"No! Racism Doesn't Exist Anymore!"

Um. Yea. Right.

A Pennsylvania mom found in Walt Disney World after claiming she and her 9-year-old daughter were abducted by two black men and stuffed into a car trunk, tricked a co-worker into giving her their identification.

Bonnie Sweeten used a co-worker's driver's license and presented it as her own when she bought an airline ticket and flew to Orlando, Fla. on Tuesday, Henry said, adding Sweeten also used the license to check into the Grand Floridian Hotel at Disney World.

Jillian Jenkinson said Thursday on CBS' "The Early Show" that Bonnie Sweeten's request to use her identification to fix a discrepancy on her 401(k) "seemed innocent."

First of all, how stupid is that?

More important, how racist is it that a woman claims to be abducted in a small town in Pennsylvania...by two men from Philadelphia who drove a Cadillac and are black???

Sweeten is from Feasterville, PA. Population: 6,500+ Percentage minority (black and Latino): 4.5%

Do the math. That's 300 black and Latino residents in a town where everyone knows everyone else.

Income: $58,000. 70% of Feasterville is family units, and the average age is 36.1 (older than the national average). So we're talking about people who have laid down roots.

You'd think a rear-end accident and an abduction might have attracted someone's attention, particularly if they involved strange minority men in a car too expensive for most residents (who probably would opt for an SUV, like Sweeten did).

Yet, Sweeten, like Susan Smith before her, opted for the "scary black man" tale to cover her own self-indulgences. At least in Sweeten's case, the child is alive!

But, no, there's no more racism in this country, no siree! Indeed, it's the scary black man who is racist! And his Latino "wise woman" appointee! But the rest of us? Oh no! Butter wouldn't melt in our white hoods mouths!

The Media Is The Massage

Finally, the Imus flap is over, to no one's great relief, except maybe Imus. A minor uproar in the American social dialogue has closed, and has seen the fall of a broadcasting icon, as well as the near death of a governor.

Not much positive comes out of this mess, except perhaps the vow by Al Sharpton that Imus will only be the first to go. Praise God if Sharpton keeps this vow, but Sharpton has been a little less than diligent in filling his promises. Lots of mouth, little action, and the scale is more than counterbalanced by how badly he has hurt the African American community with his own hijinks.

And I say that as someone who very nearly voted for him for governor a few elections back.

See, here's the thing: the media gets away with what it gets away with because, in truth, it sells. Imus was not a radio personality. He was a vehicle through which GM and GE and Staples and others pushed product. You listened to Imus and for free, you got more advertising pushed at you. Imus knew this and was not afraid to utilize this equation to his advantage, legally even.

Imus had been on the air 35 years or so, between his New York and Cleveland gigs (among others), and has been fired before for unbecoming conduct, usually centering around the fact he was an addict and just never showed up for work. He must have been doing something...well, not right, but profitable, for big corporations like RCA and Viacom, and later, GE to take chances on his behavior.

Roll the dice. For the last twenty years or so, people have managed to look the other way, or even offer enough grudging support to keep him on the air, toiling in the name of Mammon.

IF the firing of Imus creates an opening that leads to the wholesale clearance of "personalities" from our airwaves like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter (among many others), then I say "Huzzah!" for in truth, Imus was the least among these and probably the easiest to get rid of.

After all, technically, his was a sports show, and partisan politics was a secondary topic. His listeners were less rabid enthusiasts of his views than the Dittoheads and Hannitybots, and put up less of a fight.

These other, filthier, more disgusting proselytizers for perverse pulchritudes, espousing viewpoints of "correctness" that would be more at home in Stalinist Russia than America, won't go as quietly as Imus did.

But go they must, if we are to be true to this mission of making the airwaves safe for democracy. Al Sharpton seems to be vowing to take this boycott movement to the advertisers, taking a page out of the neo-conservative playbook of "if we don't like something, we'll force it off the air," a la Terry Rakolta, and Focus on Family.

I don't see it happening, because what should come out of this incident, the dialogue that really needs to be held, is about respect for people, for differences, for tolerance. And moreover, for understanding that this nation is undergoing an unstoppable transformation from a bastion of white male uberpower, shifting the balance of the world's resources --both physical and ethereal-- to a minority (on a global basis), to one that recognizes that people of all nations and cultures have an equal say in the future of this planet, and that this planet cannot be artificially divided into arbitrary political boundaries.

Ironically, it was the founding of the United States that signalled this evolution.

The media will b a powerful tool in this. We've seen the slow evolution on our TV screens (and its not nearly enough and not nearly fast enough) of anthropologic evidence of this transformation. Right now, it's mostly token gestures, but in the not too distant future, we'll stop seeing tokens and start seeing reflections of the world as it exists outside of our isolated island of immunity from the world's reality.

Firing Imus may, oddly enough, be the trigger for this, but given the power of his voice, if he had truly seen the light (and I suspect he has), silencing that voice may eventually do more harm than good.

tags technorati : Imus media

Race, Royalism, and Religion

So I'm standing in the shower this morning, hacking and wheezing my ass off, when my mind flashes across an argument I've been having with liberal friends: why is it that the theocrats and the economic royalists of the Republican party are able to hang together? What issues unite them and what issue could we wedge between them?

And my mind wandered back to a brief little item from the Sunday talk shows, I think it was Chris Matthews, where someone contrasted the appearances this weekend in Selma, Alabama of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. What triggered this inquiry in my mind was the fact that Obama is black and Hillary brought with her arguably "America's First Black President", husband Bill.

It's funny how race gets talked about in this nation. Bill Clinton has more in common with poor folks than Barack Or Hillary ever did. Born poor, in a single parent family for significant stretches, stepfather beat him, all pretty common occurences in the rural South of the 50s.

Black AND white. Meanwhile, Obama was born in Hawaii to two college students, and had a fairly middle class life (altho he was basically i a single parent family since age two) and Hillary was born into a traditional middle class family, the daughter of immigrants.

In truth, Bill is more "black" than either one, and yet, he's cleary not black.

And neither, I suspect, are most of the people we think of when we think of "black". And I think that's the intent of the Republican party.

It started back in the 80s, when Ronald Reagan touted his "Chicago welfare queen," the prototypical welfare cheat: black, drawing more than one check, wearing furs and driving a new Cadillac.

Subsequent research proved there was no single person who fit this precise story, and in fact, most welfare recipients (and therefore, most welfare cheats) were poor and white.

But welfare had been successfully linked by the GOP as a racial issue, and the ball started rolling. The black community impoverished, living off the fruits of our labors, undereducated, and economically in need of assistance.

Which may in fact, be all true, but turn this statement on its head for a moment. There are many poor blacks, no one doubts this, but do they make up the majority of poor people in this nation?

We know the statistics: 46% of African American children live in poverty where overall 21% of kids live in poverty, for example. Clearly blacks are disproportionately affected by poverty.

But blacks make up 12% of Americans (36,000,000). Whites make up 75% (225,000,000). That alone means that there are far more white people in poverty than black. Yet poverty is always cast as a racial issue: solve black poverty and you'll solve poverty.

Now, no one doubts that being black and poor in the United States is a lot harder than being white and poor. But being black in America is tougher than being white in America, and we ought to work to separate these two issues into two issues: race is one thing, economics is another.

The problem is, the second a liberal raises that issue, he's accused of "class warfare", which is usually enough to shut down the argument in a kind of Godwinian fashion.

It's here that the key to using this issue to divide the theocrats from the economic royalists lies. The unity on this issue revolves around the confusion most people have in delineating poverty as an issue without including race. This stereotype is reinforced consistently in the media.

Think about the television shows that showed poor white people: Roseanne, and maybe Married With Children as opposed to the endless shows of middle class white families. Now think of how many television programs showed poor or working class black familes, and how many showed middle class black families (The Cosby Show is about the only one I can think of, although you can probably include The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as one which showed the conflict between classes).

The theocrats believe in the teachings of Christ, who was very clear about the poor, but they also have a large proportion whose beliefs about race lag behind the rest of the nation (to be sure, many evangelicals live in nearly all-white communities); they can compartmentalize their work with the "poor" to include the few poor white families they may encounter, while wondering why the black churches don't do more for their own kind.

One wonders what would happen if, say, a church in suburban South Carolina was forced to spend a summer in Appalachia. How overwhelmed would they be once they finally see an auditorium of abjectly poor white faces looking back at them?

Similarly, if the message were able to get through to the theocrats that the royalists in the Republican ranks have been deliberately using their "goodness" to exploit themselves and their fellow theocrats, how quickly would this coalition remain together?

Not very long, and we started to see it dissolve in the wake of the Foley scandals and other high profile missteps by the Republicans in office who abused their power and authority and clashed mightily with some core beliefs of the church-goers. This is, in large part, why November 2006 turned out as well as it did.

There is one other issue centering around race and the Republican party that should be addressed here: of all the candidates Republicans of both stripes will have serious problems with, it is Barack Obama. The economic royalists will not be able to paint him as a "Republican in sheep's clothing" as they can with Hillary, and the theocrats will have a hard time denoting someone who speaks with a preacher's patios as "irreligious". But the one thing they can, and will, attack is his race. And given the fear of blacks that so many Republicans have, it will be very hard for Obama to peel voters away from the Republicans and the "Reagan Democrats".

What evidence do I have to support this? I look no further than the black candidates that the Republicans themselves have run for public office and in fact, the campaign of Michael Steele for Senator from Maryland in 2006 points up an object lesson: knowing he could not count on white suburban and rural Republican Marylanders to vote for a black candidate of either party, Steele fashioned himself as a "democrat", even co-opting the color blue for his campaign posters in an attempt to trick "dumb Democrats" into voting for him, and bussing in hundreds of poor people from Philadelphia to hand out campaign fliers.

For his opponent. His white opponent.

race
theocrats
economic royalists