The Republic of Dissent

Racial fetishism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Thea Lim:

The idea that interracial relationships are anti-racist, and having a mixed race family will fix racism is not only naive; it may even go hand in hand with racial fetish.  A few weeks ago I met a freshman college student – a good-looking black guy with a bright future – who told me that he doesn’t want to date black women because he has a thing for mixed race girls*, specifically ones that look like Alicia Keys. (So of course I emailed him CVT’s article about how mixed race people on the whole may actually *not* be that hot.)  When I suggested that his racial dating preference was messed up, he said that the bad balanced out the good, because isn’t dating outside of your race a way to end racism? The more we mix up, he reasoned, the less there will be reason for people to hate.Please! Yuck! No. Date someone because you like them inside and out, not because a) you have a racial preference or b) you think that dating out will end racism when you have little beige babies. That’s just asking for parental trouble when your beige babies have their own consciousness and their own desires, and don’t want to be poster kids for your personal crusade. And anyways, racism is not truly about racial phenotypes; it’s a social campaign to assign power based on ethnocultural group.  There will always be ways to demarcate ethnocultural group, even when people are “all mixed up.”

My reaction to this viewpoint is that the trouble with racial fetishism isn't the fetishism part of it, but the racial component of it. Lim can make all the points that she wants about race, but she cannot change the fact that the fetishism of race in the context on personal relationships exists because of its sacralization period. Fetishism always take on its most perverse and disturbing form when its object is perceived as capital, sacred or forbidden. Thus, the trouble here isn't that people involved in mixed relationships have a racial fetish for they would be having it about something other race if it wasn't such an artificially essential concept particularly in American society.

Racism is racism is racism

Quote of the afternoon from Norman Geras:

To deny that millions of Jews were done to death in Nazi-occupied Europe is an odious lie harmful to the interests and the well-being of Jews. Racism and other forms of prejudice can often be traced back to prior social or political causes; but that doesn't undo their racist character.

Projection and 'American racism'

Interesting bit from Bill Benzon's essay, the best thing I've read this weekend, on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

European-Americans, some more than others, and some little if at all, have used African-America as a means of discovering and acting out aspects of their own desires and needs which they cannot deal with directly.  Such psychological maneuvering is quite common on an individual level.  American culture has made such projection a part of its collective culture.

Racist Tea parties

The assertion of the day from Cathy Young:

The endurance of racial stereotypes in this day and age is disturbing; but Tea Party supporters differ little in this regard from mainstream Americans.

Most of the times, when the charges of racism and of anti-racism are used within the political context, especially the American one, the intent is to shut down the debate by diabolizing the opposition in order to ignore their concerns. The point is that racism is America is no longer about racism, but about identity politics and ideology.

Mugabe and nonracialism

It is both ironic and distressing to compare what Mugabe said before his country's independence (exactly 30 years ago) when he was trying to get the support of the outside world in his fight for independence and what he started doing and saying when he lost grip of  powers and realized that he his country's prosperity and its citizens' welfare only mattered if he was the state. To put things simply, racial politics are seldom based on sincerity and conviction, but solely based on greed, ambition , and fears. Thus, racial politics is solely about power and legitimating appalling ways to distribute or redistribute it. Mugabe became both a racialist and a racist politically when he realized that it was the only for him to keep Zimbabwe as his personal possession just as the Congo used to be King Leopold's machin. The point of this comparison is that there isn't much difference between a racialist like Mugabe and the leaders of the former Colonial countries. The tragedy for Zimbabwe and for many African countries is that their political leaders recolonized them by making the state their private thing.

Race as the only important political issue

Sugary excerpt of Adam Serwer's post on some 'conservatives's' questionable beliefs about Obama and his family history:

John Podheretz and Peter Wehner argue that whether or not Obama's mother slept with men who weren't white is incidental to the fact that Obama hates America, but Michael Ledeen thinks it's a valid subject for discussion:

The character of our president is an important matter. I think both John and David have tried to illuminate it, but I wish John had taken more time with his latest tirade, gotten the facts right, and focused his considerable talent on the serious matters that rightly concern us.

Apparently being attracted to people outside of your own race reflects not just on the character of the parents, but on their children who have no choice in the matter. This kind of racial determinism seems like a lateral movement from the days when conservatives were debating whether or not interracial sex made you love communism. Again, there's a sort of mystical power accorded the phalluses of nonwhite men here that begs some serious psychological analysis from a qualified professional.

Why don't black people vote Republican again?

I'm amazed by Serwer's last question. He implies that it is an abomination for any people with dark skin to vote for republicans because they ought to be single issue voters  and solely focus on race to the detriment of economics and any other thing  that they believe because race is the only important political issue, the one who defines them and ought to determine their politics. If that isn't racial determinism, I don't know what is. I'm not addressing the views Sewer are excoriating because it isn't just some conservatives who feel that Obama is different because of his background, many liberals and Americans share that perception except that for them it is a positive difference. In my view, it isn't a meaningless different for Obama is as American as George W. Bush. It is thus hypocritical for Serwer to argue that 'conservatives' are the only people who believe that race is all defining and that one is her/his color of skin. In short, Serwer is in fact legitimizing the vision of race that appalls him, racial determinism by making the point implicitly that people shouldn't vote for people who don't share their views of race. As the Church Lady in Dana Carvey's sketch would say, isn't that special !!!!

Racialized!

This video depicts, I'm afraid, a reality that ought to be expected when identity politics become the supreme form of politics and when race becomes supra-essential. How different is South Africa from the United States? Or rather would the United States be South Africa if the majority was impoverished since it too is racialized society

Calling students 'black bitches'

Appalling:

The students -- both African-American women in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center who have asked that their identities not be made public -- got to the event, at the University of Rochester, late. But they still didn’t expect that after their professor, Grant Farred, thanked them for making the unfamiliar two-hour drive, he’d briefly pause and then add, “When you came in, I thought, ‘Who are these black bitches?’ ”
Yet, that was the response they say they got from Farred, a professor of Africana studies and English. And, in the more than two months since the alleged incident on Friday, Feb. 5, the students and others contend, the Africana center and the university more broadly have failed to foster a public dialogue on the incident and to address deeper tensions involving the center and its role on campus.

I thought that universities such as Cornell and the University of Rochester were supposed to be liberal places and that liberals couldn't be racists. To make more than a cheap point, it think the incident show s again that race and racism in American is not longer essentially about color, but about something else, which makes the issue ideological, political and unsavory much like the one of autochtony in African and European countries. Of course, it is important to point out that I'm assuming that the story is true. I'm betting in case that the Professor of Africana studies thought that he was being funny and hip which is more telling.

Racism is omnipresent in Obama's America

The latest accusation of racism against a critic of the POTUS in Obama's America as described by Nick Gillespie:

Gingrich pronounced that

Shooting three-point shots may be clever, but it doesn't put anybody back to work....What we need is a President, not an athlete. We need somebody who actually focuses on getting people back to work.

Now Gingrich is nobody's idea of an athlete and while it might be easy to write this off as water-boy envy at its most obvious, it's also a great line, especially given Obama's annoyingly public displays of jump shots (see above, which comes from the White House's official site!). O'Donnell insisted that the proper reading of Gingrich's comment was that the Georgia Peach was channeling Jimmy the Greek (not a stereotype!) and dredging up racist stereotypes of African Americans as born to play basketball.

"I’m not sure what he means by this particular soundbite and I think it’s open to some criticism because it suggests that the President is an athlete and some people may suggest, you  know, because all black people are good athletes. I mean that’s what it sort of sounds like to me... Well what’s this suggestion about him playing basketball? That he’s not doing his job?"

Wonderful, I thought the point of electing Obama was to get past this kind of thing meaning the easy branding of anything/anyone as racist because it criticizes brutally somebody who has a different color of skin or hurts their feelings. Well, it is established that it takes more than a man, a symbol to change America and its obsession with race.

The nonexistence of 'black' racism

Suntosh Pilay has a great post on the assertion of a South African scholar Andile Mngxitama that "blacks" cannot be racists. It's a must read. Sugary excerpt:

Andile reckons the definition of “racism” must include the ability of one group to subjugate another, and since black people have never had the social, economic or political power to subjugate white people, they cannot be racist, by definition. He sees racism as “discrimination by a group against another for the purpose of subjugation or maintaining subjugation” (Biko, I write what I like).
Does this mean black people cannot be racially prejudiced against whites? No. Does this mean black people do not utter racial slurs? No. Does this mean black people do not commit nasty acts of atrocity against other race groups? No. Black people are fully capable of doing unsavoury things to other race groups, but Andile maintains that we must call it something else, just don’t call it racism.

Mngxitama lives in a parallel universe and needs to explore a little more what is outside of view. However, my biggest issue with Mngxitama is that he dehumanizes "blacks"or rather "whites" depending on how where you choose to put the lens on by asserting that one group is essentially different than the other and that race color determines essence, particularly when one can be a racist or not. This viewpoint is troubling to say the least.

Racism and normality

Philip Ridley on what believes to be the differences between racism of the past and the present one:

When I was at school, the two sides of the extreme right vs liberal argument were easier to identify. Every fascist wore their swastika with pride and wasn't afraid to call a spade a – need I carry on? But these days racism (and its blood brother, homophobia) has a far scarier visage: normality.

I have to admit that I'm disturbed by Ridley's assumption that all racists are abnormal people who are scarier now that they are able to bear the mask of normality. My experience has taught me that racism is fact part of daily lives and it is in that sense very normal. It is the wearing of the swastika or whatever that is abnormal because it indicates that it isn't just 'racial' hatred that is behind the proud use of that symbol, but also a belief in violence and in a radical political ideology. At some point, people are going to have to accept that every single day  they make regrettable and demeaning judgments about one another based on every little thing, race, gender, appearance, and mannerism. The focus has to be on avoiding that these assumptions lead to crimes such as discrimination and to an unwillingness to accept that they may be wrong. All racists aren't created equal and most are actually normal people. That doesn't excuse their imperfection, it just makes it banal.

Obama and post-Americanness:

I agree in part with this:

There is a difference, of course, between arguing that Obama’s policies are somehow post-American-exceptionalism, and saying that Obama himself is post-American. The insinuation blatantly is that he is not really American, a notion that will doubtless give succour to “birthers”, racists, and other nidiots. Indeed, one might even suspect that the phrase is designed to do just that, to act as a little slow-fused bomb of hatred and contempt secreted within an ostensibly rational discussion of foreign policy in a broadsheet newspaper.

Obama is  not a post-American exceptionalism president. He is a normal American president trying to capitalize on his best asset that is his popularity in the world, and the belief that he is special because of what he symbolizes because he looks different.  He will always do whatever he has to do to protect American interests. He is a firm believer in American exceptionalism whenever that belief suits his political purposes and advances them. It is disturbing that race and the fact that America and the rest of the world sees Obama as 'black' make it difficult/impossible for them to realize/accept/acknowledge that he is a typical American president and not some kind of exotic or eccentric creature that got to the White House.

Racist slurs, theTea party movement and the American political dialogue

I agree in part with Michael Moynihan on this:

(...) it is my instinct to distrust politicians (an instinct the media typically avails themselves of—except in situations like these), and especially politicians trying to push through health care legislation, but these claims seem suspicious. It would be useful if those covering the story asked if the shouts were from just one jackass or it constituted a "chorus?" Was it really as bad as the desegregation battles of 1960's South Carolina? If someone did shout a racial slur at Lewis—and again, this seems entirely possible, though no one has corroborated it and the paucity of video evidence is curious—it is certainly deserving of strong condemnation, though hardly proves Olbermann's assertion that racism is at "the heart" of the Tea Party movement.

I have the sense that both parties in America have accusations that they use to shut each other up and to discredit one another. The Democrats have the racism, religious extremism, and the ignorant cards. The Republicans have the hate-America, wimp, and Socialism cards. The point is that Republicans and Democrats are not interested in debating one another, they are just trying to win elections and to delegitimize one another. I don't understand why people are so obsessed  with the Tea parties as if they represented something new in American history and as if they are going to take over America. Experience shows that their message will be co-opted by smart politicians and that their most marketable members will get off the margins and integrate the America political establishment.

'Black' boys and feminization

My only reaction after reading Tony Sewell's assertion that the trouble with 'black boys' is over-feminization is to wonder on what planet he lives on:

More than racism, I now firmly believe that the main problem holding back black boys academically is their over-feminised upbringing. First, because with the onset of adolescence there is no male role model to provide guidance and lock down the destructive instincts that exist within all males. Second, in the absence of such a figure a boy will seek out an alternative. This will usually be among dominant male figures, all too often found in gangs. This is the space where there is a kind of hierarchy, a ritual and, of course, a sense of belonging.
We have wasted years, and lives, looking in the wrong direction as to the causes of crime and education failure. We've had endless studies attempting to prove institutional racism – while all along our boys' psychological needs weren't met.

According to Sewell's logic, the absence of a father leads to over-feminization, which he doesn't define because to him, it is means simply the contrary of manliness and anything that impedes a black boy being a boy according to his definition of normalcy. What is frightening about Sewell's arguments is that his perception of gender is so inflexible that it leads one to wonder whether his issue isn't really that he believes that 'black' boys ought to fit the stereotype of black manliness as represented by Jacob Zuma and others by accepting that they are the king of the castle and that 'black' girls exist only to meet their needs.

The scars of invisible racism

Interesting stuff from Margaret Wente, but what does it mean? :

Sensitivity to perceived discrimination is so acute these days that it can lead to perverse results. One instructor at the University of Toronto was told not to criticize foreign-born students for their poor language skills, even if they were unintelligible. Some aboriginal students say they shouldn't be evaluated by the same standards as everyone else, because they have different ways of knowing. Yet, as Mr. Al-Solaylee sensibly observes, his students will be working in an English-speaking, Eurocentric world. So they might as well get used to it.

I have to admit that I'm no longer sure what racism is and whether all racisms are equal and all 'racists' equally despicable. The screams of people who love to be outraged have gotten to my brain. One of the most surprising and remarkable lessons that I have learned in the last few years is that people who have prejudices might be more willing to help the people who are the victims of their prejudices than anti-racists who believe that their openness is a sign of purity and virtue and doesn't mean that they have to do more or at least to remain open. It is always unsettling to me to realize that the first thing  that most "white" New Yorkers say to me to approach is about race and the ways that they assert  it is still holding "my people"  down, then my lack of enthusiasm for the subject and my silence lead them to conclude when they are from the creative or other elitist class that I'm a legal alien in New York.

Black Mammies and other 'positive' stereotypes

I agree with Adam Serwer on this:

Mammy" is not a "positive" stereotype. There are no "positive" stereotypes, all stereotypes are created with a dehumanizing flip side that is inseparable from the faint "compliment" used to justify their invocation. But the legacy of the Mammy in particular is a grotesque one. Like every other carefully engineered old-school caricature of black people, it's meant to reinforce notions of what kind of behavior is appropriate--in this case, a docile, even happy acquiescence to white authority. "Mammy" was meant to depict black women as ugly and asexual, content to exist as surrogate mothers to the saintly white children of their owners or employers. Mammy's false happiness assures white people that the institutions of slavery and later Jim Crow have black people's consent and approval, her rotund body an alibi for the rampant exploitation of black women by their white slave masters. 
There's simply nothing "positive" about it. Mammy may give some people the warm fuzzies, but that has to do with whom the stereotype flatters. It sure as hell doesn't flatter black women.

When Winnie bites Nelson

Winnie Mandela is probably one of the few persons who is not afraid to slam her former husband, even though he is a God in South Africa. After reading her comments, I have to believe that any movie made about her will be better than any movie made about Nelson Mandela because she is more flawed and thus more human; actors and directors aren't going to be afraid to go "there." A few of her reproaches to her former husband: 

Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a burning young revolutionary. But look what came out.(.,.) I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel [Peace Prize in 1993] with his jailer [FW] de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. (...) Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed, and our struggle was not a flash in the pan, it was bloody to say the least and we had given rivers of blood. (...) I had kept it alive with every means at my disposal.

Something tells me that Winnie Mandela wishes Mandela had remained in prison so she would never had had to fade in the background as a disposable thing when he came out because she wasn't clean. Part of the truth of course is that Winnie Mandela never learned to become a stateswoman because she believes in radicalism ,raciality, identity politics, money, and not much else. For after all, she is speaking up this loudly now because she wants somebody to pay her to shut up.

The buffoon and the cultural imperialists

The South African Times's editorial on Jacob Zuma's State Visit to Britain puts it just right :

You've got to feel for Jacob Zuma. There he is in London being described by one right-wing commentator as a buffoon and bigot. The state visit to the UK was supposed to finally afford him the opportunity to move on from weeks of criticism of his scandalous relationship with Sonono Khoza. Instead the sex scandal is following him around like chewing gum on the sole of his brogues.
But why, oh why, did he choose to react by saying that the British believed Africans were barbaric? All because one blogger on the Daily Mail's website was provoking him.
His ill-considered response accomplished two things:
It soured the attitude of his hosts, who were now being caricatured as racist jingoes - not by a lone South African blogger, but by its president; and
He displayed vulnerability when he ought to have projected strength.

Whoever is advising Zuma ought to be taken out back and given a sharp kick on the shin.

The point is that buffoons especially the ones who cannot justify their own vile conducts or who have their godly manliness challenged are prone to attack others, to use culture as an excuse, and to accuse others of cultural imperialism because they refused to accept that some people have the right to be barbarians.

Obsessing about Colonial history

Louis Georges Tin's (a vice president of the French version of the NAACP, Le Cran) interview in the Root offers another proof that unfortunately, the United States has exported successfully its racialized views of history and of society to France. Sugary excerpt;

In spite of the process of decolonization, French institutions continue to believe in the good they think they have done colonizing the world. Many intellectuals refer to colonization with a sense of nostalgia and think it was a privilege to be colonized by the French.
(....) I know this debate may seem a bit odd. It could not happen, I hope, in other countries. Confronted by the United States, India, Australia and many other powerful countries, the United Kingdom could hardly claim that colonization was “positive.” We could say the same thing about Spain, confronted by Mexico, Venezuela or Colombia.
But France remains in a dominant situation toward its former colonies. So it is still possible to maintain these ideas. For example, when he went to Dakar in 2007, a few months after he was elected, [French president] Nicolas Sarkozy made a famous speech in which he stated: “The African man could not make his way into history. In his imagination, everything always starts again, and there is no room for human adventure and any notion of progress.” You could not imagine Zapatero (Prime Minister of Spain) saying the same thing to Chavez, or Gordon Brown saying this to Obama. But being in a dominant position, France can “afford” to act in that way when it comes to its former colonies.

I agree with the popular, but yet vacuous notion that it is important to know about history to learn from it. However, increasingly, history has become a way to fight old battles, to make political arguments about the present, about social justice, and more importantly about the distribution of wealth in a society. I am tired of obsessing about history, of thinking that it conditions the present. I have had, to the contrary of too many people, to stop assuming that the past is so sacred that it cannot be defied and has to overshadow our common humanity. The problem that I have with people such as Louis-Georges Tin and the members of Le Cran  is that they believe that America is a model on the race issue and that they have to racialize every question to one day have a French Barack Obama, as if that would be a sign that all is well again in la Douce France. In other words, my message i to Tin and others:is to let it go at last, to focus and to take care of the present and more important of France's future without putting race at the center of everything to achieve social justice.

Adopting "black" children

I almost agree totally with Angie Chuang on this:

Bring up race and adoption, and watch people squirm. The deep racial politics of adoption are mired in centuries of colonialism, as well as white paternalism over domestic minority groups and developing countries. The result: They have left scars as deep as forced adoption of American Indian children into white families in the mid-20th century—and fresh ones from the campaign to convert Muslim Indonesian orphans to Christianity after the 2004 tsunami.
The current-day realities of transracial adoption remain tangled in the U.S. government’s own conflicted policies about race-matching versus “colorblind” adoption, as well as constantly shifting regulations in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union and Guatemala. There are uncomfortable contradictions: Whites are chastised for their reluctance to adopt black children, but then those who do adopt black children are criticized for not being able to prepare black adoptees to face discrimination—or embrace their identities.
And the most unsettling contradiction of all: Isn’t adoption an act of love? A selfless act? Can we honestly tell the parent of an adopted child who happens to be of a different race that their bond is somehow tainted by generations of racism?

The main issue remains that race is still seen as essential to one's identity and that for too many people, black children especially when they come from Africa are like animals who have to be raised in the wild in order to remain themselves, to retain their blackness. I had an interesting experience at the airport last December as I was waiting for the arrival of an Air France flight. There was this French woman who was holding a "black" toddler who was being unruly, running everywhere, she kept running after him and you could tell that she felt that she was his mother. I was with a Friend who is Brazilian who said because he couldn't believe what he was seeing  "I'll bet you anything that the kid is either mixed [even though the child was so obviously not] or that she is married to an African and the kid is his." The child was holding a balloon who said "welcome home Daddy" We waited and when the Dad came, he was white white. My Friend couldn't believe his eyes, and just remarked, "I guess when you want kids desperately and cannot have them, you will love whatever you can get." That's just shows that people have narrow views when it  comes to race and that they believe that black kids or others need parents who look like not to be lost or to become something/someone they were never meant to be.

The tyranny and fetishism of culture

Jacob Zuma just won't let me leave him alone when he continues shamelessly and shamefully to use culture as an excuse for his incivility and barbaric manliness:

When the British came to our country they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way ... I don't know why they are continuing thinking that their culture is more superior than others.(...) Bear in mind that I am a freedom fighter and I fought to free myself, also for my culture to be respected. (...) I've not looked down upon any culture of anyone ... and no one has been given an authority to judge others.

What a limited, pompous, and dangerous argument ! I guess we should just let the Talibans stone women in the name of Islam, we should tolerate female circumcision because Africa was colonized and yes, finally,  we should say to "African women" as Fela Kuti would say that they should be grateful to be one of the numerous possessions of "African" men who are all Kings with great needs that no just one of them can satisfy. I have the feeling if Zuma were white, and were justifying the unjustifiable by using culture, he would be called a racist because people would say that he is in fact saying that some people have the right to be savages because it is their nature and because their culture encourages barbarity.

The pains of looking "diverse"

Boy do I agree with Ariane Sherine on this:

It's not that I'm embarrassed about my ethnic background. I don't think about it much, though it's good for jokes ("I'm half Iranian, half American – so basically, I hate myself"). But some people seem to want me to think about it. "Why don't you visit Bombay?" they enthuse. "You'd love it." They may be right, but have yet to explain to me why I'd love it more than Tokyo, or Guatemala, or any of the other places I haven't yet been. It's an odd misconception that you should somehow feel connected to a far-flung country because your ancestors lived there centuries ago, even if your entire life has been spent morris dancing in Loughborough.
It's not that I think the questioners are all differently faced versions of Nick Griffin, either. I don't – they're probably just curious (except perhaps for the bloke who made a constipated noise when I told him my Dad was white). People with a different appearance often seem more interesting than those who look everyday, and questioners are clearly hoping for a more satisfying response than the mundane "Right here". When they don't receive one, they probe.
So my reluctance to enter The Conversation isn't due to shame or to fear of any dubious ulterior motives. It's partly down to exasperation at people thinking I'm less British than them because I'm brown; but it's mainly down to extreme boredom. The rundown of my convoluted four-continent-spanning genealogy takes ages unless I lie, and I've started to deliver it in a funereal voice more monotonous than Tiger Woods's public apology.

This reminds of a personal encounter I had a few years ago. I was buying some groceries when I noticed a old man staring impolitely at me. I looked at him, he came to me and said to "you are from Haiti, right?" I answered truthfully, "Hum, No." He insisted, "You don't have to ashamed of it, I was in Port-au-Prince last week and met a lot of people just like you." I said to him jokingly, "Are you trying to say that we all look alike?" He answered emphatically, "Yes !" I looked into his eyes and said, "In that case, can you tell me where Ben Laden is, I really need to talk to him." His face turned red and he shouted at me, "You are an Islamophobe and an anti-Arab racist !." The moral of the story is that nobody likes people to assume that they either know where they are from based on the way they look or that they know who they are because of the way they look. What shocked me was that it never even occurred to the man that I didn't have any Haitian origins and it is possible to look "Haitian" whatever that means ( I suspect that for a woman it means being black, having wide eyes, and red lips, which is my case,) and not be Haitian.
The point is that when you look "diverse" you are never allowed to be yourself, you must be from somewhere, represent something, and more importantly, you must be different in a culturally interesting to teach others about exotic parts of the world. The trouble is that, as Sherine asserts, it gets tiresome especially when you have a mind of your own and when your sole eccentricity is caused by your intellect and your refusal to accept totalitarian normality not any exotic experience.

Indigenous Zimbabweans and the racialization of racism

Robert Mugabe may not senile, but he is still a racist as this sugary excerpt of a post by Annie Lowrey shows:

Today, in Zimbabwe, a highly controversial new law requiring businesses to be majority-owned by indigenous Zimbabwean citizens comes into effect.
Within the next 45 days, every company with an asset value over $500,000 needs to submit paperwork detailing the racial background of its shareholders. If the company has a majority of white or foreign shareholders, the Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Act -- brainchild of President Robert Mugabe, whose catastrophic land reform act caused hyperinflation and famine -- requires it to transfer shares to indigenous Zimbabweans.
The goal of the law -- "a deliberate involvement of indigenous Zimbabweans in the economic activities of the country, to which hitherto they had no access, so as to ensure the equitable ownership of the nation's resources" -- is a noble one. But the law is a calamity that promises to drive away foreign dollars and further the impoverishment of average Zimbabweans.

It troubles me that people are reluctant to call Zimbabwe a country with a "race" problem and Mugabe a racist because they are justifying his actions with history as if a rose has stopped to be a rose to be a rose when it is of a different color. In other words,  I find it outrageous that Zuma can consider even asking the Brits to lift/ease the sanctions on Zimbabwe and that there seems to be a complaisant silence from too many people who like to scream racism on this story when one doesn't need much of an imagination to guess what they would be saying if Mugabe and the so-called indigenous Zimbabweans had another skin pigmentation.

Sex in black and white

For some reason, I had the feeling that I could count on Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to expose the racial aspects of the Tiger Woods story. She didn't disappoints me:

The black American comedienne Sheryl Underwood also blasted the randy golfer: "The issue comes in when you choose something white because you think it's better. If you never date a black woman or women of colour you never sample the international buffet of human beings. If you never do that, we've got a problem."
Some black women I know say Woods goes for "the barbies" because he thinks he can pass for white. They come down hard on other black men too – like Seal, Trevor Macdonald, Lenny Henry and all those others who marry white. Cole has raised the same emotions among many black folk. He went for white, always, and so seems to be "self-hating".
There are white people out there who believe Woods and Cole exploited sweet white princesses, used them and tried to control them. It is vengeance for slavery and historical injustice. Back then torture and death were used to emasculate black males whose sexuality was feared, envied and hated by masters. To regain their pride and dignity, to punish their tormentors, black men turned that fear into reality.

I'm at a loss for words. I'm officially speechless.

Racializing Abortion

Just another proof that in America, despite the election of our lord and savior Obama, it is possible to racialize anything especially polarizing issues :

A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations.
Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children.
“What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”
The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.

We are truly in Postracial America. Is too dumb or malicious of me to believe that Obama ought to say something? Oh yeah, that's right he loses his eloquence and the desire to take risks when there is no personal/political rewards for them . But in any case, it is too easy, too self-righteous, and willfully blind (fanatical) to cry racism when it comes to abortion instead of addressing the main issues, which are the ones of poverty and gender when it comes to "African-Americans." It seems to me that it is too easy to make grand speeches or issue religious condemnations from the podium of a church, when it might be more productive to use social activism to address the underlying causes of the problem. This is one of the reasons why I argue that religion is a delusion that particularly the poor and the underprivileged don't need because it becomes, as Marx would say, an opiate, I would use the phrase crack cocaine because it is too pejorative and would distract from my main point.

Georges Frêche and the need to create a socialist Le Pen

John Lichfield has an article in the Independent, which proclaims solemnly Geoges Frêche, the sulfurous President of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, the Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Left:

Originally, the Socialist Party, at national level, had agreed reluctantly to back Mr Frêche's centre-left coalition, or "list". Last month, Mr Frêche once again outraged the leadership of the national party – and many other people in France – by making what appeared to be an anti-Semitic remark about the former Socialist prime minister, Laurent Fabius.
Mr Fabius is from a Catholic family of Jewish origin. After he had criticised Mr Frêche during a radio interview, the president of Languedoc-Roussillon retaliated by saying that the former prime minister had a "tronche pas très Catholique" – literally a "not very Catholic mug or hooter".
This may seem a trivial insult. Mr Frêche says that it was a version of a well-known phrase in the French south, "pas très Catholique", meaning not entirely straightforward. This is disingenuous. By referring to the "tronche", the face or nose, of Mr Fabius, Mr Frêche was indulging in just the kind of insidious, nudge-nudge anti-Semitism which still thrives in bourgeois, Catholic France, north and south.
This was far from Mr Frêche's first lapse. He has been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks before, despite being a strong supporter of Israel. He once referred to two ex-"Harkis" – Algerians who fought on the French side in the colonial civil war – as "sub-humans". In 2007, he repeated a complaint once voiced by the far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, that there were too many black players on the France football team.

The trouble with Lichfield 's article is that it remains purposely on the periphery of the Frêche's issue. It does so in order to create a new monster and  then to make the case with ease simply one of an anti-Semitic and racist socialist who shows that Le Pen is not an anomaly within the French political system. This is, in my opinion, a voluntary misreading of the situation for the Frêche's issue is neither about anti-Semitism and racism, but rather about the fracture of the French left between those who consider that politics is about management (the modernists) and the others who believe that it has to be  also about values and the nation (the traditionalists). The French socialist are excluding Frêche and his supporters not because they believe they are racist but solely because there is a witch hunt that has begun in the party ahead of the next presidential election whose goal is to make sure that only a modern (Martine Aubry or Dominique Strauss-Kahn) is the socialist presidential candidate. It is a shame that John Lichfield because it is more flashy and more politically correct.  to sell the story that French is Le Pen didn't dig deep enough to give his readers the whole context by pointing out for example that the most important French Jewish organization supported Frêche and that many influential socialists  (Gérad Collomb, the mayor of Lyon and François Rebsamen, the one of Dijon) who can hardly be called racist or anti-Semitic have campaigned for him.

Black Children as an endangered species

Shani Hilton on An Atlanta Billboard campaign declaring that "black children (what does that mean?" are an endangered species:

The campaign is part of a new push by anti-choice advocates to exploit unequal access for reproductive-health services and black-genocide conspiracy theories (including the problematic history of Sanger) to further their agenda. As a quote displayed prominently on another anti-choice Web site, BlackGenocide.org, reads, "The most dangerous place for an African American to be is in the womb of their African American mother."
Poor women have four times as many unintended pregnancies as women who live above the federal poverty line. Among black women -- who are more than twice as likely to be poor than white women -- the numbers are even more dramatic. Sixty-nine percent of their pregnancies are unintended, and they have 37 percent of all abortions, a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the population.
Black women may be having more abortions, but that doesn't prove that they're being coerced into having them. The only thing it proves is that black women are disproportionately having pregnancies they didn't intend.

The first thought that came to my mind is "Only to America" then after some reflection, I wa forced to realized that America has imposed its views on race on the rest of the world and that  it seems that nowadays, everything needs to be categorized to find  its niche. To go back to the central issue, I wonder why the billboard focuses on the children, the fetuses and their race, the color of their skin instead of focusing on the mothers and their social condition. It is so easier and demagogic to argue that "Black Children" are an endangered species rather than to make the point that too many women whether they are black or not find themselves too easily alone and in poverty and therefore have to make difficult decisions. Is the message here really that "Black mothers" ought to be thinking about race first when they are pregnant instead of thinking about whether they would be able to provide for a child, who nobody else not even their government or their "racial community" will raise in their place?

Mugabe at 86

Mugabe is or is going to be 86 years old. Bob Marley, if he can watch what is happening nowadays, wishes surely that he could rewrite his famous song, which celebrated proudly the hard fought independence, which Zimbabweans seized from Britain by warning them against providential men who believe that they are the state and their country cannot survive without them.
What do you wish a dictator who was once a national hero and an example for other leaders on the continent and who has become just a vulgar racist, narcissist, and autocrat on his Eighty-sixth birthday? : to die the mouth open in his sleep as soon as possible so that there is no bloody coup or political revolution and so that his people can at last start to build their country without living in the past and hanging on to old resentments.

"White" liberals

These series of  rants from Verashni Pillay about "White liberals" show that next to America, South Africa is the most racialized country on earth, in fact "the race" issue, whatever it is camouflages, may even be more explosive in the streets of Pretoria than in the ones of DC:

• In any conversation about apartheid, white liberals will immediately and loudly bring up the fact that their parents were forced to join the army. As if this fact mitigates generations of economic and political advantage. As if life is a neat game of tag where you can shout "Nix!" and invoke some sort of blanket amnesty, instead of the messy web of power it really is.


• White people are very used to hearing the sound of their own voice. A white liberal friend once told me he had been to an academic conference where a paper was presented on the best responses to white guilt. It was lauded for positing silence, and listening, as a solution. I waited to respond to this interesting idea but my friend spoke about it without pause for about ten minutes without allowing me a word in edgewise. Eventually I left mid-sentence to get a drink.


• White liberals who love Africa are the funniest. Look for the pale male donning an African print shirt and rocking out to Johnny Clegg. To be honest, the only actual black man I know who wears African shirts is Madiba. And he's, you know, Madiba. Funny thing about this kind is that they'll wax lyrical about the African dream but never quite bring themselves to date an actual black woman. I guess they leave that to the European tourists.


• White liberals never, ever, think it's weird that they have no good black friends. In fact, if you bring this up they'll think you're being racist. Then they'll whinge about how hard it is to meet black people

Manly fights and the obsession with trees

Hum is the only word that comes to my mind when I read this for I feel that Eric Fingerhurt is onto something, but I'm not sure if he is right, though I can say that he isn't totally wrong when he writes this (hat tip: Smuel Rosner):

In fact, the whole Wieseltier-Sullivan episode has served to illustrate an emerging trend among critics of Israel: Their eagerness to allege that they've been accused of being an anti-Semite. I do agree that some of Israel's defenders are too quick to throw out charges of anti-Semitism or "self-hating Jew," and that's lamentable and a problem. But it seems that among many of Israel's critics, claiming that you've been accused of being an anti-Semite has become some sort of bizarre badge of honor. And quite a few of those that have allegedly been accused of being an anti-Semite, according to Wieseltier's critics, either were never smeared with such a term or were only accused of making a specific problematic remark and not tarred with some broad brush of disliking Jews, as they claim.

The one thing I know is that through the Wieseltier-Sullivan episode, it was obvious that when it comes to some issues, people would rather focus on the trees because they they cannot/do not want to see the forest. That is the reason why that episode was so boring to me, because it was a childish and distracting soap opera between two manly men who cannot get over their egos and admit that they have trouble not demonizing people who are not like them.

Institutional anti-racism

It's been a long time since I've heard arguments about institutional anti-racism as pertinent the ones that Rod Liddle are making:

By ‘institutional anti-racism’ I do not mean people not being racist — that, we might all agree, is a good thing. I mean the state of mind which connives in wickedness, which is in a perpetual state of denial, which turns the other way, which does all this stuff because of the terror, the career-ending calumny, the shame of being accused of being ‘racist’.
(....)You can see institutional anti-racism pretty much wherever you look; as I mentioned last week, it is there in the closing down of any debate which touches upon race, unless it is to prove a charge of racism. It is there in the ludicrous sackings of people who are not remotely racist but who dare to speak their minds about issues concerning race; from the Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford back in the 1980s, to the Conservative MP Patrick Mercer — who, it should be remembered, was booted off the opposition front bench for suggesting that it was not unheard of for some sub-standard black soldiers in the army to use race as a weapon when challenged as to their poor performance. What a shocking thing to allege; who could believe it, etc.
And institutional anti-racism is there in a subtle but no less corrupting way in your office, right now, or maybe on your TV screen; the suspicion that someone has been given promotion, or preference, or leeway, because they are not white and that as a consequence someone else has been done down. It is there in what sometimes seems to be an over-representation of non-white people on the news programmes, or in drama productions and that in both cases these people are treated a little differently because of their supposedly defining non-whiteness. And sometimes all of this is a misperception, and then again, sometimes it isn’t. Who knows? Either way, it springs from the same source.

Institutional anti-racism cannot be distinguished form institutional racism with institutional racism for it poses the same questions about meritocracy, societal ethics and the use of unkosher categories and criteria to promote or to punish individuals. The trouble is that it is an issue more difficult and less sexy to address than the racism/anti-racism of people because it is harder to shame, to guilt, and to silence institutions into a political correct behavior or into an accommodating silence than powerful institutions. As I get older and I hope wiser, I have the feeling that the issue of racism/anti-racism is not even close from being the issue of our times, it is one too potent and too flashily empty who blinds people from more pertinent ones such as equity and social justice. Of course, the reality is that in heterogeneous societies everywhere, people talk about racism/anti-racism really to question the distribution of power in order to avoid developing more substantive and universal (and in my view more convincing) arguments to delegimate/legitimate a power structure and the powerful.

Zuma is just another powerful normal man

Ah, so people just have a narrow mind to see the need to defend "Africanity" even though it is an illusion and more importantly when their first instinct should be to condemn vile behaviors instead of focusing on the fact that they come from a particular group. Those were my first thoughts  when I read this op-ed in the Mail&Guardian by Verashni Pillay  :

Zuma's contravention of a certain public and cultural standard by having an extramarital affair is unlikely to earn him more than a slap on the wrist by his party and alliance.
In the double standards that attend reporting on our very African president, the international media seems to forget that dodgy behaviour on the part of men in power is hardly an exclusively African trait. Sex scandals are ubiquitous as they are deliciously satisfying media fodder.
The fact of human nature is that we can all be corrupted.

I need to take a moment to resist the urge to vomit.

Post-raciality and the cleansing of America

Insightful and precise (in my opinion) thoughts from Courtney Martin  on the so-called post-racial society, which America become suddenly, magically and supposedly with the election of Obama:

We elected a black man within a racist society, leading many to mistakenly see race as surmountable. In fact, we elected Obama in spite of our collective history of racism and, less acknowledged, in spite of our continuing individual racism. The moment was historic, indeed, but didn't change our past -- or our present. Obama's presidency doesn't eradicate our "race problem" or even the very positive and rich existence of our varied racial identities -- thank God. Race has roots -- political, cultural, social -- far too deep in this country to be pulled with one electoral yank.
Why do pundits like Matthews latch on to the post-racial rhetoric so enthusiastically? Because it promises relief for them, a sort of finish line of racial struggle -- ironic, I know, since they weren't the ones carrying the revolutionary load. For many white Americans, post-racialism goes hand in hand with the notion of a "bootstrap" nation, one where your race doesn't determine your station in life. If there is no more race -- this thinking goes -- white people can stop apologizing.

Of course, this conundrum was unavoidable for an election cannot end America's history with race and will not wipe the slate clean. I think that it was Glenn Loury who pointed that America still hasn't had a president who is a descendant of slaves  (not all Africans were enslaved) and that this fact makes a big difference in the creation of a post-racial American society. I agree that this fact is important, but I think that America's race problem comes from the fact that it legitimizes communitarianism and racialism. People are strongly encouraged to identity with a group in order to be visible and to get a bigger share of the  shrinking American pie.
I have never believed in the post-racial narrative for the simple reason that I don't believe in the racial narrative in the first place and that the issue of race in America and elsewhere isn't really about race.

Accepting Cablinasians

I agree with John McWhorter on this:

That is, Woods long ago declared himself to be “Cablinasian” to Oprah, and America has bought it. And it is of a piece with so much else: it’s the America whose youth have embraced hiphop as mainstream music. It’s the America who thrill to a 24 on television with not one but two black Presidents, and then elected a  real one.(...)Tiger Woods, in designating himself truly a mutt rather than Black By Default, is ahead of the curve. There are those who think he was supposed to declare himself “black” because of how, say, police might see him. But to do that would be to deny that his Thai mother contributed half of his genes and raised him – raised him, unable, as someone not Black American, to do so as a Black Mother. So, Tiger was brave enough to – brace yourself, Soul Patrol – be what he is. Two things. Not just black – and not even mainly black.
Something we can all agree on – in fifty years a lot of people will see it as odd that in our times that was seen as news. We’re mixing, a lot. There are now increasing numbers of self-avowedly “biracial” people – the days I knew as a kid when the black-white “mixed” kid was faced with having to “admit” that she was “black” when she was about thirteen, crying at forums where such issues were discussed out of ambivalence over disowning her non-black parent, are past. Tiger isn’t, from what is evident publicly, especially deep – but he’s prescient. He is the future, just as FDR, hardly deep himself, gave us Social Security, the FDIC and so much more. Sometimes we need to hearken to people who are not given to thinking too very much.

I'm wondering if it is possible to make the choice not to be black by defaut and to have a future in American politics.

Fiction and Darkness

Chinua Achebe on Conrad's Heart of the Darkness and its racism:

I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

I've always wondered how much racism is acceptable for books who written in times when the prejudices which they transcribe were the norm. In other words, should we be able to read Conrad, Voltaire, or Céline without feeling not only guilty, but dirty? Can any work of fiction ever be equated to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kempf ? My only problem with The Heart of Darkness has always been the chosen limitations, which Conrad placed on the story because he was aware on his superfluousness and the subjectivity of his experience in the Congo and of the fact that he needed to give his readers what they wanted. I would have love The Heart of Darkness to have been more graphic, that is for example for "the savages" to either eat the "whites" on the boat or for the "civilized" people to just massacre them.  What I'm trying to say is that fiction has a right to racist, grotesque, vile or whatever else, the problem is its infeudation to biography or reality, when it is asked to represent the world as it should be or even as it is. Achebe seems not to be able to accept the fact that racists or rather prejudiced people can be good and even great writers and that to me is disappointing.

Racial essentialism, hybrid culture, and America

I almost agree totally with Scott McLemee responding to the criticisms of his post expressing disappointment with Cornel West's latest work:

The most important premise being that no white writer can say anything critical about a black writer without having vile and probably violent motives. This axiom is typically nested, in turn, within an assumption that American life is best understood as having two distinct cultural complexes. One is coded white and the other black. They are accessible via distinct (and well-guarded) entrances, and obey incommensurable zoning codes. You are supposed to stay in your proper matrix.
A system of internal colonies, between which a spirit of mutual disinterest prevails, is not my idea of a good society. As a basis for cultural criticism, “separate but equal” is not that appealing a principle. Nor do I feel deeply accountable to any “tolerance” found choking on its own stifled aggression. My sense of life owes a lot to the work of C.L.R. James, who thought that the multiracial crew of the Pequod was what made Moby Dick such a touchstone to understanding American possibilities.We should leave racial essentialism to the stand-up comedians who finesse it best. This is a hybrid culture. That is perhaps the one good thing you can say about it. I don’t intend to give that up.

I'm wondering looking at America with some distance (though with adoring eyes) whether the fact that it has a hybrid culture means that it can become a society where racial essentialism isn't in fact its essence. I have come reluctantly to the realization that America is a country, which accepts that origins, race define who people are and acceptable to criteria to form legitimated communities. The American societal model is one where every single member of society has to choose a group, a community to become to avoid marginalization at the best and castrating powerlessness at the worst.

Les mêmes choses

After reading the following assertions from Yasmin Alihbai-Brown, I am reminded how much the fact that the only connections that our times to race are racism, ethnicity, and identity blocks any forward thinking because the focus is placed on particularities and différence and on the erroneous assumption that self-derogation is solely ideological:

So much of the media is embracing the new world, and today's most popular TV programmes, especially reality shows, feature a cornucopia of racial types. Yet "ethnic" psychosis persists and is manifestly getting worse.
On Asian marriage sites or matchmaking newspaper adverts, third-generation British Asian men want "wheaten" brides. In black communities western features are craved, hair is straightened, skin lightened for reasons profoundly disturbing. Jet gets herself a pointy, long nose. Now, she says, she looks rich enough to shop in Waitrose.
Back in the 1960s the Black is Beautiful movement in the US spread across the world and made us proud to be who we were, even in Kampala, Uganda where I was growing up. I stopped ironing my hair to look like Jean Shrimpton's, and my African college room-mates went Afro. No more burnt hair in the sink and a new dawn, we thought. For a few decades, yes. Now comes globalisation spreading Starbucks and standardised western notions, and with it a surge in "ethnic" self-loathing and self-mutilation.
What is different now is the absence of any political and social fightback. Race is dispensable, can be wiped out if you can pay for the privilege.

The new Black is the old Black because Blackness doesn't exist

I have to admit that I have never liked Tracy Morgan. I have never hated him, but I have just always switch the TV to another channel the few times I was unlucky enough to catch him on Saturday Night Live. That being said, I can understand why some people like him and why they can find him compelling. I have to give him credit for the fact that that he isn't bland and annoyingly trying to please or to be loved by everybody. I listened to this episode of Fresh Air (hat tip: Ta-Nehisi  Coates) in which he discusses his autobiography, I Am the New Black and I thought, "Man ! Life must hard when the first thing or the only that you are is someone of a particular color or of a particular religion." I can already hear people telling me that  most people don't have a choice and that society forces them to be who they become. I have to say that although it isn't false, but I don't think that it takes away from the responsibility that we are for what we become and for how we define ourselves. I may only a Camusian existentialist, but I still believe that more often than not, especially in the most difficult and atrocious of cases, the choices that one makes within the circumstances in which one was born and grew up tell us more about that person rather than about about  the inflexibility and the inhumanity of his/her person's environment, which again matters tremendously. To come back to Tracy Morgan, I think that the fact that I don't like him is because he reminds me of  too many guys who had it bad/good and who still aren't able to realize that having it bad/good is neither an identity nor an excuse. In a weird way, Tracy Morgan reminds me of the new president of Gabon, Ali Bongo because you get the sense that he lost his self in something he allowed to become bigger than his dasein his blackness, his maleness, whatever else and that now, he is just playing the fun and fruitful role of Tracy Morgan to remain cool and not to wake up.

Cultural cloning

Hum, I'm tempted to agree with Samir Shah on this ( I think his main point can be made about the US, France or any other country dealing with a population, which is diverse and mixed), but it would be too easy and moreover, I have the feeling that he is only offering part of the picture even though it is one, which I find both uplifting and depressing because it leaves open the possibility that race doesn't have to doom the future of a country and to pollute its politics:

The plain truth is that Britain is developing an underclass who share more in common with each other than they do with other members of their own ethnic group. What are these traits? Everyone will have their own theories. But here are mine.
The first impediment to progress is a community’s determination to cling on to elements of their own cultural traditions and ways of life. Parents from certain Muslim groups, for example, have a tendency to bring up their children in such a way that they never interact with members of other cultures — restricting the ability of their children to get ahead. Then take the ‘babyfather’ phenomenon. David Cameron has urged Afro-Caribbean fathers to attend to their parental duties — an issue because half of black children live in lone-parent households, double the ratio of whites. Jack Straw made this point rather well with the surprisingly pithy ‘Lads need Dads’. The need for a father is not specific to children of any race.
If we are to hunt for discrimination in 21st-century Britain, then we should look at other factors that make us different. Each distinguishing feature — class, culture, accent, being Northern — plays a part. For example, in some liberal industries such as the media, being right-wing doesn’t help. But why should this surprise us? The kind of people who make decisions — white, middle-class, metropolitan, liberal, male — all think that the best people for the job are, er, white, liberal, metropolitan, middle-class and male. To describe this phenomenon as ‘institutional racism’ (as many are inclined to do) misses the problem by a country mile.
The real problem is what I call ‘cultural cloning’ — the human tendency to recruit in one’s own image. Recruitment, instead of being about picking the best people, becomes a process of finding people like the ones already there. The overwhelming need for a kind of cultural comfort blanket takes precedence over every other consideration — and rules out those whose backgrounds don’t quite fit. This is what a 21st-century Equalities Commission should have in its sights. Cultural cloning is, in my opinion, the main source of discrimination in Britain today.

Poland, France, and Anti-Semitism

Interesting comparison between Poland and France and the way their society deals with anti-Semitism from Konstanty Gebert;  he seems to imply that France deals well with Anti-semitism I disagree strongly with him because I don't think that laws can eradicate bigotry, on the contrary they tend to victimize the bigots thus giving them  too much of the spotlight, which enable them in turn to become larger than the hate they spread:

Because Polish anti-Semitism is as widespread as it is skin-deep. Let me explain. Take France. In France they had very strong laws against public expressions of anti-Semitism. If you express anti-Semitism in public you can be seriously penalised. This doesn't necessarily affect what Monsieur Dupont says at his dinner table (and I've sat at some of those dinner tables – I know) but in public if somebody makes an anti-Semitic statement you'd better believe he or she is serious, because they are willing to take the rap.
In Poland, anti-Semitism is not penalised, period. Just recently, the public prosecutor in the town of Krakow closed the investigation into soccer fans yelling "Gas them!" to the fans of another club which is labelled as Jewish because, historically, like 70 years ago, it had been Jewish. So they yelled "Gas them," and they yelled, "We'll always triumph over you, you fucking Jews," and the public prosecutor decided such contents do not constitute a crime and dropped the case. And this comes in the wake of similar statements by different public prosecutors. So anti-Semitism isn't penalised, therefore it becomes a convenient venue for the expression of frustration. So if somebody says in public it's all the fault of the Jews and they should be kicked out of the country, this does not necessarily mean, as it probably does in France, that he is a dyed-in-the-wool and dangerous anti- Semite. It might mean that he had a bad day at work, full stop. This is no less excusable morally...

It's an incurable disease

I'm speechless after watching this tape. I'm not just asserting it, I'm really describing my state of my mind. I have the feeling that America is stopped in the middle of nowhere and that it is going to waste a lot of time not on becoming a good country, but an impossible "clean" country. If I wanted to be bluntly cute, I would wonder at aloud whether if wouldn't have been a good thing for the US if the South had been able to form its own country.

It's so easy to divide that it's scary

Well, I just got to go one thing to say after reading this article from Leon Wieseltier, boom boom; no I will say more, is it just me but don't culturalism and ethnicization bring the worst in people?:

Jewish self-hatred is another term for Jewish anti-Semitism, for the internalization of the standpoint of the enemy; and this is a genuinely grave charge. Jews who fling it about for political ends are desperate and disgraceful. And they are some of the same people who are outraged when right-wing African Americans are smeared as Uncle Toms.So I wish to attest--I have placed my hand on my copy of The Zionist Idea--that Rahm Emanuel is not a self-hating Jew. I know this. I have never met David Axelrod, but I am aware of no grounds for the suspicion that he has committed "race treason." (I take that charming phrase, which sounds like it was translated from Treitschke, from David Mamet's thuggish book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews. Mamet is another one of the Most Jewish Jews of All.) Differing with Benjamin Netanyahu does not yet make you a bad Jew. If Emanuel is a self-hating Jew because he believes that Israeli settlement in the West Bank should finally cease, then I, too, am a self-hating Jew. Perhaps you will agree, friends, that this is not very plausible.

The earth didn't move

Thought-provoking, I guess change is more a state of mind than anything else.

The level of the political debate in America part II

Hat tip Harry's Place

Racism and gas

Quote of the day from John McWhorter:

The racism of interest is that which deprives people of their rights. To seek a society where there is no racism whatsoever of the parochial barstool sort is to seek a society where no one passes gas.

Black women as exotic animals

Troubling...:

The French artist Jean-Paul Goude shot that last image of Jones; the two were involved in a tempestuous and sometimes violent relationship. The objectification and exoticization of black women isn't incidental to Goude's art: it's the whole point. "Blacks are the premise of my work," the artist told People in 1979, "I have jungle fever."
In case anyone thought that was a joke, Jungle Fever was also the title of Goude's 1982 book. The shot of a caged Jones made the cover.
So it's no surprise that Goude shot Jones surrounded by raw meat, under a sign that reads "DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL." But why would Complex choose to emulate images, some of which come across as not just dated, but riven with deep and troubling statements about black women as animalistic, primitive, and uncivilized creatures? (...)
The industry's general unwillingness to embrace models of color as anything besides the exoticized "other" is thwarting the development and popularization of other kinds of black beauty. Even Alek Wek, the Sudanese supermodel, noted that she was often asked to pose in spreads that she felt fitted into a wider and more troubling tradition of black people's representation in the mainstream media, particularly with regard to a Lavazza calendar where she posed inside a coffee cup, her skin intended to represent the espresso. As Wek wrote in her memoir, "I can't help but compare them to all the images of black people that have been used in marketing over the decades. There was the big-lipped jungle-dweller on the blackamoor ceramic mugs sold in the '40s; the golliwog badges given away with jam; Little Black Sambo, who decorated the walls of an American restaurant chain in the 1960s; and Uncle Ben, whose apparently benign image still sells rice."

Tomorrow will never be another day

Is it just me or do Americans have an Hobbesian view of human nature and of the world, which lead them to believe the worst in people as this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Niall Ferguson and the race card demonstrates? So much for the post-racial stick! I have to admit that after last year's presidential election, I no longer knows what it means to play the race card and in what circumstances, it is evil socially acceptable (I'm not saying morally because it will make any discussion impossible) to do so.

Racial literacy

I would like to agree with Professor Lani Guinier on this, but I cannot because it just reaffirms the old and distressing French saying that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. America has a Race problem as Hannah Arendt would say, in great part because it has accepted the precepts of racialism and it just can't figure a way out of it without redefining its identity:

(...) we need to become racially literate, not postracially blind. Racial literacy is the capacity to conjugate the grammar of race in different contexts and circumstances. Like the verb "to be," race takes a different form when we speak about "I am" versus "you are" compared with "he is." In other words, race still matters at a psychic, economic, and sociological level for people of color, even for those who are middle class or multiracial. It may not reveal itself through the spewed invective of a Bull Connor. It is less overt but nonetheless real. It is sometimes a virulent subtext, at other times a nuanced dynamic. But always the meaning of race needs to be interrogated and conjugated carefully in light of relevant local circumstances and their historic underpinnings.
All Americans, not just people of color, need to be better schooled in the subtle yet complex ways that race actually works in the 21st century. Racial literacy requires familiarity with unconscious bias as well as structural racism. It demands a far more nuanced approach than typical charges of racism or race-carding.

The perils of defensiveness

I guess it takes distance to understand that America and Americans don't know how to talk about race. It is therefore not surprising that Margaret Went, writing on the Skip Gates affair in the Globe and Mail gets it right:

Why does every story about race in America turn into a screaming match? Maybe it's because so many people are on the defensive. They feel they're automatically judged guilty until proven innocent – blacks, of being lawbreakers or second-class citizens, and whites, of being irredeemably racist. Mr. Obama has promised us a teachable moment, but he surely knows the biggest lesson is for him. He won't go there again. You can count on that.

The act and the mirror

Glenn Loury on the affair of the summer:

It is depressing in the extreme that the president, when it came time for him to expend political capital on the issue of race and the police, did so on behalf of his “friend” rather than stressing policy reforms that might keep the poorly educated, infrequently employed, troubled but still human young black men in America out of prison. This is to say that, if Mr. Obama were going to lose some working-class white votes to the charge of “elitism,” I’d much rather it have been on countering the proliferation of “three strikes” laws, or ratcheting down the federal penalties for low-level drug trafficking, or inveighing against the racial disproportion in the administration of the death penalty.

Obama can't win on this issue and that's why he shouldn't have commented on it in the first place, especially the way he did by making an assumption that he didn't have the guts to defend because it would have Sharptonized him. He lost ground because he wasn't willing to stand his ground and to lead on this issue rather than to just comment, make a speech, and say the words that make people feel good about themselves by confirming that they are good and decent americans (the large majority of americans are) for having voted for him. In short, Obama was very Sarkozy-like on this issue, he started with a strong appeal to emotions then backed off when he realized that these emotions didn't make his electorate feel good and actually reminded it everything that it hates about what Shelby Steele like to call "race people."  It is difficult to act if one always do it in front of a mirror and in front the gaze of a public (which includes the press) that can be so fanatically adoring.