Black America, White America, and Racial Sensitivity

The latest racial discussion and debate going on in the United States is stemming from the senseless death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Florida high school student that was gunned down in a gated community in Sanford, a community northeast of Orlando, by 28 year old self-appointed Neighborhood Watch representative George Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic. Martin, who was wearing a hoodie, roused apparent suspicion from Zimmerman, even though Martin was unarmed and only carrying candy and a can of iced tea that he got from a nearby convenience store and was only walking back to his father's girlfriend's house to watch the rest of an NBA game he was watching.

Black activists and social activist groups, along with a massive national viral campaign, are calling for Zimmerman's head arrest for murder, vehemently disagreeing with the Sanford Police Department's assertion that  Zimmerman claimed self defense and by way of a controversial Florida law passed in 2005, cannot press any charges or proceed further in an investigation. Martin's parents started a petition on Change.org which has sense collected over one million signatures calling for a federal investigation into the shooting because they lost confidence in local authorities to do so. According to a few stories I came across, this is not the first time Sanford has had issues in regards to race and police investigations.

I'm going to take this post to explain the current state of race relations in the United States that a lot of mainstream writers are either too scared or too polite to really write about: why blacks, and now whites, are so sensitive about race.

Social sensitivity is mostly an acquired trait, as in, you're taught reason to be sensitive. Often times, it begins at the home.

If you're black, like myself, and you're my age (24), you undoubtedly have parents and grandparents that grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. And while the movement resulted in landmark decisions such as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- black resentment of whites, in truth, never completely wavered. So for a significant number of us, as we were growing up, we were taught the "don't trust white people" mantra, as they believed (and they justified this based upon their experiences growing up) that whites were only out to hold back and suppress the black man.

Couple that by the limited education we receive in today's public and private schools in elementary and secondary education (or intermediate and high school for those that don't know what the hell I meant) about the black American experience -- i.e., "blacks were brought over on ships to the 'New World' in the 'Atlantic Slave Trade' by 'Spaniards, Britons, and Portuguese'...then some blacks were given freedom for fighting against the colonists in the American Revolution...then blacks were considered 3/5th of a person the U.S. Constitution...then blacks spent the rest of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century trying to end slavery and achieve equality both socially and legally" -- it only adds to that sensitivity.  It's an additional reason why I can't stand Black History Month -- it aims for black empowerment but it only reinforces black sensitivity. It's the difficulty that most activists have in separating language of empowerment and language of sensitivity, that erects unnecessary boundaries within our culture and our community.

What further adds to it is that no matter where we go as blacks, we're often subjected to pandering -- which only adds fuel to that sensitivity fire. The Democratic Party, for example, openly courts blacks for the simple reason that they are black. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Quannel X (for those that are from Houston reading this) have made their careers out of pandering to black sensitivity with their numerous grandstanding antics and events. Affirmative action, while well meaning, is another example of pandering. In short, a lot of the time, we're not taught to look at ourselves as being human before anything -- we're taught to look at ourselves as being black before anything, and while there are positives and negatives to that, the overwhelming negative is limiting how we look at ourselves in the mirror.

Now, I'm not saying these things and trying to say that racism does not exist, because it does -- blatantly and passively -- and I'm not saying these things because I don't think that "because I'm black" is a legitimate reason to give, because there are many times out of a hundred when that is a legitimate reason as to why certain things occur. I'm saying these things because I hope that sooner or later, we have a major philosophical and cultural shift to where we adopt the ideal of "before you look at me as someone that's black, look at me at someone that's a human being" and that ideal is self-reflective and not used as a justification or defensive punch line towards someone else. However, I do realize that is a major generational shift. At the same time though, everything that I just said about black America can be said about Hispanic America, Native America, Asian America, and yes, even white America.

White America has generally always been sensitive about race, but largely it was out of a Western European egotistical attitude which further fueled a combination of fear and a distorted superiority complex over black America -- especially black men. Over time, that attitude has not changed and really, it has manifested itself into a different dimension.

Where white America still fears -- really with black men -- black masculinity (i.e.. "This black guy will whip my ass.") and still possess attitudes of cultural superiority (see, "All Pejorative Statements Made About Hip Hop Culture, Blacks and Welfare Programs, and African American Dialect, Otherwise Known As Ebonics, or to Harry Reid, The Negro Dialect"), it's not to the degree where white America will actively campaign to openly violate or restrict black civil rights to the degree that was seen in this country from end of Reconstruction to end of the Jim Crow South. In a way, it's less about white supremacy and more about "white pride" and "white separatism".

However, there's a new dimension to white racial sensitivity that has not been seen since really the Reconstruction Era. Whites, really Northern whites, during the 1870s began to resent blacks and the whole Civil Rights Movement of the 1870s, largely due to exasperation from the Civil War and the fact that Northern whites more or less stopped giving a damn whether or not Southern blacks were ensured of their civil rights. As you well know, Southern Democrats (yes, for those that don't know, the Democratic Party was black America's biggest enemy up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election in 1932) seized this opportunity, regained control of Southern state legislatures during the later half of the 1870s and the early 1880s and ushered in the Jim Crow era.

This attitude of white American resentment of blacks has regurgitated in the past few years as white Americans became increasingly irritated with what they feel as the federal government's pandering to black Americans at the expense of white Americans. An example of this is the current American conservative movement to more or less wind down and cripple social programs that the poor (and as a consequence a significant proportion of black Americans) depend on, even if the majority of the beneficiaries to social programs in the United States are white. A major example right now is the affirmative action case recently brought to the Supreme Court by a student (who is white) that applied to the University of Texas a few years back and was denied, feeling that it was UT's affirmative action policy more than anything that was at fault. This whole "angry, white America" has fueled the political commentaries of Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, and Bill O'Reilly and also bolstered the American Tea Party Movement when it was at its peak during 2010 and 2011.

You're now also seeing more social and Internet memes such as "Why isn't there a White History Week?" or "Why isn't there A White Entertainment Network?" -- direct examples of the new dimension of white sensitivity. If I had to sum it all up into a shorter way to express this it would be: for the first time white Americans are asking the same questions about themselves and their identity that black Americans have been asking for the past two centuries.

I'll wrap this up by saying this: we're going to keep discussing race for a long time. It's unfortunate that in the mainstream media that an honest assessment of racial sensitivity is not made. Hopefully, this post gets around the way it needs to get around and opens eyes. Post-racial America will not ever come to fruition until the color of one's skin becomes secondary and not primary. As long as it is primary, then we're going to keep having discussions and we're going to keep having responses and we're going to keep asking the same questions we've been asking every time an incident occurs where race may be a question.

Correction: This isn't a post racial society

The biggest lie that has ever been proliferated since Obama being elected to the office of the presidency is not anything that has to do with the budget or the economy.

The biggest lie that has ever been proliferated since Obama being elected to the office of the presidency is a "post-racial" America.

I've admittedly never really dealt with anybody that took open issue with my race to the point where it escalated into a confrontation. Never say never, of course, yet so far it has not been an issue. However, so far, I could say that I have not.

Racism, in itself, is a mutated form of tribalism, in that for all the years that human race has walked the face of this earth, has been institutionalized in some form whether it is through slavery, legalized apartheid, racial profiling, or race- and ethnic-based immigration policies. It is the dream of many to "eliminate" the disease that is racism, however, the reality is that as long as we tie skin color to any sort of system of risk or value, whether it is propensity to commit crimes, sexual prowess, ability to perform in a professional climate, and so on, there will still exist a bastion of racism. 


However, personal convictions, which fuel racism as it is, more often than not lead to disgusting consequences -- slavery in most of the Western Hemisphere well into the latter half of the 19th century, slave trade, apartheid systems in the United States and South Africa,  mass ethnic murders in holocausts in Armenia after World War I and Germany before and during World War II, rampant discrimination, white farmers being forced to leave from Mozambique, and it goes on and on. If you are a racist, and you don't like me for being a black man and you simply want to have nothing to do with me, then that's your problem. If you are a racist, and you're waging a campaign for the systematic violation of the human and civil rights of others through systematic containment and murder, then it becomes everybody's problem.

Quite few people here in the United States -- largely, white and conservative -- will claim that this is truly a post-racial society, that political correctness now seems demonize "whiteness", that the playing field is actually level, and now it is up to black and Latino Americans to make the most of the opportunities that have presented themselves since the Civil Rights Movement concluded with Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.  Yet, while there may be truth that self-empowerment push of leaders such as King, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta has transitioned to a "you [the white majority] owe us for the past four hundred years" mentality, it is honestly a representation of an endgame that was four centuries in the making -- blacks and Latinos having a general resentment of whites because of the past transgressions committed by the white majority and whites having a general resentment of blacks and Latinos for consistently feeling like they still have to pay for the "sins of their fathers". At the same time though, blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians are more sensitive to racial issues than whites -- reaching to the point of hypersensitivity amongst Latinos and especially blacks.

However, racism does not have to be blatant -- it can be passive as well. Passive racism is most seen with racial profiling and racial bias. Generally, the latter (i.e., preferring to date someone of a certain race) is far more tolerated than the former (i.e., a police officer pulling someone over for no reason other than the color of their skin). In short, skin color and tone is always going to carry some weight of relevance. 


Unfortunately, that is the reality that we live in.

That reality was made apparent in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teen, who was killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a white Hispanic man, in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, which lies a few miles northeast of Orlando. Zimmerman had no real reason to call 911, except to further his belief than young black men are just criminals, and further had no reason to shoot someone unarmed. It was the same reality illustrated by James Byrd, Jr's death. The same reality illustrated by Emmett Till's death. It's the same reality faced by thousands of men, women, and children that were only assaulted and slayed for the color of their skin -- "black", "white", "red", or "yellow".

So, anyone that tells you that the United States has transitioned to a post-racial society is telling you a bold faced lie. As long as we're still using skin color to judge and decide how much value they have as a human being, even to the extent of violating their human and civil rights, then racism will remain a fabric that is deeply woven in the quilt of society. 

Don't Call Me Nigger or Nigga, Whitey...wait, what?

To start off, I will have to apologize to Sly & The Family Stone fans for thinking that this would be a post about one of the greatest bands to ever take the stage in rock music. This post is about words and society. I came across a story that was posted on MSNBC about a Chicago Public Schools teacher that filed a federal lawsuit against the district for the right to use the word "nigger" in his classroom as part of teaching Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

As Chicago Public Schools' Lincoln Brown, the teacher in question, was teaching his 6th grade class at Murray Language Academy back in October, school principal George Mason walked in as he uttered the word "nigger" during his lecture and all hell seemingly broke loose. Brown took to the media after filing his lawsuit with his attorney and claimed that he is a victim of character assassination, denied he is a racist, and reiterated that he was only using the word in historical context as part of the lesson. Mason, on the other hand, contended that Brown used it in an abusive and inappropriate manner which is a violation of Chicago Public Schools policy. For the incident, Brown was suspended for 5 days by Chicago Public Schools and Child Protective Services for Illinois upheld the suspension when Brown tried to appeal.

I think the vast swath of us can remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from back in middle school. Set in the antebellum South, the titular character forms a friendship with Jim, a slave, who Finn helps escape to freedom. Twain used Southern Vernacular English in the text, which gave way to frequent use of the word "nigger". At the time, "nigger" was often used as Southern vernacular for the word "negro", and was not only used by whites, but by a vast amount of blacks as well. What is often noted, and at times ignored, is that Huckleberry Finn is indeed a satire, and one of the most scathing attacks on antebellum Southern life and attitudes, especially racism; not to mention, at the time that the novel was published in 1884, "nigger" was actually not seen as a pejorative racist term -- the word would not take on that meaning until the late 1890s to the early 1900s.

In the irony of all ironies, the word "nigger" became "nigga" with African American Vernacular English (which I think is a massive misnomer, because blacks, whites, Latinos, and even Asians all use this form of English) during the 1970s, after which it grew in use in various comics by black artists. "Nigga" is a vernacular corruption of "nigger". Just like "ain't" is a vernacular corruption of "isn't". Just like "chink" is a vernacular corruption of "China" and more specifically "Chinese". For the record, when I say "corruption" I merely mean it as "progressive distortion". Connotation is what makes something acceptable or not acceptable, but even then the clarity of what is "acceptable" is now becoming expanded and some what clouded. In fact, its increasingly being seen that "nigga" is not even used to just refer to blacks; Latinos picked up on the word referring to other Latinos that may not even be of black African descent. 


"Nigga" has taken on the same movement that "bitch" has taken on since the feminist movement: a word of self-identifying empowerment. This is mainly in conjunction with the hip hop movement, in which the word started to explode in acceptance and usage throughout the 1980s, and today you will have to look high and low for a hip hop album that doesn't even have the word uttered once. While connotation still carries a lot of weight, as it should considering use of certain words will illustrate what attitudes someone holds, it actually foolish that we should insist that the word "nigger" should never be uttered in public and stricken from public conscience. To do that, we would have to do the same for "nigga", "bitch", "queer", and any other word that is now a term of empowerment and loose endearment and had previous use as a pejorative exercise of a superiority complex.

So what's the point of this post? I personally take no real issue with the word. As unpleasant as the word may be, for one, it is a part of the development of the English language and secondly it is an artifact, if you will, in the evolution of race relations. Because it is really a historical linguistic artifact, I would not be opposed to the word being used in a classroom for teaching purposes. Realistically, it cannot be expected that sixth graders, like the ones at Murray Language Academy, would be able to fully comprehend the development of a word that by that time in their educational and personal lives, has largely been ingrained in their minds that ever since the word was developed in the 16th century, it has always been a "bad word" even though for nearly the first 3 centuries of the word's existence in the English language, it wasn't seen as one.  It is indeed the reason why that it takes significant care when using that word for teaching purposes as part of a lesson on historical race relations, which is often what books like Huckleberry Finn is used for at the middle school level in conjunction with teaching the historical development of the Great American Novel.


As for the lawsuit in question that spurred this post, it is coming to a fight of "he said, he said". We'll probably never know what truly happened until the case goes to trial and ostensibly students that were present in the class will get called to testify. Yet at the same time though, political correctness has to give way to an unabashed critical look at our history. We'll never have a good understanding of how this society functions unless we take a look at the historical construction of our society, no matter how plush or painful it may be. 

Why I don't celebrate Black History Month -- Even Though I'm Black

We're getting in the middle of Black History Month, and once again we are treated to different visages of cultural ass-kissing -- yes, ass-kissing -- from various sources of the mainstream media. Of course, there's going to be some white conservatives out there that's going to circulate the infamous quotations of Morgan Freeman in his 60 Minutes interview from a few years back when he dispelled his support for Black History Month.

There's two reasons why I don't really like Black History Month: for one, I resent that it fosters the belief that we should only give a damn about black history only one month or a few weeks out of the entire year. In fact, I resent that same idea for all various demographic divisions that humanity has concocted for I am a strong believer that historical awareness should have no boundaries in length of time. History is a beautiful thing and it necessary to be consistently and constantly aware of it so that we have a greater understanding of the present and enhanced perspective as to what we think or hope for in the future.

The second part is the ass-kissing and I'm going to limit this part to this diatribe to only Black History Month even though it could be universally applied to any "Insert Demographic Here" History/Awareness/Only-Give-A-Damn-About-It-Right-Now Month. We're going to see numerous specials, numerous commercials, and schools are going to make numerous announcements in commemoration of black history, and then it's mostly quiet for an entire year afterward. What makes me more of upset that it is largely regurgitation only exploring household names with a little bit of a curtly nod to the less celebrated. We often talk of tirelessly of the work that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X during Civil Rights Movement, but even during this month, we don't hear much of the work and sacrifice that W.E.B. du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Abernathy, James Baldwin, Clyde Kennard, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, Claudette Colvin, and others did during those turbulent years. You'll hear of Langston Hughes, a fine author in his own right, but why wait until college to hear about Ralph Ellison and August Wilson?

I understand the awareness which is mainly the purpose that Black History Month serves, and while that is a fair assessment, I still believe that the history of our people, both here in the United States and abroad, is worth way more than just 28 days (or 29 days in a leap year) of conscious groveling that will all but cease on the first of March.

If I Were A Poor Black Kid...

The other day, I probably read the most idealistic op-ed ever. And I mean ever.

Let me begin by saying that I did not grow up with a family that was well off. My mom and my grandparents financed their cost of living primarily by credit, and indeed we're paying for it now. However, I lived a pretty comfortable life growing up. I was never abused. I went to school. I got good grades. I only ended up with a GED instead of a high school diploma because of issues surrounding a half credit. I'm presently in the middle of my seventh school year taking of either being in college or taking collegiate courses.

At the same time, I grew up with a luxury that is a cornerstone of suburban life -- stability. Stability is what people drove people in the suburbs in the first place. White Americans fled the urban core for the suburbs in the white flight eras of the 1960s and 1970s, for a culture of stability, for they resented the change brought on by black Americans moving into their neighborhoods. Black Americans fled to suburbia increasingly in the 1990s and 2000s for a more stable, healthy climate as opposed to the turbulence of the inner city. Families are more apt to settle in the suburban world because of the stable, family-friendly environment. But of course, I am well aware that stability is indeed a perception.

Gene Marks, the author of the piece that is the namesake of this post, wrote a list of things that he would do if he was "a poor black kid" in the inner city. He reasoned that his children were no smarter than the kids coming out of the 'hood, and thus a lot of his reasoning is based upon a vicariously distorted, romanticized view of himself as a progressive, education-hungry "poor black kid" in America. He meant well, he really did, and he said a lot of stuff that, if pursued, could lead a poor black kid to some measure of success. However, he still falls into the same trap that most suburbanites fall into when it comes to commentating about issues of the inner city -- "if I can do it, you can do it, too, and if it's available to you, you can do this, and you'll be successful" -- completely ignoring what is really at the genesis as to why many inner-city black children fall into a pattern of mediocrity.

It's rooted in the climate and more importantly -- the culture that they were raised in. While it would sound synonymous, I differentiate climate being more local (as in local in the home) in comparison to culture, which refers to the community. The one thing that I've never seen written very often about in the editorial press, such as the one that inspired this post, is the entire culture that is brought about by low incomes and poverty. Sociologists have written about it but few social commentary pieces when it comes to the plight of inner city black children ignore it aside from how low incomes and poverty create a much more fertile ground for criminal activity. Some of it is a passive aggressiveness of an entire community, some of it is a lack of hope of an entire community, but a lot of it is rooted in socially desecrating patterns that, unfortunately, do not get broken.

The cornerstone of inner city life is survival. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Ignore the more sexual hedonistic, materialistic, and misogynistic shit that you hear about in popular hip-hop music. It's really about survival. And because of the stakes getting raised higher because of the impoverished culture, survival takes precedent. And because its more about survival and less about stability, there exists a value structure that is completely different than what is in the suburbs or in more affluent neighborhoods. Think about, especially for those that are reading this and live in Houston -- how can Gulfton in Southwest Houston be one of the most dangerous areas in the entire city, yet Bellaire, a city that is an enclave within the city of Houston and sits one mile east of Gulfton, can be one of the safest areas in Greater Houston? Same thing can be said for the Spring Branch area of Houston versus the Memorial area of Houston that sits to the south of Spring Branch across the Katy Freeway. A different culture spurs a different climate which is going to spur different results.

A survival culture and stability culture are different and sequential. You have to survive before you can achieve stability. If you're in the suburbs and you're not fighting for your own survival, then all you're left to fight for is either achieving stability or maintaining it. What this translates to for children growing up are less stressors, which will provide children the ability to do better academically, to do better socially, and to be better off in general than their inner city counterparts. I'm not saying that there isn't a survival culture in the suburbs, however, because it exists, but not to the rampant, widespread degree of the inner city where its an affliction on a wider swath of a demographic. I also want to make it known that I'm not saying "better off" in terms of superiority, either. Middle class and wealthy suburban kids, or hell, middle class and wealthy urban kids statistically fare better academically (better grades, high school graduation, and collegiate attendance), socially (less likely to be involved in crime), and better off (quality of life), than poor kids from the inner city or even poor kids in the suburbs because of the different climate of which the culture they are apart of spurs.

In short, and really the whole point of this post is this: the survival culture creates a different value system. Good grades and education is important, yes, but if whole point of making it in inner city dystopia is doing what you can to survive and that mantra fuels a troubled climate in the household which creates issues at schools and on the streets, then good grades and education is not going to carry weight. It's especially true when it comes to young black men my age -- the reason why the likelihood of inner city black men getting killed or going to prison is so high because of climate they were raised in, fueled by the culture that is crafted by low incomes and poverty.

So going back to what Marks wrote about: it's idealistic, not because there aren't any poor inner-city black children that aren't studious, because believe me, there are many, but because the climate that the grow up in as a consequence of a survival culture generally doesn't provide for it. I guess the best way to put in terms of attempting to summarize the survival culture is the point of instant gratification as compared to eventual, worthwhile payoff. If Marks was really a "poor black kid" in the inner city, then he'd see for himself why many of the things that he would supposedly do would almost never occur. It's easy to say vicariously what you would do in someone's situation until you actually get why they're in that situation in the first place.

The Confederate Flag

Proposed license plate (Houston Chronicle/Texas Department of Transportation). FAIR USE: I am only using this image for educational purposes only as it has to do with the subject of this post.

I'm writing this in response to a story that I saw posted on the Houston Chronicle's website about local political critics ramping up their campaign against the proposed allowance of a Confederate insignia to be on Texas license plates, which will be voted on by the Texas Department of Transportation next month. The proposal is sponsored by Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson on behalf of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The group plans on using the proceeds from custom license plate purchases to mark Confederate graves and build monuments for Confederate heroes. In turn, they will share the proceeds with the Texas General Land Office.

I went to school with a guy that had a girlfriend who bought him a Texas Confederate belt. The belt did not really offend me because he was not really a racist (even though he tried to act like one) and he did it out of Southern pride and not out of white racial supremacy. Or so I think. I haven't spoke to him in years so I could never really quiz him on his intentions. To tell you the truth, I really could care less. When it comes to racial issues I see it like this -- you're entitled to your opinion, however, if you have an issue with the color of my skin do not allow it to get to a point where you're interfering with my right to my own life. That's when we have problems.

It is indeed understandable as to why the Confederate flag offends the majority of Americans and not just black Americans. The Confederacy's Constitution guaranteed slavery and Southern politicians justified it by invoking a twisted interpretation of the Biblical story of Ham in the Bible. There are indeed those that use the Confederate flag to not only show off their Southern pride, but also as a racial intimidation tactic in support of white supremacy. Yet, at the same time, even the Confederate flag has increasingly began to take an avant-garde meaning to it -- as just a mere display of Southern pride and heritage. It is the avant-garde meaning that the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Land Commissioner Patterson are sticking to in their campaign for the insignia.

It goes back to freedom of speech. You're guaranteed the freedom of speech so as long as you are not putting others lives in danger. If the TxDOT allowed for the Confederate flag to be put on license plates, it would not interfere with others quality of life, however it might affect those that choose to have the Confederate flag on the license plate because they're going to stick out and the judgment calls will roll in. However, the formation and the existence of Confederacy was one of the many markers that was a part of the unfortunate first three centuries of American society, where there was widespread, legalized disenfranchisement based on the color of one's skin. But the Confederate flag manifested itself from being a flag of a nation that institutionalized racism to being a flag of a distinct part of the country with its own culture and distinctive heritage. Now, how much you are willing to accept the latter is up to each and every one of you, but personally I have accepted the "heritage not hate" aspect of the Confederate flag.

On a personal note, I'm not bothered by the Confederate flag. I've seen it flown, I've seen it on window decals, I've seen it on bumper stickers, I've seen it on online profiles -- you get the point. There's no point in oppressing or trying to cover up history, no matter how unpleasant. If you wish to fly the Confederate flag or display it in the name of heritage, fine. If you do so out of racist means, that's fine too, so as long as you do not interfere with my life and my right to live.