep" and "dark money" and racist icons in our culture (Darth Vader's head is black; witches wear black; angels wear white) have brainwashed all of us to fear blacks. I also pointed out that Trump never called Obama nigger. Finally, I defended Maher by reminding Joy that he was one of the few media people who criticized Trump continuously for his racist birther lies. He was even sued by Trump for offering to pay him a million dollars if he produced his birth certificate proving that his father was not an orangutan. I suggested we need to know who our friends and our enemies are. Maybe if the black people in the media had made more noise about Trump when he was disrespecting our President during 2011-12, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now.

Before I could completely recover from the "black sheep" disaster, Joy set me off again. Early in her show yesterday, there was breaking news that the jury in the political and media-created so-called rape trial of black icon Bill Cosby was deadlocked. Joy talked to "civil rights" attorney Lisa Bloom on the telephone twice, did not let her viewers hear what Bill's lawyer and publicist (she was reading a statement from Camille Cosby) were saying, but let us hear Lisa's bigoted mother Gloria Allred, who was not representing the plaintiff, speak, and rushed the Georgia U.S. Representative candidate whose election is Tuesday off the air so that we could hear from the white prosecutor who campaigned on locking up Bill Cosby. I turned off my television and almost ran to my laptop to unleash another twitter storm on Joy. I told her that we will never overcome racism as long as we can't distinguish between our friends (Maher) and our enemies (Allred and Bloom). I wondered if we would call a male lawyer whose career consisted of targeting high-profile women a feminist lawyer. I asked her to find out how many white rapists whose victims were black women Lisa or her mama had prosecuted and persecuted, I pointed out that Tiger Woods had not been accused of raping any of the women with whom he had sex, yet Gloria had represented some of them and got hush money (apparently 10 million dollars) for one of them.

What made Joy's handling of the Cosby trial so upsetting is that in the next segment of her show she discussed the latest black and blue tragedy. At least this cop went on trial for murdering an unarmed black man in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old child, but he was found not guilty. I repeat, not guilty; the jury was not hung. The contrast between that murdered black man's mother's calm rage and some silly black woman wearing an ethnic costume and crying because an almost 80-year-old black man wasn't going to jail for whatever she claimed he did to her decades ago was very revealing. Black women are strong; they have to be. Black men are also strong, and a strong black man gave Joy the perfect connection to make between her first and second segments. As they discussed the killing of black people, Mr. Phillip Goff mentioned the nine black people killed in a South Carolina church two years ago. Those black people were, of course, not killed by a cop. They were killed by a domestic terrorist who claimed he did it because "they rape our women." Where did he get that idea? Trump had just mentioned Mexican rapists in his announcement speech, but I don't think the racist terrorist was stupid enough to confuse black and brown people. Besides, his attack took more planning than a day or two. If Bill Cosby, America's Dad, the jello pudding man, can't be trusted with white women (and despite the appearance of the costumed brown-skinned woman and the light-skinned woman in the big seventies Pam Grier afro, most of Bill's "victims" were white), no black man can. As I said in my twitter storm, if we call Bill Clinton (or Bill O'Reilly) a rapist, no one will go into a church and kill nine white people.

Rape, especially when used to describe sexual interaction between a black man and a white woman, is a trigger word, more powerful and dangerous than nigger. Bill Cosby was not on trial for rape; he was on trial for sexual assault because he did not penetrate with his sexual organ the foreign white woman who took money from him in a civil case and then testified against him in a criminal trial. He pawed her, fingered her while she was conscious (she claims) but unable to move or respond. Ironically, almost exactly a year ago (June 19, 2016), I wrote about the Stanford case, calling out Miss Emily Doe, who was fingered by a drunken undergraduate while unconscious. I wondered if she had done the same thing to him would she be on trial for sexual assault. I wonder the same thing about these cases. None of these women were beaten or overpowered by Cosby. All of them apparently took pills willingly, and they were all hanging out with a known-to-be-married celebrity. Why did these women think that Bill Cosby wanted to hang out with them? Why would he want to be their mentor? What was so special about them? A smart woman, who wasn't an entitled narcissist, would have been suspicious of an older, very successful celebrity wanting to be her "friend" and "mentor"; she would have wanted to know where his wife and four daughters were. And smart, strong women would not have allowed a bigoted, fame-hungry "civil rights" lawyer like Gloria Allred to turn them into professional victims who might be responsible not only for the death of nine black people but also for Hillary Clinton's loss in November. If white women are so weak that being pawed while they are unconscious or semi-conscious can ruin their lives, how can they be Commander-in-Chief, leader of the free world? Allred, Bloom, and their cavalry of whining victims damaged the image of both black men and white women. Not only can I refer to strong black women like Pam Grier, Oprah Winfrey, and Maya Angelou, who survived and thrived after being molested as children, I can mention as I did in my letter to Emily Doe and a tweet to Allred the young white heroic victims Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, and Michelle Knight. These women refused to accept the role of victim, although by any definition of the word they were. As I said to both Doe and Allred, men can rape and assault women, but they can't make them victims. Only the women can do that to themselves with help from self-promoting bigots like Allred.

As I said to Joy, the primary victims in America are not weak white women but strong black men and women. I will add that our victimization will not end, and we will not overcome racism if we continue to have trouble distinguishing between friends and enemies. The reason we must always talk about race and never allow our white "friends" to use the colorblind lie is so that we can spot those white people who know all of the right words to say but whose actions say something else. Actions always speak louder than words. Bill Maher's actions say he's black people's friend. Gloria Allred's say she's our enemy.

Shortly after I joined Google+ in 2014, I decided to help white folks figure out if they were racist by listing traits that might be racist but might not be and those that are definitely racist. I had noticed that whites seemed to be more worried about being called racist than they were about actually being racist. Since I wrote that list when Obama was still President, I used him as a measure of extreme racism. I said that if people thought the only (half)-black President was the worst President ever, that the President who had been raised by his white mother and maternal grandparents hated white people, that the President who had been born in Hawaii and had met his father only twice was a Kenyan or thought like a Kenyan, they should put on their white sheets and pick up a burning cross because they were extremely racist. Three years later, as I have watched people like Hugh Hewitt claim that the man who took out expensive ads in New York newspapers calling for the execution of teenage boys accused of raping an adult white woman (she was badly injured but survived, and they were later exonerated), the man who raised his political profile by falsely accusing Obama of not being born in America, and who opened his political campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and claiming that he would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it is not racist, I have decided that it's time to update my list of "you might be a racist" traits. Although this test is for whites only, nonwhites can use it to decide if they are ignorant self-haters, which would make them even worse than racist white folks.

1) If you use racial slurs, you may be racist or you may just be politically incorrect, a provocateur, a disrupter.

2) If you use subliminally racist language like "black sheep," "dark (meaning corrupt, dirty) money," and "darkness of hate," you may be racist, or you may be brainwashed like the darkest anchor on MSNBC, Joy Reid, who used the first two phrases, and the darkest of the one hundred Senators, Republican Tim Scott, who used the last one to describe white haters. Let's face it, we all use subliminally racist language, so let's turn light into dark; let's follow Richard Wright's lead and make the white cat the scary one.

3) If you are more frightened of unarmed black men than you are of unarmed white men, you may be racist, or you may be brainwashed (see #2) like the black police officers who shoot their unarmed brothers or like a bad-ass black woman (i.e. me) who will stare down a big, mean-looking white man, even if he's bald and has multiple tattoos, but will try to look pleasant if she encounters a big, mean-looking black man and hopes he loves his mother, grandmother, sister, or wife, depending on his age.

4) If you are more frightened of unarmed black men than you are of armed white men, you are racist and a fool. The most dangerous people on earth are armed white men; they are much more dangerous than armed black men. If I see an armed white man coming toward me, look back and see an armed black man (or any other colored man) behind me, I will run toward the black man and hope he will save me from the crazy white man with a gun. If the armed white man is wearing a uniform and the armed black man isn't, that will be a dilemma. I will probably hit the ground and hope they shoot each other.

5) If you picture white folks when you hear the word "American" and nonwhites when you hear the word "foreigner," you are brainwashed, racist, and ignorant. It is 2017 when the white First Lady is foreign and the white President didn't have one grandparent born in America. The previous First Lady was blacker than her half-white husband, but she is more American than he is and is the most American occupant of the White House since George and Laura left.

6) If you picture whites when you think of doctors, lawyers, professors, and politicians and picture blacks or Mexicans when you think of thieves, drug dealers, and rapists, you are as racist as Donald Trump and Gloria Allred and need to watch reruns of Bill Cosby's old eighties show. While you're watching, ask yourself why Cosby went to trial for giving mostly white women drugs, which they took, and then pawing them, while Trump went into the White House after crudely bragging about pawing women. Ask yourself why Cosby gets ostracized by the so-called liberal Hollywood community while Woody Allen, who at the very least (I'm not sure about the child molestation charges; Mia might be nuts too and/or smart enough to know that people would be more bothered by a man who molested his white adopted daughter, so she might have brainwashed that daughter) had sex with and married his Asian surrogate daughter, gets lifetime achievement awards and standing ovations. You can console yourself with the knowledge that you may be racist, but you are among some "fine people."

7) If you can talk about class, religion, politics, gender, and sexuality all day but become tense and grow silent when the conversation turns to race, if you think racism would end if we just stopped talking about it, or if you think Hillary and the Democrats lost in November because they focused too much on race or what you might call "identity politics," you are racist, and you need to stop talking until you stop being racist.

8) If you can understand and sympathize with the anger of the small-town white losers who voted for an insane, incompetent white man because they're upset about their jobs leaving or they don't like the elites who think they're stupid, but you can't understand or sympathize with blacks who are angry that unarmed men and occasionally women and children are being murdered by the people who are supposed to protect and serve them, then you are racist and need to work on your empathy skills.

9) If you voted for an insane bigot because you thought he would stop the browning of America, you are an unpatriotic racist and loser. Trump can't stop the browning of America even if he's successful in banning Muslims, building a wall on our southern border, deporting every undocumented nonwhite person, and increasing the number of nonwhites killed by emboldened cops. America will turn brown, and you will be in the minority. Live with it or die before it happens.

10) If after seven months of chaos, you believe that Donald Trump is a better President than Barack Obama, who is the best President in my lifetime, you are a racist and almost as crazy as Trump is. You are also on the wrong side of history and will be seen as a villain by future generations the way the Nazis and KKK are seen by most of us living today.

White people who are concerned about not being racist should be pleased if they say yes to only the first three traits. If they say yes to only one of traits four through six, they should be worried but not too disturbed. A few weeks of quiet contemplation, watching MSNBC, especially Joy Reid, Ari Melber, and Lawrence O'Donnell (some white folks know how to talk about race), reading some nonwhite writers, and discussing race openly with some nonwhite friends or acquaintances might cure them, wake them up. If they say yes to more than one of those traits or to traits seven and/or eight, they will need more intense therapy, but they can still be saved. Those who say yes to either nine or ten or to all of the traits probably need to join David Duke and the other deplorables in the margins of our society. They cannot be saved. We will have to move forward toward a more perfect union without them.

RIP Dick Gregory.

Two weeks ago, I was so delighted with MSNBC weekend anchor Joy Reid that I tweeted she won the week and should be Time Person of the Year (I would still pick her over the editors' absurd choice). In fact, I was so giddy with delight when I sat down to write my blog that I made a mistake, writing the word "class" in the title when I meant to write "sex." For about a week, the title of my last blog was "Race Versus Class" instead of "Race Versus Sex." I also made a mistake when I posted a tribute to Joy on Facebook, saying she should be "Time Person on the Year." What did Joy do to delight me and earn such praise? She either was thinking like me and realized she needed to debunk the case against Al Franken, or she read my tweet after her Saturday show and quickly created a segment on her Sunday show that followed my instructions. For a week, Joy was the greatest person in the world. Then she returned to her show and the topic of sexual harassment and got on my last nerve. I had to mean-tweet her last week, pointing out that Trump's supporters believe him when he calls the news fake because she and other journalists keep presenting fake news and alternative facts. I was responding to the big lie promoted by her and several of her panelists that only women are sexualized and objectified, that people don't talk about men's looks. I, of course, made the opposite point in a recent blog (10/29/17). While it's true that Sarah Palin, who clearly did not use her superior intelligence to move up in the world, was described as hot and sexy, attractive Democratic Senators and former lawyers Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have not been treated the way equally smart, "hot" men like Paul Ryan, Barack Obama, and John Edwards have.

The John Edwards case is especially interesting to me right now because I wrote about how the media treated him in both my memoir and my second book, THE BRONZE RULE. I pointed out, for instance, that the photo used by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER to expose him and his "love child" was fake, but the mainstream media never made that point. His disloyal aide, Andrew Young, said the picture was fake, both in his book and in at least one television interview, but years later people were still saying that the NATIONAL ENQUIRER told the truth about Edwards; like most tabloids, they told some truths and some lies. The failure of the mainstream media to debunk that phony tabloid picture is similar to what has happened with Al Franken. Even the 11/26 Joy Reid panelists who pointed out that conservative dirty trickster Roger Stone was behind the attack on Franken didn't address the picture or question the motives of his original accuser, a conservative. If I had not watched how the media operated not only in the Edwards case but also during the OJ trial when I was shocked (as I reported in my memoir) by the difference between what I saw and heard while watching the trial and what the media reported, I would assume that the comments about original Franken accuser Leeann Tweeden and the phony photograph that I've found on social media were fake, but I knew how fake the mainstream media was before the phrases "false narratives" and "alternative facts" became part of our lexicon and before I read Donna Brazile's book, where she admitted that she was acting, playing the role assigned to her by producers of the news shows, when she served as a commentator on ABC and CNN. Although the obnoxious Gillibrand led the witch hunt against Franken for whatever reason, the media is the reason he has resigned.

The media don't just report on the news; they make the news. They choose what they will cover and what they won't cover. They choose what they will call horrifying and appalling and what they won't. That's why Trump was able to continue to be on television after his appallingly racist birther lies. The media folks, including the black ones, weren't sufficiently horrified to demand that he lose his jobs ("Celebrity Apprentice" and the pageants) on NBC. But Billy Bush and Matt Lauer lost theirs because of sexual misconduct. And let's be clear; the corporate media are political and conservative. I made that point in one of my earliest blogs (12/1/2013) when I was commenting on an ABC news special that focused on the top ten political scandals of this century. The top three scandals, according to ABC, were sex scandals featuring three liberal Democrats--Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and John Edwards. Spitzer and the now jailed Weiner had tried to restart their political careers in New York in 2013, but Edwards, whose sex scandal was listed in first place, was sitting quietly in North Carolina. He hadn't even been on television since his trial more than a year earlier. However, Baby Mama Rielle Hunter had recently apologized for a tell-too-much, mean-spirited book she wrote, and the corporate media probably thought Baby Daddy Edwards was preparing to "rise up" and start fighting for the poor and against insurance companies again. I saw another motive, however. This special, which did not include the WMD lies that led to a costly (we're still paying for it) war in Iraq or the Katrina disaster among the top ten political scandals of the 21st Century, appeared shortly after the government shutdown that turned Americans against Republicans. Disney's ABC had to help them by making Democrats look like the more scandalous politicians.

I thought of that special when I caught the end of Stephanie Ruhle's show on MSNBC one day last week. She was apologizing for not covering John Conyers' sex scandal when she had covered Roy Moore's as if she had to be fair and balanced by finding a Democrat to smear every time a Republican misbehaved. If the news media had been fair and balanced before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House. Her coverage was much more negative than that of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

If the media folks were just incompetent and being manipulated by politicians and other narcissistic celebrities, they would be annoying, but not sinister. However, they are manipulating as much as, if not more than, they are manipulated. The media launched this witch hunt, lynch mob moment that they are now celebrating. The NEW YORK TIMES, the NEW YORKER, the WASHINGTON POST, MSNBC, and CNN started this sexual assault, harassment "wave," as Lawrence O'Donnell called it recently, while the politicians and other celebrities just rode it. And the media are continuing to keep the wave going with TIME choosing alleged sexual harassment victims for their people of the year. I would have chosen the survivors of mass shooters or murderers, including the severely injured on a baseball field Republican Representative who still supports the NRA and the two Washington D.C. officers who saved his life and those of other Republicans. If we could include people who didn't survive, I would have chosen a true hero, civil rights martyr Heather Heyer, or the four soldiers lost in Niger. Maybe they could have pictured Heyer's mother or LaDavid Johnson's widow and a family member for each of the other soldiers. Certainly these whining women who are riding this sex-obsessed, fake media wave don't deserve to be named people of the year. Even Trump would have been a better choice.

Having created the monster Trump, not demonized him off television after his racist birther lies, given him free, usually uncritical publicity during most of his primary campaign, and helped him beat Hillary by focusing on the gossip from the Russian hacked DNC e-mails instead of on the hacking, the corporate media have continued to damage our culture by promoting narcissistic jerks like Kirsten Gillibrand and destroying true political heroes like civil rights warrior John Conyers and arguably the most popular Democratic Senator, annoyingly persistent fundraiser (no more money for the Democrats from me), and women's champion Al Franken.

I would stop watching the news if I didn't believe that I could occasionally make a difference in what is covered by calling news anchors and commentators out on Twitter. As I reported in my memoir, even before Twitter, I changed (however slightly) what was happening on the NBC station in L.A. during the OJ trial when I called the station, ranted in my husky, authoritarian teacher voice (I'm 100% sure they thought I was a tough, powerful man) about the biased coverage, and then asked where black newscaster Furnell Chatman (whatever happened to him?) was. KNBC continued to be biased against OJ, but Furnell started reporting on the trial. I've seen evidence recently that my tweets also are being considered, especially by some of the anchors and commentators on MSNBC. In fact, both Lawrence O'Donnell and Katy Tur (or their staff; I'm no fool) have "liked" one (not the same one) of my tweets.

As part of the resistance, we the people have to not only sign petitions while tweeting and calling politicians, we must also tweet and call the news stations and their commentators. We must write letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers. We must keep the news media honest because they are the key to saving not only our democracy but also our culture. Right now they're destroying both.

When the caustic female comedian at the White House Correspondents' dinner last night dropped the F-bomb, I barely noticed, and I certainly wasn't bothered by her use of the word "pussy." Only when I listened to commentary by MSNBC talking heads after the event did I remember that cursing is not allowed on basic cable. When the President can say "sons of bitches" at a rally and when millions vote for him after he's heard bragging about grabbing pussies, it's hard to be shocked by anything a comedian says. Earlier on Saturday, my sometimes favorite cable anchor Joy Reid had to apologize for words she may or may not have used in blogs written ten years earlier. In the discussion that followed her apology, the talking heads pointed out how much damage can be done by words. I have written several blogs about words that matter. Recently (2/12/17, 1/21/18), I've focused on subliminally racist language. But I've also been increasingly disturbed by how two very similar words (only one letter is different) have been treated. It's stunning to me that people feel more comfortable calling men like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump rapists than they do calling Trump and his deplorable followers racists. In fact, yesterday afternoon (between Joy's show in the morning and the Correspondents' dinner in the evening) when I said while commenting on a Joy Reid fan club post that calling a black man who sexually assaulted a white woman a rapist is racist, an apparently younger black woman chastised me for mentioning race because that's why whites become upset with us and accuse us of playing the race card. As the former FBI director might say, "Lordy!"

Both rapists and racists are deplorable. But only rape is a heinous crime that can lead to years of jail time (depending on the race(s) of the victim and perpetrator). If racists don't act on their racism by attacking nonwhite people or vandalizing their property, they are free to spread their racist lies about lazy black and brown rapists and drug dealers. And as I suggested in an earlier post (10/29/17), unlike sexual assault and harassment, rape is easy to define. If one person says no, and the other person (or people in gang rape) forces himself (because most rapists are men) on her, it's rape. If one person having sex is underage and the other one is not, even if the younger person (male or female) gives consent, it's statutory rape. Racism, like sexism, is harder to define. To rewrite an old Ralph Ellison joke (INVISIBLE MAN), some nonwhite people are so racially sensitive that they might condemn a white person as racist for not liking the dark meat of a turkey. But we should all be able to agree that when a white man accuses a black man born in Hawaii to a white mother and black African-born father of being secretly Kenyan, he's a racist. We don't have to worry about what he did in the seventies or what he's saying about "shithole" countries or the black NFL players now. Yet media critic Howard Kurtz, in his book MEDIA MADNESS, criticized journalist Ben Smith, the editor of BUZZFEED, for calling Trump a racist. I gave Kurtz's book a one-star rating in my Goodreads review for the following sentence: "That might have been the most troubling declaration: that Trump's racism was simply an undisputed fact, not a journalist's assessment, and that there was no room for dissent on this score." I have news for Mr. Kurtz; Trump's racism is an undisputed fact; it's as undisputed as his gender, race, age, and birth place.

I'm not sure why "racist" is a taboo word, and "rapist" isn't. The MSNBC commentators' response to the F-bomb and the comedian's use of the word "pussy" at least twice last night suggests that references to sexual acts should be more taboo, but Americans, especially those in the media, have always preferred discussing sex to race (See my 11/24/13 and 11/26/17 blogs). In fact, I'm convinced that the METOO movement was started by the media not only to help create an atmosphere where they could lock up freaky Bill Cosby for having weird sex with all of those white women but also to take attention away from Trump's constant racist outbursts--shithole countries, building that southern wall, attacks on nonwhite immigrants/refugees and black athletes. And, of course, if we don't mention race, then we might not notice that the prosecutor who campaigned on locking up Cosby for rape is white, that the foreign woman who took three million dollars of his money and then pursued him in a criminal case is white as are all but two of his alleged victims, that the witness who claimed that the foreign white woman had talked about framing a celebrity for money is black, and that all but two of the jurors who apparently believed the white woman and not the black one were white. We can pretend that calling a black man who had sex with a white woman a rapist has nothing to do with lynching, Emmett Till, and the objections to integrated schools in the fifties. We can pretend that what James Baldwin said explicitly and other black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison have implied--racism is all about sex--is not true.

The problem with taboos is that we tend to be drawn to them; like priests denied sex, we become more obsessed and eventually perverted in our need to sample the forbidden. Ellison made that point about white women and black men with his character Sybil. We tend to desire what we can't have, which is why white women like Sybil secretly want black men to rape them and may scream rape when it's the last thing on a black man's mind. And black men might want to have sex with white women because until the seventies sexual contact between a black man and a white woman (but not between a black woman and a white man) was taboo. Our failure to openly discuss racism not only allows it to hide in plain sight, to grow, fester, and move into the White House but also probably makes all of us secretly think and worry about racism more than we would if we could openly discuss it. We become secretly obsessed and perverted in our thoughts.

I have become the racism whisperer (actually shouter). If I see racism, I will call it out, and as I said in my review of Kurtz's book, I like to point out that the racism deniers are more dangerous than Trump and his deplorable followers. Bill Cosby may or may not have committed criminal sexual assault, but he is definitely not a rapist. Those who call him a rapist are either racists or brainwashed nonwhites and clueless whites who need to read some black history to know what time it is. Calling a black man accused of having nonconsensual sexual contact with a white woman a rapist is racist. That should be (in fact, is) an undisputed fact.

When I read that politically incorrect, sexually explicit Jewish writer Philip Roth had died, I assumed he died from disgust at the state of American culture and democracy during this absurd moment in American history. In 2004, Roth published a novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, which imagined America if Charles Lindbergh had beaten FDR in the 1940 election. As I pointed out in an earlier blog (1/7/18), his novel now seems psychic. Roth had a healthy sense of the absurd, and I am convinced that this period is the most absurd one in American history. Fortunately, he died before seeing a rich, powerful Jewish man in handcuffs for sexual misconduct while a rich, now too powerful half-German man, who thought some Nazis were fine people, was in the White House campaigning to win a Nobel Peace Prize and watching his poll numbers rise. I don't know what the now late Jewish writer thought of this fake media-generated METOO movement, but I believe that anyone who doesn't feel ashamed that a black man who gave millions to mostly black colleges and did more to enhance the black male image (whatever he was doing privately) than even Reverend Martin Luther King Junior and President Barack Obama is facing jail time for having freaky sex with a foreign white woman who had previously collected three millions dollars from him and a Jewish man who produced many award-winning movies, often starring white women who won awards for being in those movies, and who apparently kept the AIDS charity AmfAR thriving after Elizabeth Taylor died has been indicted for using his power to force beautiful actresses to have sex with him while a white supremacist who bragged about sexual assault and about peeping at sometimes teenage beauty contestants in the organizations that he owned, a greedy, corrupt con man who believes that charity begins at home, is sitting in the White House, put there by white women and white evangelicals, must be either as bigoted as Trump or a fool, incapable of thinking.

As I was watching white women celebrate while the Jewish guy was being taken into the courtroom in handcuffs, I was also reading about another black man--the dignified, award-winning actor Morgan Freeman, the man who actually played God--being accused of sexually harassing women on movie sets. They didn't say what race his accusers are, but I'd be surprised if the majority of them were nonwhite. Let's count how many black men have already been caught up in this sexual misconduct witch hunt: Tavis Smiley and former Representative Harold Ford lost their jobs. Record producer and mogul Russell Simmons is being investigated. Dirty, but powerful singer (I have most of his CD's; sue me) R Kelly has been targeted by the powerful black women in the METOO movement. Here are the shameful facts. There are not as many powerful black men in America as there are powerful white ones. So each black man who is taken down by this absurd witch hunt is a greater loss for our community. Also, using sexual misconduct to attack powerful black men (see Jesse Jackson, Clarence Thomas, and Hoover's spying on King) and to kill or lock up not at all powerful black boys and men (Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys, the Central Park Five) is as old as racism in America. Once white women voted for a rich, insane, racist white man who was heard bragging about sexual assault before the election instead of his competent, sane white female opponent, the prosecutor who campaigned on locking up Bill Cosby should have dropped the charges. And Anthony Weiner and all other men or women being investigated or in jail for any sex crime other than violent rape or child molestation should be allowed to continue their freaky sexual behavior in peace. Probably the media should have apologized to previous victims of public shaming and humiliation for sexual misconduct like Gary Hart, Monica Lewinsky, and Bill Clinton.

That Bill Cosby was prosecuted twice after Trump became President, and relatively decent (compared to the rich, white bigot in the White House) men like Matt Lauer, perhaps the most decent Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Tom Brokaw, and Morgan Freeman are losing their jobs and/or being publicly shamed is a national disgrace. I will always believe that the media-generated METOO movement was at least subconsciously an attempt to create an atmosphere where a jury would find Cosby guilty. But I thought the strategy might backfire. What if the jurors decided that since so many men, including Franken, Rose, and Lauer, were sexually freaky, Cosby shouldn't have to go to jail for his bad behavior? Probably if Cosby had been white or his accuser and the majority of his other "victims" black, he would have gone free. One juror claimed the use of drugs was the problem. But that foreign white bitch voluntarily took the drugs; Cosby didn't slip them into her drink. The drug excuse is actually one of those fake excuses that generally decent people use to explain bad behavior. It's like the excuse that some white folks are giving for moving out of too "diverse" California. It's not white flight; they're not fleeing the nonwhites. It's the weather or the high cost of housing. White folks, bye!

Although the fall of decent men like Lauer, Rose, and Franken didn't help a black man accused of having freaky sex with white women, it undoubtedly has helped born-rich, white Trump. Remember how we weren't supposed to normalize that freak? Why hasn't someone realized that the more we show other men behaving badly, the less disturbing his behavior seems? Maybe his poll numbers are creeping up not because of the economy or whatever is happening with North Korea, but because the more we focus on seemingly normal men's bad sexual behavior the less abnormal he seems. On the other hand, the fact that so many men, and especially really powerful men like Weinstein, Cosby, Lauer, and Rose, have been so easily destroyed, in the latter two men's cases, by anonymous accusers, may make Trump seem bigger and better than normal, like the most powerful man in the world and not because he's the electoral college, illegitimate President of the most powerful country. Forget Teflon Don. He's a superhero, a god, if not the God. After all, God's son Jesus hung out with prostitutes, so even Stormy helps promote the Trump the All Powerful God narrative. I said when this insane bigot was beating all of those mostly respectable Republicans that non-thinkers who watched his reality show believed he could push around Congress, NATO, the UN, and other world leaders, because they saw him bully and fire well-known celebrities. The Oscar and Grammy winners, retired superstar athletes, and reality stars would attack each other, but the star of "The Apprentice" was always called Mr. Trump by the celebrities he bullied and fired. During the Republican primaries, he pointed out truthfully that the candidates who attacked him usually went down in the polls. And he won the Republican nomination easily despite being despised by almost all establishment Republicans; he also defied all odds, the polls, and the pundits to win the electoral college. And now he's strutting in the White House while Harvey and Bill had to pay a million dollars to stay out of jail and wear ankle monitors. Why wouldn't his ignorant supporters think he's God? Am I the only one thinking right now?

Let's play a what if...what would they do game. What if Trump was running against Obama in 2016, and he won the electoral college because a majority of nonwhites joined white men in voting for him while most white women voted for Obama? What if when he got into the White House, he and his Cabinet/staff/followers started attacking women (there was a brief period of that ugly behavior among some of his deplorable male followers right after the defeat of Hillary), what if he was raping Hope Hicks and calling KellyAnne Conway and Sarah Sanders the kind of names he called Rosie O'Donnell? What if instead of shoving that male NATO leader, he shoved May or Merkel? What if the number of rapes and physical assaults on women increased, and what if he pardoned Bill Cosby? And what if while all of that was going on, the nonwhite folks who put this sexual assaulter in the White House started complaining about racism? What if they started accusing white people, including white women, of discriminating against them, and white women started losing their jobs? What if Kristin Gillibrand was run out of the Senate because of her comments about mostly black NFL players? What if Andrea Mitchell, the MSNBC anchor I once called castrator of black men for attacking both Obama and Eric Holder as weak, lost her job? What if David Duke and some other out-of-the-closet racists were arrested and tried for hate crimes while mostly white women were being raped and beaten? What would white women do? Would they join the nonwhite people's anti-racism movement? Would a white woman serve as an assistant prosecutor to a black man in Duke's trial the way the female Christopher Darden did in Cosby's? Would an unknown white woman allow famous nonwhite women to use the name of a movement she created to promote their anti-racism cause? Would white women create their own anti-racism movement?

If you think they would, you don't know white women, and you don't know Americans. I've written multiple blog posts (11/24/13, 11/26/17, 4/29/18) about Americans' preference for discussing sex instead of race. And I've also called out white women for being weak whiners, too willing to embrace the victim role (6/19/16,10/15/17, 2/4/18). I'm not sure if the death toll from natural causes has creeped up among nonwhites, but many white women would not be able to survive in the atmosphere that I just described. After all, some of them are supposedly permanently traumatized by dirty jokes, French kisses, and being pawed while sloppy drunk or drugged.

It is very difficult to be a thinking black woman right now. In fact, I suspect this absurd period is difficult for all thinkers, no matter their race, gender, religion, or political leanings (white male conservatives David Frum and George Will aren't enjoying this period either). But maybe Roth gave up too quickly. I have some hope. MSNBC seems to be responding to my frantic tweets (and hopefully commentary from other sensible Americans; I can't read and watch everything). Joy Reid's show was spectacular yesterday. She and her guests never mentioned Weinstein, Stormy (except in a disparaging comment about the need to talk about her), or sex, while focusing quite a bit on race (the NFL anthem nonsense, the horrific treatment of nonwhite immigrants). And on Tuesday, Joy and Chris Hayes will spend an hour discussing race. I'll be watching.

Come on, America, let's start thinking. Let's focus on the issues that matter: racism, Russia's interference in our election, mass murder/gun violence, insanity, including in the White House, income inequality, climate change, mass incarceration, and the media's absurd, dangerous obsession with sexual misconduct.

RIP Philip Roth

One of my earliest Goodreads posts (12/1/13) attempted to debunk the liberal media myth. I recognized that just as the affirmative action myths undermined black folks, this false narrative ("alternative facts" hadn't entered our vocabulary in 2013) hurt Democrats. If the majority of the media were pro-liberals, and yet they criticized liberals and exposed their scandals even more than they did conservatives, then liberals must be worse than conservatives. I pointed out in that post that the NATIONAL ENQUIRER attacked Democrats (Hart, Jackson, Edwards, the Kennedys, the Clintons) and protected Republicans (Arnold S, the Bushes, McCain, and all of the sexually scandalous--Ensign, Sanford--Republicans). I also called out ABC for airing a fake documentary about the so-called ten greatest scandals of the 21st Century that included six Democrats and listed as the top three sexually misbehaving liberals (Edwards, Spitzer, Weiner) who were no longer in office. They didn't mention Katrina, the WMD lies that led to the Iraq War, or the recent (2013) GOP-led government shutdown. Since I wrote that post, I watched ABC interrupt regular programming to snarkily announce something that they thought would be bad news for Obama and when it turned out to be good news (some captured American military had been released), they abruptly returned to regular programming. Of course, this behavior on the part of what is supposed to be liberal media makes liberals look especially bad. But there are actual liberal media folks like most of the MSNBC anchors and at least some (Lemon, Cuomo, Cooper) of those on CNN. Unfortunately, just as Democrats tend to attack each other instead of behaving like conservatives who will support and defend a child molester or a racist maniac (see 2/17/19 and 3/31/19 posts), the liberal media will often attack Democrats more ferociously than they do Republicans. The behavior of the real liberal media is one of the many reasons why Democrats have trouble winning elections. If the real liberal media acted more like Fox, we would win more often and more easily.

A few months ago during the latest GOP government shutdown, I tweeted about the liberal media bullying elected Democrats for being paid while other government workers were not. I had watched morning MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson bullying a Democratic Congressman I didn't know. Why was she shaming him? He was not the rich, narcissistic, sadistic bigot who claimed he would be proud to shut down the government and then shut it down. Now the Democrats are being bullied by MSNBC and CNN anchors over impeachment. These know-it-all talking heads who didn't know that Trump could win, who didn't know or care that Michael Avenatti was a media whore (see 11/24/18 post), and who focused on the content of the Clinton campaign e-mails instead of on who had hacked them and why, think they know more than the leaders who gave us the now popular ACA. The two most obnoxious liberal media bullies are angry, suddenly-obsessed-with-impeachment black woman Joy Reid on MSNBC, who rudely interrogated the seventy-something, very dignified and stately (also too courteous for my taste) black Representative James Clyburn about what really happened when Clinton was impeached, and the privileged, entitled, smugly self-righteous (smug-righteous?) white man Chris Cuomo on CNN, who not only wants the Democrats to impeach the insane bigot that the media and Republicans elected but wants them to send money to the Homeland Security Department so that the Republicans will use it to help those poor immigrant children as if the racists running our government won't use that money to make life even more difficult for those brown children. It must be wonderful to be a naïve, know-it-all, born-to-fame-wealth-and-power white man.

If you keep attacking Democrats instead of protecting them and attacking Republicans, you will help Trump win again, liberal media, so here's what you must do:

1) Attack Republicans for not demanding that Trump resign or activating the 25th Amendment. Remind everyone that Nixon was not impeached, that he resigned before impeachment. Also, remind everyone (some talking heads are making this point) that the two impeached Presidents were not removed, and impeachment takes a long time. Shame, blame, and attack every Republican who enables or defends the President. Make it clear that Trump needs to go now because he is causing more damage to our democracy, our citizens, migrants of color, and our reputation around the world every minute that he stays in the office that Putin (and you) helped him win.

2) Attack McConnell, Graham, and other Trump enablers who are facing reelection. Focus not only on how they're enabling Trump but also on any connections they may have with Russia or any other nonsexual corruption you can find. Instead of digging up dirt on the 2020 Democratic candidates, which is the conservative media's (including ABC) job, dig up dirt on the Republicans and Republican-leaning organizations like the NRA.

3) Continue to attack the conservative media whenever they attack liberals. Chris Matthews (my least favorite MSNBC anchor because he has the personality of a Fox anchor) was especially effective last week at debunking the fake criticism of Speaker Pelosi's mentioning (in a private meeting) that Trump should go to jail.

4) Help me with my drive-Trump-crazier campaign by constantly criticizing him and comparing him unfavorably to Obama and the Clintons. Follow the Brits' lead by highlighting the polls revealing Trump's approval ratings around the world versus Obama's. Also, contrast how Obama responded to criticism and smears (with wit or by ignoring them) like Trump's racist birtherism to how Trump responds.

5) Minimize or don't report any good news, and maximize any bad news about the economy, relations with our allies or adversaries, etc. Blame Trump for anything bad that happens, and give others (Obama, Congress, the Cabinet members) credit for anything good that happens. You could also interpret good news as bad news or question the source of the good news as the conservative media did when the unemployment and jobs created numbers were good for Obama.

What's happening now reminds me of how the media helped elect messy GW Bush twice (attacking Gore as dishonest and calling Florida and the race for Bush in 2000 before taking it back, promoting the Swift Boat nonsense in 2004) and then criticized Obama for not cleaning up the mess left by the media's President fast enough and for the way he cleaned. The Democrats did not put Trump in the White House; racists, the electoral college, Putin, and the media did. The media need to get him out of there, and they can do that by attacking him and his enablers while protecting and supporting the Democrats. The media may not be the enemy of the people, but they are helping destroy our democracy by the way they treat Democrats and Republicans.

As I said in a post on the Joy Reid Fan Club site (the post was quickly removed by the moderators; hmmm, don't liberals believe in freedom of speech, constructive criticism?), if Trump wins in 2020, we should blame the media again. Let's hope the real liberal media will start acting like the conservative media. Let's hope the MSNBC anchors and the liberals on CNN will be more like Fox so that the 2020 Democratic nominee can win in a landslide.

I spent most of last week making a point that should be obvious to anyone living in the real world and paying a little attention to politics: Democrats are the best behaved and the most criticized and demonized political party in the USA. When Chelsea Clinton tweeted that some of Trump’s deplorable cultists were outside her parents’ home shouting, “Lock her up,” one of the more polite Clinton critics (Chelsea received mostly positive support) said that the Trump family probably suffered the same treatment. I pointed out that Chelsea’s parents hadn’t mocked a disabled journalist, trashed a tortured Vietnam War hero (I didn’t add “even when he was sick and even after he had died” because I was on Twitter and had to limit my words), or mean-tweeted everyone except family members and Putin. They weren’t bullies. A Trump supporter and/or Clinton critic who must not know about me or he wouldn’t have responded to my tweet claimed that Hillary had mocked more people than Trump because she called Trump supporters “deplorables.” I explained to him the difference between an evaluation of bad actions and mocking. I explained why Trump supporters (uh, they supported a corrupt, self-confessed sexual assaulter but wanted to lock up Hillary) were deplorable and pointed out that Hillary didn’t mock Trump’s slow, fish-lipped walk down the West Point platform or his panting for breath like a catfish out of water stand on the White House balcony after he ripped off his Covid-filled mask (again, I used fewer words on Twitter) the way he mocked (at a 2016 rally) her fainting spell during the 9/11/16 ceremony. A day after that exchange, I read the editors’ opinion in my local paper (I forgot how conservative those opinion editors are and so will now have to stop subscribing to that paper) and felt my blood boil as they chastised the media-made “leader of the Democratic Party” AOC for saying that we should remember what the Republicans did and not let them walk away from their bad acts (I pictured Susan Collins as I read those words). The DAILY BULLETIN conservatives wondered how Biden could unite the country if the Democrats mistreated the Republicans. I wrote a brief (they have a 150 word limit, although some of the published letters seem longer) letter to the editor titled “Accountability Versus Demonization.” The letter opened with the following facts: “At least AOC didn’t say that Republicans eat children and/or drink their blood. She didn’t accuse Trump, who claimed he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, of murder the way the Republicans have the Clintons.” Of course, the conservatives didn’t do what the more liberal and very anti-Trump opinion editors of the LA TIMES did: Devote a whole page to letters with opposing viewpoints. They published two letters that were mildly critical of their opinion, but for the second time didn’t publish mine. But this old black woman can’t be silenced. She not only has Twitter and Facebook accounts, but she has a Goodreads blog and knows how to use it. I’m going to use as many words as I need to point out why Democrats are demonized while Republicans are literally killing us: We hold better behaved people to a higher standard and/or use false equivalencies. Badly behaved people demonize the better behaved to justify their behavior and/or to feel less guilty. The badly behaved might also be projecting, distracting, and/or putting the better behaved on the defensive by demonizing them.

Conservatives aren’t the only media folks who attack Democrats while giving Republicans a pass. I spent several weeks in 2019 verbally spanking one of my favorite MSNBC anchors for badgering Nancy Pelosi and the very dignified Jim Clyburn, trying to convince them to impeach Trump. I let Ms. Joy Reid know that I trusted the people who gave us the ACA more than those who promoted media whore and crooked lawyer Michael Avenatti. I also pointed out that impeachment didn’t lead to the removal of the other two Presidents who had been impeached and that Nixon left voluntarily. I wondered why people didn’t attack the Republicans for not telling Trump to resign as the seventies Republicans did with Nixon or for not impeaching Trump during his first two years in office when they were in charge of the House. I also had to go after Hallie Jackson for interrogating one of the Democrats in Congress about whether or not he was being paid while the government was closed. Trump closed the government, not the Democrats. Why do we blame Democrats for not cleaning up the messes that Republicans made? The media and some Americans treat the better behaved party the way some bad parents treat their better behaved child, expecting that child to be perfect and maybe even to police the bad child(ren) who get(s) away with everything.

As “the Hillary mocks too” example shows, we also equate minor offenses by the better behaved party with deplorable actions by the evil party. The latest example is the attempt to compare what Gore did in 2000 (which was finally to concede when he should have kept fighting since he had a good case) to what Trump is doing now. Without looking at the way the Republicans cheated (Bush’s cousin declared he had won Florida on Fox, and the other stations followed his lead), we can easily see the difference. Bush “won” one state, the one where his brother was the governor and the Secretary of State was a GWB campaign chair, by fewer than 600 votes, and Gore won the popular vote. Biden has won both the electoral college and the popular vote in a landslide. Sometimes when the conservatives can’t find an equivalency, even a false one, they make one up. Since I didn’t watch Trump’s inaugural speech, I didn’t realize he had thanked Obama for his help during the transition. But I knew that Obama had graciously welcomed the man who had for five years accused him of lying about his place of birth, who had joined the racist birther movement and made it go viral, to the White House. Trump’s fourth press secretary in fewer than four years, the one who said she wouldn’t lie, claimed that the Obama-Biden administration had behaved during the 2016-17 transition worse than Trump and his minions are behaving now.

Of course, the most outrageous lie told by conservatives comes from the QANON cultists who I hope don’t really believe that liberals eat children. Because so many of the crimes conservatives accuse liberals of committing or planning to commit—voter fraud, killing babies (Tamir Rice and the many black babies who die in poverty or from ingesting too much lead), creating death panels (because of Covid)—I wonder if it’s possible that some of them are eating children or drinking their blood. Are the Republicans projecting again? They accuse us of being unpatriotic, yet they are the ones who are helping Putin to destroy our democracy. They rant about how much money is spent and how much debt is created when Democrats are in charge of the federal government, yet they run up the debt giving tax cuts to the rich. They call peaceful protesters anarchists and terrorists while donating millions of dollars to seventeen-year-old Killer Kid Kyle (he’s out of jail on a two million dollar bond) and not criticizing their “dear leader” for telling a truly dangerous terrorist group to “stand back and stand by.” Is it possible that these cruel politicians, who went home for Thanksgiving without providing aid to so many Americans who don’t have enough to eat and may not be able to pay their mortgage or rent, actually eat children? Who looks more like they eat children? Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and Mike Pompeo or Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and AOC? Who looks like he’s more likely to drink blood? The spooky looking man from Kentucky who happily calls himself the Grim Reaper or smiling, occasionally crying Chuck Schumer from New York?

The lies told by the Republicans are often used as distractions from their bad behavior and/or to put the Democrats on the defensive while they’re being offensive. The best example of that despicable tactic happened when McConnell, Graham, and the rest of the Republican racists in the Senate rushed through the appointment of racist mother of adopted black children ACB to prevent Biden from appointing a black woman to the Supreme Court. The Republicans actually tried to claim that the Democrats were discriminating against ACB because she’s Catholic. Fortunately, the media didn’t play their game, pointing out that Biden and Pelosi are both Catholics, and the court is already packed with Catholics, including a Catholic woman appointed by Obama.

Perhaps the primary reason Republicans demonize Democrats is the same reason white people demonize black people and family members demonize their better behaved spouses or siblings. They feel guilty, so they try to convince themselves that they’re better than the people they are hurting. White people don’t want to believe that good and decent humans were enslaved, raped, and lynched in earlier centuries and are being murdered by cops today, so they claim blacks are lazy criminals; we’re animals. The spouse who is committing adultery claims that the betrayed spouse is a drug addict and/or abusive. The siblings who neglect their elderly parents criticize the ones who are caring for them, suggesting they’re cold and mean or maybe they’re stealing from the parents. How can Republicans, especially evangelicals and women, justify supporting a thrice-married, sexist, racist, narcissistic adulterer, who was heard bragging about sexually assaulting women and was seen hanging out with a man arrested for operating a child sex ring, who encouraged his followers to physically assault protesters, and mocked and bullied everyone except Putin? Well, if the Democrats run a child sex ring, eat children, and/or drink their blood, then Trump doesn’t seem so bad. He is the lesser of two evils. And those of us who support the Democrats are more evil than his supporters are.

Like blacks and the more decent family members, Democrats have to fight back against the attempt to demonize them by their more evil counterparts. When the Republicans call us socialists, we should say, “If FDR, who gave us Social Security, is a socialist, then I’m a socialist. If LBJ, who gave us Medicare and fought the war on poverty much more effectively than he did the Vietnam War, is a socialist, then so am I. If BHO, who battled the demonizing Republicans, who screamed about death panels and pulling the plug on Grandma, to give us the now beloved by most Americans ACA, is a socialist, then I’m proud to be a socialist too.” Less verbose and steeped in history Democrats can simply say, “I’d rather be a socialist than a white supremacist.” When they call us baby killers, we can wonder why they care about a fetus only when it’s inside its mother’s womb. Why don’t they care about Tamir Rice or the two white people killed by Killer Kid Kyle? Why do their supporters tear down signs that say “Black Lives Matter”? We can ask them if they believe that all lives matter more than buildings and businesses. The Republicans are the pro-death, pro-corporate welfare, anti-health care, anti-education, anti-democracy white supremacist party. They are the party of Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell and racist malignant narcissist Donald Trump. We are the party of empathetic Joe Biden and civil rights icon John Lewis. We may not be saints, but they’re definitely the demons.

As I watched commemorations and commentary on events that happened 100 years ago while dealing with current events, I felt as if I were in an everything old is new again Ground Hog Decade or Century. News commentators discussed how the Tulsa terrorist attack on the area called Black Wall Street in 1921 was either not reported or was covered as a race riot where (in one Oklahoma newspaper) blacks were the villains while Trump-worshipping Republicans and conservative news media either tried to ignore the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol or portrayed the insurrectionists as patriots, tourists, and (in the most ridiculous fantasy) BlackLivesMatter and Antifa activists posing as Trump supporters. As I battled the employees of a corrupt, racist property management company (Condominium Management Services) and the “fixer” lawyers (Kriger Law firm) who enable them, I learned about the theft of a black family’s land in Huntington Beach 100 years ago. And as I heard about plans for Republican politicians to ban the study of critical race theory in public schools while bigots like Megyn Kelly removed their children from private schools to protect them from learning the truth about racism in the not so United States of America, I remembered that in the 19th Century it was illegal for blacks to learn to read and write and that toward the end of the 20th Century there was the “cultural literacy” versus multiculturalism debate among academics, where those of us who wanted to expand and diversify the canon had to deal with know-it-all white male educators like Allan Bloom (THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, 1987) and E.D. Hirsch, Junior (CULTURAL LITERACY, 1987) who thought they could determine what all of us needed to know, no matter who we were, where we lived, and what career we planned to pursue. It’s clear that the more America and some Americans change, the more racists stay the same. The more historians, teachers, and journalists reveal the truth about our racist past and present, the more racists try to deny, distract, and revise the truth. And the more we progress toward a more moral and perfect union, that “promised land” where all people are treated equal, the more white supremacists like politicians Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, so-called journalists like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and organizations like the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers try to reverse our progress. That’s why white supremacists are still winning.

Of course, despite the white supremacists’ attempts to obstruct and sabotage us, we have made considerable progress toward racial equity since the 19th and 20th Centuries. Black people not only can read and write, we can also teach white students how to read and write. And we can write history and literature, sometimes revising the stories told by white writers. In my 20th Century American Literature classes, I usually paired what I called “dominant culture” (i.e. white) texts with those written by blacks or other writers of color, showing how the white texts were revised. Richard Wright’s NATIVE SON (1940), for instance, revises Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), and August Wilson’s FENCES (1985) revises Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949). But white writers can also revise writers of color as I showed with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s GREAT GATSBY (1925) and James Weldon Johnson’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN (1912). Through his portrait of Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed that even a white man couldn’t just show up in New York society and be accepted by the rich white folks the way the ex-coloured man was when he passed for white in Johnson’s novel. Fitzgerald’s response to Johnson’s tale of a black man passing for white, marrying a wealthy, beautiful “lily white” woman (who dies after having two children), and living successfully as a businessman is similar to the response of some contemporary white journalists to the 1619 project, a version of American history that focuses on slavery instead of Christopher Columbus, the Puritans, and the Founding Fathers. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black female journalist who developed that project, was just denied tenure at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her scholarship has been viciously attacked by mostly white men who are probably as bothered by her race and gender as they are by the truths she revealed about American history. Some revisionists are even suggesting that slavery was good for blacks (even a few black fools are making that point) and/or that the Southerners were really the ones who wanted to free the slaves.

While the journalists and commentators (historians, politicians, educators) that I watch mostly on MSNBC are currently rejecting attempts to revise history and deny the truth about American racism, they are still too easily distracted by news that doesn’t matter as much as the dangers of white supremacist terrorism and the attacks on our democracy by racist Republican state legislators and governors, which represent the most serious attempt to reverse progress toward a truly equal American society since Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow at the end of the 19th Century. Last week, the MSNBC anchors planned to spend most of May 25 focused on the anniversary of George Floyd’s becoming a civil rights martyr. They announced these plans in advance. “Coincidentally,” on that day someone in the Manhattan district attorney’s office leaked the information that a grand jury was being formed to investigate Trump. It wasn’t clear who leaked that information, which should not have been leaked, but I suspect it was a soft bigot (the information also could have been leaked earlier, and the soft bigot could have been the journalist who decided to publish it on the Floyd anniversary) who didn’t want to watch a whole day of news about a black man being murdered by a racist white cop. Instead of briefly mentioning the grand jury news and focusing on Floyd, the MSNBC anchors all threw away their scripts and focused on Trump; they spent at least half of their May 25 shows speculating about what was going to happen with the grand jury as if they couldn’t have that discussion the next day or the day after that since the jury probably won’t indict anyone for months. That distraction reminded me of the 2016 Hillary’s e-mails media distraction that allowed Trump to win the electoral college and the 2017 METOO media distraction that allowed us to ignore Charlottesville, the mass murders in Las Vegas, and the fact that a year earlier white women and white evangelicals voted for a confessed sexual assaulter because he promised to stop the browning of America. Even now some news media commentators are still being distracted by sex. Although no one (not even Rachel Maddow, who is practically hyperventilating) is more focused on how dangerous this attack on our democracy is than MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, she still had time in her one-hour (minus time for commercials) show this week to spend a segment on the Matt Gaetz sex scandal. Really? If Gaetz isn’t eating children and drinking their blood (which is possible since the Republicans project all of their sins onto Democrats), who cares about his sex life. The Republicans aren’t going to demand that he resign, and he’s not the one blocking the Republican Senators from voting for a 1/6 commission. Everyone needs to stay focused on the threats to our democracy and to the lives of people of color, Jews, and Muslims by white supremacists.

The murder of George Floyd by a racist cop was one of those “inflection” moments in American history that can lead to major change. I was astonished by how quickly everything changed last summer. Suddenly we were celebrating Juneteenth, Target and Walmart were carrying books about race, and Mitt Romney marched with the BlackLivesMatter protesters. White folks who thought they weren’t racist or who thought everything would be fine if we black folks and our too progressive white allies just stopped talking about race suddenly woke up and started talking about race; some apologized for being asleep for so long. Everyone was now saying what I’ve been saying for years. We’re not colorblind, and we don’t treat everyone the same. Like black lives and black votes, race does matter. Of course, there is always a backlash to change, and the more mostly nonblack people marched, and the more talk there was of race and racism, the more dangerous the white supremacists became. Like the trapped rat in the opening scene of NATIVE SON, they started attacking, leading finally to the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol by the unpatriotic, racist white people I call TRASH (see 1/17/21 blog post).

Of course, we’d been moving toward that attack since at least the eighties, the last period when a major reversal of progress toward equality occurred. The election of Ronald Reagan, the attack on affirmative action, and the rise of groups like the skinheads during the eighties all were leading to Donald Trump and the Proud Boys in the 2020’s. The failure to tell the truth about racism in the past allowed racists to hide in plain sight during the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, eventually enabling not so secret white supremacist (in the eighties he took out newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and said on television that he wanted people to hate those very young, too dark for some people’s taste falsely accused boys/young men) Trump to move into the White House and start undermining our democracy.

Our democracy continues to be in danger, so it’s important that we stay focused on telling the truth about the racism of the past and the present. We all need to do our part—teachers, journalists, documentarians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. We social media warriors also need to keep posting and tweeting the truth. I’m encouraging several celebrities (LeBron James, who executive produced one of the Tulsa documentaries, Spike Lee, who has produced at least three great documentaries, and Michael Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary attacking Bush’s wars) to produce a documentary on the mirror image dates 1/6/20 and 6/1/21. I’ve also suggested that everyone should make this June 14, Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, Pro-Democracy and Pro-Voting Rights Day. The Vice President and President should make speeches explaining how we can show our love for the flag (not by hugging and kissing it) by protecting our democracy and making it easier for all eligible American citizens to vote.

Too often the white supremacists have won the propaganda war. It’s time that the “real” Americans, the true patriots, start winning by telling the truth about our past and our present so that we can progress toward a more just, equitable, multicultural, mixed race future.

Until the majority of white people, including women and evangelicals, voted for a low-rated reality television star, a self-proclaimed sexual assaulter and insane white supremacist, for President, I loved watching reality television shows. It started with the Osbornes, (then) married singers Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, and best friends (until the show caused some trouble between them) Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton. Later came the Kardashians and the (sometimes unmarried) “wives.” I not only watched the Beverly Hills and Atlanta Housewives but also enjoyed the Basketball Wives and briefly a series starring the ex-wives of Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Prince, and (late addition to the cast) R Kelly. I also enjoyed shows that featured celebrities and once were or wannabe celebrities living together (“The Surreal Life”), trying to lose weight (“The Celebrity Fitness Club”), recover from drugs (Dr. Drew’s shows), and most hilariously, work as cops in Muncie, Indiana. The only totally scripted (I figured out fairly quickly that most of the reality shows were partly scripted) shows I watched during this period were set in schools—“Community” and “Glee.” I watched only one season of “The Apprentice,” the one that featured LaToya Jackson (who was one of the “celebrity” Muncie cops and also briefly had her own show as did her brothers shortly after Michael’s death; I watched both shows while complaining about the exploitation of Michael’s death and LaToya’s lack of talent), Atlanta Housewife NeNe Leakes (may her husband RIP), former “The View” cohost Star Jones, and the very contemptuous of the show and other “contestants” legendary singer Dionne Warwick. I wasn’t a fan of that show, especially after Trump started his racist birther lies. Once he entered the White House and started creating chaos, I mainly watched news shows because I had to know what that incompetent maniac was doing to our country and the world. I usually watched MSNBC but would switch to CNN if I didn’t like the guest or the topic on the MSNBC shows. I would watch Hallie Jackson’s show while eating breakfast, Katy Tur’s (occasionally Ali Velshi’s if I was late eating) during lunch, and Rachel Maddow’s during dinner. When the news was especially important or scary, I would also watch Lawrence O’Donnell and Brian Williams’ shows. During the last year of Trump’s reign, which featured Covid and the BLM protests, I started turning on “Morning Joe” as soon as I woke up and watched Nicolle Wallace and Joy Reid’s afternoon (in LA) shows. Once Biden finally moved into the White House, I dropped Nicolle’s show, which had expanded to two hours, but continued to watch Joy and frequently to check out Joe and Mika’s show in the morning. Then came what I refer to as the Cuomo mess. I was so disgusted by the Democrats’ dirty politics, using fake sexual misconduct charges to force another popular Democrat to resign after the majority of white women and evangelicals had voted for a self-proclaimed sexual assaulter and accused rapist twice, that I turned off MSNBC and CNN and started streaming comedy and documentary shows while eating my meals.

Dining with SNL’s Bernie Sanders, aka Larry David, whose show (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) I’m currently streaming, is so much more relaxing than trying to eat while the MSNBC or CNN anchors are presenting their biased version of the news. My only worry is that I might choke while eating and laughing at Larry’s foolishness. Hurricane survivors Vivica Fox (I don’t remember her character’s name) and her brother Leon (played by a should be more well-known comedian named J.B. Smoove) have added color to the show. Before Larry’s show, I enjoyed watching the first season of “Hacks,” which won several Emmys on Sunday, “Nora Is From Queens,” which is about a hilarious Chinese family, and all six or seven seasons of “Sex and the City.” I’ve also watched a couple of documentaries, one about Obama, which was as informative as it was inspiring, and a disturbing (but also informative) one about Sandra Bland. But even that documentary was less difficult to swallow with my food than the METOO-promoting, false equivalency nonsense too often spewed on MSNBC and CNN.

I still watch Jonathan Capehart’s MSNBC show on Sunday morning, but I’ve usually finished breakfast before I start watching him, and I will skip segments that I think might agitate me. I once said that being able to tweet and post on social media had stopped me from screaming at the television, but lately I’ve been doing both, screaming at the television and then rushing to my I-Pad to tweet. Since Snowflake Meghan McCain (See 3/14/21 post) is gone, I’m watching “The View” again, but after a segment on Monica Lewinsky turned my stomach this week and sent me to my I-Pad to launch a Twitter storm about Clinton being impeached over sex and Monica still cashing in on her infamy after all these years, I wondered if I would be able to continue watching that show. I’m too old to watch provocative political television. I need entertaining comfort television, especially while I’m eating.

Since I believe it’s important for American citizens to be informed, I now read my two daily newspapers more carefully and realized too late to save my 9/11 experience (I turned off the television when all of the stations I checked had switched to a speech by the second worst President in my lifetime instead of continuing to show the solemn and moving name-calling ceremony at Ground Zero) that I can watch C-Span during major political and historical events. Sorry, Brian, Rachel, Joy, and Nicolle, while your 2020 Democratic convention commentary was entertaining, I think I’ll provide my own commentary for major events while watching CSPAN without commercials.

I’m looking forward to seeing our Vice President on “The View” this morning. I hope Whoopi is back to help interview her and don’t expect Ana to cause any problems because she is one of my favorite Republicans (along with Nicolle and Steve Schmidt; I like McCain’s 2008 campaign staff much more than I do his daughter). But when I turn off “The View” and start eating lunch, I’ll be streaming “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I don’t care what the anchors on MSNBC and CNN think about the Harris interview. I figured out years ago that I’m a better critical thinker (although equally biased) than they are. Between 11:00 and 11:30, I’ll be laughing at Larry’s foolishness, not screaming at the fools on MSNBC or CNN who will probably be criticizing VP Harris for all the wrong reasons.