Mary Sisney's Blog - Posts Tagged "mike-pence"
Rape Vs. Sexual Assault & Harassment: Words That Matter III
When I first heard about the Brock Turner-Emily Doe sexual assault case, I thought Turner was a sick freak who should be locked up in either a prison or mental institution for several years. The news stories that I read described him as penetrating the blacked out from drinking Doe with a foreign object. I assumed that the object was something more freaky and potentially painful than the male sexual organ. I assumed Brock used a cigar, a bottle, or (based on some other reported details) a tree limb. When I learned that the foreign object was his finger, I was disgusted that so much fuss was being made over clearly a less serious crime than rape. When I read Emily's lengthy, self-indulgent courtroom statement, I was even more annoyed, especially since I had talked to several other people who were surprised to learn that the foreign object was a finger, and wrote a blog post (6/19/16) condemning her.
As that sexual assault case shows, language matters in how we discuss criminal activity. There is a major difference between rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Whether the rape victim is beaten or simply overpowered by a larger or stronger person, whether the rapist is a stranger, an acquaintance, a lover, or a spouse, whether the victim is wearing a choir robe, a bikini, or nothing at all, whether the victim is a nun or a prostitute, a child, a twenty-year-old, or an eighty-year-old, whether the victim is in a locked house, a bar, or a dark alley at midnight, rape is a crime, and the victim should not be blamed for what the rapist did.
Because rape involves penetration, usually with a sexual organ, rapists are almost always men. Women would have to use a "foreign object" to rape anyone. However, women can sexually assault and harass, and that's one of several reasons why the most recent outbreak of woman-as-prey and man-as-predator stories is problematic. Let's start with sexual assault. Clearly, if a man or woman grabs someone's body part hard enough to cause pain, that act should be classified as an assault. But what if he or she just pats the person on the rear end or brushes against a woman's breast or a man's penis? Is that sexual assault? The word "assault " suggests a painful or at least threatening act, and yet I've heard touching a woman's breast or an unwanted kiss called an assault. Really? What if a woman kissed a man, and he didn't appreciate the kiss? Should he accuse her of sexual assault? I discussed this issue with my brother several years ago after I saw singer Beyoncé chastise a fan for touching, possibly pinching, her rear end when she was kneeling with her back to him. I wondered what her husband rapper Jay-Z would have done if a female fan had pinched him on the same spot. My brother and I wondered then why it was okay for women to touch and maybe grope male singers, but male fans couldn't do the same thing to females. I've more recently mentioned the female fans who used to throw their panties at old school singer Tom Jones. Were they assaulting him? If my male students had thrown their underwear at me while I was trying to teach them, I would have probably called security. I also wonder now about singers like Beyoncé and Janet Jackson who bump and grind against male members of their audiences. Has R Kelly or Bobby Brown done that? I remember that Brown was arrested for simulating a sexual act back in the early nineties; was he humping a woman? Probably before the fan touched or pinched her, Beyoncé and her Destiny's Child group members did what Will Smith called a lap dance for Magic Johnson and two other black male celebrities at the BET Awards show. The men seemed to enjoy it, but what if one of them didn't? Could they accuse Michelle, Beyoncé, or Kelly of sexual assault?
There's another problem with labelling almost any unwanted sexual contact as sexual assault. What if a man accidentally touches a woman's breast? What if he bumps into her when he's not paying attention or when he loses his balance? What if he brushes against her on a crowded subway? A scene in Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN shows the invisible man horrified by the fact that he's pressed against a white woman on a crowded train when he first moves to New York. Under the current rules, she probably could have accused him of sexual assault, but then could he accuse her of assault too because she was pressed against him?
The term "sexual harassment" is equally problematic. If we define the term as someone in power using that power to coerce another person to engage in sexual activity or using that power and sexual behavior to intimidate and/or embarrass the less powerful person, then both men and women can be guilty of sexual harassment. Men are more likely to engage in such behavior because they are still more likely to have more powerful positions than women. But what if the less powerful person flirts with the more powerful person? I never had male students flirt with me (or if they did, I was too asexual to notice), but I know that female students flirted with male professors. Because of their position, those men should not have had sex with their students, but the students were more guilty than rape victims. College-level students know that it's inappropriate for students and professors to have sex, and yet they often made the first flirtatious moves. I compare them to Monica Lewinsky, who was less guilty than the much older and certainly more powerful Bill Clinton, but he didn't harass her. In fact, if he weren't so powerful, we could argue that she harassed him. I saw a few of my male students' underwear because I was still teaching during the period when men wore droopy pants, but if one of them had deliberately shown me his briefs and snapped them while grinning or winking at me, I would have called security.
There's another problem with the term "sexual harassment." I heard 20 million dollar "victim" (hell, yes, I'm bitter; if these blonde women can get 20 or 32 million dollars for putting up with gross men while making relatively big bucks on television, black women who actually went in back doors, rode in the back of buses, and dealt with overt racism and sexism while making much less money even when they had three college degrees and graded thousands of papers deserve billions for their suffering) Gretchen Carlson say that when "victims" complained, they were sometimes described as not being able to take a joke. Well, can they take a joke? I say in my memoir that my students probably thought I was a hot mama off campus, not just because of my race and generation (younger folks think we baby boomers were all drug addicts and sex fiends; thanks, Weinstein, for helping confirm that stereotype) but also because I joked about sex. I love double-entendres and can spot a phallic symbol from a mile away. Anyone who came of age during or right after the late sixties sexual revolution should not pretend to be appalled and horrified by any sexual behavior other than molestation of children and bestiality. The only people more chaste than I am live in nunneries and monasteries, and even in the eighties and early nineties, I was still capable of being shocked by the behavior of some of my educated colleagues who had open marriages and swinging hot tub parties, as well as affairs with students and each other. But I could joke about sex because I saw movies like MIDNIGHT COWBOY and BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE when I was younger. I also saw a streaker when I was watching the Oscars in the seventies. If one of my supervisors joked with me about sex, I would not be offended. I might not laugh if the joke wasn't funny, but I wouldn't feel threatened or harassed. I also certainly didn't think I was harassing any of my students when I joked with them about sex. If we can't laugh about sex, which is kind of ridiculous, then we are in big trouble. Actor David Niven made fun of the Oscars streaker and went on with the show.
The "victims" also seemed to be suggesting that if a man compliments a woman's physical appearance, he's harassing her. Really? If he says, "I like your figure" or "You look good in that dress," that's harassment? What if a woman tells a man she likes his body? Is he being harassed? When the actress formerly known as Blossom (Mayim Bialik) suggested that women shouldn't flirt and should wear more modest clothes, she was viciously attacked (liberals have shown with this issue that they know how to bully) and quickly apologized. If she was referring to rape victims, she deserved to be chastised, but if she was referring to women who felt harassed by male attention, she had a point. Men can go bare-chested and not be raped, so women should be able to do the same. But I assume that if a woman compliments a man's abs, he won't feel harassed. If women feel that comments made about their looks is harassment, then they should dress in a way that will prevent those comments from happening. Here's another problem: I've had a couple of discussions with white women who complain about the invisibility of the older woman. In other words, they clearly enjoyed capturing the attention of men when they were younger and miss it now. Are they wrong? What if some women enjoy having men whistle at them and compliment their looks? Should we bully them for not realizing that they are being harassed? I've noticed that we have a double standard for men and women when discussing physical appearance. Male political candidates like Barack Obama, John Edwards, Martin O'Malley, and Paul Ryan have been described as sexy hunks, but when Obama said a few years ago that the current California Senator Kamala Harris was the best looking attorney general he was criticized. If women are going to be treated as equal to men, make the same money as they do, become President of the United States, we need to be treated as equals when it comes to sexual behavior.
There are many reasons why this current focus on sexual assault and harassment is destructive to our culture. One is that it allows us to ignore more serious problems like racism and crazy elderly white men becoming the new (instead of crazy younger white men) mass murderers. But another reason is that unlike rape, these "crimes" are subject to interpretation so that one person's sexual assault is another person's affectionate embrace or kiss and one person's bad joke is another person's harassment. There is also a gender inequality problem, where only women can be victims and only men can be villains. If women do not want to be treated like children, who have special protections but also have no rights (they can't vote, drive, marry, or drink alcohol), then they need to stop embracing the passive victim role and start acting like empowered people who are responsible for their own fate.
Women: Only you can prevent sexual assault and harassment by refusing to see every joke or touch as a crime against you. Continuing down this women as brave victims path will lead to men like Pence, refusing to interact with women unless their wives are present, and eventually to the inevitable backlash with men raping women and then claiming that these true victims are just being politically correct feminazis.
As that sexual assault case shows, language matters in how we discuss criminal activity. There is a major difference between rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Whether the rape victim is beaten or simply overpowered by a larger or stronger person, whether the rapist is a stranger, an acquaintance, a lover, or a spouse, whether the victim is wearing a choir robe, a bikini, or nothing at all, whether the victim is a nun or a prostitute, a child, a twenty-year-old, or an eighty-year-old, whether the victim is in a locked house, a bar, or a dark alley at midnight, rape is a crime, and the victim should not be blamed for what the rapist did.
Because rape involves penetration, usually with a sexual organ, rapists are almost always men. Women would have to use a "foreign object" to rape anyone. However, women can sexually assault and harass, and that's one of several reasons why the most recent outbreak of woman-as-prey and man-as-predator stories is problematic. Let's start with sexual assault. Clearly, if a man or woman grabs someone's body part hard enough to cause pain, that act should be classified as an assault. But what if he or she just pats the person on the rear end or brushes against a woman's breast or a man's penis? Is that sexual assault? The word "assault " suggests a painful or at least threatening act, and yet I've heard touching a woman's breast or an unwanted kiss called an assault. Really? What if a woman kissed a man, and he didn't appreciate the kiss? Should he accuse her of sexual assault? I discussed this issue with my brother several years ago after I saw singer Beyoncé chastise a fan for touching, possibly pinching, her rear end when she was kneeling with her back to him. I wondered what her husband rapper Jay-Z would have done if a female fan had pinched him on the same spot. My brother and I wondered then why it was okay for women to touch and maybe grope male singers, but male fans couldn't do the same thing to females. I've more recently mentioned the female fans who used to throw their panties at old school singer Tom Jones. Were they assaulting him? If my male students had thrown their underwear at me while I was trying to teach them, I would have probably called security. I also wonder now about singers like Beyoncé and Janet Jackson who bump and grind against male members of their audiences. Has R Kelly or Bobby Brown done that? I remember that Brown was arrested for simulating a sexual act back in the early nineties; was he humping a woman? Probably before the fan touched or pinched her, Beyoncé and her Destiny's Child group members did what Will Smith called a lap dance for Magic Johnson and two other black male celebrities at the BET Awards show. The men seemed to enjoy it, but what if one of them didn't? Could they accuse Michelle, Beyoncé, or Kelly of sexual assault?
There's another problem with labelling almost any unwanted sexual contact as sexual assault. What if a man accidentally touches a woman's breast? What if he bumps into her when he's not paying attention or when he loses his balance? What if he brushes against her on a crowded subway? A scene in Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN shows the invisible man horrified by the fact that he's pressed against a white woman on a crowded train when he first moves to New York. Under the current rules, she probably could have accused him of sexual assault, but then could he accuse her of assault too because she was pressed against him?
The term "sexual harassment" is equally problematic. If we define the term as someone in power using that power to coerce another person to engage in sexual activity or using that power and sexual behavior to intimidate and/or embarrass the less powerful person, then both men and women can be guilty of sexual harassment. Men are more likely to engage in such behavior because they are still more likely to have more powerful positions than women. But what if the less powerful person flirts with the more powerful person? I never had male students flirt with me (or if they did, I was too asexual to notice), but I know that female students flirted with male professors. Because of their position, those men should not have had sex with their students, but the students were more guilty than rape victims. College-level students know that it's inappropriate for students and professors to have sex, and yet they often made the first flirtatious moves. I compare them to Monica Lewinsky, who was less guilty than the much older and certainly more powerful Bill Clinton, but he didn't harass her. In fact, if he weren't so powerful, we could argue that she harassed him. I saw a few of my male students' underwear because I was still teaching during the period when men wore droopy pants, but if one of them had deliberately shown me his briefs and snapped them while grinning or winking at me, I would have called security.
There's another problem with the term "sexual harassment." I heard 20 million dollar "victim" (hell, yes, I'm bitter; if these blonde women can get 20 or 32 million dollars for putting up with gross men while making relatively big bucks on television, black women who actually went in back doors, rode in the back of buses, and dealt with overt racism and sexism while making much less money even when they had three college degrees and graded thousands of papers deserve billions for their suffering) Gretchen Carlson say that when "victims" complained, they were sometimes described as not being able to take a joke. Well, can they take a joke? I say in my memoir that my students probably thought I was a hot mama off campus, not just because of my race and generation (younger folks think we baby boomers were all drug addicts and sex fiends; thanks, Weinstein, for helping confirm that stereotype) but also because I joked about sex. I love double-entendres and can spot a phallic symbol from a mile away. Anyone who came of age during or right after the late sixties sexual revolution should not pretend to be appalled and horrified by any sexual behavior other than molestation of children and bestiality. The only people more chaste than I am live in nunneries and monasteries, and even in the eighties and early nineties, I was still capable of being shocked by the behavior of some of my educated colleagues who had open marriages and swinging hot tub parties, as well as affairs with students and each other. But I could joke about sex because I saw movies like MIDNIGHT COWBOY and BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE when I was younger. I also saw a streaker when I was watching the Oscars in the seventies. If one of my supervisors joked with me about sex, I would not be offended. I might not laugh if the joke wasn't funny, but I wouldn't feel threatened or harassed. I also certainly didn't think I was harassing any of my students when I joked with them about sex. If we can't laugh about sex, which is kind of ridiculous, then we are in big trouble. Actor David Niven made fun of the Oscars streaker and went on with the show.
The "victims" also seemed to be suggesting that if a man compliments a woman's physical appearance, he's harassing her. Really? If he says, "I like your figure" or "You look good in that dress," that's harassment? What if a woman tells a man she likes his body? Is he being harassed? When the actress formerly known as Blossom (Mayim Bialik) suggested that women shouldn't flirt and should wear more modest clothes, she was viciously attacked (liberals have shown with this issue that they know how to bully) and quickly apologized. If she was referring to rape victims, she deserved to be chastised, but if she was referring to women who felt harassed by male attention, she had a point. Men can go bare-chested and not be raped, so women should be able to do the same. But I assume that if a woman compliments a man's abs, he won't feel harassed. If women feel that comments made about their looks is harassment, then they should dress in a way that will prevent those comments from happening. Here's another problem: I've had a couple of discussions with white women who complain about the invisibility of the older woman. In other words, they clearly enjoyed capturing the attention of men when they were younger and miss it now. Are they wrong? What if some women enjoy having men whistle at them and compliment their looks? Should we bully them for not realizing that they are being harassed? I've noticed that we have a double standard for men and women when discussing physical appearance. Male political candidates like Barack Obama, John Edwards, Martin O'Malley, and Paul Ryan have been described as sexy hunks, but when Obama said a few years ago that the current California Senator Kamala Harris was the best looking attorney general he was criticized. If women are going to be treated as equal to men, make the same money as they do, become President of the United States, we need to be treated as equals when it comes to sexual behavior.
There are many reasons why this current focus on sexual assault and harassment is destructive to our culture. One is that it allows us to ignore more serious problems like racism and crazy elderly white men becoming the new (instead of crazy younger white men) mass murderers. But another reason is that unlike rape, these "crimes" are subject to interpretation so that one person's sexual assault is another person's affectionate embrace or kiss and one person's bad joke is another person's harassment. There is also a gender inequality problem, where only women can be victims and only men can be villains. If women do not want to be treated like children, who have special protections but also have no rights (they can't vote, drive, marry, or drink alcohol), then they need to stop embracing the passive victim role and start acting like empowered people who are responsible for their own fate.
Women: Only you can prevent sexual assault and harassment by refusing to see every joke or touch as a crime against you. Continuing down this women as brave victims path will lead to men like Pence, refusing to interact with women unless their wives are present, and eventually to the inevitable backlash with men raping women and then claiming that these true victims are just being politically correct feminazis.
Civility 101: Why Age, Gender, And Race Matter
With a Trump supporter sending dysfunctional bombs to his favorite liberal targets and a bigot killing Jews while they're worshipping in a Pittsburgh synagogue, everyone is at least pretending to believe that we need to be more civil toward each other. But it's hard to be civil in the current political climate when the illegitimate President is campaigning on hate and fear. Hatred breeds more hatred, which leads to incivility, which leads to more hatred. It's as easy to call for civil discourse as it is to offer thoughts and prayers, but how do we make our discourse more civil? We can start by treating each other the way we would like to be treated. In other words, try to follow the golden rule. If we don't like to be cursed, yelled at, called names, and bullied, we shouldn't treat other people, no matter what their race, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, or party affiliation, that way. However, as I indicated in an earlier post (8/5/18), we also can't treat everyone the same. We can't nor should we treat old people the way we treat children, women the way we treat men, or blacks the way we treat whites.
Most sane people understand that special treatment is appropriate for people with disabilities or health problems. Only an insane person (looking at you, Trump) would publicly mock a disabled person. Most also understand that older people should be treated with respect. When younger people call me "mam" and hold the door for me, I appreciate their good manners and sometimes silently thank their mothers (fathers or guardians) for raising them well. Occasionally, I've become irate because I believed I was being disrespected due to my race and then realized that my dark skin had made the younger person underestimate my age. If a relatively large woman in her early fifties asks for help taking a chair back to her mother's room in a senior facility, she might be treated dismissively while a woman in her late sixties will be treated the way the residents and the clearly older daughters and/or wives of residents are treated. I make a point of letting the employees of Pacifica Hillsborough know that I'm old enough to live there so that they will treat me with the civil respect that a woman nearing seventy deserves.
My dark skin causes some people to treat me better than they would if I were white and others to treat me worse. I argued in that earlier post that the first response is more appropriate. Dark-skinned black people have been treated worse than lighter people for too long; we are more likely to be compared to monkeys and apes, to be killed by police, and to be disrespected even when we are older or in positions that usually command respect. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and even novels by black writers of the late 19th and early 20th Century (James Weldon Johnson's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN was the exception) portray dark-skinned blacks as ignorant and buffoonish. In some cases, they are portrayed as evil--rapists, murderers, traitors to their race. Sadly, there are still people who assume that dark-skinned blacks are stupid, no matter how much education they have, and evil, no matter how kind and morally decent they are. Civility requires that people who have been so oppressed be treated better than those who have lived more privileged, entitled lives.
Of course, white women have also been oppressed. Black men won the right to vote (although they had trouble exercising it) before white women did. And, although there have been many more white female governors than black male ones ( partly because there are many more white females than there are black males), we still haven't had our first female (of any race) President or Vice-President. Still, just as I said in my book THE BRONZE RULE that an old white woman would be the person least likely to be suspected of committing a crime (young, dark-skinned black men are most likely to be suspected), they are the Americans who are most likely to receive civil treatment. I found Judge Kavanaugh's attack on Senator Amy Klobuchar very interesting. Kavanaugh was undoubtedly angrier at my senior senator, who had submitted the letter that led to the METOO hearing, and my junior senator, who had made him look bad in an earlier hearing when she asked about laws governing men's bodies, but because Senator Feinstein is much older than he is (her being Jewish would be a factor today but probably not a couple of weeks ago) and Senator Harris is black/Indian, he attacked the younger white woman. He probably realized shortly after he attacked Klobuchar that going after any of the women was a bad idea, so he quickly apologized. He should have taken his anger out on one of the white men (which eliminates Booker) nearer his age (which eliminates Leahy).
Obviously, the people who should be the most civil are white men with power. In other words, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence should be the most civil people in America. But Trump and McConnell are old, and Trump is also insane. Should we excuse them because of those mitigating factors? Of course not. Just because I'm an old black woman doesn't mean I should curse and bully younger white people, especially if I expect them to treat me with respect. I think we old folks should be allowed to be a little crankier and more impatient than the younger ones, and we old black people should be allowed to be a little angrier than everyone else, except old Native Americans, but incivility is unacceptable, no matter how old we are, what our histories of oppression are, or what disabilities we may have.
The most uncivil person I saw this week was not Trump but a blind, elderly white woman who was seeking help at the Bank of America ATM. As I walked into the scene, she was blasting the bank employee, a fortyish Asian woman, who was trying to help her. I don't know how long the tense encounter had been going on when I arrived, but the Asian woman quietly left before I started my transaction. At that point, a civil, elderly white man who was just a bystander (he may have been walking by or had completed his bank business) let the blind woman know that the employee had left and offered to go into the bank to see if someone else was coming out to help her. The uncivil blind woman turned on him, yelling at him, asking why he couldn't help her, saying she had other things to do and didn't have time to wait. When I realized that my evil glare was not effective because the woman couldn't see it, I decided to mind my business. As I was leaving and the civil man, looking worried and sad, was entering the bank to search for help for the uncivil woman, I said quietly to him, "You are a very nice man." I was being unusually (for me) civil in that scene because my instinct was to loud talk the uncivil woman, to let her know that no one had to be nice to her just because she was blind, white, and a relatively old woman.
We can all learn a lesson from the elderly, civil white man and even from the elderly, less civil black woman in the Bank of America scene. During this uncivil time in our history, we all need to work on being more civil by treating everyone the way we would like to be treated, treating some people (the elderly, disabled, black and other oppressed people) even better than we would like to be treated, and (most difficult) resisting the urge to react uncivilly to incivility. When faced with incivility, we can do what the Asian woman did-- walk quietly away. Or we can do what I did--ignore the uncivil person and compliment/encourage the civil one. If we're extraordinarily civil (I'm not), we can do what the white man did--treat the uncivil person with kindness and civility.
Most sane people understand that special treatment is appropriate for people with disabilities or health problems. Only an insane person (looking at you, Trump) would publicly mock a disabled person. Most also understand that older people should be treated with respect. When younger people call me "mam" and hold the door for me, I appreciate their good manners and sometimes silently thank their mothers (fathers or guardians) for raising them well. Occasionally, I've become irate because I believed I was being disrespected due to my race and then realized that my dark skin had made the younger person underestimate my age. If a relatively large woman in her early fifties asks for help taking a chair back to her mother's room in a senior facility, she might be treated dismissively while a woman in her late sixties will be treated the way the residents and the clearly older daughters and/or wives of residents are treated. I make a point of letting the employees of Pacifica Hillsborough know that I'm old enough to live there so that they will treat me with the civil respect that a woman nearing seventy deserves.
My dark skin causes some people to treat me better than they would if I were white and others to treat me worse. I argued in that earlier post that the first response is more appropriate. Dark-skinned black people have been treated worse than lighter people for too long; we are more likely to be compared to monkeys and apes, to be killed by police, and to be disrespected even when we are older or in positions that usually command respect. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and even novels by black writers of the late 19th and early 20th Century (James Weldon Johnson's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN was the exception) portray dark-skinned blacks as ignorant and buffoonish. In some cases, they are portrayed as evil--rapists, murderers, traitors to their race. Sadly, there are still people who assume that dark-skinned blacks are stupid, no matter how much education they have, and evil, no matter how kind and morally decent they are. Civility requires that people who have been so oppressed be treated better than those who have lived more privileged, entitled lives.
Of course, white women have also been oppressed. Black men won the right to vote (although they had trouble exercising it) before white women did. And, although there have been many more white female governors than black male ones ( partly because there are many more white females than there are black males), we still haven't had our first female (of any race) President or Vice-President. Still, just as I said in my book THE BRONZE RULE that an old white woman would be the person least likely to be suspected of committing a crime (young, dark-skinned black men are most likely to be suspected), they are the Americans who are most likely to receive civil treatment. I found Judge Kavanaugh's attack on Senator Amy Klobuchar very interesting. Kavanaugh was undoubtedly angrier at my senior senator, who had submitted the letter that led to the METOO hearing, and my junior senator, who had made him look bad in an earlier hearing when she asked about laws governing men's bodies, but because Senator Feinstein is much older than he is (her being Jewish would be a factor today but probably not a couple of weeks ago) and Senator Harris is black/Indian, he attacked the younger white woman. He probably realized shortly after he attacked Klobuchar that going after any of the women was a bad idea, so he quickly apologized. He should have taken his anger out on one of the white men (which eliminates Booker) nearer his age (which eliminates Leahy).
Obviously, the people who should be the most civil are white men with power. In other words, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Mike Pence should be the most civil people in America. But Trump and McConnell are old, and Trump is also insane. Should we excuse them because of those mitigating factors? Of course not. Just because I'm an old black woman doesn't mean I should curse and bully younger white people, especially if I expect them to treat me with respect. I think we old folks should be allowed to be a little crankier and more impatient than the younger ones, and we old black people should be allowed to be a little angrier than everyone else, except old Native Americans, but incivility is unacceptable, no matter how old we are, what our histories of oppression are, or what disabilities we may have.
The most uncivil person I saw this week was not Trump but a blind, elderly white woman who was seeking help at the Bank of America ATM. As I walked into the scene, she was blasting the bank employee, a fortyish Asian woman, who was trying to help her. I don't know how long the tense encounter had been going on when I arrived, but the Asian woman quietly left before I started my transaction. At that point, a civil, elderly white man who was just a bystander (he may have been walking by or had completed his bank business) let the blind woman know that the employee had left and offered to go into the bank to see if someone else was coming out to help her. The uncivil blind woman turned on him, yelling at him, asking why he couldn't help her, saying she had other things to do and didn't have time to wait. When I realized that my evil glare was not effective because the woman couldn't see it, I decided to mind my business. As I was leaving and the civil man, looking worried and sad, was entering the bank to search for help for the uncivil woman, I said quietly to him, "You are a very nice man." I was being unusually (for me) civil in that scene because my instinct was to loud talk the uncivil woman, to let her know that no one had to be nice to her just because she was blind, white, and a relatively old woman.
We can all learn a lesson from the elderly, civil white man and even from the elderly, less civil black woman in the Bank of America scene. During this uncivil time in our history, we all need to work on being more civil by treating everyone the way we would like to be treated, treating some people (the elderly, disabled, black and other oppressed people) even better than we would like to be treated, and (most difficult) resisting the urge to react uncivilly to incivility. When faced with incivility, we can do what the Asian woman did-- walk quietly away. Or we can do what I did--ignore the uncivil person and compliment/encourage the civil one. If we're extraordinarily civil (I'm not), we can do what the white man did--treat the uncivil person with kindness and civility.
1/6/21 Was a White Day of White Terror: Words (And Facts) That Matter V
Wednesday, January 6, 2021, started as a joyful day. After avoiding the news to save my nerves the evening before, I learned when I awakened and turned on “Morning Joe” that my Georgia family and friends, with some help from Trump and McConnell, had pulled off a miracle. They had flipped the Senate by electing a black preacher and a young Jewish former aide to John Lewis. But then came the afternoon when I returned from my weekly shopping trip, turned on the television, and saw Trump’s mob storming the Capitol. Those Terrorists (also Traitors), Anarchists, Racists, Seditionists, and Hoodlums stole my joy. As I watched TRASH attack our democracy, I became incensed by the language being used on MSNBC to describe them, so I rushed to my I-PAD to declare that TRASH was not protesting, so they shouldn’t be called protesters. I said that commentators should call them what Donald Trump and William Barr called the peaceful BlackLivesMatter protesters—terrorists and anarchists. Soon the language changed. Some commentators used “terrorists,” a few used “insurrectionists,” but most called TRASH “rioters.” However, a more persistent problem developed as Americans, including some of our liberal leaders, commented on the insurrection. In the 1/21/18 blog post, I discussed subliminally racist language and suggested that we try to purge our language of words like “dark” and “black” to mean evil/bad and “white” and “light” to mean innocent/pure/good the way we did of sexist language like “man” or “mankind” to mean people. Inevitably, folks assessing the damage caused by TRASH used “dark” to describe what happened. Even as he talked about how much words matter while chastising Trump for inciting the insurrection, and even after I had mildly chastised him for using “dark” inappropriately during his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, President Elect Biden called the day and the events “dark.” But we shouldn’t just blame the white folks. Senator Cory Booker also used “dark” while describing the evil acts of white supremacists. Let’s be clear. January 6 started as a beautiful black day but turned an ugly white when TRASH stormed the Capitol, and five people died. Despite 9/11 and the occasional nonwhite serial killer or mass murderer, terror has almost always been white in America.
White people enslaved and lynched black people, exterminated Native Americans while stealing their land, and interned the Japanese. White people brought their children to lynchings of black people. There are pictures of them grinning and laughing while a hung black body burned. In fact, pictures of lynchings were used as postcards during the early years of the 20th Century. During the fifties, two white men tortured and killed fourteen-year-old Emmett Till because a white woman lied and said he insulted her. During the sixties, white men bombed a church, killing four little black girls. More recently, white cops have killed a twelve-year-old black boy, an eighteen-year-old black young man, and a twenty-six-year-old black young woman, who was innocently sleeping in her home. But black folks aren’t their only victims. A white man killed 22 mostly brown people at a Wal Mart in El Paso, Texas. Another white man killed 11 Jewish worshippers in a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania synagogue, and a young white man killed 20 mostly white (only one was not) young children and 6 white female educators in a Newton, Connecticut school. Then there was the Las Vegas shooter who killed people of all races and genders at a concert. After a recent death, his body count is at 59.
The BlackLivesMatter protests last summer and the insurrectionist riot led by white supremacists on January 6 illustrate my point about white terror. Did the protesters in Minneapolis chant, “Hang the cops”? Did they go to the jail with plastic zip ties, hunting the killer cop, planning to kidnap him and shoot him in the head? Did the peaceful protesters outside the White House chant, “Hang Trump” or “Hang Pence”? In fact, the cops were more likely to riot during those peaceful protests than the protesters were. The mostly white cops shot the peaceful protesters and journalists like Ali V of MSNBC with rubber bullets; they also gassed, pepper sprayed, and beat them with batons. One Buffalo cop shoved an old white man who fell to the concrete sidewalk while other cops walked by without assisting him as blood flowed from his ear. Before this white seditious riot, I said the best way for a white person to be injured or killed (as happened in Kenosha and Charlottesville) was to champion a black (good) cause like taking down statues of Confederate generals (traitors) or stopping the murdering of black folks by killer cops. Who is surprised that there were cops among the TRASH storming the Capitol? Who is surprised that there were former soldiers among those insurrectionists? And if you’re surprised that these so-called patriots used the American flag to beat cops, you must have missed the famous 1976 photograph of a scene captured in Boston. A well-dressed black man was chased by white students who left school to protest busing, and one of them was attacking him with a flag pole.
Because of subliminally racist language, it is easier to demonize black people (and their allies) than it is whites. And the darker we are, the easier it is to demonize us. Because of the racist language, darker black people are scarier not only to white supremacists but also to less racist white folks, brown, yellow, and red folks, and even other black people. That’s why even black cops are more likely to kill an unarmed black “suspect” than an armed white one. And that’s why I’d bet the $1400 stimulus check that Biden has promised us that Senator Tim Scott has been racially profiled more often than the lighter skinned Senator Booker.
Here are the black and white facts about America and Americans. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed supposedly because he was wearing a hoodie on a rainy night, and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed because he was playing with a toy gun. On January 6, 2021, a crazy-looking white man wearing a fur hat with horns, carrying a spear, and displaying a tattooed bare chest entered the Capitol, walked around, sat at the desk where Pence had recently been performing his constitutional duty to count the electoral college votes, and was not killed or even shot. White people beating a police officer and chanting, “Kill him with his own gun” were not shot or killed. Some of the TRASH desecrated the Capitol with urine and feces. They were not killed or shot (the woman who was killed was trying to break into a window). Some cops even took selfies with members of this white mob, and one was seen helping a member of TRASH down the stairs. She didn’t look like she was eighty, which is the age of the white woman that TRASH was hunting so that they could shoot her in the head. “Where are you, Nancy?” TRASH called as they hunted the petite, classy, 80-year-old Speaker of the House.
Here are some more black and white facts. 1) Portland, Oregon is the whitest large city in America, and what happened there had little or nothing to do with the BlackLivesMatter movement. The city is known for having extremists on both sides of the political divide. There was at least one man who identified as antifa living there until Trump’s federal cops murdered him after he killed a white supremacist. Trump sent his federal cops to Portland to try to start a race war between the radicals on the left and the white supremacists. It was a HELTER SKELTER strategy, borrowed from Charles Manson. The few activist blacks in Portland were begging the radical white folks to stop rioting because they were giving racist jerks like Trump and Barr ammunition to demonize peaceful black protesters as terrorists and anarchists. 2) There has been no evidence that BlackLivesMatter activists were involved in destroying buildings or starting violence during the peaceful BlackLivesMatter protests. Several white supremacists posing as antifa have been arrested for rioting and looting. Other looters were probably opportunistic thugs who will use any event, including winning a sports championship, to loot and destroy property. 3) Black people do not burn or bomb churches. Black rioters have burned businesses and sometimes (as Ralph Ellison suggested in INVISIBLE MAN) the buildings where they live. If a church burns during a black-led riot, it’s probably because it’s near a targeted business. 4) White supremacists have frequently burned and/or bombed black churches. They also, of course, have terrorized black folks and their allies by burning crosses (a Christian symbol). In other words, whoever set fire to the church near the White House was undoubtedly a white supremacist. 5) BlackLivesMatter protesters and their liberal white allies never said, “When the shooting starts, the looting starts.” Donald Trump said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” leading Killer Kid Kyle to kill two white protesters in Kenosha. 6) The one man known for eating people (mostly people of color) was a very white man, a blonde man named Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and ate mostly young men of color. There are no videos or pictures of any liberal politicians or Hollywood stars eating children or drinking their blood and no evidence that missing children have been seen with Tom Hanks, AOC, Nancy Pelosi, or Hillary Clinton, but those liberals have been seen with black people, so they too can be demonized.
Until we purge subliminally racist language from our speech and writing, evil white supremacists like Donald Trump and William Barr will be able to demonize black folks and their allies while enabling their deplorable, often insane white allies like the TRASH who stormed our Capitol, planning to kill our leaders and overthrow our democracy. Joe Biden, Cory Booker, and everyone else who talk about what happened on January 6, 2021, must describe that day accurately. It was a white day of white terror!
White people enslaved and lynched black people, exterminated Native Americans while stealing their land, and interned the Japanese. White people brought their children to lynchings of black people. There are pictures of them grinning and laughing while a hung black body burned. In fact, pictures of lynchings were used as postcards during the early years of the 20th Century. During the fifties, two white men tortured and killed fourteen-year-old Emmett Till because a white woman lied and said he insulted her. During the sixties, white men bombed a church, killing four little black girls. More recently, white cops have killed a twelve-year-old black boy, an eighteen-year-old black young man, and a twenty-six-year-old black young woman, who was innocently sleeping in her home. But black folks aren’t their only victims. A white man killed 22 mostly brown people at a Wal Mart in El Paso, Texas. Another white man killed 11 Jewish worshippers in a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania synagogue, and a young white man killed 20 mostly white (only one was not) young children and 6 white female educators in a Newton, Connecticut school. Then there was the Las Vegas shooter who killed people of all races and genders at a concert. After a recent death, his body count is at 59.
The BlackLivesMatter protests last summer and the insurrectionist riot led by white supremacists on January 6 illustrate my point about white terror. Did the protesters in Minneapolis chant, “Hang the cops”? Did they go to the jail with plastic zip ties, hunting the killer cop, planning to kidnap him and shoot him in the head? Did the peaceful protesters outside the White House chant, “Hang Trump” or “Hang Pence”? In fact, the cops were more likely to riot during those peaceful protests than the protesters were. The mostly white cops shot the peaceful protesters and journalists like Ali V of MSNBC with rubber bullets; they also gassed, pepper sprayed, and beat them with batons. One Buffalo cop shoved an old white man who fell to the concrete sidewalk while other cops walked by without assisting him as blood flowed from his ear. Before this white seditious riot, I said the best way for a white person to be injured or killed (as happened in Kenosha and Charlottesville) was to champion a black (good) cause like taking down statues of Confederate generals (traitors) or stopping the murdering of black folks by killer cops. Who is surprised that there were cops among the TRASH storming the Capitol? Who is surprised that there were former soldiers among those insurrectionists? And if you’re surprised that these so-called patriots used the American flag to beat cops, you must have missed the famous 1976 photograph of a scene captured in Boston. A well-dressed black man was chased by white students who left school to protest busing, and one of them was attacking him with a flag pole.
Because of subliminally racist language, it is easier to demonize black people (and their allies) than it is whites. And the darker we are, the easier it is to demonize us. Because of the racist language, darker black people are scarier not only to white supremacists but also to less racist white folks, brown, yellow, and red folks, and even other black people. That’s why even black cops are more likely to kill an unarmed black “suspect” than an armed white one. And that’s why I’d bet the $1400 stimulus check that Biden has promised us that Senator Tim Scott has been racially profiled more often than the lighter skinned Senator Booker.
Here are the black and white facts about America and Americans. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed supposedly because he was wearing a hoodie on a rainy night, and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed because he was playing with a toy gun. On January 6, 2021, a crazy-looking white man wearing a fur hat with horns, carrying a spear, and displaying a tattooed bare chest entered the Capitol, walked around, sat at the desk where Pence had recently been performing his constitutional duty to count the electoral college votes, and was not killed or even shot. White people beating a police officer and chanting, “Kill him with his own gun” were not shot or killed. Some of the TRASH desecrated the Capitol with urine and feces. They were not killed or shot (the woman who was killed was trying to break into a window). Some cops even took selfies with members of this white mob, and one was seen helping a member of TRASH down the stairs. She didn’t look like she was eighty, which is the age of the white woman that TRASH was hunting so that they could shoot her in the head. “Where are you, Nancy?” TRASH called as they hunted the petite, classy, 80-year-old Speaker of the House.
Here are some more black and white facts. 1) Portland, Oregon is the whitest large city in America, and what happened there had little or nothing to do with the BlackLivesMatter movement. The city is known for having extremists on both sides of the political divide. There was at least one man who identified as antifa living there until Trump’s federal cops murdered him after he killed a white supremacist. Trump sent his federal cops to Portland to try to start a race war between the radicals on the left and the white supremacists. It was a HELTER SKELTER strategy, borrowed from Charles Manson. The few activist blacks in Portland were begging the radical white folks to stop rioting because they were giving racist jerks like Trump and Barr ammunition to demonize peaceful black protesters as terrorists and anarchists. 2) There has been no evidence that BlackLivesMatter activists were involved in destroying buildings or starting violence during the peaceful BlackLivesMatter protests. Several white supremacists posing as antifa have been arrested for rioting and looting. Other looters were probably opportunistic thugs who will use any event, including winning a sports championship, to loot and destroy property. 3) Black people do not burn or bomb churches. Black rioters have burned businesses and sometimes (as Ralph Ellison suggested in INVISIBLE MAN) the buildings where they live. If a church burns during a black-led riot, it’s probably because it’s near a targeted business. 4) White supremacists have frequently burned and/or bombed black churches. They also, of course, have terrorized black folks and their allies by burning crosses (a Christian symbol). In other words, whoever set fire to the church near the White House was undoubtedly a white supremacist. 5) BlackLivesMatter protesters and their liberal white allies never said, “When the shooting starts, the looting starts.” Donald Trump said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” leading Killer Kid Kyle to kill two white protesters in Kenosha. 6) The one man known for eating people (mostly people of color) was a very white man, a blonde man named Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and ate mostly young men of color. There are no videos or pictures of any liberal politicians or Hollywood stars eating children or drinking their blood and no evidence that missing children have been seen with Tom Hanks, AOC, Nancy Pelosi, or Hillary Clinton, but those liberals have been seen with black people, so they too can be demonized.
Until we purge subliminally racist language from our speech and writing, evil white supremacists like Donald Trump and William Barr will be able to demonize black folks and their allies while enabling their deplorable, often insane white allies like the TRASH who stormed our Capitol, planning to kill our leaders and overthrow our democracy. Joe Biden, Cory Booker, and everyone else who talk about what happened on January 6, 2021, must describe that day accurately. It was a white day of white terror!
