Cheat To Win

Romney may have received a paltry 27 percent of the Latino vote, but that was an incipient landslide next to his 6 percent of the black vote. Six percent is the exact percentage of blacks who voted for the GOP in the 1964 presidential election, when its standard-bearer, Barry Goldwater, kick-started the metamorphosis of the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Strom Thurmond by defying most of his own Republican senatorial colleagues to oppose that year’s landmark Civil Rights Act. You’d think the persistence of the GOP’s near-total estrangement from black America almost a half-century later would merit the most drastic corrective action in its new outreach effort. But you would be wrong. The party still believes it can spin its racial history and, when required, literally and figuratively whitewash it.

I may be a little too obsessed with race and 20th century politics, since I was all set to write my PhD. thesis on it, but this article from Frank Rich in New York Magazine is devastating in the best possible way.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Samuels of the Washington Post voiced the most common complaint against the fad — it reappropriates the name of an actual dance with a storied history rooted in our nation’s most iconic predominantly black neighborhood. The people in the “Harlem Shake” videos aren’t doing the real Harlem Shake; essentially, they’re dry-humping empty space like a pack of hyperactive poodles lost in a sea of fetching pant legs.² ”I’m nowhere as peeved as some who live in Harlem,” Samuels writes, “who view the dance as the latest thing to be mangled and robbed from the country’s cultural black mecca.” He’s referring to this video of Harlem residents reacting — some with good-natured befuddlement, others with pronounced “not again” dismay — to a compilation of “Harlem Shake” videos. “The Harlem Shake meme should not die until groups of committed dancers reclaim it from the jowls of foolish oblivion,” Samuels concludes.

Grantland goes on to discuss the offensive appropriation involved in Macklemore’s hit “Thrift Shop” and “Gangnam Style,” pictured above.  You should all be reading Grantland.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

All the applause for Ta-Nehisi Coates with this editorial.

Preach.

The United States fell on its face in its war on drugs because it let an animalistic reaction to fear take over policymaking. It abandoned facts and science. Though Newtown has traumatized us all, we should think through the consequences of proposals before acting. Gun laws passed today to stop tomorrow’s suburban school shooter may well end up incarcerating more generations of young inner-city black men.

From Biden to Barbara Boxer, Democrats are yet again leading the way toward more mass incarceration by falling back on tried-and-failed policies. Some have resurrected the War on Drugs’ cries for “mandatory minimums.” Yet research shows longer prison sentences increase unjust racial disparities while doing little to reduce crime or violence.

I’d love to know what Michelle Alexander thinks about this article and the impending “gun safety” legislation.

But really, though - I want this one framed.

Mr. Obama and Ruby Bridges Hall, the first black child to integrate an elementary school in the South, admiring the Norman Rockwell painting of her marching into school, which he hung outside the Oval Office.

Source: NY Times

While some may think it complimentary to be considered “magical,” it is infantilizing and offensive because it suggests black excellence is so shocking it can only come from a source that is supernatural. To accept a black leader who is extraordinary yet so human that he cannot be magical is an entirely different prospect than electing a black superhero. Anyone would vote for a superhero who lived up to my mom’s standard of having to be twice as good. But for it to embrace a nonmagical black person who cannot promise anything but hope, intelligence, sweat and experience, now that comes closer to equality. Equality is freedom from having to be twice as good to get ahead.

Yet again Touré drives home the all too important point regarding the strains put on African-Americans in contemporary society, and why this is election is even more important than the history of 2008.

Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., argues that unlike South Africa and apartheid or Germany and the Holocaust, the United States has never fully confronted the legal oppression and widespread violence that occurred between Reconstruction and the civil rights era.

“If you only talk about the moment when someone achieved something, you look at this history as infrequent periodical achievements, as if that was just the only thing going on,” said Mr. Stevenson, whose group is working on a campaign to mark lynching sites and publicize the legal features of the South in the Jim Crow era….

Professor King, who is 39 — and like more than half of all Americans was born after Mr. Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss — said he was troubled by how little his students knew about Mississippi’s history. There is nothing wrong with celebrating accomplishments, Professor King said, but he added that Ole Miss has an obligation to do much more.

“You have your memorials and you have your markers,” he said, “but you need to ask the harder questions. And that’s what a university’s for.”

This article in the NY Times touches on some issues I want to work on extensively in my PhD work: the lack of closure on racial crimes of the past and the oblivious nature of even the most liberal citizens to the racial crimes of the present.