Tim Wise's Blog, page 31

The Dangers of Colorblind Post-Racialism

A brief snippet of my October 6 speech in Detroit, for the Michigan Roundtable:

Talking Loud and Saying Nothing…

Nazis and other assorted racists have a penchant for running their mouths and threatening violence. It's all they have: a politics of intimidation and phony bravado. So ever since last week, when my open letter to the white right went viral, they've had their lederhosen in a wad, screaming as loudly as they can to all those willing to listen that I "hate white people," because I am "genetically programmed as a Jew" to destroy the white race. And of course, my perfidious Jew-inspired plans for their demise require them to inform me that they will — in the words of one caller to the non-profit organization that books my speaking engagements — "come after me and hang my Jewish ass."

Note to Hitlerites: aside from lousy reading comprehension skills — my letter, after all, was aimed at the white right only, not whites generally — perhaps you haven't noticed that most people respond to claims of pernicious Jewish evildoing with eye rolls (at best), realizing, as one almost instinctively does at that point, that the persons launching such an attack are, well, ya know, Nazis. And though you seem to have missed it, most Americans — indeed most carbon-based sentient beings — hate you. Even most white racists think you're assholes, and that's saying a lot. Without Jews, after all, they'd be forced to watch "Touched by an Angel" re-runs, over and over again. And frankly, I'm pretty sure even that show had Jews involved in its production. I'm just saying.

Anyway, so after my letter blew up, I started getting hate mail and death threats. Yawn. That's been a constant since I was 18. The first time it happened, Reagan was president. It was like a month after Bill Buckner flubbed that pathetic ground ball hit his way by Mookie Wilson in game 6 of the 1986 World Series. And while that may seem like yesterday to Red Sox fans, that shit was a long time ago. In short, I'm used to it. Like, my-entire-adult-life-used-to-it.

So last week, when I got an e-mail from a New York area racist named Jim Clyne, who runs some outfit called Nighttown Media, letting me know that he had — in his own words — "fucked me up at Sewanee and Cal State L.A." (where my next two appearances were scheduled), I immediately laughed and wrote him back to ask how so? He didn't respond of course. Nor did he "fuck me up," unless by "fuck me up" he meant to say, "produce sustained and even standing ovations for long periods of time." As it turns out, about 400 people came to my talk at Sewanee (also known as the University of the South) — an incredibly conservative campus — and none caused trouble or even asked a challenging question. In Los Angeles, some kid with "White Power" tats apparently did show up near the end, during the Q&A (according to a friend who saw him and alerted security), but, unable to fashion a point any more profound than the one inked on his arm, he slinked away as the event broke up. Wow, scary.

And so it goes. Racist assholes, in the words of James Brown, "talking loud and saying nothing" (and doing even less).

More to the point, every time I speak at a campus, or in a community, I meet hundreds of people — folks of color and white — all of whom are prepared to crush these Nazi jackholes, politically, physically, whatever it takes. They are not "going back" to whatever days the Hitlerites glorify. New generations of white folks by and large reject the sociopathic hatred of the organized white supremacists. That's not to say that the young don't have any race issues to resolve, or that they are free from the racism that has so marked their forbears. But it is to say that when someone like me can get prolonged applause at a place like Sewanee, the Nazis are losing. They are finished.

Now if they would just take to their bunkers and emulate their hero once and for all — after all, why revere Hitler if you're not prepared to go out like he did? — the world would be a better place. And the rest of us could get on with building a new future.

Silly Nazis: Encounters With Idiots, from Childhood to the Present

Had they not long ago demonstrated their capacity for sociopathy, Nazis would prove amusing. Amusing and not at all threatening or worrisome, sort of like those people who dress up their dogs in fancy sweaters when the weather turns cold, or those who enjoy pilates.

But as it is, Nazis (and note, I am using this term in its proper context, not loosely as is so common nowadays to refer merely to those with whom one disagrees), are not very amusing. At all. And this is in no small part due to their proven penchant for mass murder and their almost pathological detachment from any sense of a common humanity: things that make one worthy of being avoided, or, alternately locked away for a long stretch of time, rather than, say, being engaged by others in idle conversation.

I've had more than a few encounters with these types. And again, I mean real, honest-to-God Nazis, as in, admirers of Hitler. I would call them neo-Nazis, but seeing as how none of them have had an original thought since the fall of the German Reich, I'll abstain from doing so. There is nothing new about them. They are decidedly old school in their fascism: Paleolithic Nazis, or perhaps Jurassic, but never neo.

Actually, my first such encounter with a Nazi was in high school, where I bumped up against a wanna-be skinhead. I say wanna-be, because as it turned out, this kid wasn't very committed to the whole Hitler, master-race thing. He just thought it was cool and "punk" to wear leather jackets with swastikas on them, because Sid Vicious used to do it, or something to that effect. Once, when a bunch of us were hanging out at a friend's house, this guy showed up to wish a happy birthday to one of the girls who was there — who was Jewish — and at some point, apparently gripped by a Nazi equivalent of Tourette's shouted out "fuck Jews." I responded by saying "fuck you," and reminding him that not only was I Jewish, but so was the girl he had come to see. "Oh, sorry," he said, before slinking away, somewhat embarrassed. He went on to be a concert promoter for a while, including for quite a few ska and reggae shows, so, ya know, that whole racist thing didn't last long with him.

Later, my encounters with Nazis were of a decidedly more disturbing nature, tracking as they did my involvement with the statewide coalition in Louisiana that was implicated in the defeat of one of their own, David Duke, when he ran for U.S. Senate and Governor in 1990 and 1991. Both Duke and I are still around, me regretting the former and they the latter, and so it goes. These encounters were particularly unamusing, involving as they did death threats, skinheads (real ones this time) following me from work to my home, and others trying to run me off the road, as well as the receipt of envelopes filled with dead cockroaches, promises of future gas chambers, or even better, human fecal matter. At least I'm assuming it was human.

Then, once I began to speak around the country about issues of race and racism, I would occasionally be greeted by various white supremacists (most of them quite dedicated to Hitlerism), like the guys in Washington State who used to follow me around, and who once came to a reception held for me at Central Washington University. There, amid tea cakes, finger sandwiches, and, as I recall, some especially tasty lemon squares, Nazi Things 1 and 2 calmly pontificated about the "faddish" nature of jazz music, the inherent superiority of the "white-created" diatonic scale, and how polka would enjoy a renaissance once the white revolution triumphed. When one of the two young men that very month posted a profile on a Nazi web board, in which he indicated his desire to find a woman who could "get down and dirty" but still comport herself as a lady, I suggested to others on the campus (where the lonely heart was enrolled), that they should wheat-paste oversized posters everywhere they could, with his picture on them, alongside the singles ad verbiage he had posted, and the headline, "Find This Nazi a Date. Even Assholes Need Love." I don't know if they ever did it, but he left the school shortly thereafter, bringing to four the number of colleges at which this member of the self-proclaimed master race had failed to graduate.

Later, the hilarity continued with still more death threats, called in to schools where I was scheduled to speak, or, a few years ago, a call placed to my home by a Georgia-based bigot affiliated with Jared Taylor's American Renaissance, who woke my wife and I from our sleep, talked all tough, and then, informed that I had his name and number thanks to the wonders of caller ID, went strangely silent. Then last year, a particularly awkward looking young man who claimed to be a member of the white terrorist group, The National Alliance (which group is basically defunct, but apparently forgot to tell this guy), came to one of my speeches in Kentucky. He — all 140 pounds of him, and even then only if he was soaking wet and carrying a lead-lined copy of Mein Kampf — was all big and bad until I began to verbally humiliate him in front of 300 people. At that point, he turned tail and ran, as Nazis always do nowadays, back to their bunkers, where sadly lacking access to their very own Walther PPK, they fail to emulate their hero fully and finally, if you know what I mean.

In any event, most such encounters in the past several years have been of an electronic kind, rather than up close and personal. E-thuggery is, after all, so much easier and less messy. And so I am regularly the subject of attack threads on Nazi websites, where Aryan warriors spend countless hours each day — rather than, you know, working — and seek to remind themselves how superior to everyone else they are, even as so many of them continue to live in their parents' basements, long past the age of 40. They give themselves bad-ass Volkish nicknames, create avatars with swastikas, or SS lightning bolts, or pictures of Edward Norton as a skinhead in American History X, so as to compensate for their spectacular professional and social inadequacies. Oh, and they like to point out especially that I am…wait for it…Jewish.

And this they say as if it were news; like some big secret had just been revealed by they, the lords of research, the racist equivalent of CSI detectives or something. And I suppose my Jewishness is news to some, the same way it might be news to some that Simon and Garfunkel haven't released new work in a really long time, or that that Captain guy, from the Captain and Tennille, has not really, ever, piloted a boat. Next thing you know they'll be pointing out that I'm also a father, something about which they'll be sure to let everyone know, right about the time our daughters are graduating from high school.

I, of course, have never denied being Jewish. Rather, I have spoken of it often, in public presentations, at least two dozen essays, and in my book, White Like Me, which has been out for five years.

It is this last matter that has them so steamed in fact. It's the point they have tried to make on the Amazon.com review boards for the book; namely that I am an "imposter," merely pretending to be white, when in fact I am a stealth Jew, or something to that effect. As is true for all Nazis, to be Jewish makes one a member of an entirely separate, distinct and evil race of Asiatics, and disqualifies the carrier of such genetic pathogens as these from being able to honestly claim kinship to real white people: principally good Nordic types like themselves. To white supremacists, the white race is a very special club to which membership is limited — and like Spanky and Alfalfa in the Little Rascals, who policed the borders of the He-Man Woman Hater's Club — they and they alone know who belongs and who does not. Jews do not, and how dare we try and hitch our wagons to their superior race.

Whenever they have sent personal e-mails my way, to remind me (as if I had forgotten) that I'm not really white because of my Hebraic roots, I have wondered: do they really think I'm trying to fake my way in to their club so I can be one of the cool kids? So I can be one of them? Apparently this is what has them worried, which I find slightly hilarious, suggesting as it does that my lack of connection to a bunch of people with such a history of conquest, slaughter and genocide would somehow make me feel inferior.

In any event, what makes Nazis especially silly in this regard is that as they guard the borders of real whiteness they ignore two points in particular that render their objections to my claimed Jewish-whiteness moot. The first of these has to do with their claims to scientific certitude and the second — and even more important point — concerns the way in which I am using the notion of whiteness, as a social category, unrelated to any scientific notions of race whatsoever. And it is with regard to these two points that Nazis demonstrate their lack of intellectual heft and general all-around ignorance.

First, as per the science. Although Nazis insist Jews are a distinct biological population, separate and apart from white people — and although there is some recent haplotype research indicating specific Jewish clustering in Ashkenazi populations of Central and Eastern European Jews, which makes them more like Jews elsewhere than non-Jews in the same countries — there are a number of problems with this claim, and the insistence that it makes American Jews like myself something other than white.

To begin, whatever "genetic distance" exists in certain respects between Jews — who, due to low rates of intermarriage for most of recorded history have maintained certain gene frequencies over time — and non-Jews, that distance is not large enough to suggest sub-speciation, which is to say, the true creation of a uniquely "Jewish race." This, according to the very scientists who have mapped the Jewish haplotypes, and whose work is seized on by Nazis to prove otherwise. In short, Nazis either can't read academic research, or they can, but can't manage to tell the truth about it.

More to the point, and as regards myself, my Jewish lineage extends only on my Y-chromosome, that is to say, my paternal paternal line, as three of my four grandparents are of Northern European and decidedly non-Jewish derivation. Which is to say, that unless the Nazis can explain — and they cannot — how the "Jew genes" arguably extant on one-fourth of my family line manage to cancel out the Gentile genes on the other three-quarters (and in which case, whiteness would seem to be awfully recessive, and indicative of biological inferiority rather than its preferable opposite), their attempt to erase me from the circle of whiteness amounts to a giant pseudo-scientific fail. The failure is made all the more acute when one considers that the research on Jewish genetic clustering was only done on a few hundred Jews, all of whom had four Jewish grandparents. For many American Jews, myself included, whose relatives married Gentiles, this research means literally nothing, as it does not speak to our genome in the least, no matter what the Nazis may think that genome portends.

Of course, and more importantly, that there may be certain genetic tendencies that cluster in populations of Jews says nothing about the larger point that Nazis seek to make: namely, that these genes confer upon their carriers an insatiable desire to destroy white people. No one — neither scientists nor Nazis (these being mutually exclusive categories almost by definition) — have ever demonstrated that the genes they find so important, and which suggest Jewish lineage, actually have any relationship to known characterological or behavioral traits. They merely take it on faith that Jews are evil because theological bigots like Martin Luther and insecure, impotent, and psychopathic killers like Adolf Hitler tell them so.

But finally, and this is the truly critical point: When persons like myself talk about our whiteness, or white privilege, we are not particularly concerned about genetics at all, and whatever biology may or may not say about race. By definition we are discussing race as a social category, with social meaning, irrespective of DNA. In other words, I am "white" in this society (and around the world) because to most anyone with whom I would interact, I will appear "white." Employers, loan officers, police, teachers, and average everyday folks on the street would look at me, presume my whiteness, and treat me accordingly. Which is to say, I can reap the benefits of presumed whiteness — the presumptions of competence, and law-abidingness, and credit-worthiness, and general intelligence, none of which people of color can assume others will presume about them — no matter what my genes may or may not say about my ancestry. By the same token, historically there have been tens of thousands of folks who were African American by ancestry and most of their lineage, but who were light enough, and whose facial features and hair texture were sufficiently "white-like," to be perceived as white and reap white privilege too.

In short, whiteness as I use the concept in my writing and work has nothing to do with genetics. Whiteness is conferred by the society based on what people presume you to be. And that presumption has nothing to do with genotype — since observers cannot know your DNA just by looking at you — but rather, everything to do with phenotype, which is to say the way certain genes are expressed outwardly, as with skin pigmentation, and a handful of other characteristics, which are controlled by about six genes out of 30,000 in the overall human genome. So I am not "pretending" to be anything. I couldn't care less about genetic whiteness and my relationship to it, as I find the entire concept absurd. But mostly, it just doesn't matter. My experiences with whiteness and white privilege have to do with the way I am received and perceived by others. Others, that is, besides Nazis, whose judgments matter quite little.

Tim Wise on CNN, Discussing the "Open Letter to the White Right," 11/7/10

Tim Wise on CNN with Don Lemon to discuss his "Open Letter to White Conservatives" and the backlash from it…

Reading Comprehension 101: Text, Subtext and the Politics of Misinterpretation

Here's something I never imagined I would say:

I think I know what it feels like to be the person who writes the reading comprehension questions for those standardized tests we're so fond of giving, if quite a bit less fond of taking.

After all, think about that person for a minute. He or she writes four or five paragraphs for inclusion on the PSAT or whatever, knowing full well that when asked questions about the passage they just read, millions of those who are taking the test will not get the point. It must be difficult to write, all the while aware that large numbers of those reading your work will utterly fail to comprehend it.

I've long known that the same kind of miscomprehension often greets my own writing. First, I focus on touchy subjects like race, and whenever we delve into such matter as this, there is a chance that emotional reading may take the place of reasoned study and analysis. In other words, we see what we want to see, based on wherever we are at the time of the reading, emotionally, and with regard to the issues at hand. Interestingly, the same phenomenon is true for writers, whose work product — or "art" on our better days — also reflects our emotional state at any given moment. In other words, sometimes the writer chooses language that is deliberately hyperbolic, provocative, or edgy, so as to force a reaction — to force an examination of the underlying message, no matter how discomfiting it may be for all involved — and doesn't give much regard to how it may be received. Like the writer of the reading comprehension questions on the PSAT, such writers know ahead of time that many readers simply won't get it.

That said, and while I know we live in a culture where reading comprehension (and writing itself) is devalued — what with our emphasis on short, sweet text messages, or tweet-talk, in which we are expected to make a point in 140 characters — I am yet amazed at how difficult some find it to decipher the words I have caused to appear on the page, and to really interpret what they mean, as opposed to that which they do not.

To wit, after my latest piece on the election results went viral, there have been more than a few folks who have written to say how appalled they were by my "attack on white people," or my "attack on America," or my "hateful diatribe" in which I "gleefully anticipate the death of the elderly" and the "initiation of violent payback of whites writ large by people of color" once whites become a less prominent portion of the national population, a few decades hence. In other words, putting aside the inherent absurdity of this interpretation — I am white after all, as are my kids, as is my wife, as is my momma, all my immediate family and my best friend too — some who read the piece believe against all logic and in the face of plain English (however aggressive the piece may be), that I have announced, excitedly, the coming of a glorious race war and the end of white people.

(Sigh).

So perhaps we should start with the obvious, for those a bit too slow to begin the reading of the essay with, ya know, the title. For if one reads the title, "An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum," one would almost immediately discover an important nugget of relevant information; information that rather clearly spells out who is being critiqued in the piece, and thus, to whom my ire is being directed. It is not white people. It is not the white elderly. It is the white right, as in right-wing. And given the timing of the essay — released the evening of the mid-term elections, in which the right (mostly on the backs of heavy white conservative turnout) managed to capture the House of Representatives and make substantial inroads throughout government, from the Senate to state houses across the nation — it should be obvious that, more precisely, I am taking aim at the Tea Party types who take their electoral triumphs as evidence that they have "taken their country back" from the evil leftist/Marxist/fascist/Kenyan-Muslim hordes who had previously hijacked it.

To believe that I am condemning all white people in this essay requires an incapacity for rational thought almost too stunning to contemplate. I specify the white right, and I even go on to note that a "sizable minority" of whites (including myself) will, in the future, stand against the kind of reactionary whiteness embodied by those to whom I was directing my verbal wrath. So by definition, I'm assuming that not all whites are deserving of this critique, because not all whites buy into the reactionary agenda.

Although I do say that the white right that triumphed on election night is disproportionately composed of "older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like," this does not mean that I "hate elderly white people." Nor is it — and let's just head this off at the pass right now — an indication that all those claims about leftist "death panels" euthanizing grandma were accurate after all. First, just because the white right is disproportionately older (and this isn't a debatable point, frankly), doesn't mean that I think all older white folks are members of the white right. Many are not. Indeed, many of those in the same generation as the aging tea baggers were among the principal white allies within the civil rights struggle. That generation, like all generations, has its good and bad. They are neither all heroic nor all venal. Obviously.

Nor does my mention that this bunch of older right-wing white folks are "dying" — nor my insistence at various points that this will be a good thing for the nation and the world — mean that I hope they die soon, or am cheering their physical obsolescence. Simply put, it is just a fact: generations come and go, and within a few decades, all those white folks who have the luxury of clinging from first hand experience to the nostalgic past of the 50s, and the days we often refer to as "American innocence" will be gone. And although I wish them all a long and healthy life (even if I might prefer that fewer of them vote), this passing will, when it comes, make it easier to move forward on a whole host of efforts for social justice. The nostalgic remembrance of the pre-civil rights era by millions of white people — folks who never had to really contemplate how hellish those days were for people of color — is an impediment to progress. Unlike merely remembering fondly one's childhood, which is normal and natural and usually healthy I suppose, nostalgia is a political matter, often blinding us to the more complex reality, creating tunnel vision and eradicating altogether the peripheral comprehension needed to interpret our world.

Yes, I believe their historical memory is blinkered, absurd and dangerous. And I think this makes them dangerous, in turn. And I think it will be a good thing when we are no longer hampered as a society by those who have the capacity to so thoroughly misremember a time that they themselves lived through, and in which so many of them did nothing to move the country forward (and in fact, often stood in the way of human and civil rights for so many). But I am not, therefore, hoping for their death. I am simply noting the inevitable and commenting on what it will, in my estimation, mean. I am making the point that they should enjoy their political victory while they can. Because soon, within a few decades, their type (again, in political terms, not just racial terms) will be finished. To the extent the right has all but given up on attracting significant numbers of people of color to their movement — and by virtue of their anti-immigrant hysteria, all but ensured the increasing whiteness of their clique — this becomes an almost incontestable fact. If half the population in the U.S. will be people of color in, say, 40 years, then even a decent minority of progressive white folks, combined with a heavily progressive population of color will be able to eviscerate the white right, in political terms. Saying this isn't hateful. It's just true. One is free to look forward to those coming days, or to be afraid of them, but either way, those days are coming.

I will grant you, some of the wording I chose for the piece was intemperate, and upon greater reflection, there are no doubt words and phrases I could have chosen that would have conveyed this same core message, perhaps more effectively. That's how it goes sometimes when you're trying to speak your truth: it's raw, unfiltered, and not always beholden to strategic considerations. Fine.

But because one may disagree with my tone in places, or certain language used, or wish I hadn't conflated the concepts of political and physical death in such a way as to make it unclear what I was cheering — the former or the latter — should not therefore make it acceptable to fundamentally misinterpret the underlying meaning of the message: a meaning which is still quite clear, or so it seems to me, tone and language notwithstanding.

Having to Turn off Comments for a While – Sorry About This

As many of you have noticed, for the past month (roughly) I have not been approving comments on my posts, either new or archived. I got behind basically, and then the comments started to pile up, including a steady stream of just nasty evil crap — mostly from right wing zombies and such — which I frankly just didn't feel like reading, let alone posting on the site of course. So I just stopped paying attention for a while.

Today, after my post-election piece went semi-viral the comments poured in again. Many supportive, others not — which is fine — but some, once again, purely vile and borderline sociopathic. The trolls over at SomethingAwful apparently are also trying to cook up some kind of internet based attack on me, for which I have already alerted the proper authorities (as several of the possible lines of attack are purely illegal, and the kinds of things for which I will happily destroy them in return, financially and legally if need be). So for now, unfortunately the ability to comment on the site will be disabled for all new posts, and I won't be approving any new comments on archived material either. I will leave everything currently in the comment queue there, in case I decide to revisit commenting again in the near future.

Thanks.

And seriously, if you don't like what I have to say, cool. Go write a rebuttal piece, on your own site, or on some properly inflammatory web board. Have at it. No big deal. The strange and bullying tendencies that some folks have — which compel them to invade another person's space and become abusive to them — is something I will never understand. It is something for which medication may be the only solution.

An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum

For all y'all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.

And for y'all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty ass beer you favor.

Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this…

You need to drink up.

And quickly.

And heavily.

Because your time is limited.

Real damned limited.

So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.

The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.

Not much more now.

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Tick.

Tock.

I know, you think you've taken "your country back" with this election – and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that's what we white folks are bred to believe, that it's ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise – but you are wrong.

You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.

'Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.

There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.

There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks "had no rights that the white man was bound to respect," – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.

But they lost.

And you will lose.

So make a note of it.

Tweet it to yourself.

Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you'll remember that I told you so.

It is coming, and soon.

This isn't hubris. It isn't ideology. It is not wishful thinking.

It is math.

Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.

The kind of math that proves how your kind – mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like – are dying.

You're like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass – even if it takes four sequels to make it happen – but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, convinced that you're really dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember, please, how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity – they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he's gonna be popping out in some 3-D shit to scare the kiddies, so he isn't going quietly. But he's going nonetheless, as all bad guys eventually do.

And in the pantheon of American history, old white people have always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, so screw you then.

Because you're a dying breed.

On the endangered list.

And unlike say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won't be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.

There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we'll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called "greatest generation" — a bunch of miscreants who saved the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.

So frankly, to hell with you and all who revere you.

By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.

Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.

Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.

And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement – hell you've all but done that now – thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.

Like I said, this shit is math, baby. And numbers don't lie.

Bottom line, this too shall pass.

So enjoy your tax cuts a while longer.

Go buy whatever you people buy when your taxes get cut – a new car or two, a bigger house, an island – whatever.

Go back to trading your derivatives, engaging in rampant financial speculation that produces nothing of value, that turns the whole world into your personal casino. Whatever.

Play your hand, and for the love of God play it big. Real big. As in, shoot for the moon big. As in, try to privatize Social Security, and health care, and everything else. Whatever.

At least that way everyone else will be able to see what you're really about.

We've been trying to tell them, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes, so "Go big or go home," Bubba.

"Git 'er Done."

"Cowboy up," or whatever other stupid-ass catch phrase strikes your fancy.

Just promise you'll do more than talk this time.

Please, or as one of your celluloid heroes might put it, "make my day."

Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.

They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion.

They are like the tortoise to your hare.

They are like the San Francisco Giants, to your New York Yankees: a bunch that loses year after year after year, until they finally win.

You have had this confidence before, remember?

You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, they who refuse to die are still here.

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.

You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatever about them. And this, will surely prove fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.

It means you will take their greatest strength – perseverance – and make of it a weakness, called losing.

But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know how to lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.

And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: a skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.

You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.

But, surprise…they are not.

And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now – we are – your destruction.

And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don't play those games. We're not into the whole "Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance" bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don't have to be.

We just have to be patient.

And wait for your hearts to stop beating.

And stop they will.

And for some of you, real damned soon truth be told.

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of your demise is beautiful.

So know this.

If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…

Payback, thy name is…

Temporary.

Because Tea Bag is a Language We all Need to Know, If Only to Ridicule It…

Great video, on the new right wing bilingualism (the only kind they would ever support, of course)…

Official Unemployment Data Minimizes Racial Disparities

Although no compilation of data, sampled from a nation of 300 million can be perfectly precise, it seems fair to insist that the data not obscure obvious facts about which the public should be aware. Sadly, the way the U.S. government has long collected its information on things like unemployment, poverty, wages and other social/economic indicators has done just that: specifically, it obscures the depth of the racial disparities endemic to the nation.

So, for example, most government data collected by the Census Bureau or Labor Department, among other agencies, is broken down by racial category (white, black, Asian, and occasionally American Indian/Alaskan Native), and then separately by Hispanic ethnicity. You can notice in the footnotes to most government tables that "Hispanics can be of any race," since the term Hispanic does not refer to a separate "racial group." What this means, in data collection terms, is that the other "racial" group data totals will include the Hispanic/Latino numbers. In other words, if you were to add together the white, black, Asian and Hispanic numbers for something like "number of persons unemployed" or "persons living in poverty," or "persons in the workforce," you would end up with a number that was larger than the total number of persons in those categories (typically to be found at the top of each table), because the Hispanic numbers would be, in effect, counted twice.

The reason this matters should be obvious. If you are a researcher interested in examining the extent of racial disparity in the U.S., and comparing the well-being of whites as contrasted with those to whom we loosely refer as "people of color," you would need to make sure that the "whites" you were looking at in the data were not Hispanic. After all, if Hispanics face discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, culture, color and language barriers (and of course they do, especially in this era of anti-immigrant sentiment), and if Hispanics generally have higher unemployment and poverty rates, as well as lower median incomes than whites generally (which they do), then to have Hispanics folded in with the white racial numbers will distort the economic situation facing "real whites" (meaning those who are not classifiable as people of color and thus potentially subjected to racism on that basis). The government calls these "real whites" non-Hispanic whites, and in some data tables, there will be a category for this group. But oftentimes, especially in monthly or quarterly data (as opposed to annual Census Bureau estimates), this category is not broken out separately. So, in order to get an accurate picture of the white/person of color divide, we would need to break the data out ourselves, by extracting from the white totals, all those whites who are also Hispanic and thus, potentially subjected to the lesser opportunities that often befall people of color in the U.S.

But how to do this? Well, as a general rule, roughly 92% of all Hispanics in these kinds of government tables, are racially grouped in the white category. Between 5-6% are classified as black (often Dominicans, and others from the Caribbean), and the rest are split between Asians and indigenous/native peoples. You can see this breakdown for yourself by looking at any table that does include a breakout section for non-Hispanic whites (like with typical census tables), and subtracting the numbers for non-Hispanic whites from the larger number for "whites," generally. This difference will represent Hispanics classified as white. Then, by examining the numbers provided for Hispanics, generally, you can determine what percentage of the overall Hispanic group were classified as white. For instance, if the number of non-Hispanic whites in the population was 190 million, and the number of overall whites was 229 million, this would mean than 39 million "whites" were Hispanic. If the overall numbers of Hispanics were 42 million, 92.85 percent of all Hispanics would have been classified as white in that table.

Applying this general rule regarding how Hispanics are racially apportioned in government data, reveals some interesting facts about racial disparity in employment and unemployment. Indeed, it indicates that the official data significantly obscures the extent of existing white/non-white disparity.

In September 2010, for instance, the raw data tables from the Department of Labor, compiled in Employment and Earnings, October 2010, suggest the white unemployment rate for September was 8.7%, the Hispanic/Latino rate was 12.4% and the black rate was 16.1%. Even this level of disparity would be alarming, indicating a black unemployment rate that is fully 1.85 times the white rate (or 85% higher). But in fact, the disparities are larger than that. The data, as presented, artificially inflates the white unemployment numbers by including in the overall numbers, about 92 percent of all Hispanics. Once Latinos are broken out of the white totals, the non-Hispanic white unemployment rate falls to a little less than 8% (7.97% to be exact), meaning that the black-to-white unemployment multiple climbs to a full 2:1 ratio, and the Latino-to-white ratio settles at 1.56 to 1. (Table A-4)

If you'd like to verify my claim here, you can do these calculations yourself fairly easily by following these steps:

1. Looking at Table A-4, multiply the raw numbers of Hispanics in the civilian labor force by .92;

2. Subtract the resulting number from the raw numbers for "whites" in the civilian labor force. This leaves you with a raw number for non-Hispanic whites in the labor force;

3. Multiply the raw numbers of unemployed who are Hispanic by .92;

4. Subtract the resulting number from the number of "white" unemployed, leaving a raw total for non-Hispanic white unemployed. Finally,

5. Divide this last number by the number of non-Hispanic whites in the labor force. The resulting percentage is the "real white" unemployment rate.

Once we compare persons with similar levels of education and in the same age cohorts, things don't get any better. For instance, when looking only at persons 16-24, with high school diplomas (and no college), after removing Latinos from the white category, the white unemployment rate for this group stands at 16.7%. Although this is unacceptably high to be sure, it pales in comparison to the 39.1% rate for similarly educated and aged African Americans. For this cohort, the black-to-white unemployment ratio is 2.3 to 1. And for 16-24 year olds with college degrees or better (meaning, mostly new graduates between, say 21-24), although the disparities are not quite as large, they are still jarring. Although the white unemployment rate for this group is listed as 9%, once Hispanics are extracted from the totals, the rate falls to 7.8%, compared to 11.8% for similar African Americans: a rate that is 51 percent higher than the rate for young white college grads (or a ratio of 1.5:1). (See Table A-16).

For those who are 25 or older, with only high school diplomas, the black unemployment rate is 14.6%, or 1.83 times the rate for whites (at 7.98%) once Hispanic whites are extracted from the data. For those who are 25 or older with college degrees, the black unemployment rate is still 7.5% (almost as high as the rate for whites this age who never went to college), and this is a full 90 percent above the comparable 3.97% rate for college educated whites (a ratio of 1.9:1). (Table A 17).

There are several lessons to draw from this data:

1) Even as millions of people of all races are hurting in this economy, let us not forget that some are still being hit harder than others, and the relationship between color and the degree of hardship is still strong, as it has always been;

2) Despite conservative claims to the contrary, people of color are not getting all the good opportunities, and are not benefitting from any kind of "reverse discrimination" against whites. After all, were that the case, black folks with college degrees would be better off than whites with degrees, or at least as well off, or at least gaining on those whites. But they aren't. They are falling further behind, qualifications notwithstanding.

3) The United States is not an equal opportunity society that rewards hard work and effort equally. The payoff to education, for instance, is widely disparate based on racial identity, which would not be true if the nation were truly a meritocracy. And note, the differences in payoff to education cannot be explained — as some try to do — by pointing to widely divergent courses of academic study or preparation on the part of blacks, as opposed to whites. So it is not the case, for instance, that black folks are all majoring in subjects that don't pay off in the market, while whites are taking more exacting class loads. With few exceptions — as any glimpse at Department of Education data indicates — the majors for whites and blacks are roughly identical, percentage wise. Although whites and Asians are far more likely than African Americans to major in Engineering, only a small percentage of whites and Asians major in these subjects (around 7 percent or so), so this differential cannot explain substantial employment or earnings gaps.

Beck once again inspires unhinged anger…

And so the craziness continues…amid a number of violent acts committed by devoted followers of Glenn Beck over the past year, now comes additional evidence that the Beck-Heads are an unstable bunch, willing to threaten anyone their silly little clown of a leader chooses to target for criticism. A few days ago Beck criticized the League of Women Voters for a debate they were sponsoring in Grayslake, IL for the 8th Congressional District seat. At the debate, someone in the audience protested that the moderators hadn't begun the event with a Pledge of Allegiance (as if any debate, EVER has started with that, or as if there is any reason for them to do so). The moderator noted the strangeness of the request and one of the LWV officials later noted that the request was little more than "phony patriotism," which is exactly what it is: ridiculous pandering to nationalistic immaturity. That set Beck off…

And now the LWV officials are getting death threats…

All in a days work for Beck and the right-wing noise machine he heads…